At first it was a boys’ club. It was Pollock and the others mentioned alongside him in Life—Gorky, Hans Hofmann, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Philip Guston, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still. Women became more prominent among the so-called second generation of younger artists who rose in the later 1940s and ’50s that included Leslie, Larry Rivers, Joan Mitchell, Jane Freilicher, Nell Blaine, Grace Hartigan, and Helen Frankenthaler. They still had to fight their way through thick clouds of testosterone and much macho posturing, either by being even tougher and harder drinking than the boys, like the foul-mouthed, hot-tempered Mitchell, who sarcastically labeled herself a “lady painter,” or by being very pretty and ladylike in a traditional way, like Jane Wilson.
Romantic ideals of bohemian poverty, alienation, and dedication to art for art’s sake made a big comeback in this milieu. Explaining the downtown scene to the mainstream readers of the magazine Horizon in 1947, Greenberg used images that could have come straight out of Murger, describing “young people, few of them over forty, who live in cold-water flats and exist from hand to mouth,” who “show rarely on 57th Street, and have no reputations that extend beyond a small circle of fanatics, art-fixated misfits who are isolated in the United States as if they were living in Paleolithic Europe.” In Down and In, Ronald Sukenick jokes: “The misunderstood genius starving in his garret was the role model for artists of all kinds at the time. I myself could hardly wait to start going hungry.” De Kooning was the model of the downtown artist ferociously dedicated to the work and nothing but. He lived in abject poverty, sometimes painting in household enamels because he couldn’t afford art pigments, but he could spend a year on a single painting, scraping and repainting and scraping and repainting. For all their poverty and angst, however, many of them still managed to get away in the warmer months. Provincetown filled up with an ever larger crowd of Manhattan aesthetes and intellectuals every summer—de Kooning, passed out drunk and nude on the beach, would be arrested for indecent exposure there—while the Hamptons became a destination or permanent home for many artists, writers, and their affluent patrons, and Fire Island bloomed as a nearer weekend resort, especially for the gay and lesbian members of the scene.
Until the media plucked Pollock from among them to be a star, the public and press had little interest in what President Truman dismissed as “that ham-and-eggs school of art,” explaining that abstract art looked to him like someone stood back and threw eggs at the canvas. Asked how many people in America he thought liked modern art, Duchamp quipped, “Oh, maybe ten in New York and one or two in New Jersey.” Even the art critics who wrote about Abstract Expressionism in its formative years generally despised it. Greenberg, Pollock’s “formidably high-brow” champion, was among the few lonely cheering voices at first. Collecting and viewing modern art were not yet fashionably hip pursuits in New York, the way they would be by the 1960s. Guggenheim closed Art of This Century in 1947 and moved back to Europe, as did many of the refugee artists. There were only a handful of commercial art galleries in New York, all uptown, and into the early 1950s only a few small ones—Parsons, Charles Egan, Kootz, Tibor de Nagy—showed the downtown artists. So the artists started their own small collective galleries, where they all paid monthly dues, five to ten dollars each, to cover the rent and lights. Most of these were on and around East Tenth Street. But the first was in Greenwich Village: the Jane Street Gallery, which opened in 1943. In 1949 it moved uptown to be near the commercial galleries. The best-known Jane Street member, Larry Rivers, who’d been painting only a few years, had his first show there of bright, cheery interiors heavily influenced not by Abstract Expressionism but by French post-impressionist Pierre Bonnard.
Eighth Street from Broadway over to Sixth Avenue was the artists’ Village hub. Above the Eighth Street Playhouse and the basement Village Barn with its hokey hoedowns, Hans Hofmann had opened his School of Fine Arts in 1938. Hofmann was a living link to the European modern art of the early twentieth century. He’d worked in Paris when Fauvism and Cubism emerged and had been teaching art since the 1910s. Larry Rivers describes him as Santa Claus with a German accent. In both his color-rich paintings and what Rivers calls “his diatribes against all that was not inherently abstract” he was an obvious influence on the Abstract Expressionists, and on Greenberg too. Hofmann was the sole teacher at his school, and the idea of a school where a single instructor pounded home his dogma didn’t appeal to everyone. In 1948 Motherwell, Rothko, Baziotes, and the sculptor David Hare rented a loft at 35 East Eighth Street near Broadway to start their own Subjects of the Artist school. The pay for guest lecturers was dinner and a bottle of their favorite liquor. It lasted only about a year before a group of teachers from NYU’s art education program took it over as Studio 35.
