12
“The Greatest Living Painter”
1949–50
In February 1949 Pollock was visited in Springs by Arnold Newman, a thirty-year-old freelance photographer on assignment for Life. The magazine had provided Newman with no specific instructions as to how to photograph Pollock, indicating only that it needed some pictures in both black-and-white and color for a feature story to be published that summer.
Pollock was happy to spend a day with Newman posing for pictures. Tailed by his dog Gyp, he took the photographer (and the photographer’s assistant) behind the house toward the bay and then around the corner to Dan Miller’s general store. He also took them inside his studio and posed for pictures in the barn. When Newman asked him a few questions about his technique, Pollock offered to demonstrate. He placed a fresh sheet of canvas on the floor of the barn, kneeled on top of it, and with slow studied movements dripped paint from a stick. He proceeded to pick up a can of sand, and crouching on his heels, added pinches of earth to his painting. Pollock, who had never painted for a photographer before and almost never allowed anyone to watch him work, was willing to paint for the five million readers of Life. In a denim jacket, blue jeans, and paint-spattered work boots, he crouched on the floor and ran earth through his fingers, giving a performance as the rough, rugged all-American genius of his ambitions.
In the course of the day Pollock took note of a peculiar irony: Newman, a freelance photographer, was better off than he was. He had arrived in Springs in a chauffeur-driven car; he had his own assistant. Both Newman and the assistant were being paid for the story, whereas Pollock, of course, was not. Pollock was the “famous artist,” but everyone except him seemed to be profiting from his fame. Pollock was standing outside the barn when he turned to Newman suddenly. “I’m a little bit short of cash,” he said. “Can you lend me a $150?” He disappeared for a moment and returned with a painting, leaning it against the barn without saying anything. Newman declined the sale, explaining politely that he was getting married the following month and had to save his money.
Besides agreeing to be photographed, Pollock had also consented to be interviewed by the magazine. Later that winter he visited the offices of Life, along with Lee, and met with editor Dorothy Seiberling. What did his art mean? the interviewer asked. Who were his favorite artists? Was it true that cigarette ashes and dead bumble bees could be found in some of his paintings? “He talked,” Seiberling later recalled, “but you felt it was agony for him. He twisted his hands. Lee had to amplify whatever he said.” Even with Lee’s help, his answers failed to satisfy the editors and were never published. To read them is to understand why. While his answers were consistently interesting, Pollock refused to explain his art or himself. Asked why he didn’t paint realistically, Pollock told the interviewer: “If you want to see a face, look at one.” When asked how he felt about hostile critics, Pollock replied: “If they’d leave most of their stuff at home and just look at the painting, they’d have no trouble enjoying it. It’s just like looking at a bed of flowers. You don’t tear your hair out over what it means.”
Life’s feature story on Pollock appeared on August 8, 1949, along with pieces on the return of Austrian war prisoners, George Bernard Shaw’s ninety-third birthday celebration, and the rage for dime-store clothing. “JACKSON POLLOCK—Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” Thus read the headline in Life. The article explained:
Recently a formidably high-brow New York art critic [Clement Greenberg] hailed the brooding, puzzled-looking man shown above as a major artist of our time and a fine candidate to become “the greatest American painter of the 20th century.” Others believe that Jackson Pollock produces nothing more than interesting, if inexplicable, decorations. Still others condemn his pictures as degenerate and find them unpalatable as yesterday’s macaroni. Even so, Pollock, at the age of 37, has burst forth as the shining new phenomenon of American art. . . .
Five million copies, five million reactions. In White Plains, New York, a doctor who had treated Pollock at Bloomingdale Asylum a decade earlier sent his congratulations, while requesting that Pollock drop him a line about his mental health and the “adjustment you have made since you left the hospital.” In Rockwood, Tennessee, his old girlfriend Becky Tarwater considered sending a note but decided against it because “maybe it would seem exploitative.” In Deep River, Connecticut, the local newspaper interviewed Pollock’s mother, who confessed she did not “completely understand” her son’s art. In Cody, Wyoming, the town was in an uproar. Although the article in Life presented Pollock as a paint-slinging cowboy from Cody, no one in that town remembered his having lived there. An investigation was launched by The Cody Enterprise, which reported that the “Pollock controversy is similar to that of movie cowboy Roy Rogers who claims Cody as his home. . . . Cody does not disclaim such noted sons, but is only careful to check on their authenticity.” Meanwhile, back home in Springs, the farmers and fishermen could not believe their eyes. What was Jackson Pollock, of all people, doing in America’s favorite magazine? “A good many of them made peace with themselves,” according to Dan Miller, “by figuring that Life magazine was crazier than Pollock.”
