One day in 1943 Pollock and Motherwell visited the gallery along with Matta, who introduced the two young painters to Peggy Guggenheim. Their names were not unknown to her; Matta had been trying to convince her for some time to visit their studios and consider showing their work at the gallery. Peggy was not averse to the idea of showing Americans alongside Europeans. She was then working out the details of a large collage show scheduled for April. Dozens of artists were participating, including Kurt Schwitters, Ernst, Picasso, and Braque, all of whom had worked widely in collage and the last of whom is often credited with inventing it, in 1912. There was no reason why the show couldn’t include some Americans as well, and acting on the advice of Matta, Peggy asked Pollock and Motherwell whether they were interested in submitting some collages to the show. Neither of the two had ever made a collage, nor was it something they had aspired to. But they had no intention of turning down the chance to exhibit at the most exciting gallery in New York. Collage? We love collage!
For purposes of mutual support Motherwell suggested to Pollock that they work together. Pollock agreed, which, says Motherwell, “I regard as something of a miracle, when I think of what a loner he was.” Pollock even volunteered his studio as a work site, since it was the better equipped of the two. Together the two artists tore, pasted, and composed, trying to make collages that could hold their own next to Picasso’s and Braque’s legendary combinations of sheet music, cardboard, chair caning, playing cards, and the like. For Motherwell the experience turned out to be a revelation. He appreciated the quick-drying properties of collage, which eliminated the tedious problem of having to wait for oil paint to dry before going back to revise—and Motherwell’s art had so far been a process of ongoing revision. He would make many more collages and was later to emerge (as was Lee Krasner) as a master of the medium. For Pollock the experience was also a revelation. He realized he did not like making collages. No amount of tearing or pasting could allow him to capture the spontaneity or immediacy of even one brushstroke or one sketched line. Unimpressed with his finished product, Pollock applied a match to the paper and burned the edges.
Pollock’s debut at Art of This Century was somewhat anticlimactic. His name was misspelled as “Pollach” on the exhibition announcement, and his participation went unnoticed by the press, save for a lone reviewer who described his collage as “nice.” The collage didn’t sell. After the show closed, Pollock took it home and threw it away.
It was the last time Pollock went unnoticed. In April 1943, while the collage show was still on exhibit, Peggy Guggenheim announced plans to hold the first of her annual “Spring Salons,” a competition-exhibition for young artists working in America. Advertisements were placed in the art magazines soliciting recent work by artists under thirty-six, and a jury was selected. Pollock, in accordance with the rules, dropped off a painting at the gallery, choosing to submit his Stenographic Figure. (At the time it was titled simply Painting.)
On the day set aside for jurying, Mondrian was the first of the judges to arrive at the gallery. As Peggy Guggenheim busily arranged paintings around the room, Mondrian walked over to Pollock’s Painting and spent a few moments looking at it. “Pretty awful, isn’t it?” Peggy asked him. “That’s not painting, is it?” She came back twenty minutes later to find Mondrian still looking at the Pollock. “There is absolutely no discipline at all,” she said. “This young man has serious problems . . . and painting is one of them. I don’t think he’s going to be included.” She told Mondrian that she felt a little bit awkward about rejecting Pollock from the “Spring Salon” because Matta had endorsed him highly and so had her assistant, Howard Putzel. As Peggy Guggenheim talked, Mondrian continued to study the Pollock. He turned to her suddenly. “Peggy,” he said. “I don’t know. I have a feeling that this may be the most exciting painting that I have seen in a long, long time, here or in Europe.”
As the other jurors arrived—they included Duchamp and Alfred Barr—Peggy ushered them across the room one by one. “I want you to see something very exciting,” she told them. “It’s by someone called Pollock.”
The “Spring Salon for Young Artists” opened at the gallery in May 1943, and the show marked a turning point for Pollock. He was singled out in the press as the one painter in the show—there were more than thirty altogether—who possessed unmistakable talent. Jean Connolly, who was then living with Peggy Guggenheim, reported in The Nation that the painting had made the jury “starry-eyed.” A more objective viewer, Robert Coates, of The New Yorker, felt that most of the work in the show was amateurish but that “in Jackson Pollock’s abstract ‘Painting,’ with its curious reminiscences of both Matisse and Miró, we have a real discovery.”
