For the first few months on the job, Jackson worked the noon-to-six shift, confined to the basement, building and repairing the massive wooden frames (called “baguettes”) in which the baroness encased her Kandinskys and Bauers. Except when he cleaned, hung pictures, or ran the service elevator, he seldom had a chance to participate in the antics upstairs. Every day at lunchtime, Bell would retreat to the basement and the two would argue good-naturedly for exactly half an hour. “He would ridicule Arp,” Bell recalls. He’d say, ‘I could do an Arp easy!’ He made faces about Mondrian and he hated Klee, especially, because Klee only did little works, nothing big.” Bell’s visits were Jackson’s only release. He rarely saw De Niro, who had the night shift as janitor and watchman, or Jean Xceron, who worked alone in the storehouse. The work was easy, if boring, but Jackson resented the imposition nonetheless. Because he seldom rose before ten or eleven in the morning, it effectively robbed him of the prime daylight painting hours while leaving his evenings perilously free. The night silk-screening job had at least kept him occupied during the hours when he always found it easiest to drink—not that he found it hard at any hour.
Meanwhile, he waited for some word from Peggy Guggenheim. In early June, the Spring Salon began its third week and there were still no sales. He took some solace in the fact that the Baroness had decided to boycott the show. According to Bell, Jackson lived in terror of being found out as a “figurative” painter. “He worried a lot about losing his job over that,” says Bell.
The combination of uncertainty about the future and long stretches of tedious, lonely work took its toll. One night, De Niro came in late for his shift and discovered that a slop-sink faucet had been left on, the elevator pit and parts of the basement were already flooded, and Jackson was nowhere to be found. On another occasion, the baroness tongue-lashed the staff “for leaving the basement cluttered” and demanded that it be cleaned up before they left that night. When several staff members returned to the museum after supper to do the job, they found Jackson “drunk and wrecking the whole basement, throwing furniture around like a maniac.”
Finally, in mid-June, Putzel stopped by Jackson’s studio to deliver some good news: Peggy was coming to visit.
Putzel had worked too hard for too long to leave anything about the meeting to chance. He started coming by the Eighth Street apartment every night, often staying for dinner, to brief Jackson on a subject that Putzel knew better than anybody: Peggy Guggenheim. “He told Jackson what to do, and how to behave,” Lee remembered. “Jackson was thoroughly prepared.”
Or so Putzel thought. Unfortunately, the day Peggy had chosen to visit, Wednesday, June 23, also happened to be the day of Peter Busa’s wedding. Jackson would have to rush back from the ceremony to keep the appointment. Even from a distance, Lee saw trouble coming: a crowd of people, free liquor, professional anxiety—it all added up to disaster, and she begged Jackson to skip the wedding. When he refused, she resolved to shepherd him there and back rather than wait for Peggy by herself. Not until they arrived at the house on Fifteenth Street where the ceremony was to take place did Lee discover that Jackson was to be best man. Otherwise, the afternoon unfolded exactly according to her worst nightmares. Surrounded by drinkers and semi-strangers—the guests, all in suits, included Gerome Kamrowski, Fritz Bultman, Tony Smith, and Tennessee Williams—Jackson camped beside the bar. By the time the ceremony began, he was reeling. During the vows, he was heard to mumble, “What a dumb thing, to get married,” and just before the Unitarian minister called for the ring, he passed out. With infinite composure, Lee stepped forward, pried the ring from his fingers, and handed it to Busa.
But the problems had just begun. After getting Jackson on his feet, she guided him unsteadily back to Eighth Street, hoping the walk would clear his head. When they arrived, however, he was still woozy and incoherent and Peggy was due any minute. With mounting desperation, she dragged him to the nearby Waldorf Cafeteria and forcefed him coffee. (In Lee’s hilariously sanitized retelling of the story, “[Jackson] suggested that Krasner accompany him to the corner drugstore for a cup of coffee.”) The moment he was coherent and self-supporting, she hustled him back to the apartment.
