Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Dismissing Jackson in the early forties was easy to do. Unlike the paintings of Matta and Masson, Jackson’s works didn’t enjoy the flattering light of Breton’s theories. Nor were they finely crafted objects like the hand-painted dream photographs of Dali or the near academic canvases of Magritte. They weren’t exquisitely modulated like Tanguy’s dream landscapes or elegantly composed like Miró‘s abstract “magnetic fields.” Although Jackson was far from a theorist, his paintings took the theory of “automatism,” with its emphasis on spontaneity, psychic energy, and unconscious imagery, very seriously, and they demanded the same of the viewer. “You had to work to like them,” recalls Peter Busa, “they were not easy paintings.” Jimmy Ernst called them “shocking.” “But the closer you looked and the more you thought about them,” says Busa, “the more you saw and the better they looked.” To those who still clung, furtively or unconsciously, to old notions of elegance, accomplishment, and style, however, Jackson’s dense, turbulent, rough-hewn canvases remained an acquired taste.

  Sweeney had first brought Jackson’s work to Peggy’s attention in early 1942. That spring, Herbert Matter, an old friend, had approached him brimming with enthusiasm (a comparatively agitated state for the restrained Matter) after a visit to Jackson’s studio. Sweeney’s response was polite but noncommittal. “He was a little like Calder,” Matter remembers. “If it didn’t come from Europe, he wasn’t interested. … He wouldn’t promise anything, just that he would go look.” (Sweeney remembers agreeing only because “Matter and I looked at pictures the same way.”) After visiting Jackson’s studio, Sweeney reported back to Peggy: “I told her I thought this man was doing interesting work.” He may even have introduced her to Jackson at the time, but once that was done he considered his duty to Matter discharged. “It was between Peggy and [Jackson] after that,” he says. In the spring of 1942, of course, Peggy had other art and other artists on her mind, especially Max Ernst. She didn’t forget the encounter—David Porter remembers that when Jackson’s name came up in conversation, she commented, “Sweeney tells me he’s a very important artist”—but neither did she pursue it.

  The next voice that whispered “Pollock” in Peggy’s ear was Howard Putzel’s. No one would have a more critical or more unsung role in Jackson’s career than Putzel, an overweight, alcoholic, epileptic homosexual with a passion for art and an unerring eye for quality. Behind the cigarette holder and owlish glasses, beyond the weakness for martinis and gourmet meals, lurked a Promethean enthusiasm for modern art. “He paid twenty dollars a month, but he simply had to have the picture,” recalled Julien Levy, from whom Putzel bought a very early Gorky painting. In conversation, he often choked on his own ardor, stuttering uncontrollably as his fat cheeks turned crimson. Despite ill health, poverty, and a troubled personal life—including a wealthy mother who considered him “an insane and embarrassing nuisance” and refused to support him—Putzel managed Peggy’s affairs and the gallery with frantic efficiency. Peggy showed her gratitude by abusing him relentlessly (“she treated him like a slave,” recalled her son, Sindbad), but that was part of the odd bond that held them together.

  Jackson met Putzel in the summer of 1942 during a brief visit to New York by Reuben Kadish. Putzel and Kadish had known each other in Los Angeles where Putzel, a New Jersey native raised in San Francisco, ran a gallery on Hollywood Boulevard—the successor to Lorser Feitelson’s Hollywood Gallery of Modern Art. As early as 1934, Putzel had alerted the small and close-knit Los Angeles art community to Surrealism and by 1937 was selling works by Tanguy, Ernst, and Miró to his gallery’s small clientele of “movie people.” Unfortunately, even Hollywood wasn’t yet ready for Putzel’s modernist vision, so in 1938 he closed his gallery and traveled to Paris, where he met Peggy.

  Of all the people who later claimed to have recognized Jackson’s genius on first sight, Howard Putzel was one of the few who did. According to Reuben Kadish, Putzel used the word “genius” the minute he saw Jackson’s paintings. He used it again soon afterward in a letter to Gordon Onslow-Ford. “He wrote to me that he had discovered an American genius,” recalled Onslow-Ford. “It was Jackson Pollock.” Inevitably, the word soon found its way to Peggy—Putzel was incapable of suppressing his enthusiasm—but once again she turned a deaf ear. Putzel persisted, showing her some of Jackson’s work and perhaps pointing out his contribution to the “Artists for Victory” show that ran at the Metropolitan Museum throughout 1942—all to no effect. Even a favorable recommendation from Matta, whose “workshop” Jackson was attending during this period, apparently drew a blank. Jackson’s conspicuous absence from the First Papers of Surrealism at the Whitelaw Reid mansion didn’t help Putzel’s case. In fact, of all the young Americans, Peggy’s personal favorite was Baziotes, whose work had been “approved” by Breton and included in the First Papers show.

