Pollock’s favorite drinking companion was Franz Kline, a short, stocky, good-natured painter who had grown up in the coal-mining country of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. He had a trim mustache and thick black hair, which he combed straight back to reveal a heart-shaped face and small, sad eyes that slanted downward. Kline had painted figuratively until the late forties, when one day he enlarged a drawing of a rocking chair with a Bell-Opticon magnifier and conceived the idea of his famous black-and-white abstractions. “Dali once told me,” Kline has said, “my work was related to John of the Cross, whom he called the ‘poet of the night.’ Not having read him I wouldn’t know.” Kline’s speaking manner was rambling and ardent, larded with frequent references to the Brooklyn Dodgers, railroads, automobiles, Wagnerian opera, and every aspect of art history, though he never went on at length about his own work. He and Pollock both believed that real artists didn’t talk about their art, and anyone who did was suspect. One morning after an evening when Kline had participated in a panel discussion at the Museum of Modern Art, he was awakened around dawn by a hammering on the door. He opened it. Pollock, still out from the previous night’s carousing, barged in. He faced Kline angrily. “I heard you were talking yesterday,” he said.
Lee seldom accompanied her husband to the Cedar. “I loathed the place,” she once said. “The women were treated like cattle.” She hated the tough talk, the horsing around, the sight of her husband drunkenly slapping strangers on the back as if he were one of the guys. Whom was he kidding? She blamed the Cedar for his drinking, reasoning that if he did not go to the bar he would not drink, and it frustrated her to be unable to keep him away. Pollock, in turn, seized every chance to heighten her frustration. One of his favorite strategies was to pretend that he was drunker than he actually was. A typical incident occurred one night when Kline and his sidekick, a young painter named Dan Rice, dragged Pollock home to 9 MacDougal Alley to find Lee standing outside her bedroom at the top of the stairs. “Don’t bother bringing him up,” Lee shouted. “I don’t want a drunk in my bed.” Pollock collapsed in the entryway, face first, and lay there as if unconscious. Lee continued to scream, failing to notice as her husband lifted his head, turned it toward Kline, and flashed his friend a wink.
Sober, he could barely remember what had happened the night before. But he remembered enough to know that he had been drunk, and the thought left him utterly dejected. Only one year earlier he had believed he was finally “above water,” yet realized now that “things don’t work that easily I guess.” He asked his wife to try to understand. “It’s a storm,” he assured her. “It will pass.” He tried to show her how sorry he was, buying her roses, baking her bread, and even telephoning Betty Parsons one day to suggest that she give Lee a show. Parsons was opposed. “I don’t show husbands and wives,” she told him, but Pollock insisted that she at least give Lee the courtesy of a visit. Lee always forgave Pollock for his nasty, drunken behavior. She knew his drinking depressed him even more than it depressed her. “Life’s not worth it,” he often told her despairingly. “The whole thing isn’t worth it.” One day that winter he returned home with a will. “If my wife, LEE POLLOCK, survives me then I give, devise and bequeath to her my entire estate.”
Pollock thought he might feel better if he left New York. An arts group by the name of Momentum had invited him to Chicago to help jury an exhibit, and though “jurying was something I swore I’d never do,” he figured “the experience might do me good.” On February 7 he flew to Chicago, his first time on an airplane. “Flew out and back alone—and liked it, flying.” Maybe it reminded him of other experiences: riding freight trains, driving his Ford, traveling at fast speeds, and capturing for one brief moment an exhilarating sense of change, risk, and release. The airplane ride turned out to be the only good part of the trip. In Chicago, Pollock visited Werner’s bookstore, on Michigan Avenue, two blocks south of the Art Institute, and joined two other jurors in an effort to select 60 works, from more than 800 entries, for a show called “Exhibition Momentum 1951.” The Momentum group had asked Pollock to participate in order to ensure that advanced artists received fair and adequate representation but regretted its choice as soon as the jurying began. Each time juror Max Weber, the distinguished American Cubist, recommended a work for the show, Pollock would respond the same way—“That’s awful.” He meant what he said. He judged the art of his contemporaries by the same harsh standards he applied to his own art, and by that criterion almost everything failed. “The jurying,” he later wrote, “was dissappointing and depressing—saw nothing original being done.” The New York Herald Tribune was surely referring to Pollock when it reported the following month, “If one juror had his way, the show would have numbered less than ten items all told.”
