One person whom both Pollock and Lee liked was Howard Putzel, the assistant at the gallery. He often stopped by 46 East Eighth Street to complain to Lee about the latest abuse he had suffered at the hands of his employer. “I don’t know how I can face another day,” Putzel would moan as Lee nodded sympathetically. Lee was more than willing to indulge him in his complaints as Putzel was one of the earliest admirers of Pollock’s work and was very devoted to the artist. One day when James Thrall Soby, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, stopped in at the gallery and spoke highly of a few Pollocks he spotted in the storage room, Putzel sent off a kind note: “Soby dropped in this afternoon and is mad about your work. . . . [He] predicts you’ll be THE new sensation of the season, and moreover, that, unlike past season’s sensations, you’ll last.”
About a week before the opening of his show Pollock received a copy of the exhibition catalogue. The introduction by James Johnson Sweeney, the first text devoted to Pollock’s work, offered ardent praise. “Pollock’s talent is volcanic. It has fire. It is unpredictable. . . . It is lavish, explosive, untidy. . . . What we need is more young men who paint from inner impulsion without an ear to what the critic or spectator may feel—painters who will risk spoiling a canvas to say something in their own way.” At the same time Sweeney acknowledged that there was room for improvement: “It is true that Pollock needs self-discipline.”
Pollock sent Sweeney a gracous thank-you note on November 3. “I have read your forward to the catalogue, and I am excited. I am happy—The self-discipline you speak of—will come, I think, as a natural growth of a deeper, more integrated, experience. Many thanks . . .”
For all his polite comments, Pollock was upset by Sweeney’s claim that he lacked self-discipline. Didn’t Sweeney understand how much discipline it took to paint a work like The She-Wolf? His work may have looked undisciplined, but the effect was entirely deliberate. Pollock was determined to prove to Sweeney that he had erred in his judgment. He returned to his studio and painted a work called Search for a Symbol, an elegant, decorative painting in which biomorphic shapes float against a creamy pink background. Without waiting for the painting to dry, Pollock carried it up to the gallery and showed it to Sweeney. “Here,” he said, “I want you to see a really disciplined painting.” Search for a Symbol was added to his show at the last minute and put on display, as an amused reviewer noted, “wet with new birth.”
Pollock’s first show at Art of This Century, November 9–29, opened to generally favorable reviews. While some critics found his canvases overbearing, they were so impressed by Pollock’s raw energy that they were willing to disregard the flaws. There was a crude strength to his painting that no one could ignore. With time and experience, it was believed, Pollock had a chance of becoming one of the best painters in the country. Already he had a distinctive style.
Robert Coates, of The New Yorker, who one year earlier had admired Pollock’s entry in the “Spring Salon,” remained enthusiastic. “At Art of This Century,” he wrote, “there is what seems to be an authentic discovery—the paintings of Jackson Pollock . . . the effect of his one noticeable influence, Picasso, is a healthy one, for it imposes a certain symmetry on his work without detracting from its basic force and vigor.”
Clement Greenberg, the reviewer for The Nation, found “surprise and fulfillment” in Pollock’s first show. He was particularly fond of the smaller works, which he considered among “the strongest abstract paintings I have yet seen by an American.” The larger paintings, by comparison, struck him as less successful, but perhaps that was inevitable given the enormity of Pollock’s ambitions. “Being young and full of energy,” Greenberg noted, “he takes orders he can’t fill.” Greenberg was to emerge as Pollock’s most ardent champion after his second show.
In the three weeks in November that the show remained on view Pollock and Lee stopped by the gallery almost every day to see if any sales had been made. Lee often stayed for a few hours, hoping she might be able to interest visitors in Pollock’s work. Peggy Guggenheim too worked hard at trying to sell the paintings, if for no other reason than that she was paying Pollock $150 a month and was eager to recoup the expense. But by the time the show closed, none of the paintings had sold. Pollock was poor as ever, and his hardest work still lay ahead—he had to finish the mural commissioned by Peggy Guggenheim.
