Pollock’s inaugural show at the Janis Gallery, with Blue Poles, Convergence, and ten other paintings, opened in November to wide critical acclaim. It was reviewed favorably in The Nation, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and the art magazines, with Art News voting it the second-best one-man show of the year (after Miró). For Pollock, however, the show was a terrible disappointment. He telephoned the gallery often, hoping to hear that sales had been made, but the best news Janis could offer him was that a collector or two had stopped into the gallery and promised to consider his work. A typically exasperating incident occurred when a collector from Baltimore who had agreed to buy a certain “drip” painting backed out because the painting in question was four inches too long for his living room wall. By the time the show closed only one painting had been sold—Number 8, 1952—and it was not even a large painting. Pollock received a check for a thousand dollars, his entire earnings from the gallery that year.
His humiliation was keen. He had moved to the Janis Gallery out of anger with Parsons, yet realized now that his anger had been unjustified. It was not Parsons’ fault that she had been unable to sell his paintings. The simple fact was that no one could sell them. The public did not want his paintings; it did not want him. In his frustration Pollock telephoned Sidney Janis one night when he was drunk and yelled into the phone: “This is Jackson Pollock and I hear you like my painting. Why don’t you buy one?”
When Pollock’s show closed Janis removed Blue Poles from its wooden stretcher, rolled it up, and placed it in storage in an unlocked stairwell. A year later Lee expressed concern that the painting might crack if left in that position. Janis didn’t have room to store the painting unrolled, so he sent it back to Springs. In January 1954 Blue Poles was shipped back to the Janis Gallery and shown for a second time in a group exhibition called “Nine American Painters Today.” This time the painting sold. It was purchased by the collector Fred Olsen at the urging of Tony Smith, who was designing a house for the Olsens in Connecticut. Olsen paid Janis $6000, of which Pollock received $4000. Two years later Olsen sold the painting to collector Ben Heller for $32,000. In September 1973 Heller sold it to the Australian National Gallery in Canberra for $2 million, then the highest price ever paid for a work by an American artist.
One voice was missing from the chorus of praise accompanying Pollock’s first show at the Janis Gallery. Clement Greenberg did not review the exhibit. He felt that Pollock’s new paintings marked a falling off from his earlier work and that for the first time Pollock had produced “not bad paintings, but paintings where the inspiration was flagging.”
As a loyal friend, Greenberg decided to keep his opinions between Pollock and himself; there was no need to castigate him publicly. Besides, Pollock had already produced more than enough evidence to justify his reputation as the greatest painter of his era and had nothing to apologize for. Greenberg continued to champion him; if he couldn’t promote the new paintings, he’d promote the old ones. In the fall of 1952 he organized the first retrospective of Pollock’s career. It consisted of eight works, dating from 1943 to 1951, hung in a barn on the campus of Bennington College.
For Pollock the retrospective was not so much a tribute as a tribulation. Already Greenberg was burying him, acting as if his career had ended with his 1951 “black” paintings. And as much as Pollock recognized the shortcomings of his 1952 paintings, he resented having to hear about them from Greenberg. Perhaps it was inevitable that Pollock and his champion would have a falling out. It happened on November 16, when Pollock, along with Lee, visited Bennington for the opening of his show. The reception was a small, genteel affair, hosted by the painter and art teacher Paul Feeley and attended by faculty members and students. At one point during the party Pollock walked over to the bar and started pouring himself a drink when Greenberg caught sight of him and said to himself: “The last thing I want is for Pollock to get drunk at Bennington.” Taking no account of what the guests might think, Greenberg loudly ordered Pollock to put down the drink. Pollock became embarrassed, blushing noticeably as he tried to conjure up the appropriate comment. Only three words came out, but their message was unmistakable. “You’re a fool,” Pollock told Greenberg. Almost two years would pass before they spoke to each other again.
Within a few weeks Pollock’s anger with Greenberg had paled compared with his anger at another critic. At least Greenberg understood his art, which was more than Pollock could say for Harold Rosenberg. In December 1952 Pollock picked up a copy of Art News and learned that his art, according to his neighbor Harold, could best be defined as an “encounter” between the artist and his canvas. “At a certain moment,” the article began, “the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act. . . . What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.”