Back in New York, at 9 MacDougal Alley, Pollock found himself as disconsolate as ever. He missed his house in Springs and wanted to go home but had already committed himself to various projects in New York. He spent considerable time that winter writing and recording a narration for the color documentary that Hans Namuth had filmed the previous year. Pollock, in his own words, was “not too happy” about having to talk in the movie but had agreed to do it anyway after coproducer Paul Falkenberg assured him that his statement need not be elaborate. Together Pollock and his producer wrote a six-minute statement that was based for the most part on earlier statements. “My home is in Springs, East Hampton, Long Island” it begins. “I was born in Cody, Wyoming thirty-nine years ago.” Soon after he recorded the narration, Pollock visited the producer’s studio one day to watch the finished movie. Not one minute after it had begun he became exasperated. Falkenberg, without consulting him, had added Balinese gamelan music to the sound track. “Paul,” Pollock told him angrily, “this is exotic music.” The producer tried to explain, saying that the free-flowing rhythm of the music reminded him of Pollock’s art. “Paul,” Pollock said, amazed that the producer could fail to understand, “I’m an American painter.” That was the end of the Balinese gamelan music. The eleven-minute documentary was first shown that summer at the Museum of Modern Art—with music by composer Morton Feldman. Of Brooklyn.
For Pollock the long, troubled winter was not entirely without consolations. He at least managed to complete a few dozen ink drawings; “feel good about them,” he noted. It had been a number of years since Pollock produced a significant number of drawings; he had more or less stopped making drawings in the years he was making “drip” paintings. But his 1951 drawings, like his earlier “psychoanalytic drawings” for Dr. Henderson, were probably intended more as personal notations than public statements; he ended up recycling most of them into other works. Some he pasted into collages. Dozens more he soaked in Rivit glue and pasted to a pyramid-shaped wire armature to create a sculpture (Untitled), which was exhibited that spring at the Peridot Gallery, on Twelfth Street, in a show called “Sculpture by Painters.” Critics admired the sculpture—“Jackson Pollock stops the show with a writhing, ridge-backed creature,” gushed Art News—but Pollock took no pride in the work. He thought it was trivial. On the day the show closed he drove to the gallery to pick up his sculpture. Realizing it was too large to fit in the trunk of his car, he tossed it into the street and stomped on it until it was flat. He took it home and later threw it away.
More and more Pollock was being singled out in the press as the leader of American painting. His work was exhibited throughout the year in a succession of group shows at the major New York museums, with even his detractors acknowledging that he had become, as Henry McBride, the conservative critic, put it, “the chef-d’école, such as it is; and that is always something.” Pollock’s contemporaries, however, did not consider him any kind of “chef-d’école,” and the distinction was one that Pollock himself would have quickly disavowed (not least because it was French). He was uninterested in winning followers, and even his art, in some ways, seemed to spurn disciples. For as is true of any artist whose style is intensely personal, it is difficult to borrow from Pol
lock without lapsing into crude imitation. Why would any serious artist want to drip paint when Pollock held the patent on the technique? De Kooning’s style, by comparison, was more traditional and easier to appropriate, and many young artists, like Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Alfred Leslie, already owed a debt to his thrusting brushwork and elbow-action style. The extent of de Kooning’s influence became evident in May 1951 when a group of Club members organized the “Ninth Street Show,” the most celebrated art event of the year. It consisted of sixty-one works by as many artists, hung in a defunct antique shop in a building that was about to be torn down. Hundreds of people attended the opening-day celebration—a banner was raised above Ninth Street—generating the feeling that something substantial had been accomplished in American art. For Pollock, however, the “Ninth Street Show” was merely another reminder of his solitariness. He authorized Betty Parsons to send one of his paintings down to Ninth Street, and by the time the show opened, he had returned to Springs.
