Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  In a later description of Jackson’s case, Henderson laid the blame for the relapse squarely on Marot’s death. “He had in fact suffered from considerable isolation due to emotional deprivation in early childhood, and this had not yet been adequately compensated,” Henderson wrote. “He had begun to compensate in a close relationship with a sympathetic older woman friend, whose interest in him he had learned to trust, but unfortunately, she died before he had attained the security of a really new position.”

  Whether Marot’s death in fact touched off the long depression that followed, or merely coincided with one of the periodic downturns that marked Jackson’s emotional life, the effect was the same. Without a job and without Marot’s maternal support, Jackson quickly reverted to old habits. “He had made up his mind to drink,” recalls Nene Schardt, “and nobody could stop him. The motivation was suddenly too strong. It was just a compulsion. He had had a period when he was all right, then suddenly it was broken.” As always, Jackson’s art suffered first. His productivity plummeted—he told a friend that he “wanted to paint very badly,” but “that was just no longer possible”—a paralysis made more frustrating by the successes of the recent past. As his expectations had risen, so had his capacity for disappointment (a dynamic that would be repeated, with devastating effect, a decade later).

  As in the past, Jackson expressed his frustration by lashing out at his competitors. Drunk and raving, he descended on Arshile Gorky’s apartment at 36 Union Square. Gorky, who was six feet four and “immensely strong,” received him civilly until Jackson called his paintings “nothing but shit,” whereupon Gorky threatened to throw him down the stairs. At an exhibition of Manuel Tolegian’s works, he tore paintings off the wall and routed patrons from the gallery. Tolegian’s successes on the Project (one of his paintings had been bought by the White House) and at the Ferargil Galleries still rankled. Later, Jackson laid siege to the apartment building that Tolegian managed at 25 Vandam Street, hurling stones at the windows, breaking them one by one with methodical madness.

  No successes, however, rankled more sharply than Philip Goldstein’s. Even before he arrived in New York in 1936, Goldstein had been the subject of an article in Time magazine. Although his mural designs for the WPA met with no more success than Jackson’s, he frequently entered small, well-publicized public competitions and routinely won. In 1938, his mural design for the WPA pavilion at the New York World’s Fair was accepted, along with one by Anton Refregier. Jackson spent the next year listening to the raves it earned from critics and public alike. At the end of the summer, Goldstein’s mural, Maintaining America’s Skills, was awarded, by public vote, first prize for the best outdoor mural of the fair. Not long afterward, Jackson wrote Charles, barely disguising his dejection and bitterness: “I haven’t been up to all these competitions. … Phil [Goldstein] and his wife have been winning some of the smaller jobs. I’m still trying to get back on the project.”

  When he wasn’t staggering drunk in the street or waging war on rivals, Jackson spent the days recovering in his studio as he always had, head in hands, sitting motionless for hours at a time. More and more, the schizophrenia-like state that Henderson had described was playing itself out in a binary drama of “depression and elation.” Disconsolate, he wrote Charles later that summer: “I haven’t much to say about my work and things—only that I have been going thru violent changes. … God knows what will come out of it all—it’s pretty negative stuff so far.” For the first time since the early thirties, he contemplated suicide. One friend remembers seeing a drawing he had done of a male figure “hanging by a cord.” “I took it to be a hint of suicide,” she remembers, “but I thought it was too delicate a subject to talk about.”

  During the months after Marot’s death, Jackson spent more time than ever in John Graham’s apartment on Greenwich Avenue. He undoubtedly found some solace in Graham’s belief that a profound nature and genuine talent often invite emotional disaster. “Regrets, sorrow, loneliness and eventual collapse”—these, said Graham, “are the wages of genius.” Acutely aware of Jackson’s unsuccessful therapy with Henderson and his drinking problem, Graham allowed their discussions of art to assume a psychotherapeutic dimension. (Despite his interest in Jung’s theories of the unconscious, Graham felt that, therapeutically, “Freud was on the right track.”) Later, in retrospect, friends would say that Graham acted as Jackson’s “lay analyst,” a label that Graham himself rejected. According to another artist whom Graham helped through similar difficulties, his therapeutic method consisted of “nothing but listening.”