Pollock was appalled by Rosenberg’s famous essay on “action painting.” Even though the article did not mention any contemporary painters by name, Pollock felt sure that the piece was about him. It had to be, for it even included a comment he had once made to Rosenberg. The previous summer, a time when he was having difficulty getting down to work, he had casually referred to his canvas as an “arena,” perhaps thinking of Picasso’s corridas, or bullfights. The last thing he had meant to imply was that he considered the canvas “an arena in which to act,” but there was his word, completely out of context, with Rosenberg building a theory around it and caricaturing him as a Promethean paint-flinger who cared more about the act of hurling paint than making good paintings.
Rosenberg later denied that Pollock’s use of the word “arena” had given him the idea for the article, and indeed, one does not have to be a philosopher to recognize the piece as a variation on the existentialist fashions of the fifties or to suspect that it was inspired by the Hans Namuth movie in which Pollock literally becomes an actor. But that did not lessen Pollock’s frustration. To the outside world he was suddenly an “action painter,” a title that must have struck him as cruelly ironic. His creative powers had begun to wane. Inside his studio the action was virtually over.
15
Final Years
1953–56
The next four years of Pollock’s life were dominated by a struggle against alcoholism and depression. He did manage to produce a few good paintings but agonized constantly over whether he was “saying anything.” So severe were his self-doubts that one day he called his wife into his studio and, gesturing toward a finished painting, asked her without a trace of irony, “Is this a painting?” Unable to work, he lost all sense of purpose. He talked about suicide but did not attempt it with means any faster than alcohol. He took to spending long hours at local bars, particularly Cavagnaro’s, on Newtown Lane, whose owner recalls the sight of him “pulling up in his coupe at eight-thirty or nine in the morning for his double Grand-Dad on the rocks.” His days often ended at the East Hampton police station, where well-intentioned officers, who knew he was someone important, let him off with a mere reprimand for his drunken recklessness. A typical incident occurred in April 1953 when he drove his Model A into the opposing lane of traffic on Main Street and forced a motorist off the road. On other occasions driving a car was altogether beyond his powers. “Found Jackson Pollock outside on sidewalk lying down,” notes one item in the police blotter.
The summer of 1953 was Pollock’s last period of sustained creative activity, and the ten or so works he completed are a tribute to his persistence in the face of fanatic self-doubt. In most of his late works Pollock rejected his celebrated “drip” style for a style resembling the European moderns, as if heeding Picasso’s dictum that “To copy others is necessary but to copy oneself is pathetic.” Pollock’s Easter and the Totem, an elegant painting with pretty swatches of pink and green pinned flat against vertical planes, has often been likened to Matisse’s Bathers by a River. Sleeping Effort, with its vibrantly colored undulating forms, evokes both Matisse and Kandinsky. In Portrait and a Dream, a long horizontal canvas rigidly d
ivided into two sections, a big Picasso-like head balances a wiry tangle of black-and-white lines. There is an undeniable strength to these paintings, but what finally comes across is an emptiness beneath the surface. The Deep, which shows a huge floe of ice split down the middle by a crack, seems oddly contrived; unable to recapture the meaning that had unfolded almost magically in his earlier work, Pollock turned to heavy-handed symbolism.
When Pollock’s second show at the Janis Gallery opened in February 1954—it was Janis who had Pollock switch back from numbering to naming his paintings so he’d be able to keep them straight—the critics were approving. “To begin with they’re really painted, not dripped!” gushed Emily Genauer in the Herald Tribune. Pollock, however, was long past the point of driving satisfaction from good notices. He recognized his 1953 paintings for what they were: an admirable effort to continue working at a time when he wasn’t quite sure of what he wanted to say. For so many years he had raced forward, testing limits, pushing at extremes, discarding discoveries as soon as he came upon them; but he could no longer sustain this momentum. For the second consecutive year he had failed to move forward, and unable to move forward, Pollock quickly lost faith in his abilities. In 1954 he completed only one painting. In 1955 he completed Search and Scent. In the last year of his life he completed nothing. Many of his friends agreed among themselves that the reason Pollock stopped painting was that he had already done everything he could, and whether this is true we can of course never know. But as the sculptor David Smith wrote to Adolph Gottlieb: “I don’t agree that he had shot his bolt. He had shot a bolt but he had been bolting for fifteen years, and he had other bolts left. But bottles won.”