Just as they reached the stoop, Peggy burst from the front door of the building “almost incoherent” with rage. Striking a pose of epic suffering against the stair rail and looking like an avant-garde Medea in unmatched earrings, tattered dress, and ankle socks—giving a full view of her unshaven legs—she cursed the five flights of steps she had just climbed in vain, bewailed her weak ankles, and bitterly denounced those, particularly Putzel and Lee, who had made her suffer such an indignity. Only after fifteen or twenty minutes of coaxing by both Lee and Jackson (who had sobered up quickly at the sight of Peggy) did she agree to climb back up to the studio and look at the paintings. Inside the apartment, the first thing she saw was a group of paintings signed “L.K.” (To save money, Lee had recently relinquished her Ninth Street studio and was storing her paintings in Jackson’s apartment.) “L.K. L.K. Who the hell is L.K.?” Peggy snapped impatiently. “I didn’t come to look at L.K.‘s paintings.”
Peggy showed somewhat more enthusiasm for Jackson’s work—she was particularly taken by a gouache drawing, Burning Landscape, which she later bought—but she still had reservations. Putzel had been urging her to give Jackson a “solo” show at the Art of This Century. Such a bold gesture would have signaled not only her support for Jackson’s art but also her break from the European Surrealists and her newfound interest in American art in general. She had already taken the first tentative steps in that direction with a late 1942 show featuring the works of the American Surrealist Joseph Cornell and, in February, with a solo exhibition for the French abstractionist Jean Helion. But to feature Jackson, who was neither a Surrealist nor a European, would be to step beyond the point of no return. Although still partial to Baziotes’s work, she had managed by now to internalize Mondrian’s assessment of Stenographic Figure. According to Lee, she called it “the most beautiful painting done in America.” As of June 23, however, she still wasn’t ready to take that last step. Instead, she told Lee and Jackson before leaving that she would send Marcel Duchamp to look at the paintings. His reaction would settle the matter once and for all.
It was not an encouraging prospect. As Putzel had no doubt already told Jackson, Duchamp’s reaction to Stenographic Figure had been anything but enthusiastic. Since then, Jackson had encountered the fifty-six-year-old Duchamp only once, at Art of This Century, soon after the show closed. In a rage, he had ripped a copy of Duchamp’s salon poster from the wall, torn it up, rolled it into a ball, handed it to the stunned Duchamp, and said with a snarl, “You know where this goes.”
The next day Jackson returned to the museum and shared his anxieties with Leland Bell. “He wasn’t very optimistic about his chances with Duchamp,” Bell remembers, “and even if Duchamp said yes and Peggy Guggenheim gave him the show, worried that it might flop, and then the baroness would find out he wasn’t really a nonobjective artist and he would be fired.” Only a few weeks later, Bell was fired after one of the baroness’s spies overheard him recommending to a visitor a Mondrian show at another gallery. Jackson was brought up from the basement and given Bell’s old job as guard and doorman, a move that put him back into contact with sunlight and people. By now, however, he was too anxiety-ridden to care. “He didn’t fraternize with anybody,” recalls Lucia Salemme. “He gave the impression of being a loner. He seemed very secretive—like he had other fish to fry.”
In early July, Duchamp finally made his anxiously awaited appearance.
Fortunately, Jackson had underestimated the Frenchman’s notorious indifference. As Lillian Olaney said, “[Duchamp] didn’t give a goddam.” No one who knew him was surprised that Duchamp was the last of the European artists to arrive in America. Although capable of pomposity, he “didn’t mind wearing old clothes and having a bowl of soup for dinner,” recalls Ethel Baziotes. He also “didn’t mind” Jack
son’s art, although that was as far as his enthusiasm went. His report to Peggy following his visit amounted to little more than ”pas mal.” From the laconic Duchamp, however, even “not bad” was considered a rave. Suddenly the forces pushing Peggy in Jackson’s direction were irresistible: Sweeney, Matta, Putzel, and now even Duchamp. She had no reason left to say no: Jackson Pollock would be her new protégé.