  In September, after having several dreams about cross-country train trips, Joseph Henderson packed his bags and left for San Francisco. The New York psychoanalytic community, dominated by Freudians, had proven “too stifling” for his capacious ambition. (Henderson would later found the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, one of the leading centers for Jungian studies in the United States.) His departure, only four months after Marot’s death, apparently caused not the faintest trauma in Jackson’s life, not even a modest binge. Jackson gave him a gouache as a going-away present.

  Arguably, Henderson’s most important contribution to Jackson’s emotional well-being was his choice of a successor: Dr. Violet Staub de Laszlo. A Swiss-born analyst and student of Jung, de Laszlo had just arrived in New York from London where she and Henderson had studied together. Henderson did not choose a female successor by chance. “It is frequently efficacious,” he later wrote, “for a man with this type of mother-complex to be treated by a woman analyst capable of playing the mother role temporarily.” A stout, amiable-looking woman in her early forties with a diffident manner, matronly air, bright blue crescent eyes, and a round Alpine face, de Laszlo quickly filled the void in Jackson’s life left by Helen Marot’s death—despite her own efforts to “avoid involvement that might get in the way of his therapy.” Twice a week for the next year, Jackson eagerly made the long trek up to the apartment building at 27 West Eighty-sixth Street where de Laszlo lived with her two sons.

  Dr. Violet de Laszlo

  In some ways, the sessions merely recapitulated his experience with Henderson; the first few consisted of near-total silence. “I learned almost nothing about his childhood,” recalls de Laszlo, who had not discussed Jackson’s case with Henderson in advance. “It’s hard to convey how little he said in words. He was enormously inhibited.” Once again, the deadlock was broken only when Jackson began to bring drawings to their sessions. Unlike Henderson, however, de Laszlo proffered a minimum of Jungian interpretation. “We just sat together and looked at the drawings,” de Laszlo remembers, “and I picked out various elements that told me something. It was a search in common, really—totally unsystematic and based on mutual sympathy. I didn’t condemn, I didn’t criticize. I tried to be understanding.” Mutual sympathy and understanding from a maternal figure were, of course, precisely what Helen Marot had provided, and precisely what Jackson needed most. Only a few months after the sessions began, he tried to arrange to see de Laszlo outside the confines of analysis. “I would have liked to have seen him outside my office,” she remembers, “but he lived so far away and spent the greater part of his time in a drunken or semi-drunken state. So although he would have welcomed it, and I would have welcomed it, it didn’t fit together.” Jackson did, however, bring John Graham, who was contributing toward de Laszlo’s fee, to one of their regular sessions.

  In May, Jackson persuaded de Laszlo to write his draft board and request a deferment on psychological grounds. She balked at first, believing that “the army would be good for Jackson, that it would make a man of him,” but finally acquiesced and, on May 3, 1941, wrote the examining medical officer of local draft board 17:

  Dear Sir,

  Mr. Jackson Pollock has been referred to me by Dr. J. L. Henderson. Pollock has been coming to me for a number of psychoanalytical interviews during the past six months in connection with his difficulties of adaptation to social environment. I have found him
to be a shut in and inarticulate personality of good intelligence, but with a great deal of emotional instability, who finds it difficult to form or maintain any kind of relationship. I would say that the problem is fairly deep-seated and not due to any superficial tendencies towards evasion, or to immaturity of outlook.

  Although he has not during these months shown any manifest symptoms of schizophrenia, yet in the course of the interviews, it has become evident that there is a certain schizoid disposition underlying the instability. It is for this reason that I venture to suggest that Pollock be referred for a psychiatric examination.

  Three weeks later, Jackson underwent the suggested examination at Beth Israel Hospital. After obtaining another statement from de Laszlo verifying that he had been admitted to Bloomingdale’s, he was classified 4-F, unqualified. (He later told a friend that the army “rejected” him because he was “neurotic.”) It must have seemed an easy solution at the time, but in the long run, Jackson always made himself pay for what he perceived as moments of unmanly weakness.

