Thus began 1948, the year in which Arshile Gorky died, Willem de Kooning had his first one-man show, and Clement Greenberg bemoaned, in article after article, the social “alienation” and “isolation” suffered by young American painters. For Pollock the year brought the severest hardship he had known since the Depression. Three weeks after his show closed, his contract with Peggy Guggenheim expired and his monthly payments ended. Under the terms of his new contract with Betty Parsons, he was entitled to receive any money from the sale of his work minus a one-third gallery commission. All this was academic, however; his income from the gallery that year was zero. “I am very worried about Pollock,” Parsons wrote to Peggy Guggenheim in Paris on February 26. “I hope he will be able to go on painting; his finances seem very precarious.” Six weeks later Parsons wrote again: “I am still very worried about the terrible financial condition of the Pollocks.”
For Pollock the poverty was humiliating. As one who was determined to support himself on his painting, he felt deeply frustrated by the lack of sales. Lee offered to get a job—she had a degree in teaching—but Pollock wouldn’t allow it and “made a real issue of it,” according to Lee. He was too proud to have his wife support him, even if it meant living in dire poverty. That winter was one of their hardest ever. They still had only a couple of stoves and a fireplace to heat the farmhouse, and they were forced to borrow money in order to get by. Parsons lent them a few hundred dollars. Dan Miller allowed them to take groceries from his general store on credit. After running up a sixty-dollar bill at the store Pollock tried to settle his debt by offering Miller a painting. The grocer accepted and hung a small “drip” painting (Untitled) in his store. Customers laughed at the work, and many of them commented that they wouldn’t hang it in an outhouse. Someone started a rumor that Pollock painted with a broom. A decade later Miller sold his painting to a Paris art dealer for seventeen thousand dollars and bought a small airplane with the money.
Not everyone was as willing as Dan Miller to barter his goods or services for the paintings of a destitute artist. One day Pollock telephoned William P. Collins, who owned a local fuel company, and invited him to visit his studio. Collins accepted the invitation but only to decide that he wasn’t willing to trade his heating fuel for artwork. Charlie Smith, a pilot at the East Hampton airport, recalls an afternoon when Pollock pulled up at the airport in his Model A Ford and drunkenly stumbled into the terminal. He asked Smith to come outside. The pilot accompanied him to his car and was surprised to find five paintings leaning against it. “Yeah?” Smith said, after glancing at the paintings. Pollock told the pilot he could keep all five if he flew him to New Haven, a twenty-five-minute ride. He explained that his mother and brother lived in Connecticut and, “I have to see them.” Smith couldn’t believe he was serious. “Airplanes cost money to run, y’know,” he told Pollock. “They burn gas.”
With the arrival of summer Pollock’s fortunes improved slightly. James Johnson Sweeney managed to convince the Eben Demarest Trust Fund, a Boston arts foundation, to award Pollock a fifteen-hundred-dollar grant, to be paid in quarterly installments. Pollock, who took real pleasure in improving his property, kept busy with various outdoor projects. He puttered in Lee’s vegetable garden, planted rows of mimosa trees, painted the house, and gave serious thought to building a white post-and-rail fence along the edge of the property. One day he and his friend Tony Smith were gazing out the living room window when Pollock started talking about the fence. A fence, he said, would make his property look more like a farm. Smith couldn’t help but laugh. “What do you think you have here?” he teased. “A Maryland horse farm?”
For all his tinkering around the house, Pollock was not as handy as one might suppose. While he definitely enjoyed gardening, cooking, and carpentry, he had limited patience for whatever projects he undertook. He brought his intensity to bear on even the simplest tasks and tended to get frustrated rather easily. Edward Hults, a local plumber in Springs who assisted Pollock with many home-improvement projects, later recalled that “he was reckless with tools . . . he’d throw them around, kick them even.” One day Hults arrived at the house to find that Pollock had impulsively ripped out some beams while trying to install plumbing for an upstairs bathroom. “Why,” Hults exclaimed, “if there’d come any wind the house would have collapsed!”