  After the departure of Breton and Ernst in March 1943, Putzel gingerly proposed Jackson’s name for inclusion in the upcoming international collage show scheduled at Art of This Century in April. This time, Peggy agreed. Besides, she had already solicited a collage from Gypsy Rose Lee. How could she say yes to a striptease artist and no to Putzel’s genius?

  Jackson’s contribution to the collage show, prepared alongside Motherwell and since lost, earned a favorable word from Peggy’s friendly critic at the Nation, Jean Connolly. But Putzel had grander plans for Jackson. As soon as the collage show closed, he persuaded Peggy to revive Herbert Read’s proposal, formulated for the London museum, for a “Spring Salon for Young Artists.” In its revived form, the show would be made up almost exclusively of American artists, a sign of how far Peggy, with Putzel’s nudging, had come in the seven months since the gallery’s opening. Except for Marcel Duchamp and Piet Mondrian, even the judges would be American: Sweeney, Soby, Putzel, and Guggenheim. The rules were simple: any artist under thirty-five could submit works to the panel (although rumors persisted that Peggy “edited” the submissions before the jury saw them). From the works submitted, the judges would choose the best forty or fifty, using a voting system designed to eliminate biases. As soon as the competition was announced in Art Digest, the floodgates of Greenwich Village opened. Artists who had been locked out of the gallery world for years lined up outside 30 West Fifty-seventh Street with canvases under their arms. Howard Putzel spared Jackson that indignity by coming to the Eighth Street apartment and selecting the paintings he thought Jackson should submit, one of which was Stenographic Figure.

  But Putzel’s scheming was in vain. No matter how carefully or how often he led Peggy to the well, she steadfastly refused to drink. When presented with Stenographic Figure, she dismissed it as “dreadful.” On the day the jury met to make their selections, her only thought of Jackson was how Putzel and Matta would react when none of his paintings made the final cut, as she was sure they wouldn’t.

  Mondrian was the first of the jurors to arrive—he wanted to have plenty of time to give every work fair consideration—and while Peggy and Putzel rushed about with last-minute arrangements, he began to examine the entries that Peggy had arrayed against the walls of the gallery. Tall and professorial in a double-breasted suit and horn-rimmed glasses, he walked slowly from painting to painting. When he came upon Stenographic Figure, he stopped and stroked his chin. Looking over, Peggy saw him “rooted” in front of the Pollock and rushed to apologize. “Pretty awful, isn’t it?” she said, more as a statement than a question. “That’s not painting, is it?” Mondrian didn’t reply. A few minutes later, he was still staring at the Pollock. Peggy, increasingly uneasy, felt called on to elaborate her opinion. “There is absolutely no discipline at all. This young man has serious problems … and painting is one of them. I don’t think he’s going to be included.” Mondrian stroked his chin a few more times. “I’m not so sure,” he finally said. “I’m trying to understand what’s happening here. I think this is the most interesting work I’ve seen so far in America. … You must watch this man.”

  Peggy was stunned.
“You can’t be serious,” she said. “You can’t compare this and the way you paint.” Mondrian responded patiently, as if instructing a student, “The way I paint and the way I think are two different things.”

  Peggy protested no further. What was gibberish from Putzel was gospel from Mondrian. After almost two years of resisting Jackson’s art, she was converted in a matter of minutes. As each juror entered the room, she pulled him over to the Pollock and said, “Look what an exciting new thing we have here!” (Years later, Peggy would boast, “Pollock was easily accepted by me. His art was so overwhelming and wonderful I loved it right away.” It would be easy to see cynicism or mercantile savvy, or both, in Peggy’s reversal, but Jimmy Ernst, who witnessed the scene, had a more sympathetic view. “She was willing to listen, she was willing to be told, she was willing to see. … There was nothing phony about it.”)