With his show behind him, Pollock returned to his studio, prepared to devote himself to the mural. He had stretched the canvas in July 1943. Now it was December. The canvas was still blank.
When Pollock emerged from his studio after his first day of work on the mural, Lee didn’t ask him how it had gone. She could tell from the look on his face that he had been unable to get started. The next day went no better. Nor the next week. Pollock couldn’t get started.
He had wanted to paint a mural for many years, ever since his student days when he had visited Benton’s studio and watched admiringly as his teacher produced giant murals about American history and culture. And though the mural movement of the thirties was over, Pollock’s feelings about mural painting hadn’t changed; it had never been his intention to paint a mural that would advance some social cause. What appealed to him about murals was their enormous size; a mural is larger than life. As one who was obsessed with a need to prove himself, Pollock no doubt saw mural painting as the ultimate test of his artistic prowess.
But the enormous size of the piece of canvas in his studio posed some very specific problems. How would he structure the mural? How would he manage to sustain tension over so large an area? Only a few weeks earlier Clement Greenberg had written in The Nation that Pollock’s one flaw as a painter was his inability to handle size. The larger the paintings in the show, Greenberg had written, had been less successful than the smaller ones, as the artist “takes orders he can’t fill . . . spends himself in too many directions at once . . . [his] space tautens but does not burst into a picture.”
After two weeks Pollock told Lee that her presence was interfering with his work. He asked her to leave the apartment for a few days. She went to Huntington to visit her parents. When she returned three days later the canvas was still blank.
Late one afternoon in January 1944 Lee’s friend John Little stopped by the apartment. He found Lee pacing nervously. “Jackson’s supposed to deliver that mural tomorrow,” she told him. “He hasn’t even started it.”
When John Little stopped by the next day Lee was all smiles. “You won’t believe what happened,” she said. “Jackson finished the painting last night.”
After a month of agonizing, Pollock had painted the mural in one night.
Working with both a stick and a brush, Pollock had created a syncopated arrangement of swooping black lines and whirling forms that charge the picture surface with “allover” intensity (Fig. 18). At first glance the mural looks wholly abstract, but the swooping black lines are actually totems, or stick figures, that have been partly obscured. There are eight of them altogether, and they are shown in profile, their back legs raised slightly as if in midstep. In their static gait across the canvas the tall, spindly figures give the painting structure, like a scaffold that holds everything in place. Against this rigid framework is a swirling overlay of turquoise and yellow strokes, each one intertwining with the next and uniting the figures in a rhythmic ritual procession. Mural, with its circling strokes and giant arabesques, is a cross between painting and drawing that hints at the crucial role of line in Pollock’s future work.
Pollock was proud of the mural. When Peggy Guggenheim sent a truck to his studio in January 1944 to pick it up and transport it to her apartment on East Sixty-first Street, Pollock rode along with the truckers. He arrived at Peggy’s apartment to find that his patron was not home—she was at the gallery—but had assigned the job of installing the mural to her friends Marcel Duchamp and David Hare. It took the two artists only moments to figure out that the mural was eight inches too long for the designated spot in the hallway. Duchamp asked Pollock a touch
y question: Would he mind very much if they cut eight inches off the end of the work? Pollock said it was fine with him.
While Duchamp was installing the mural, Pollock went upstairs to the living room and helped himself to a drink. He proceeded to get very drunk and telephoned his patron at the gallery to ask her to come home. Peggy said she couldn’t come home; she had work to do. When Pollock called again, Peggy slammed down the phone. He continued to call throughout the afternoon and pleaded with her to come home. In her autobiography Peggy Guggenheim recounts that at one point during that difficult afternoon Pollock took off his clothes and wandered stark naked into a party being given by her roommate Jean Connolly. As the guests looked on in dismay, he urinated in the fireplace. Like other stories told about Pollock, this is one that many of his acquaintances are fond of telling but none quite remember having witnessed.