New neighbors arrived from New York, easing the oppressive isolation of the country. John Little, an abstract painter whom Lee knew from the Hofmann school, purchased a barn on Three Mile Harbor Road. Wilfrid Zogbaum, a fashion photographer and sculptor, bought a farmhouse a few hundred yards south of the Pollocks on Fireplace Road. Pollock became good friends with both men, retiring the aggressive stance he assumed among his colleagues at the Parsons Gallery. He had no need to prove himself “the strongst painter of his generation” among his neighbors in Springs, who acknowledged, hands down, that he was the master among them. To John Little and Wilfrid Zogbaum, Pollock was a gentle, appreciative friend. He often stopped by Zogbaum’s house to bring him homegrown eggplants. He visited John Little too and lent many hours to the renovation of Little’s house. When his friends returned the visits, they could expect to be welcomed graciously by Pollock and his latest pet, Caw-Caw, a mischievous black crow that provided amusement by poking holes in tubes of oil paint and stealing clothespins from neighbors’ clotheslines. At least one particular incident endeared Pollock to Zogbaum. One day the sociable “Zog” showed up with Wilfredo Lam, insisting that Pollock acquaint himself with the Surrealist painter. Zogbaum left the two artists alone under a tree and returned an hour later, eager to see how they were getting along. He found them sitting silently. Pollock looked up and explained. “Wilfredo doesn’t speak any English,” he said, “and I don’t speak any French.”
As Pollock languished in Springs his reputation was advancing abroad. Six of his works went on exhibit that summer at the Venice Biennale, the largest and most prestigious of the great European art fairs. The six Pollocks were part of a show mounted by Peggy Guggenheim, who, as a leading art patron in Venice, had been invited to exhibit her collection at the fair. She was given her own pavilion, alongside those of Great Britain, France, and Holland, prompting her to comment wryly, “I felt as though I were a new European country.” The United States also had a pavilion, but it would be some time before Pollock was exhibited in Venice as an official representative of this country. (Featured in the U.S. pavilion that summer were such conservative choices as Benton, Pop Hart, and Andrew Wyeth.) Pollock’s appearance at the 1948 Biennale marked his international debut, and it apparently went well. “I am glad you took on Pollock and only wish he could sell,” Peggy Guggenheim wrote to Parsons in 1949. “Here in the Biennale he was considered by far the best of all the American painters.”
Back home, however, Pollock seemed to be attracting only ridicule. Resistance to his art had been mounting steadily ever since his Parsons show had closed. In February 1949 James Plaut, the director of the Institute of Modern Art in Boston, announced that the museum was changing the “modern” in its name to “contemporary” to disassociate itself from certain modern painters whose work signaled “a cult of bewilderment.” The museum statement did not mention any artists by name, although a follow-up story in The New York Times specified that the name change in Boston represented a necessary effort to distinguish the “experimental meanderings” of such artists as Pollock and Gorky from art that possessed meaning. That May a group of artists headed by the painter Paul Burlin planned a well-publicized protest meeting at the Museum of Modern Art to oppose the name change in Boston, and while Pollock was not among the thirty-six official organizers, he and Lee both attended.
Meanwhile Life magazine finally caught on to the events on Fifty-seventh Street and was perturbed to discover that the latest movement in the fine arts bore no resemblance to the cultural renaissance that Henry Luce’s publications had envisioned for the coming American century. Confounded by “the strange art of today,” Life presented
its readers, in October 1948, with a “Round Table on Modern Art” in which fifteen leading cultural figures were asked to evaluate the work of Pollock, de Kooning, and other “young American extremists.” Pollock’s Cathedral was submitted to the panel of experts, eliciting a round of praise from Greenberg and Sweeney and predictably patronizing comments from the others:
Sir Leigh Ashton, director of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London: “It seems to me exquisite in tone and quality. It would make a most enchanting printed silk.”
Aldous Huxley, novelist: “It raises a question of why it stops when it does. The artist could go on forever. I don’t know. It seems to me like a panel for wallpaper which is repeated indefinitely about the wall.”
A. Hyatt Mayor, curator of prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: “I suspect any picture I think I could have made myself.”
Theodore Green, professor of philosophy at Yale: “A pleasant design for a necktie.”