Around the corner from Hofmann’s school, on Sixth Avenue just below Eighth Street, the Waldorf Cafeteria opened early in the war years. Artists headed there after attending Hofmann’s classes. The food was lousy, the lighting made people look so bad they nicknamed it the Waxworks, and the other patrons tended to be bums, drug addicts, tough guys, and cops. The staff was not particularly welcoming to arty boho types. In her diaries Judith Malina writes that Maxwell and Ruth Bodenheim celebrated his birthday there with a few friends, and assorted drunks and junkies, in 1953.
Seeking more amenable surroundings, artists again chipped in to rent an Eighth Street loft—this one near Fifth Avenue—that was called the Eighth Street Club or the Artists Club. Alfred Leslie says it happened simply because “everyone needed a place to sit and to hang out” when they weren’t at work in their studios or out at the bars. “You needed a place to go, ‘a social club.’ ” In addition to mounting some group shows, they held panel and roundtable discussions, sometimes with guest speakers, such as Hannah Arendt or E. E. Cummings. The four poets most associated with the New York School painters—and called, inevitably but just as inaccurately, the New York School poets—all read in public for the first time at the Artists Club: John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler. At Friday night parties Larry Rivers and a pickup band would often play jazz.
Discussions at the club led to the members organizing a large group show, which they staged nearby in May 1951 at 60 East Ninth Street, between Broadway and University Place, in an empty, high-ceilinged storefront that had most recently been an antiques shop. It was the first show Leo Castelli curated. “He hung around,” Leslie recalls. “He didn’t have a gallery yet. He showed things in his home. I painted his apartment.” The sixty-one artists who participated in the Ninth Street Show were a who’s who of first- and second-generation New York School artists, from Pollock, de Kooning, Reinhardt, and Motherwell to Robert Rauschenberg, Mitchell, Frankenthaler, Hartigan, and Leslie. Everyone pitched in to rent the space for a month—Leslie remembers it was fifty or sixty dollars—and clear it out, whitewash the walls, promote the show among friends, and take turns sitting there when it was open. On opening night a big banner was stretched across the street. Despite an almost complete lack of interest from the press, the opening was like a scruffy downtown version of a Hollywood premiere, with a big crowd milling to get in and taxis jamming the street. Uptown art dealers took note.
Of all the sites in the Village associated with the painters, the best known and longest-lived was the Cedar Street Tavern, aka the Cedar bar, at 24 University Place just above Eighth Street. It was in the right spot to be their local, and they liked it because there was nothing quaintly Greenwich Village-y or bohemian about it. University Place at the time was on the skids, dotted with flophouses, its sidewalks littered with bums, which put it well off the tourists’ and slumming uptowners’ path. John Gruen described the Cedar, named for the street farther downtown where it was originally located, as a “nondescript, ill-lit, more than slightly depressing place” with “drab naugahyde booths.” Ruth Kligman, whose brief, tragic-romantic affair with Pollock began at the Cedar in 1956, described it as “a small, crummy-looking bar�
� with some booths in the back. “The walls were painted a pea-soup green. The place smelled faintly of stale urine.” It had nothing to attract hipsters or tourists, at least not until all the artists and writers hanging out there became famous. Before that it was their spot and they kept it to themselves. “It became ultimately completely tribal, as all bars become tribal,” Alfred Leslie recalled. “Everybody sleeps with everybody else, everybody knows each other, and basically strangers are not welcome unless they are brought in.” But with Life and Time writing about them the mobs of gawkers, yahoos, aspiring youngsters, and art groupies on the make showed up, making it, as Rivers called it, “the G-spot of the art scene.”
Like Pfaff and Romany Marie, the Cedar management enjoyed having artists and writers in the place to attract these crowds and was lenient about their running up tabs and knocking each other down. “We go there to meet the very people we hate most, the other painters,” Reinhardt quipped. Many of them were bad drunks, and the psychodrama of numerous spats, feuds, and fallings-out of former friends got played out in the dark, noisy, smoky bar. Gruen was there one night when de Kooning and Pollock got into a drunken, heated argument that culminated with de Kooning punching Pollock in the face. When someone in the crowd urged Pollock to fight back, he gave the legendary reply, “What? Me hit an artist?” Pollock was briefly 86’ed for his own violent outbursts, which culminated in his kicking in a bathroom door. The painter Lee Krasner, his long-suffering wife, rarely accompanied him to the Cedar, later telling Pollock’s biographer Deborah Solomon, “I loathed the place. The women were treated like cattle.” Greenberg rarely went there either—it was too full of the drunken painters he’d written about.