Unable to work, Pollock began a precipitous decline. He drank heavily and continuously, consuming as much as a quart of whiskey a day. Sober, he abruptly descended into gloomy depressions and was overcome with unabashed self-pity. A gesture as slight as a compassionate glance from a woman could reduce him to tears. In a typical outburst Pollock started to cry one night in the middle of a dinner party after Cile Lord, his neighbor, asked him how he was doing. “I’m an old man,” he repeated between sobs as he reached for her hand. On other occasions he confessed to feelings of utter worthlessness, announcing to anyone willing to listen that he had never learned how to draw. One day he was visited by the writer Selden Rodman, who planned on interviewing him for a book. When Rodman and his wife Maia asked to see his work, Pollock led the couple outside to the barn. Upon realizing the door was locked, he smashed two windows and climbed inside. After a few minutes Rodman went back to the house, and Pollock, alone with Maia in the studio, started to cry uncontrollably. She took his head in her hands and tried to console him, which only made Pollock cry harder. As he wept he pointed to some paintings leaning against the wall and asked her, “Do you think I would have painted this crap if I knew how to draw a hand?”
Such desperate pleas for sympathy alternated unpredictably with outrageous displays of arrogance. Greenberg recalls his disgust one day after showing Pollock a book on Rubens. Glancing quickly at the reproductions, Pollock proclaimed, “I can paint better than this guy!” At a dinner party one night at the home of Herbert Ferber the guests were appalled when Pollock, gesturing toward a worn rug slung over the couch, announced to Adolph Gottlieb: “Your work is just like this rug. It’s full of holes.” Friends who had known Pollock in better days began avoiding his company, refusing to subject themselves to the obscene harangues that accompanied his drinking. But sometimes they didn’t have a choice. Harold Rosenberg, who had emerged not long ago as de Kooning’s chief champion, came to dread the sound of Pollock pulling up in his Model A, invariably after midnight. With the engine still running and the headlights beaming, Pollock would wander around the critic’s yard and holler at the house, “I’m the best fucking painter in the world.”
Pollock, who had always eschewed the camaraderie of artists, became more social toward the end of his life. Drunk, he sought out fellow artists, wanting to be part of a group. He took up with de Kooning, forcing himself to ignore the fact that in March 1953 de Kooning had unveiled his Woman series at the Janis Gallery and replaced Pollock as the sensation of Fifty-seventh Street. The art historian Sidney Geist recalls arriving at the Cedar one night to find Pollock and de Kooning sitting outside on the curb, passing a bottle between them. “Jackson, you’re the greatest painter in America,” de Kooning was mumbling drunkenly, slapping him on the back. “No, Bill,” Pollock blabbered, “you’re the greatest painter in America.” They kept at it until Pollock passed out. On other occasions, however, Pollock and de Kooning were not so mutually admiring. One night at the Cedar, Pollock started taunting his friend about his illegitimate daughter. De Kooning punched him in the mouth, drawing blood. The crowd that had gathered around them urged Pollock to hit de Kooning back, prompting him to utter his famous retort: “What? Me hit an artist?” The two painters made up, but as Greenberg wrote to his friend Sue Mitchell: “The reconciliation isn’t real. The fact is, they don’t like each other: Bill not really liking anybody, & Jackson, with all his capacity for love, seeking out people he doesn’t like . . . & then having trouble with them.”
The spring of 1954 was a particularly difficult time for Pollock. Ever since he had moved to the country, the arrival of spring had been a reminder that soon it would be time to return to his studio and prepare for his next show. This time, however, there would be no show. Pollock went into the barn almost every afternoon and stayed there until evening, but he couldn’t get down to work. When he returned to the house at the end of each day Lee did not ask him how it went; she could tell from the look on his face that he wasn’t working. As if to trick himself into working, Pollock ordered new art materials. He called up Rosenthal’s in the Village and placed extravagant orders for fresh rolls of canvas and dozens of tubes of oils. But the materials would remain unopened. As the weeks went by, it became harder for Pollock to stay inside his studio. Sometimes he came back to the house a few minutes after he’d left and headed for the refrigerator to get a beer. On other days he didn’t go out to the barn at all but started drinking as soon as he woke up, beginning with beer and graduating to whiskey by afternoon. His wife tried to be gentle. “Remember how good your painting used to be when you weren’t drinking?” she’d say, but her comments only reminded him of what he no longer was. Being in his house was worse than being in his studio, for he hated having to suffer his wife’s disappointment in him.