Putzel worked out the details. Jackson would be given a one-man show the following November at Art of This Century. To ensure that he could “work in peace” on preparing the show, Peggy would pay him a fixed sum of $150 each month for one year. At the end of the year, the total amount advanced ($1,800) would be deducted from the proceeds of all sales during the year, minus a one-third commission. Thus, for Jackson to make any additional money on the contract, the gallery would have to sell more than $2,700 worth of his paintings. If the gallery sold less than that, he would have to make up the shortfall with paintings. In addition, at Putzel’s urging, Peggy would commission him to paint a mural for the entrance hall of her new apartment (the ghost of Max Ernst still haunted the old one). Putzel was eager to see “whether a larger scale would release the force contained in Pollock’s smaller paintings.”
For an American artist, it was an unprecedented deal. Even among the Europeans, it was rare for an artist to receive anything more than informal and irregular support from dealers or collectors. “Matta’s arrangement with Pierre Matisse was perhaps the only one,” says Lionel Abel. In one grand gesture, Peggy had shown her aesthetic faith in Jackson’s future and her financial faith in the future of the art market. It was, in its own way, a bolder statement than the gallery itself.
Jackson was understandably ecstatic. When Putzel brought the offer to Eighth Street, Lee was away visiting her parents on Long Island, but Jackson couldn’t wait. “Have signed the contract,” he wrote her during the week of July 15, “… it’s all very exciting.” Soon afterward, he walked away from his job at the Museum of NonObjective Art. It’s unclear whether he quit or was dismissed. A friend recalls Jackson saying that he “left and didn’t go back” when the baroness “took a heavy ruler and tore a piece off” one of his drawings and said, “It looks much better that way.” A co-worker remembers that he was “canned for talking back to the old Kraut.” Jackson probably came closest to the truth when he said, “Between the canned music and the craziness of the director I got myself fired.”
Jackson was ready to paint. Finally, he could earn money as an artist. He was no longer his father’s ne’er-do-well son. He had fulfilled his boyhood promise to “quit my dreaming and get them into material action.” Peggy Guggenheim had lifted the last emotional obstacle to creative fulfillment. Now, beneath a conjunction of emotional tranquillity, artistic inspiration, and financial security, he began to work furiously. He tore out the wall between his studio and Sande’s old studio (now nominally Lee’s) and put up a stretcher for the mural he was to paint for Peggy’s apartment. It was a vast expanse of blank canvas, nine by twenty feet, but Jackson was undaunted. Suddenly, everything seemed possible. “It looks pretty big,” he wrote Charles triumphantly, “but exciting as all hell.”
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BEHIND THE VEIL
By August 1943, the cap was off the gusher again and paintings poured out at a rate of almost two a week. The studio, always in disarray, was suddenly bursting with big, vibrant, shiny-wet canvases drying too slowly in the sultry summer heat, the thick air made impossibly thicker by the smells of turpentine and linseed oil and scores of paint cans perpetually open. Paintings leaned against chairs and tables and one another until the room looked, according to one visitor, “like somebody had knocked over a giant house of cards.” Somewhere in the chaos, a bulky, hunched figure in a sweaty T-shirt and speckled pants, a cigarette clinging to his lip, worked feverishly on a canvas that, to casual visitors, had looked finished weeks ago. Jackson kept three or four paintings “open” at all times. He would work on one or two while the others dried. But no painting was safe. On one day, a canvas that had languished in the corner for months might catch his eye. The next day, he would repaint it entirely. Glancing up from a newspaper, he might spy some “imperfection” and, reaching awkwardly around the back of a chair, correct it with whatever brush was closest at hand, then return to the paper. Almost every inch of a canvas was worked and reworked a dozen times. He applied paint quickly, not carefully, in short, decisive bursts, testing colors and forms and even composition as he went. It was a risky way to work—Peter Busa likened it to “playing at craps”—but it was the way Jackson worked best.