“Mr. and Mrs. Jackson Pollack,” The East Hampton Star noted on May 10, “have returned to their home after spending the winter in Chicago and New York.” It was only a matter of days before Pollock was back in his studio and finally able to overcome the drinking and dissipation of the previous months. He worked hard that summer, avoiding all distractions, as he prepared for his next show at the Parsons Gallery, which was scheduled for November. It was a productive summer for his wife as well, for Lee too was preparing for an upcoming show at the Parsons Gallery—her first one-woman show. At Pollock’s urging, Parsons had recently come out to Springs to look at Lee’s work and had been favorably impressed. She scheduled Lee’s show for October.
Every day around noon Pollock headed out to the barn and Lee went upstairs to the bedroom that served as her studio. They did not see each other again until dinner time. “How did it go?” Lee would invariably ask him, though she could tell from the look on his face exactly how it had gone. “Not bad,” Pollock would say, assuming it had been a good day. “Would you like to see what I did?” He sought her support, and she sought his, neither of them taking account of the disparity in their reputations. In fact, sometimes it was hard to determine exactly who was ahead of whom, and their ranks were not as clearly defined as Pollock might have liked. When Pollock and Lee participated that summer in a group show at Guild Hall, Lee came away with a second prize of seventy-five dollars. Her husband placed third, for a mere fifty dollars.
Almost a decade had passed since a young Lee Krasner had stood before her easel wondering how she, like Pollock, might imbue her art with direct and spontaneous feeling. The result of her earliest efforts had been a series of frustrating “gray slabs.” She had destroyed them in 1945, hosing them down until the paint peeled from the canvas. A breakthrough had soon followed, however. Between 1946 and 1949 she produced about forty paintings known as her “Little Images.” These dense, small-scale, “allover” abstractions consist of tight organic forms applied in thick impasto and repeated rhythmically in parallel rows. Lee considered her “Little Images” mature, eloquent statements, yet she still sought to loosen up her style and acquire a more improvisatory approach to painting. In the summer of 1951, while preparing for her show at Parsons, she sensed that another breakthrough was imminent. She summoned her husband to her studio one day, and Pollock too noticed the change. “Lee is doing some of her best painting,” he wrote in June, “—it has a freshness and a bigness that she didn’t get before—I think she will have a handsome show.” It is hard to evaluate Pollock’s appraisal, for Lee, doubting her own accomplishments, later destroyed eleven of the fourteen paintings that she exhibited in her show. Not until after her husband’s death did she produce the work that assured her reputation as a leading Abstract Expressionist.
“This has been a very quiet summer,” Pollock wrote in August, “no parties hardly any beach—and a lot of work.” From May through September he secluded himself in his studio and worked with fanatic purpose, producing twenty-eight “black paintings” (titled Number 1 through Number 28) that mark a radical break from the style of his past. In most of the paintings Pollock limited himself to monochromatic hues of black and reddish-brown, thinning his pigment to a watery consistency and soaking it into raw, unprimed canvas. By abandoning color he gave his art a sense of urgency, which carries over into the subject matter as well. The human figure suddenly returns, with heads, faces, and mutilated limbs emerging from the webs and tangles of black. The most common and crudest of the images is a decapitated Roman head, its high, balding forehead and classical features bearing an unsettling likeness to the artist. Sometimes the head is merely suggested; other times it is obscenely explicit, floating lifelessly against the stark expanse of the canvas (Fig. 26). Even considered abstractly, many of the paintings have a morbid, funereal feeling about them, their stained and blotted off-white surfaces at times resembling blood-soiled bandages.
Pollock’s “black” paintings are difficult works. Critics remain divided over whether they measure up to his earlier achievements, and some have argued that his return to traditional drawing (that is, using line to define form) marks the onset of Pollock’s decline. Yet whether or not one considers the “black” paintings successful, it is hard not to be sympathetic to them when one takes account of the emotional necessity that impelled them into existence. Where once there were soaring ribbons, there is now a hangman’s rope, severing heads from bodies and serving as a metaphor for Pollock’s violent break with his past. His “black” paintings can be seen as a rebellion against his “drip” paintings. The violence of the subject matter, with its frequent references to sacrifice and mutilation, harks back to earlier times: to 1938, when Pollock turned against Benton, and to 1944, when he turned against Picasso. What distinguishes the “black” paintings from those earlier cycles of figurative work is that Pollock no longer “veiled his imagery.” Instead he left the human figure exposed, as if unconsciously propelled toward a revelation and confession of guilt. Many critics consider the “black” paintings an anticlimatic finale to the heroic drama of his “drip” paintings, but in some ways they constitute the most heroic episode of his career. There is something at once pathetic and impressive in Pollock’s need to violate a style as soon as it came within his grasp, even when the style happened to be the one he had struggled all his life to define.