  The oft-repeated story of what Lee Krasner later called “Mondrian’s nod,” soon worked its way into Pollock legend: the septuagenarian dean of abstract art had reached across a vast ideological gulf and embraced the young American expressionist. It was the ultimate endorsement. Of all the European masters, only the titan himself, Picasso, could have pronounced a more compelling judgment. For American artists, the story came to signify the passing of the true flame of abstraction from the old world to the new. It also seemed to foreshadow the coming alliance between abstractionists and disenchanted Surrealists. Peggy Guggenheim, the wife of Max Ernst and patroness of Breton, had agreed with Mondrian, the founder of de Stijl, about a painting by Jackson Pollock. From such an unlikely conjunction, a new movement was bound to spring.

  As grandly satisfying as it was, the tale of Mondrian’s nod was, in fact, only half the story.

  Mondrian had not come to Peggy’s gallery that day purely in the spirit of accommodation. He had accepted the invitation to serve on the jury only because he feared that his protégé and sponsor, Harry Holtzman, who was on the West Coast when the salon was announced, would not be treated fairly by the other jurors, especially Peggy. It was the least he could do for Holtzman, a Hofmann student who had rescued him from a desperate, impoverished existence in a Paris garret in 1940. (“I would be dead now, if it were not for Harry,” Mondrian would gently insist.) “He wrote me,” recalls Holtzman, “and said the only reason he was on the jury was that he wanted to be sure I would be in [the show], because Peggy didn’t like the kind of thing I did.” With the help of Fritz Glarner, a Swiss émigré artist who also considered the elderly Dutchman his “master,” Mondrian retrieved one of Holtzman’s sculptures from storage and submitted it to the jury.

  On the morning of the selection, he was apparently determined to teach the iconoclastic Mrs. Ernst a lesson in impartial judging. By selecting a painting that was outside the well-known parameters of his own taste and by defending it, he could demonstrate the kind of open-mindedness he expected Peggy to accord Holtzman. Nothing, of course, violated his tenets more egregiously, or better demonstrated his open-mindedness, than Pollock’s frenetic, graffiti-covered canvas. Jimmy Ernst recalls Mondrian elaborating his defense of Pollock’s work with a pointed plea for tolerance. “Everybody assumes that I am interested only in what I do in my work,” he reportedly said to Peggy, “[but] there are so many things in life and in art that can and should be respected.” The subtle stratagem worked. The jury “respected” both Holtzman’s sculpture and Stenographic Figure.

  To Peggy’s delight, so did the critics. “For once the future reveals a gleam of hope,” wrote her friend Jean Connolly in the Nation. Of the thirty-three artists represented in the show, she said, “They are all promising,” although she did single out works by Matta, Motherwell, and several others as “paintings it would be a pleasure to own”—a friendly bow to Peggy’s commercial imperatives. “There is a large Jackson Pollack [sic],” Connolly added, “which, I am told, made the jury starry-eyed.” It was a comment that sounded better than it was. Either she had no opinion of her own, or she chose to withhold it and preserve the appearance of enthusiasm by substituting a bit of pre-show publicity, undoubtedly supplied by Peggy. Writing in the New Yorker, Robert Coates was both more enthusiastic and less circumspect. Recognizing that the show was split between “those twin branches of advanced modern painting, abstractionism and surrealism,” he saw Jackson’s work, “with its curious reminiscences of Matisse and Miró,” as the most promising hybrid on view. “We have a real discovery,” he concluded.

  Jackson was elated. “Things really broke with the showing of that painting,” he wrote Charles proudly in July. Even more thrilling than Coates’s review was the story of Mondrian’s nod, which he heard from Putzel. “I was there when Jackson heard it, for Christ’s sake,” says Reuben Kadish, “and I remember how excited he was that it was Mondrian who had made the decisive move, that Mondrian had picked him. He was so excited, he was like a kid.”

  But excitement didn’t pay the rent.

  For a lucky few, Art of This Century’s first season brought some financial as well as critical success. Motherwell sold his collage for $85. Baziotes’s two paintings in the Spring Salon were bought for $150 each. But Jackson wasn’t so lucky. Mondrian may have nodded at Stenographic Figure, but he didn’t buy it, and neither did anybody else. The financial slide that had begun in January continued into the spring. In April, Jackson was still working nights at the silk-screening shop, growing more depressed with each passing week; Lee was still in training to be a draftsman; and Peggy Guggenheim had yet to buy her first Pollock painting. Despite Putzel’s optimism, the day when Jackson could support himself on his painting seemed further away than ever.