The painting did not sell, but Pollock had accomplished the more difficult task of winning critical acclaim. Only six months earlier Peggy Guggenheim had listened almost indifferently as Matta had informed her of the existence of several young American painters whom she might want to include in the frequent group shows at the gallery. Now she was considering turning over the entire gallery to the work of one American—she was thinking of giving Pollock a one-man show. But first she needed to know whether he was capable of producing enough good paintings to justify such an event. She made an appointment to see his work, arranging to stop by his studio on the afternoon of June 26, the day the “Spring Salon” closed.
Peggy Guggenheim arrived at 46 East Eighth Street on Saturday afternoon, as scheduled. She knocked. No one answered. Where could they possibly be? she wondered angrily.
That morning Pollock and Lee had attended the wedding of their friend Peter Busa at his apartment in the Village. Only a few minutes before the nuptials began, Pollock, who was supposed to be best man, had helped himself to a few drinks and proceeded to fall facedown on the living room floor. He was dragged into a bedroom, where he slept contentedly until the ceremony ended, at which point Lee, in a frantic mood, rushed to his side to shake him into consciousness and remind him that today was the most important day of his life: Peggy Guggenheim was coming to his studio to see his work and decide whether she should give him a one-man show. As Pollock mumbled incoherently, Lee grabbed him by the arm and took him to a drugstore to sober him up with coffee.
Pollock and Lee were nearing their building when they spotted Peggy Guggenheim coming out. She was furious. Where had Pollock been? How dare he waste her time! When Peggy Guggenheim accompanied Pollock and Lee back upstairs, she became even angrier. The first thing she saw in the living room were paintings signed “L.K.” She started to shriek. “L.K.! Who’s L.K.? I didn’t come to see L.K.’s work.” It was the beginning of a long animosity between the two women. As Lee once said, never again could she look at Peggy Guggenheim without thinking, What a bitch.
Peggy Guggenheim didn’t know quite what to make of Pollock, and she once described him as a “trapped animal who never should have left Wyoming.” She wasn’t sure whether she should give him a one-man show. For one thing, there was his personality. “Pollock himself,” she has written, “was rather difficult; he drank too much and became so unpleasant, one might say, devilish, on these occasions.” Furthermore, she was unsure about his art. She confided her reservations to James Johnson Sweeney. Peggy told Sweeney that the reason she was vacillating about Pollock was that she found his art “a little bit wild” and she didn’t know how to classify him. That was reason enough, Sweeney assured her, to give Pollock a show.
Peggy also took up the matter with Howard Putzel. Like Sweeney, Putzel felt it was obvious that Pollock deserved a show. Furthermore, Putzel suggested that Pollock be offered some sort of monthly stipend so he could quit his job at the Museum of Non-Objective Art, where he was still the elevator man, and devote himself to painting on a full-time basis.
That July, Pollock received the news he had been hoping for. Peggy Guggenheim was going to give him a one-man show and had optimistically scheduled the opening date for November 9. That would make it the second show of the gallery’s fall s
eason; the first was “Masterworks of Early de Chirico.”
For all her initial hesitation, Peggy Guggenheim gave Pollock her all-out support once she had decided she wanted to show him at the gallery. A more enthusiastic patron he could not have found anywhere. Besides offering him a one-man show, Guggenheim also invited him to paint a mural for the hallway of her apartment. Furthermore, she offered him a one-year contract by which he would receive a fixed income of $150 a month and a settlement at the end of the year if he sold more than $2700 worth of paintings. If he failed to sell that amount, Peggy was to receive pictures to make up the difference. In effect, for $150 a month, Peggy Guggenheim was to receive his entire output. At the time it sounded like a generous offer, and Pollock gladly accepted.