While much has been made of Pollock’s “victimization” by the mass media and the “torment” he suffered from a public that did not understand him, Pollock in fact tolerated his detractors with remarkable composure. He knew better than to hope for a sympathetic reception from such purveyors of mass culture as Time and Life. He had written to a friend about a year earlier, “Have had fairly good response from the public (interested in my kind of painting),” clearly accepting the fact that avant-garde art lies outside the parameters of popular taste. By the time the Life “Round Table” appeared, in autumn, Pollock had already returned to the barn and begun to prepare for his second show at the Parsons Gallery. Inside his studio the only critic who mattered was himself.
The thirty-two paintings that Pollock completed in 1948—twice as many as in the previous year—continued his earlier innovations in “dripped” paint while breaking new ground. A year after pioneering his new technique Pollock felt comfortable enough with it to venture a few risks. For one thing, the works became larger: Summertime stretches eighteen feet long, and Number 5, 1948 is eight feet tall. His style, in general, became looser and more open, the poured lines no longer burying the canvas from edge to edge; he allowed the canvas to show through. By 1948 Pollock had become master enough not only to make his own rules but to break them as well. Defying his own abstract style, he reintroduced figurative imagery into the art. In the Wooden Horse he glued onto the canvas the head of a wooden hobbyhorse (which he had found beneath John Little’s kitchen floor while helping with renovations one day). In White Cockatoo (Fig. 24) he again toyed with conventional form; fleshy masses of red, white, and blue pigment rest in the interstices of loopy black lines like birds in bare tree branches. In Number 1, 1948, described by Greenberg as “a huge baroque scrawl in aluminum, black, white, madder and blue,” Pollock put himself into the painting. He pressed his paint-smeared hands against the canvas, creating a series of hand prints reminiscent of early cave markings. (Though the prints made with his left hand remain unaltered, the prints made with his right hand were touched up to conceal the fact that his fingertip was missing.) By 1948 Pollock’s loops of flung paint had become a force to reckon with as they brazenly ensnared wooden horses, white cockatoos, hand prints, and any other forms that got in their way. Conventional forms are suggested but only to be subordinated to line, and the paintings remain abstract. Pollock was testing the limits of his mastery with a sureness that borders on bravura.
In 1948 Pollock decided to dispense with titles; there was no point in encouraging viewers to look for anecdotal meaning in his work when the only meaning lay in the use of paint. Instead he started numbering his paintings—Number 1, Number 2, Number 3, and so on, though not necessarily in the order in which they were conceived. While descriptive titles such as White Cockatoo and Wooden Horse have been picked up over the years to help keep the paintings straight, none of these titles were Pollock’s. As far as he was concerned, titles only complicated things. Commenting sometime later on why he did away with them, Pollock told an interviewer: “I decided to stop adding to the confusion.”
By December, when Pollock had finished preparing for his second show at Parsons, he felt sufficiently fortified to confront his worst problem: he decided he was going to stop drinking. That Christmas he and Lee traveled to Deep River, Connecticut, to spend a week with his family, and his mother soon reported exuberantly, “There was no drinking. We were all so happy . . . hope he will stay with it he says he wants to quit and went to the Dr. on his own.” The doctor to whom she was referring was Dr. Edwin Heller, a general practitioner who had founded a medical clinic in East Hampton the previous year. Pollock first visited Heller for a minor ailment but soon started returning on a weekly basis, determined “to leave it alone everything wine to beer for they were poison to him,” as his mother wrote. Lee was amazed by Pollock’s recovery and often asked him how Dr. Heller had managed to cure him of his alcoholism when three psychotherapists and one homeopathic physician had failed, as had she. Pollock told her simply, “He is an honest man. I can trust him.”
Lee wondered how long the recovery could last. Pollock’s mother wondered too, and she was afraid that the pressures surrounding his next show, in January 1949, would lead him to start drinking again. “When he has his show will be a test and a hard one for Jack. If he can go through with that without drinking will be something I hope he can.”
Pollock fulfilled his mother’s hopes. By the time his show closed, in February, he was still on the wagon. In April 1949 his mother visited Springs and was thrilled to find that he still hadn’t had a drink. Writing to Charles, she mentioned the visit to “Jack and Lee was so nice to be there and see them so happy and no drinking he can serve liquor to others He feels so much better says so.” Not even his doctor’s death the following year, in March 1950, sent Pollock back to alcohol. He stayed on the wagon for two years, from the fall of 1948 to the fall of 1950. It has been reported elsewhere that Pollock was able to overcome his drinking through the help of tranquilizers he received from Dr. Heller, but there is no evidence to substantiate this claim and ample reason to doubt it. As Stella Pollock wrote: “The Dr. doesn’t give him anything just talks to him.” And as the doctor’s widow has said: “My husband didn’t believe in substituting one drug for another. He treated Pollock with sympathy.” While the cause of Pollock’s abstinence can no more be known than the cause of his drinking, surely it wasn’t coincidental that he gave up alcohol at a time when his work was going better than ever and he no longer needed to doubt his talent, or doubt that his talent would be realized.