Pollock was proud of the article in Life. It may have poked fun at him, but it also ordained his position as the leading painter of his generation. (For years afterward he kept a stack of copies of the August 8, 1949, Life on a kitchen shelf and made sure that everyone saw it.) At the same time, Pollock felt uneasy about having posed for the article. He had always prided himself on his independence, so what was he doing in Life magazine, implicitly appealing to middle-class America for its support? Pollock first saw the article when his friends James Brooks and Bradley Walker Tomlin arrived in Springs from New York carrying a few copies. Tomlin opened the magazine and tried to show Pollock the pictures of himself. Pollock refused to look. Perhaps he recalled the day, not so long before, when Tomlin had asked him a question about his technique. “I can’t tell you that,” he had growled. For Life, however, he had revealed all, exploiting his art for the sake of his public image. “He couldn’t read the article while we were there,” Brooks later recalled. “He was too embarrassed.”
Soon after the article was published Pollock was sitting at his kitchen table one day with his friend Tony Smith. Out the window they could see Pollock’s Model A parked in the driveway. Pollock asked Smith if he had read the article in Life. Then he asked Smith if he thought he should be driving a better car. “The Model A’s a good car,” Smith said. “What the hell kind of car do you want?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Pollock said. “Maybe a Cadillac.”
He was only half joking. He soon bought from a used-car dealer in Southampton a Cadillac convertible—a 1941 model with a bashed front fender but a Cadillac nonetheless. It cost him four hundred dollars. “In many ways,” Smith once said, “Jackson was a straight American boy. He wanted what most people want.” He just wanted it much more.
To drive by the farmhouse on Fireplace Road was to know that someone important lived there. The short dirt driveway, which had remained empty for so many seasons, was now crowded with cars on almost any weekend afternoon as neighbors in the Hamptons appeared out of nowhere to meet the painter they had seen in Life. Friendships were formed, invitations extended, favors offered without second thought. Rosanne Larkin, a potter, invited Pollock to try his hand at the potter’s wheel in her studio in East Hampton. Berton Roueché, a genial Missourian who wrote about medicine for The New Yorker, offered to write a piece about Pollock for the magazine; it appeared the following year. Valentine and Happy Macy, East Hampton socialites who had made their money in radio stations and newspapers, casually sent over a truckload of spare antique furniture, including a red velvet Victorian couch and a massive oak table. Those who met him recognized his genuineness and helped him however they could. None of his neighbors did more than Alfonso Ossorio.
Born in Manila to a family of sugar growers, Ossorio had grown up i
n England, studied at Harvard, and established a modest reputation as a painter in 1941, when Betty Parsons gave him a one-man show at the Wakefield Bookshop. Although he continued to exhibit with Parsons for the next two decades, it was primarily as a patron that Ossorio would be appreciated. He had first met the Pollocks in January 1949 when he bought a “drip” painting for fifteen hundred dollars, more than twice as much as anyone had ever before paid for a Pollock. Lee, who was expert at cultivating collectors, promptly suggested to Ossorio that he and his lifelong companion, the dancer Ted Dragon, consider summering in East Hampton. She took the couple house hunting and eventually found them a perfect country nest—the seventy-acre Albert Herter estate, complete with a rambling Italianate mansion overlooking Geórgica Pond. Ossorio nicknamed the place The Creeks, and it became a private showcase for the dozen or so Pollocks he purchased from the artist in the next few years.