In terms of technique, the “black” paintings are not significantly different from earlier paintings. Pollock continued to work on the floor, dripping industrial paint from sticks, dried brushes, and occasionally basting syringes. But instead of tacking a single sheet of canvas to the floor, he unrolled as much as twenty feet of canvas at a time and painted the works side by side. The method allowed him to sustain his impulses from one painting to the next, and it was not until afterward, in long sessions of cutting and editing, that he thought about each image as a separate aesthetic entity. “Should I cut it here?” he asked Lee. “Should this be the bottom?” The last step was signing his canvases. Pollock hated the finality of signing his works and usually waited until they were about to be picked up by truck and taken to the gallery before dipping a brush in black and signing his name to them in a fiercely slanted script.
In October, having finished preparing for their respective shows, Pollock and Lee left Springs for a two-month stay in New York. They were both eager to hear what the critics thought of their latest work. Many people had wondered where Pollock’s “drip” paintings would lead, if anywhere, and not even his admirers could have anticipated his return to the human figure. Pollock imagined their surprise at his “black” paintings, suspecting that “the non-objectivists will find them disturbing—[as will] the kids who think it simple to splash a Pollock out.” His immediate concern, however, was Lee’s show, which was scheduled to open six weeks before his own. It had never been Pollock’s intention to overshadow his wife; to the contrary, he wanted her to stand on her own and win the acclaim he felt she deserved. He helped her hang her show, an
d when it opened, on October 15, he was careful not to monopolize attention at the reception held in her honor. The printmaker Jacob Kainen, who arrived at the Parsons Gallery a few minutes before the reception began, recalls watching Pollock head for the exit as soon as a crowd assembled. “This is Lee’s show,” he politely told a guest, slipping out the door.
Lee’s show turned out to be a dismal disappointment, arousing little interest from either critics or collectors. None of the fourteen paintings sold. The reviews were patronizing, with the critic of The New York Times detecting in her work “feminine acuteness.” When the show closed, Lee was forty-three years old, had never sold a painting, and was a $126 dollars in debt to Betty Parsons.
Pollock’s show at the Parsons Gallery, which opened on November 26, was even more disappointing. Of the sixteen “black” paintings on exhibit, only two sold, bringing him less than twelve hundred dollars. He went to the gallery almost every day hoping to hear from Parsons that additional sales had been made. On one visit there he noticed that someone had defaced Number 7, 1951, scribbling obscenities on the canvas. On another visit he ran into de Kooning’s dealer, Charles Egan. “Good show, Jackson,” Egan said, “but could you do it in color?” Pollock felt bitter and betrayed. He had gone beyond the style of his past, but the collectors only wanted more of the same. Already the “drip” paintings were considered vintage Pollock, the rest a lesser investment, a fact Pollock was reminded of every time he walked into the gallery and noticed that the small red dot signifying a sale had been placed beside only two paintings, and not even large paintings.
One day Pollock visited Clement Greenberg, who was no longer writing about art for The Nation and had not reviewed a Pollock show in three years. “My paintings aren’t selling,” Pollock told him. Greenberg tried to help, summoning up the old panegyric for an article in Partisan Review and a second in Harper’s Bazaar. (“If Pollock were a Frenchman . . . people would already be calling him ‘maître’ and speculating in his pictures.”) Still, the “black” paintings did not sell. Pollock thought that perhaps the collectors would be more receptive if his art were less expensive. What about prints? He authorized six of the “black” paintings to be photographically reproduced and printed as serigraphs in editions of twenty-five. The printing was done by his brother Sande at his shop in Essex, Connecticut. Pollock visited one day to see how the work was progressing and told his brother, “All I want is five hundred dollars.”
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