Pollock’s second show at the Parsons (January 24-February 12, 1949) opened to impressive publicity. Clement Greenberg as usual went all out. Writing in The Nation, Greenberg confessed that Number 1, 1948 (the painting with hand prints) “quieted any doubts this reviewer may have felt—and he does not in all honesty remember having felt many—as to the justness of the superlatives with which he has praised Pollock’s art in the past.” He went on to say he knew of no other painting by an American that could begin to compare with Number 1 and that the work was as well contained “as anything by a Quattrocento master.”
None of the other reviewers, as usual, shared Greenberg’s enthusiasm. But the substance of their comments was perhaps less important than where the comments appeared. While only one year earlier the newspapers had totally ignored Pollock, they now took note of the “young American extremist” whose Cathedral had appeared in Life magazine. For the first time, Pollock was widely reviewed—and mocked. Emily Genauer of the New York World-Telegram, one of the easier-to-upset critics, felt that most of the paintings “resemble nothing so much as a mop of tangled hair I have an irresistible urge to comb out.” Sam Hunter of The New York Times, later an eloquent defender of Pollock’s art, was ambivalent. The show, he wrote, “reflects an advanced stage of the disintegration of modern painting. But it is disintegration with a possibly liberating and cathartic effect and informed by a highly individual rhythm.” Hunter’s comments left various pe
ople wondering whether it was not only painting but criticism that had disintegrated. A week after the Hunter piece appeared, Time magazine reprinted it beside a sizable reproduction of Number 11, 1948, captioned “Cathartic disintegration.” The magazine item identified Pollock as “the darling of a highbrow cult,” failing to mention that the cult consisted of himself, his wife, Greenberg, and maybe two or three others.
One of the many ironies of Pollock’s career is that the mocking publicity he received from Time, Life, and the major newspapers accomplished what Greenberg’s praise never had: it helped sell paintings. By the time his second show at the Parsons Gallery closed, nine paintings had sold, compared to one the previous year. The purchasers included a Philippines sugar heir, a president of a publishing company, a trustee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and a lawyer. Best of all, the Museum of Modern Art purchased its second Pollock, Number 4, 1948, for $250. The museum had acted cautiously, choosing one of the smaller works in the show. (A year later it traded the painting for the larger and bolder Number 1, 1948, with hand prints.) Still, Pollock was deeply pleased by the museum purchase, and as Lee once said, “The museum never knew what they did by buying that painting.” She was referring to the phone call that Pollock placed to a local plumber. After four chilly winters in Springs, Pollock gave himself a present. He installed heating and hot water in the house.
* The convention among contemporary art critics and academics is to disdain the commonplace term “drip” paintings in favor of the more fashionable usage “poured” paintings. The term was originated by William Rubin to distinguish between dripping, as an act of casting paint droplets across a canvas, and pouring, which implies a continuously appied line of paint. But though the term “poured” has about it the air of technical orthodoxy (“I can tell you that they are not drip paintings at all,” insists The New York Times critic John Russell. “Poured, poured, not dripped.”), it also smacks somewhat of the pedantic. Pollock’s dripping is a term and an image that has entered the century’s vocabulary, and to eradicate it simply because of the movement of the artist’s hand during the act of creation seems unnecessarily fussy. “Pouring” ultimately is no more accurate a description of a man flinging, spattering, and tossing paint than “dripping” and conveys none of the appropriate active imagery. “Dripping,” in fact, was Pollock’s term of choice to describe his art, and it has become so universal that even the French refer to his 1947–50 works as “Le Drippings.” Considering the attention that has already been paid to Pollock’s technique, one would hope that any additional coinages would refer to the paintings themselves rather than to the method by which they were created.
Jackson Pollock Page 20