Almost immediately, he recaptured the palette, energy, and ease of expression that had distinguished the paintings of the previous winter, completed just before the Project ended. If anything, the seven months of uncertainty and relative inactivity had given him even more perspective on the lessons of the previous four years. In The Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle, he gave pictorial life to a Jungian image by combining it with elements from his personal iconography (Stella’s knife) and biomorphic shapes from Miró. Decades later, Jungian scholars would seize on the painting’s title, a reference to an ancient Indian myth (in which a young man sees a girl swinging from a grapevine on the moon and, in a jealous fit, cuts the vine, sending the girl plummeting to the earth), and tease from its obscure imagery an elaborate Jungian analysis. In the process, they would attribute to Jackson a careful reading of recondite Jungian texts and a sophisticated knowledge of Indian lore. In fact, even while under Henderson’s care, Jackson’s interest in Jungian esoterica amounted to little more than schoolboy enthusiasm. By the summer of 1943, Henderson and de Laszlo were distant, if fond, memories, and Jungian iconography had been subsumed into Jackson’s vast, personal storehouse of imagery—stripped of its ideological finery and reduced to those essential elements that served his vision, not Jung’s. Moon-Woman’s fanciful title might have been supplied by one of several friends; or, more likely, lingered in Jackson’s imagination until it suggested an image. Once a painting was begun, however, no myth—not even one Jackson knew well—could control the movement of the brush. He could no more follow a program for a painting than he could follow the lines of a model. Jungian arcana yielded to Indian imagery, which yielded to Miró, and then to immediate compositional needs. There is no indication that Jackson ever approached a blank canvas with more than just a “general notion” of where it would take him. (When asked if he had a “preconceived image” in his mind when he began a painting, Jackson replied with a touch of incredulity, “No, because it hasn’t been created [yet], you see.”)
The Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle, 1943, 42” �� 40”
Jackson had always worked that way. His earliest Benton sketchbooks document the struggle between subject matter and technique, between reality and improvisation. Unable to subordinate his errant line to the “fact” of the model, he had been forced early to cope with the compositional challenge of images that grew and transformed in unpredictable ways. By 1943, only the terminology had changed: what Benton called “ineptitude,” John Graham called “automatic écriture” and the Surrealists called “automatism.” By any name, it was the only way Jackson knew how to paint.
On one canvas, completed in August, he began with the rough outline of a bull, an image rich with personal meaning, standing against a distant horizon—as simple and straightforward as a Bentonesque sketch. Then he began to surround and obscure the outline with a delicately stippled “sky” of drips and dribbles and specks of color—a Surrealist dreamscape of blue-green, yellow, and umber. When the background threatened to envelope the bull, he took a wide brush and reworked the outline in black. At the same time, he complicated the image by adding heavy black calligraphy in the margins. On one pass, he turned the bull’s shaded, indistinct underbelly into an irregular serrated line suggesting teats—perhaps to explore the issue of sexual ambiguity, perhaps because some previous reworking had accidentally suggested them. Then he left it to dry, still unresolved: a heav
ily worked image on an abstract ground surrounded by automatist doodles. When he returned to it days, perhaps weeks, later, he again tried to sharpen the central figure, using white highlights to reduce the “multiple exposure” effect of repeated outlining. When he was finally satisfied with the central image, he covered over much of the old stippled sky and distracting calligraphy with broad strokes of battleship gray, then signed his name.
The picture became known as She-Wolf. The discrepancy between the title and the image did not go unnoticed. “When I saw it for the first time,” Axel Horn recalls, “I could have sworn that this was an attempt by Pollock to paint a calf. I looked at it, and I said, ‘He’s been trying to paint a calf.’ Then I read the title, She-Wolf, and I figured somebody had superimposed the title on it.” Like many others, Horn suspected that Lee or Sweeney or Putzel had chosen the name, either because he misread the image (the teats were confusing) or, more likely, because he preferred the mythic “She-Wolf” to the more prosaic “Cow” or “Bull.” (Struck by the title, Peggy Guggenheim asked Lee if she had posed for it, to which Lee replied tartly, “Of course I did.”) Whatever its origins, the name meant little to Jackson. He almost never began a painting with a title in mind and, afterward, often took suggestions for titles from friends and visitors. He detested titles that attempted to “explain” the imagery in a painting and, later in his career, would resort to numbering his paintings to prevent people from searching for the title in the image. The painting called She-Wolf was never intended as a comment on the reality of bulls or wolves. It was a statement about a different reality altogether. In the 1943 paintings, more so than ever before, “[Jackson’s] unconscious came through,” said his friend, James Brooks. “In a sense, he walked right into another world.”
Jackson Pollock Page 64