They also liked another dive, Louis’ Tavern, in a building no longer standing at the end of Barrow Street on Sheridan Square. Larry Rivers describes it as “a loud bar packed to its rafters with young bohemian heterosexuals lightly sprinkled with homosexuals.” It was popular, he says, for “the excellent chances, after entering alone, of going home with somebody.” It was often packed to overcapacity, the crowd spilling out to the sidewalk and the stone steps next door. Robert De Niro, the actor’s painter father who had work in the Ninth Street Show, hung out there along with folks from the nearby Circle in the Square theater such as Geraldine Page, Jason Robards, and Steve McQueen. The Beats and later beatniks cruised the joint, as did Ashbery and O’Hara, while skeevier down-and-outers panhandled the crowd for a glass of beer or a twenty-five-cent shot of rail whiskey. Rivers says that by 2 a.m. everyone who was going to get laid that night had paired up and departed, and the deserted joint, as Ashbery put it, “looked like the bottom of a pocket.”
POLLOCK’S DRUNKEN RAGES, AT THE CEDAR AND ELSEWHERE, WERE nearly as renowned as his paint-spattered canvases. The two were conflated in his legend. Dawn Powell, who became a late-night Cedar regular in the mid-1950s and used it in her last novel The Golden Spur, has the bartender and a patron at the Cedar-like Spur discuss a Pollock-ish character named Hugow. “A painter can’t turn out the stuff they have to do now without being loaded,” the patron argues. The bartender disagrees; “they got to paint sober,” he says, “then they’re so disgusted with what they done they got to get stoned.” When the patron complains about how unruly they get when they’re out drinking, the bartender replies it’s only human nature. To which the patron grumbles, “Artists get away with more human nature than anybody else.”
Whether or not he was the greatest living artist in 1949, Pollock was one of the most intense, tormented, and tormenting, a bad drunk who took swinish behavior to new lows and got away with it because he was the superstar of the scene. Born in cowboy country in Wyoming, raised all over the Southwest and Southern California, he’d first studied art in Los Angeles (with his friend Philip Guston), then followed his two older brothers to Greenwich Village in 1930. Studying at the Art Students League and working for the WPA, he absorbed the influences of the Mexican muralists Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. He met Peggy Guggenheim during the war while working as a janitor at her uncle Solomon’s new Museum of Non-Objective Painting on West Fifty-fourth Street, which later became the Guggenheim and moved to its iconic home on the Upper East Side. Peggy gave him his first show at Art of This Century, and helped him and Krasner buy the farmhouse out in Springs, near the Hamptons, where he could work in solitude and, they hoped, kick his alcoholism. It was there that he came up with the drip paintings. Like Bodenheim before him and Kerouac after, he suffered the joys and guilt of the successful bohemian. It exacerbated his drinking problem and led to many legendarily surly acts around his patrons, for instance the famous story of his pissing in Peggy’s fireplace during a party. He and Lee spent much of the winter of 1951 in the carriage house at 9 MacDougal Alley, lent to them by Alfonso Ossorio. Pollock’s carrying-on at the Cedar got particularly out of hand that winter—ranting, breaking furniture, pawing the young art groupies the bar attracted by then. Artist friends would drag him home at the end of the night, only to confront a screaming Krasner. In February 1956 Time ran its own largely negative and sometimes ridiculing overview of New York artists, calling Pollock “Jack the Dripper” and claiming that their work evoked “a mixture of puzzlement, vexation, contempt” in viewers. Yet just a few months later the Museum of Modern Art chose him to be the first in a new series of solo shows by artists in midcareer.