  Jackson found temporary relief when a job opened up at the Museum of NonObjective Painting, the new home of the Guggenheim collection, where his friends Sam Fabean and Robert De Niro worked. Museum policy was to hire young artists to fill all staff positions, from manager to janitor, provided they strictly adhered to nonobjective principles. To help Jackson over that hurdle, De Niro had developed a method for “forging” nonobjective drawings that would satisfy the museum’s requirements. “He would make pastiches out of reproductions of works in the museum collection,” recalls a friend, “and then copy them in drawings.”

  With or without De Niro’s help, Jackson quickly produced a sheaf of nonobjective drawings and, on April 14, took them to an interview with the museum’s director, the eccentric Baroness Hilla Rebay, who, in a heavy German accent, pronounced them either “cosmic” or “nicht cosmic.” When he returned home, Lee helped draft an ingratiating note (“I have been very interested in the work you have been doing, and the Museum of Nonobjective Art, for some time …”), which closed with a heavy-handed hint (“I would like to continue working in this [nonobjective] direction, but find it impossible at this time as I am working at night with little energy left for painting and drawing during the day light”). For good measure, Jackson included a hastily composed “biography,” the sole purpose of which was to repeat the code words that De Niro had coached him to use: “subjective spatial,” “spatial intensity,” and, as often as possible, “nonobjective.” Transparent as it was, the strategy worked. Rebay immediately sent a check to help pay for art supplies, and, after receiving another obsequious letter, offered Jackson a position as “custodian and preparator of paintings.” He began work on Saturday, May 8.

  As his father had discovered more than a decade earlier, Jackson Pollock was ill suited to the rigors of regular employment in every way. But working for the Baroness Rebay wasn’t regular employment; it was a trip through the looking glass.

  Founded only four years before, the museum was a trysting gift from the aging copper tycoon Solomon Guggenheim to his improbable mistress, the Baroness Rebay. Instead of minks and jewels, he bought her works by Kandinsky, Klee, Vlaminck, Chagall, Arp, Moholy-Nagy, Delaunay, Campendonck and, her own personal favorite, Rudolf Bauer—known to the staff as “Bubbles Bauer” for the candy-colored circles that were his trademark. She displayed most of h
er baubles (the objective paintings remained in the Guggenheim suite at the Plaza) in a converted two-story automobile showroom at 24 East Fifty-fourth Street. The walls, windows, and couches were all covered in gray flannel; the air filled with Bach. A guard stood at the tunnel-like entrance and a receptionist sat at the front desk to answer questions. All this, according to one staffer, to service “about two visitors a day.”

  Every morning the baroness, a short, stout woman, would arrive with the latest copy of Modern Screen Romance under her arm, “very well dressed but always a little unkempt,” carrying her lapdog and spitting orders in Katzenjammer English. She was usually followed by Bauer, a comic-book “Junker general” in dove gray spats, white linen shirt, gold cuff links, and ascot tie. The baroness had rewarded his “execrable” art with such misguided largesse that he now lived in “baronial splendor on the Jersey shore” and often came in to see the museum’s growing collection of his work. As the baroness and her entourage passed, the guard at the door would alert the rest of the staff. She had been known to discharge people for recommending visits to other galleries, for marrying without her permission, even for painting an objective picture. With employees and artists alike, “she was a Nazi,” recalls Lucia Salemme, the gallery’s receptionist when Jackson began work there. She hired spies to monitor conversations between employees and “write down what visitors and staffers were saying about the collection.” An artist herself, she felt free to “improve” canvases submitted to her by young artists by adding a triangle here or a spot there. The staff responded to her Prussian rule with relentless guerrilla warfare. “Everyone made faces and jumped around and clowned behind her back,” recalls Salemme, “and they made fun of some of the art she had, especially the Bauers and Rebays.” When a wall sculpture by Moholy-Nagy fell and broke, one staff member, mistaking the pile of fragments for trash, simply “swept it up and threw it away,” recalls Leland Bell, who worked as a guard at the front door. Bell, whose real job was to keep the baroness supplied with movie magazines, once greeted a visitor by gleefully calling out to the staff, “We have another inmate!” Another time, he slipped a Bing Crosby record into the sound system, interrupting the Bach and igniting the baroness.