With his show behind him and the mural completed, Pollock entered a severe depression. He took to heavy drinking and surrendered to feelings of self-loathing and despair. A typically distressing incident occurred one day when Hofmann came to visit along with two of his students, Fred Hauck and Janet Chase, whom he hoped to introduce to Pollock. Halfway up the four flights they heard a loud noise. An easel came tumbling down the stairs. Hofmann picked it up and carried it back to the studio, where he found Pollock in frightening condition. When Hofmann asked him why he had thrown the easel down the stairs, Pollock started to cry. “I hate my easel,” he said. “I hate art.”
Pollock’s drinking made Lee angry. She punished him by ignoring him, forcing him into solitude. When her friend Betsy Zogbaum came to pick her up for a dinner party one night, Lee didn’t bother to introduce Pollock. “Who’s that?” Zogbaum asked. “He’s nobody,” Lee snapped. When Harold and May Rosenberg visited from Washington, where the critic was working for the Office of War Information, they too wondered about the silent man in the apartment. “I thought he was the handyman,” May Rosenberg recalled. “I thought he had come to frame her paintings or stretch her canvas.”
Pollock could no longer turn to his psychotherapists for help. He had stopped seeing Violet de Laszlo, the doctor who had gotten him out of the war, the previous summer at Lee’s insistence. If he hadn’t stopped drinking after five years of counseling, Lee figured, he never would. She told him the expense wasn’t worth it. Dr. de Laszlo once commented: “Lee was very possessive and so she was threatened by anyone else on whom he was dependent.”
Lee took Pollock to see her own doctor, a homeopathic physician named Elizabeth Hubbard. She practiced on East Seventy-third Street, on the ground floor of a brownstone. Pollock immediately liked the doctor, a vivacious, gray-haired woman who believed she could restore him to well-being with herbal remedies. Regardless of the efficacy of such treatments, Dr. Hubbard was one person whom Pollock could trust. Like his other doctors, she accepted him as he was, and he felt comfortable in her presence. He often stopped by her office to talk to her; if Dr. Hubbard was busy with another patient, she would send him upstairs to her apartment until she was free to see him. Her daughter remembers coming home from school on several occasions to find Pollock in the living room, and the sight was upsetting. “He’d just sit there with his head in his hands,” she said.
In the meantime Pollock’s artistic reputation was growing steadily. He did very little to promote himself, but that wasn’t necessary; other people did it for him. One of his champions was his friend Robert Motherwell, who was also exhibiting at Art of This Century. He reviewed Pollock’s show in the February 1944 issue of Partisan Review. “Certain individuals represent a younger generation’s artistic chances,” Motherwell wrote, going on to say, rather grimly, that most of those individuals were destined to fail. “There is disease and premature death; hunger and alcoholism and frustration; the historical moment may turn wrong . . . the hazards are so great that no more than five out of a whole young generation are able to develop to the end.” He felt that Pollock represented one of those five. He didn’t say who the other four were.
That same month a magazine called Arts and Architecture ran an interview with Pollock, and the piece was accompanied by pictures of The Guardians of the Secret and Search for a Symbol—though the pictures and titles of the paintings were reversed. The editor of the magazine was a friend of Peggy Guggenheim’s, and his original idea was to have Pollock write a short essay about his work. Pollock “obviously wanted to accept,” Motherwell has recalled, “but was shy about his lack of literary ability.” So Motherwell proposed that the magazine do an interview, with Motherwell asking the questions anonymously and Pollock supplying answers. In his enthusiasm Motherwell ended up answering several of his own questions.
Another devoted friend and supporter was James Johnson Sweeney. As a member of the acquisitions committee at the Museum of Modern Art, he had been trying for some time to convince the museum to purchase Pollock’s She-Wolf. Alfred Barr was definitely interested, but felt that the price, $650, was too high. The museum asked Peggy whether she was willing to let the painting go at $450. She refused, and the deal appeared to be off. But the museum reconsidered in April 1944, when Sweeney wrote an article on contemporary art for Harper’s Bazaar and illustrated it with a large color reproduction of The She-Wolf. On May 2 Pollock received a telegram: “VERY HAPPY TO ANNOUNCE THE MUSEUM BOUGHT SHE WOLF FOR $600 TODAY. LOVE PEGGY GUGGEN-HEIM.”