With those details settled, Lee took off for Huntington, Long Island, to spend a few days with her ailing father. Pollock kept her abreast of his dealings with the gallery. “Dear Lee,” reads an undated postcard. “Have signed the contract and have seen the wall space for the mural—its all very exciting. See you Saturday. Love Jackson.”
For Pollock it was a moment of triumph. For the first time since arriving in New York thirteen years earlier his future looked bright and his past had been vindicated. He had proved himself to everyone—to his brother Charles, beside whom he had seemed so lacking; to his classmates at the League, who said he couldn’t draw; to Hans Hofmann, who had questioned his methods; to the Surrealists, who had dismissed him as an uncultivated American; to the Baroness Hilla Rebay, who had dared to tear his drawing in half. “Dear Baroness,” Pollock wrote on July 21, 1943, “I wish to thank you for the two criticisms of my work that you gave, and for the very pleasant period of employment.” This letter of resignation, coauthored by Lee, was sure to make the baroness seethe. “The Museum, ‘Art of This Century,’ has contracted my work for a one-man show this coming November, for which I must prepare. Trusting you found my services at the museum satisfactory, I am sincerely, Jackson Pollock.”
9
Mural
1943–45
In July 1943 Pollock began to prepare for his first one-man show, which was scheduled to open in less than four months. The prospect of a show galvanized his fiercest energies, and the next few months were a wonderfully creative time for him.
In a mood of supreme confidence Pollock decided he would also tackle the mural commissioned by Peggy Guggenheim for the hallway of her apartment. “I want to have the painting finished for the show,” he noted proudly to his brother Charles. Pollock wasn’t sure yet what the subject of his mural would be. He knew only that the mural would be very large, about twenty feet long and nine feet high, and that it would be painted on canvas instead of on a wall. That way, as Duchamp had advised Peggy Guggenheim, it wouldn’t have to be abandoned in case she moved.
Pollock soon realized that his studio was not large enough to accommodate a twenty-foot-long painting. So he decided he would knock down the wall separating his and Lee’s studios, which would increase his work space by about a third. Lee was not sympathetic. “And where am I supposed to work?” she wanted to know. They were having an argument about it when the sculptor Reuben Kadish stopped by to visit. Kadish, a friend of Pollock’s since high school, suggested to Lee that she consider setting up a studio in a vacant room adjoining his own studio, on West Twelfth Street. Lee accepted the offer.
With that matter settled, Pollock took a sledgehammer and knocked down the wall separating the two studios. Lee assisted, and the two of them spent a long night packing the debris into metal buckets and hauling it downstairs. By July 29 Pollock was ready to start the mural. “I have it stretched now,” he wrote to Charles. “It looks pretty big, but exciting as all hell.”
For all his eagerness, Pollock decided he wasn’t ready to start the mural after all. He needed more time to think about it. When his show opened, the twenty-foot-long canvas would still be blank.
The next few months were one of the most productive and prolific periods in Pollock’s life. He completed about ten new paintings, among them such well-known works as The She-Wolf, The Guardians of the Secret, and The Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle. While there is no duplication from one painting to the next, one feature they do have in common is their intense invocation of American Indian culture. In Moon-Woman a bright red head decorated with mock war paint is wearing an elaborate feather headdress. Other works are abundant with such Indian staples as arrows, totemic stick figures, and a whole repertory of geometric markings, such as slash marks, X’s, and zigzags. It seems entirely fitting that Pollock chose to borrow from American Indian art at this point in his career when he was struggling for a style that was free of European influence and eager to establish his independence of his predecessors abroad. Pollock once said in an interview: “An American is an American and his painting [is] naturally qualified by that fact, whether he wills it or not.”
One of the more significant paintings from this period is The She-Wolf (Fig. 16), a large, horizontal canvas in which Pollock took Picasso’s bull by the horns. The image consists of a massive, heavily outlined beast set against a frenetic background of splashed and splattered pigments. While the title of the painting evokes the she-wolf of popular mythology—the foster mother of Romulus and Remus—Pollock’s she-wolf is not a reference to a specific myth. In fact, she is not even a she-wolf. For despite the painting’s title, the so-called she-wolf actually seems to consist of two animals backed into each other. On the left is a bull, an obvious reference to Picasso, a celebrator of the bullfight. On the right side of the painting is another image altogether—a buffalo as pictured on a United States nickel. The two animals are linked together by a fat red arrow that travels horizontally from the heart of the bull to the head of the buffalo, and this “heartline arrow motif,” as it’s known in Navaho art, is one among many allusions to Indian art in the painting. The She-Wolf is the offspring of a European bull and an American buffalo; it’s Pollock’s defiant answer to the legendary beast images of Picasso.