  Bolstered by de Laszlo’s support and reinstated on the WPA in October, Jackson began to paint again. By the summer of 1941, he was enjoying the sunshine and seclusion of Bucks County for the third year in a row. “He seemed to have his drinking under control,” recalls Eda Bunce, who joined the Pollocks and the Schardts that summer. “I never saw him drink.” The most momentous event of the summer was the discovery of an old, abandoned Packard, over which Jackson, Bernie Schardt, and Louis Bunce labored like boys for weeks.

  Beyond the hedgerows of Bucks County, however, the future hurtled ahead in directions that the World’s Fair, now a distant memory, had never foreseen. By the summer of 1941, almost all of Europe had fallen to the Nazis. Paris, the artistic center of Jackson’s world, disappeared behind the wall of German occupation. Picasso was one of the few artists who remained in the city. (When a German officer visited Le Maître’s studio and saw reproductions of Guernica, he asked admiringly, “Did you do this?” To which Picasso replied, “No. You did.”) Matisse had retreated to Vichy Nice and most of the others, including the Surrealists, had fled in a decorous rout to the high ground of New York. On June 22, while Jackson tinkered with the old Packard, three million German soldiers swept across the Russian border toward Moscow.

  Closer to home, the WPA staggered toward extinction. After 2,500 murals, 17,000 pieces of sculpture, 108,000 easel paintings, and 240,000 prints, public tolerance and government money had finally run out. The furor over “communist infiltration” and “Bohemian chiselers” had dealt the final blow. Artists who complained shrilly that Communists deserved federal jobs or that reporting to workshops “consumed the precious morning light” sounded increasingly like the “ingrates and subversives” the Hearst papers accused them of being. “A winter of ups and downs,” Sande called it, “with the latter in the majority.” Thousands, like Sande and Jackson, had been on and off the Project, some more than once, living in perpetual fear of the next round of legislative harassment. Purge begat purge, beginning with loyalty oaths in 1939 and consummating in a congressional mandate to rid the WPA of Communist sympathizers, past and present. “They’re dropping people like flies on the pretense that they are Red,” Sande wrote Charles in October, “for having signed a petition … to have the C[ommunist] P[arty] put on the ballot. We remember signing it so we are nervously awaiting the axe. They got 20 in my department one day last week. There is no redress. … I could kick myself in the ass for being a damn fool—but who would of thought they could ever pull one as raw as that.”

  Artist George McNeil sums up the raw deal that most artists felt the war had handed them: “It was the best of times followed by the worst of times. During the thirties, we were young and optimistic, but then the war in Europe started and everything turned to dirt and grit. All the fantasy in life came to an end.”

  Jackson’s private world, too, was turning to dirt and grit. Stella, who had moved to Tingley in 1939 to care for her mother, was already testing the chilly family waters for a new place to live as Jennie McClure’s condition worsened. When Charles again suggested New York, Sande responded with barely concealed panic. All the ugly secrets he had been withholding from the family came pouring out in a letter to Charles—Jackson’s hospitalization, the subsequent treatment, the discovery of a “definite neurosis,” “depressive mania,” and “self-destruction”—all leading to the inescapable conclusion: “Since part of [Jackson’s] trouble (perhaps a large part) lies in his childhood relationship with his Mother in particular and family in general, it would be extremely trying and might be disastrous for him to see her at this time.”

  But Sande had other, unstated reasons for saying no. After seven years in New York, he had reached “a kind of limbo,” Reuben Kadish remembers, “where nothing really counted.” Despite the talent he had shown in adolescence, Sande’s efforts to become an artist had always been halfhearted, crippled by his time-consuming commitment to Jackson’s welfare and by their common past. “He felt that he was nothing,” says Kadish, “that he was only good enough for the most demeaning, the least rewarding jobs. He was always just a helper.” For the last seven years, Sande had helped Jackson. Now, with the end of the Project only months, even days away, with a wife to support and, he hoped, a child someday, he began to see that others needed his help more.