That spring Pollock met Ruth Kligman at the Cedar. He was forty-four; she was twenty-six and working as an assistant at an art gallery. In her memoir, she recalls how all heads in the crowded place turned when Pollock “came storming in . . . He looked tired out, sad, and his body seemed as though it couldn’t stand up on its own. He was leaning against the bar as if for support.” The writer and painter Fielding Dawson was in the bar one night that June when Pollock, after getting a stern warning from the bartender not to act up, did just that. Spying a pretty girl there with a date, he horned in on their table, started pawing the girl, and when her date timidly objected he grinned evilly and swept his arm across the table, knocking their drinks, plates, and silverware into their laps. That summer, Krasner caught Kligman and Pollock sleeping together in the barn at Springs. When Krasner went to Europe to get away from him for a bit, Kligman moved in. On the night of August 11, 1956, after a long day of drinking, Pollock ran his Olds convertible off the road, killing himself and Kligman’s friend Edith Metzger and seriously injuring Kligman. Already the biggest art star of his time, his suicide-by-Oldsmobile, like Dylan Thomas’s suicide-by-whiskey three years earlier and James Dean’s suicide-by-Porsche in 1955, secured his niche in the pantheon of martyred celebrities. He was far from the first artist killed by fame, and hardly the last, but he was maybe one of the last to be surprised by fame. By the Pop art, rock and roll 1960s, when the New York art market went on a bender that lasted into the 1980s, everyone would know if not understand that fame was integral to the game.
AT THE OTHER END OF THE SPECTRUM IN MOST EVERY WAY, LARRY Rivers was one of the younger, least pretentious, and most affable artists on the scene—a hepcat and party boy who appreciated the fame and money when they came his way. Born Yitzhok Grossberg in the Bronx in 1923, son of a man who had a garment industry trucking business, he didn’t set foot in Manhattan until he was sixteen. He became Larry Rivers as a jazzbo playing baritone sax with touring big bands in the early 1940s. Through the jazzmen he became an avid pothead and a heroin user. At the end of the 1940s he’d voluntarily entered the same notorious drug rehab facility in Lexington, Kentucky, that Burroughs writes about in Junkie. He found Dexter Gordon, Sonny Stitt, and a few other jazz greats there already. In his witty, engaging autobiography What Did I Do?, he remembers himself as a young man during the war “walking all over Greenwich Village with his big horn slung over his shoulder looking for a joint where he could sit in and blow with a lot of other desperados.” He studied music composition at Juilliard, where he smoked pot with fellow student Miles Davis. After the war he gave up trying to be a professional m
usician, and the painter Jane Freilicher, then married to another jazz musician, inspired him to try his hand at art. Despite studying with Hofmann he wasn’t one of the abstractionists; he started out imitating Bonnard and went on to prefigure Pop art. For a while he worked behind a counter at Bloomingdale’s, doing quick-sketch caricatures for customers who bought a new type of ballpoint pen, still a novelty in the postwar years. His art and his career developed gradually; by his own admission he was at least as interested in sex (he was ravenously pansexual, and not above hustling gay male friends to advance his career) and drugs and music as in art. Once when he got a lover pregnant, they went to New Jersey, where Dr. William Carlos Williams performed the abortion. By 1960, a successful and comfortable art star, he’d rented a giant pied-à-terre in the Village to be near a current girlfriend, while keeping a place in the Hamptons as well. It was a huge duplex loft on West Third Street, a former film studio that cost two hundred and thirty-five dollars a month, far more than many artists could afford then.
In 1957 Rivers was invited to be a contestant on The $64,000 Challenge. Contestants, who over the years ranged from an eleven-year-old and a Bronx shoemaker to Dr. Joyce Brothers and Jane Wilson, were tested on the depth of their trivia knowledge in fields of their own choosing. The shoemaker, an Italian immigrant, won the top prize for his opera erudition. Rivers of course chose art and made it to the thirty-two-thousand-dollar level. He took the check straight downtown to the Cedar, where all his artist friends marveled and gnashed their teeth at it. He bought drinks for the house. “Between beer at fifteen cents and whiskey at fifty this gesture cost me a whopping $70,” he recalled. Besides fattening his bank account, the show made Rivers a household name. This was the same year that resident Village intellectual Charles Van Doren, PhD, an assistant professor at Columbia and son of the eminent Village poet and Columbia professor Mark Van Doren, won the enormous sum of $129,000 on NBC’s Twenty-One. Then the quiz show scandal broke and Van Doren admitted to a congressional investigating committee that the producers had fed him answers. Rivers was called to testify about his own experience. In his memoir he says that although the producers of The $64,000 Challenge didn’t go so far as to feed him answers in advance, they did give him really good hints about the questions so he could study up.
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