Ossorio first visited the studio in Springs on a matter of business. One summer afternoon he showed up with the painting he had purchased the previous January and claimed that it needed some repair work. Pollock glanced quickly at Number 5, 1948, a large, red “drip” painting, and realized that Ossorio was right. While working on the canvas Pollock at one point had yanked a stick from a can of hardened paint and inadvertently picked up a scab that had formed on the surface. Ever democratic in his use of materials, Pollock had tossed the scab onto the painting. Months later the still-wet scab had slid across the canvas, bending the image out of shape.
Pollock politely offered to repair the painting and suggested to Ossorio that he leave the work with him for a week or so. In reality, though, Pollock had no intention of being reduced to a mere restorer. When Lee came into the studio a few days later to see how the repair was progressing, she screamed. Ossorio’s painting no longer existed. Instead of repairing the work Pollock had repainted it, creating an entirely new image. “You don’t know Ossorio,” Lee scolded. “Maybe he won’t like it.” Ossorio, however, didn’t mind a bit. He said he had learned a worthwhile lesson: “Don’t let an artist repair his own picture unless you want it to be improved.”
In many ways it was an impossibly awkward relationship—the painfully shy painter and his compulsively social patron. Pollock tended to be “very silent” on the occasions when Ossorio visited his studio, neither agreeing nor disagreeing as the collector walked around the barn and commented, for instance, that his paintings represented “the merging of two cultures—Eastern contemplation and Western action.” It was not unusual for Ossorio to bring gifts on his visits to Fireplace Road, and he gave Pollock lavish monographs on Goya, Van Gogh, and others. While Lee once complained to Ossorio that he was taking up too much of her husband’s time, Pollock tolerated the collector good-naturedly; he was appreciative of the person who bought his paintings and worshiped his genius while asking nothing in return. One day Ossorio mustered the courage to show Pollock one of his own paintings. Pollock looked at it for a long time without saying anything. Then he pointed to a form in a corner that resembled a melting ice-cream cone. “This painting of yours,” he said, “it’s all about this.” The collector was delighted by Pollock’s comment and repeated it for years afterward to all his friends.
So great was Ossorio’s devotion and so copious his means that he offered Pollock and Lee a free place to stay in New York City. He owned a remodeled carriage house at 9 MacDougal Alley in the Village and suggested to Lee one day that she and Pollock use it on their next trip to the city. On Thanksgiving Pollock and Lee left Springs for an extended stay in Ossorio’s carriage house. Their departure was announced in The East Hampton Star, which, after ignoring Pollock for years, suddenly took note of the celebrity in its backyard (although it failed to note the correct spelling of his name). “Mr. and Mrs. Jackson Pollack,” the newspaper reported, “are spending three weeks in New York while Mr. Pollack is holding a one man exhibition of his paintings. Mr. Pollack, one of the popular modern artists, has made his home at Springs for the past few years.”
Pollock’s third show at the Parsons Gallery (November 21-December 10, 1949)—his first since the spread in Life—opened to wide acclaim. The exhibit, consisting of thirty-four “drip” paintings, was reviewed favorably in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and the art journals. While Carlyle Burrows, of the New York Herald Tribune, the lone dissenter, griped that the paintings looked “more than ever repetitious,” the insult carried none of the vitriol of insults past. No longer did critics liken Pollock’s art to “baked macaroni” or “tangled hair.” The snide tone of earlier criticism had been replaced by one of respect. “Late Work by Kandinsky, Pollock and Others,” read the headline on the Sunday arts page in The New York Times, reflecting Pollock’s new stature as a painter who deserved to be taken as seriously as Kandinsky. The sales figures were appropriately impressive, with the purchasers ranging from friends on Long Island like Valentine Macy and Harold Rosenberg to such professional investors as Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III. The show, according to Pollock’s mother, was “the best show he has ever had and sold well eighteen paintings and prospects of others they both are fine he is still on the wagon.”