It was Pollock’s first sale to a museum and may well have been his actual first sale since the days, a decade earlier, when the Bentons had purchased an occasional work from him so he’d have some money. Pollock of course was pleased, but it was hard for him to get excited about the sale given his dismal financial situation. “I am getting $150 a month from the gallery, which just about doesn’t meet the bills,” he wrote to Charles that May. “I will have to sell a lot of work thru the year to get it above $150. The Museum of Modern Art bought the painting reproduced in Harpers this week which I hope will stimulate further sales.”
Motherwell once commented that Pollock was the first artist he knew “who mostly talked not about art but about money.” Indeed, he was far from indifferent to money, and part of the reason was that he had so little of it. He didn’t even have a telephone yet. As one who was determined to live off his painting—as opposed to teaching or holding any other job—Pollock worried constantly whether he could actually support himself. What would he do if Peggy Guggenheim decided not to renew his one-year contract? Would he have to get a job? What was he qualified to do? In the spring of 1944 Peggy Guggenheim renewed his contract for another year at the same figure of $150 a month. Pollock was relieved. His brother Sande noted that to Charles: “since it lets him paint he doesn’t complain.”
One day that spring Pollock was visited by Benton, who was in New York on business. The two painters had not met for several years but had followed each other’s careers in the pages of the art magazines. Benton had read the reviews of Pollock’s first show and was pleased to see that his onetime protégé was getting some recognition. But it turned out to be an awkward reunion. When Pollock took Benton into his studio, he knew that his former teacher could not possibly approve of the work he was doing. Benton always had hated abstract painting, and there could be no doubt that he would find Pollock’s work distasteful. Benton tried to be polite. As Pollock later noted: “Said he liked my stuff but you know how much meaning that has.”
From New York, Benton returned to Kansas City, where he soon started work on a new project—a mural for Harzfeld’s, a department store downtown. Pollock, by comparison, was about to unveil before the New York art crowd a mural of nearly identical proportions. Benton’s artistic reputation had faded; Pollock’s was on the rise. It was their last meeting.
With the arrival of summer Lee suggested that they take a vacation, perhaps rent a house in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She had been there before while studying with Hofmann, who moved his art school from New York to Cape Cod every summer. It was precisely the presence of Hofmann and his you
ng disciples that made Pollock reluctant to visit Provincetown; he had no intention of spending his summer in “Hofmann’s art colony,” as he derisively referred to the town. On the other hand, he liked that part of the country and had wonderful memories of his summers in Chilmark. He once told an interviewer, “I have a definite feeling for the West—the vast horizontality of the land, for instance—here only the Atlantic gives you that.” Provincetown, he decided, was fine after all.
They traveled to Cape Cod by train. Hofmann met them at the station in Hyannis and insisted on giving them a tour of the area before heading for Provincetown. But it didn’t turn out as planned. In his enthusiasm to show them some dunes, Hofmann drove directly onto sand, and his car got stuck. When he stepped on the gas the tires sank deeper and deeper. Hofmann started cursing in German, but Pollock, for once, was unagitated. He calmly got out of the car and lifted it out of the sand. For the rest of the summer, whenever Pollock’s name came up in conversation Hofmann had only praise: “Pollock? He’s strong. He lifts cars.”
It was a lazy, restless summer for Pollock and Lee. They lived in a rented house on Back Street, which was behind Commercial Street and a short walk from the beach. While both of them were hoping to get some painting done—they had shipped up rolls of canvas from New York—they got no further than talking about it. They hiked the dunes, swam in the ocean, collected shells along the shore. Pollock became friendly with the landlady and helped her almost every day with her gardening. “We get in for a dip at least once a day—“Pollock noted contentedly to his brother Sande and his mother in Connecticut. “I’ve taken a crew cut and look a little like a peeled turnip—or beet. Haven’t gotten into work yet. . . . What are the chances of your coming up? Let us know and we’ll work out some arrangements.”
Jackson Pollock Page 15