One June morning Pollock woke up early, drank some beer, and drove to Bridgehampton to see de Kooning and Kline, who were sharing a red Victorian farmhouse on Montauk Highway for the summer. He tried to get de Kooning to wrestle with him on the lawn, but de Kooning, who wasn’t a morning drinker, didn’t feel like wrestling. Pollock started sparring by himself, shooting his fists at an imaginary opponent. Suddenly there was a loud snap and Pollock fell down. His ankle broken, he spent the rest of the summer on crutches.
Pollock’s broken ankle was one more reminder of his rapidly deteriorating physical condition. With his bloated face, hazy features, and swollen, nicotine-stained fingers, he no longer was the commanding presence he had been only a year or two earlier. But even in his ruined condition, Pollock’s reputation as well as his misery gave him an aura of genius, and he found himself surrounded by various new admirers. The most determined was probably Ben Heller, a clothing manufacturer and fledgling art collector, who, on his first visit to Pollock’s studio, offered to purchase One for eight thousand dollars—the top price that Pollock ever received for a painting. Heller and his wife became frequent visitors, stopping by to sit with Pollock as he listened to records or to take him to the beach, even though he could not swim because of his broken ankle. Another devoted couple were Sheridan and Cile Lord, young artists who had recently settled in Springs. Lord was a painter of realistic landscapes, and though Pollock criticized his work—“You can’t do that kind of painting anymore!” he’d insist—the young painter adored him anyway. I
n February 1955, eight months after he had broken his ankle, Pollock was wrestling with Lord in his living room when suddenly he sat down and clasped his ankle. He had broken it again.
Important people wrote to Pollock offering their condolences. “All my sympathy,” wrote James Johnson Sweeney, director of the Guggenheim, while suggesting that Pollock visit the museum to see his own work. Greenberg, traveling in Europe, hoped Pollock’s break was “knitted by now” and, by the way, “Saw two Pollocks in Rome.” The art dealer Martha Jackson—“I hear you have broken your leg again”—got in touch with Pollock about buying a few of his paintings. One day she drove out to Springs to look at his work, and as they were discussing prices, she offered to barter her car as payment. It was quickly agreed: two “black” paintings for one dark-green 1950 Oldsmobile convertible.
On his good days Pollock talked about taking trips. He told his wife he wanted to go out west, and he invited the Lords to come with them. So too he talked about going to Europe. He had never seen the Louvre, after all, or the Sistine Chapel or the Goyas or El Grecos he had admired for years in reproduction. He drove to Riverhead, the county seat, and took out a passport, but then he wasn’t so sure. One day when the painter Milton Resnick was visiting, Pollock told him: “What do you think? I’m going to Europe.”
“Okay,” Resnick said, “well, so?”
“I don’t know if I want to go,” Pollock told him.
“What do you want to do?” Resnick asked.
“I hate art,” Pollock said.
“Sure,” Resnick said. “Everybody does. So you’re going to Europe. What do you want me to tell you?”
He never signed his passport, never went to Europe.
As Pollock’s condition worsened, his career progressed on its own. His paintings were exhibited in one group show after another, and honors accrued. In November 1955 Janis organized a retrospective spanning fifteen years of Pollock’s career, and as Time magazine noted, “friend and foe alike crowded the exhibition in tribute to the champ’s prowess.” The following May, Pollock learned that the Museum of Modern Art, which was planning a series of one-man shows called “Works in Progress” for leading contemporary artists, had chosen him to start the series. Curator Andrew Ritchie had originally proposed that de Kooning go first, but Alfred Barr overruled him, arguing that Pollock was “more deserving.” Museum directors were magnanimous and deferential to Pollock’s reputation, in spite of his churlish behavior. When the Whitney Museum showed three of his paintings in an important group show called “The New Decade,” Pollock became livid upon noticing that the exhibition catalogue claimed he had “worked for a time with Hofmann.” He telephoned the museum and angrily cursed at a curator, prompting director John I. H. Baur to send him a polite apology.
Jackson Pollock Page 26