The three weeks he had planned to spend in New York City stretched into three months, with Lee insisting there was no point returning to the farmhouse in Springs in the dead of winter. They might as well stay in New York, she reasoned, and take advantage of the free apartment at 9 MacDougal Alley, or “Nine Mac,” as Pollock called it. Besides, staying in the city would allow them to attend the many dinner parties to which they were invited, the many receptions at galleries and museums: the reception at the Whitney, on Eighth Street, where, six days after his Parsons show closed, his Number 14, 1949 went on exhibit; the reception at the Museum of Modern Art, where, the month after the Whitney show came down, his Number 1, 1948 went up. He attended many parties, his sobriety adding a new layer of absurdity to already absurd events. Among them, as Lee wrote to Ossorio, was “an insane dinner party given by a Mr. & Mrs. Lockwood, whom we didn’t know, and who weren’t there.” One night, after returning home from yet another dinner party, Lee realized that a woman who Pollock thought was Mrs. Herbert Ferber was not Ferber’s wife at all but the wife of a cartoonist. So that Pollock would know whom he had met, “I wrote out a list of the names of the people we had dinner with.”
To the outside world he had become, in the words of Life, the “shining new phenomenon of American art.” To fellow artists, however, Pollock’s exalted status carried no more credence than his earlier rank, bestowed by Greenberg, as “the strongest painter of his generation.” While no one doubted Pollock’s seriousness, artists resented the claims about his superiority. At the same time they wondered, if not Pollock, who was the best? Many thought it was Willem de Kooning, the Rotterdam-born painter who had arrived in New York as a stowaway in 1926. After painting houses in Hoboken and making displays for A. S. Beck Shoe Stores, de Kooning had gained an underground reputation in the thirties as a master of the human figure. Although he had not had his first one-man show until 1948, at the age of forty-four, his refusal to exhibit before he felt ready (and de Kooning never felt ready) only heightened the respect he commanded among artists. Unlike Pollock, who tended to alienate painters with his surliness, de Kooning had a large, loyal following. The most conspicuous of his admirers was the abstract painter Milton Resnick, who, like de Kooning, wore a wool sailor’s cap and could often be overheard saying “Terrific, terrific” in the broken Dutch accent of his mentor.
One day de Kooning and Resnick were wandering along Fifty-seventh Street when they ran into Pollock. His show had opened a few days earlier and he was interested in hearing what his colleagues felt—at least he thought he was. Pollock asked the two painters whether they had seen his show; they said they had. “What did you think?” he asked quietly. De Kooning said nothing. Resnick said he had a question about one painting in particular called Out of the Web. Pollock had cut large amoeboid shapes “out of the web” of dripped pigment, exposing
the brown Masonite board on which the canvas was glued. Resnick told Pollock he didn’t get it—what were those pieces of Masonite doing in the middle of a “drip” painting? Pollock thought for a few seconds before blurting out his answer: “Big form,” he said. As his colleagues looked at him uncomprehendingly his face turned red. “Big form,” he said again. Resnick said he understood. “You mean big like Picasso big?” “Yeah,” Pollock said, nodding his head as the two painters laughed at him.
Ever since the article in Life, his circle of acquaintances had been expanding steadily. Yet he found himself more alienated than ever from his fellow painters. De Kooning once said, “Pollock broke the ice.” While the comment has been taken (and quoted on dozens of occasions) as a tribute to the revolutionary nature of Pollock’s art—as if he had made it possible for a whole generation of painters including de Kooning to advance in their art—the comment was actually a reflection, and not necessarily a flattering one, on Pollock’s popular appeal. What de Kooning was saying was that Pollock was the first of his generation to interest the general public in abstract American painting; he broke through the ice of mass indifference. But never did de Kooning openly acknowledge an artistic debt to Pollock. The two men were not so much colleagues as competitors, each representing entirely different values. De Kooning, who came from the country that produced Vermeer and Rembrandt, prided himself on his links to tradition as surely as Pollock was pleased by the notion of his Cody boyhood and the challenge to tradition it represented. De Kooning’s acknowledged status as the more learned and intellectual of the two painters did not offend Pollock; to the contrary, he turned it into a weakness. He often accused de Kooning of being a “French painter,” referring to his reverence for Cubist tradition. Another of Pollock’s favorite jabs at de Kooning was, “You know more, but I feel more.”
Jackson Pollock Page 21