Pollock never offered interpretations of his paintings, and in the case of The She-Wolf he actively opposed interpretation. “She-Wolf came into existence because I had to paint it. Any attempt on my part to say something about it, to attempt explanation of the inexplicable, could only destroy it.” The statement was made to Sidney Janis, the art dealer, who in 1943 was putting together a book called Abstract and Surrealist Art in America. He planned to reproduce The She-Wolf and had asked Pollock to submit a short statement about it.
If Pollock’s statements offer little insight into his work, his titles are outright misleading. He never titled a painting until he was done with it, and it was not unusual for him to have Lee or his friends title his paintings for him. One day he was sitting in his studio with a newly completed work when James Johnson Sweeney stopped by to visit. Sweeney was still standing in the doorway when the painting caught his eye. Four totemic figures flank a central oval. Inside the oval a stick figure battles a beast. As Sweeney studied the painting Pollock told him, “That’s Moby Dick.”
“Pasiphaë,” Sweeney shouted out across the studio, ignoring Pollock’s comment. “That’s Pasiphaë.”
“Who the hell is Pasiphaë?” Pollock asked. Sweeney told Pollock about Pasiphaë, wife of King Minos, mother of the Minotaur by her intercourse with a bull.
“What’s wrong with Moby Dick?” Pollock asked.
“It’s a cliché,” Sweeney said.
Pollock gave in and named the painting Pasiphaë.
It is worth noting that before he met Lee, Pollock left most of his paintings untitled. The few paintings he did title were given literal names, such as Cotton Pickers, Red Barn, Menemsha Pond, Seascape, and so on. In 1943 Pollock began giving his paintings highly evocative titles, such as Pasiphaë, She-Wolf, Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle. But his titles confuse things more than they clarify them, for his She-Wolf doesn’t depict the foster mother of ancient Rome any more than his Pasiphaë depicts the Minoan queen. Some critics refer to Polloc
k’s work of the early forties as his “mythological paintings,” and while the label is certainly as valid as any other, Pollock’s subject matter had no specific connection to ancient Greco-Roman myths.
While Pollock was working on major paintings such as The She-Wolf and The Guardians of the Secret, he was also turning out small compositions. He often worked on more than one project at a time. In the course of a single day he might interrupt work on a large painting—to allow the pigment to dry or to give himself time to think about it, and undertake a pencil-and-ink drawing or a gouache or a small painting. Among the smaller compositions belonging to this period are four untitled abstractions in which Pollock experimented with the technique of dripping paint. In a work that has been catalogued as Composition with Pouring II (Fig. 17) a wiry tangle of black-and-white lines, apparently dripped from a brush, is set against a background of swirling forms. The small composition possesses none of the soaring lyricism that distinguishes certain of Pollock’s famous “drip” paintings but it does establish his interest in the technique that became his primary one four years later.
While Pollock was preparing for his show, Peggy Guggenheim was tending to the business side of his career. She wrote a press release and sent it out to newspapers and magazines. (“Jackson Pollock is 31 years old . . .”) She also had a four-page exhibition catalogue printed, which included an appreciation by James Johnson Sweeney. Lee was commandeered to fold and address the catalogues and spent several days at the gallery assisting with various projects, including the hanging of the show. Pollock himself was indifferent to the installation and chose not to get involved. It took all of Lee’s patience to work alongside Peggy, an heiress of singular stinginess. One day Peggy noticed that Lee had made a mistake in addressing some envelopes that were already stamped. She bawled her out for wasting a few cents worth of postage.
Jackson Pollock Page 14