  In the early spring of 1941, Arloie announced she was pregnant.

  Jackson’s old support system was crumbling. Just as the childhood rivalry with Charles could no longer propel him artistically, the bond with Sande, after twenty-nine years, could no longer sustain him emotionally. More than the beginning of the war or the end of the WPA, that realization was undoubtedly the real terror in his World of Tomorrow.

  In the closing months of 1941, three events combined to save him from that future. In November, John Graham invited him to participate in a show of French and American painters at the McMillen Gallery the following January. Jackson’s paintings would hang for the first time beside those of Picasso and Matisse. In December, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into the war and accelerating the movement of the international art world to Jackson’s doorstep.

  And sometime in between, Lee Krasner appeared at his studio door.

  25

  LENA KRASSNER

  According to a family legend, Lena Krassner was conceived on January 14, 1908, the day her mother, Anna, joined her father in America. They had parted three years before and half a world away in the tiny Ukrainian village of Shpikov just north of Odessa. There, at the station, surrounded by sobbing relatives and skeptical neighbors, Joseph had vowed to work hard in America and send the money for his wife and four children to join him. It was a promise heard often at the station near the shtetl—one that wasn’t always kept. “A person gone to America,” recalled a fellow emigrant, “was exactly like a person dead.” But Joseph Krassner was a reliable man and the money did come, more than $200—a fortune several times over in a community where economic activity among Jews was severely restricted and malnutrition commonplace. It was just enough for five steerage tickets from Odessa to Bremen to New York.

  Like hundreds of thousands of other Russian Jews, the Krassners came to America to escape a biblical litany of afflictions. Beginning in 1881, anti-Semitic pogroms, incited by the procurator of the Russian Holy Synod, had repeatedly swept across Russia, routing millions of Jews from their communities. On April 20, 1903, in Kishinev, the capital of Bessarabia, a group of workmen armed with picks and shovels stormed the city’s Jewish section, killing 120, injuring more than 500, and burning almost 100,000 people out of their homes. Even more than the pogroms of the 1880s, the massacre of 1903 unleashed a tidal wave of new Jewish emigration. Those who stubbornly remained faced conscription in the Russian army following the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in early 1904. Even a man as devout and oblivious as Joseph Krassner could no longer ignore the peril, could no longer peddle his tobacco and perform his duties as
shuka to the town’s rabbi secure in the conviction that the historical forces descending on him were nothing more than the “troublesome trifling of the gentile era.”

  In 1905, the same year mutineers from the battleship Potemkin faced the bayonets of the czar’s Imperial Guard on the steps of Odessa’s port, Joseph Krassner left his family in nearby Shpikov and sailed from the same port to the land where, according to one immigrant, all the men “were tall and slender and … wore yellow trousers and high hats”—America. Three years later he greeted his family at Ellis Island.

  The reunited Krassner family settled into a small house on Jerome Street in the East New York section of Brooklyn, not far from the Blake Street Market where Joseph rented a stall and sold fish. Jacob Riis had already declared the area a “nasty, little slum,” but compared to the mud-and-dung world of Shpikov, it was indeed the promised land.

  Yet the Krassners remained strangely untouched by the new world around them. Like many of the one and a half million Jews who immigrated from Eastern Europe at the turn of the century, they didn’t really leave the shtetl behind; they brought it with them. On Jerome Street, the old family unit quickly sprang back into shape with Joseph assuming the role, common in Russian Jewish households, of the distant and revered authority figure “whom one did not speak to or about lightly.” Moody and introspective, he was always the first to “assert the moral right” but the last to exercise physical discipline. “If we needed to be spanked,” recalls one of his daughters, “all he had to do was raise his strap and that was enough. You’d run like hell in the other direction. But he never came after you.” Like most of the elder men in the shtetl, Joseph spent more time at the synogogue than at home or at work, leaving the affairs of this world, business and family, to his wife and children so he could devote himself to affairs of a higher order.