Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  When it came time to name the paintings, Jackson’s despondency manifested itself in a black-mass litany of titles—Horizontal on Black, Square on Black, The Night Dancer, Night Ceremony, Night Mist, Night Magic—as well as a veiled reference to Helen Marot in the title of one painting, Portrait of H.M. (Marot’s spirit may have been conjured by the appearance of the equally maternal Hubbard.) The work continued at a feverish pace until just days before the opening. In March, Kadish brought David Slivka, a young California sculptor, to the studio to watch Jackson in the final throes. “He was working furiously with the brush,” Slivka remembers. “I was still a bit green, and I had never seen anything like it. It was thrilling to watch.”

  Totem Lesson 1, 1944, 70” × 44”

  When the show opened on an extraordinarily hot Monday, March 19, 1945, the crowd was larger and more enthusiastic than it had been fifteen months before. A few hardy visitors, including Stella Pollock, trooped eight blocks in 80-degree heat to see the giant mural in Peggy’s apartment building. But the reviewers still had reservations. While most admired the energy and expressiveness of his brushwork, they divided over the question of what it all meant—if anything. In the Times, Howard Devree questioned whether Jackson’s “big, sprawling coloramas” were “clarified enough in the expression to establish true communication with the observer.” He also likened some of the paintings, “with their pother of paint and flying forms,” to an “explosion in a shingle mill”—resurrecting, without irony, the snide description first applied to Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase at the 1913 Armory Show. Parker Tyler, a mouthpiece for the European Surrealists who were still stewing over Peggy’s defection, sniped in View that Pollock’s “nervous, if rough, calligraphy has an air of baked-macaroni” and concluded that, despite his “strong feeling for matière,” Pollock “does not seem to be especially talented.” In Art News, Maude Riley complimented Jackson’s relationship with his paint, but complained about his “belligerence … toward all other things” including “the subject, and you and me.” She concluded with a by now familiar lament: “I really don’t get what it’s all about.”

  Jackson in front of Guggenheim mural

  Of all the critics, only Clement Greenberg dared to issue a blast of unequivocal praise. “Jackson Pollock’s one-man show,” he wrote in the Nation, “establishes him, in my opinion, as the strongest painter of his generation and perhaps the greatest one to appear since Miró.” Except for a Hofmannish quibble about abrupt color juxtapositions that created “gaping holes,” Greenberg abandoned the ambivalent dialectic of his previous review. “I cannot find strong enough words of praise,” he confessed. Pollock was not only the best painter since Miró, he was the answer to Cubism—the answer to the question that had been haunting American art for almost a decade: “Is there art after Picasso?”

  To his fellow critics, craven doubters, Greenberg offered a stunning rebuke designed, consciously or unconsciously, to consolidate his position as the preeminent critic of avant-garde art. “There has been a certain amount of self-deception in School of Paris art since the exit of cubism,” he wrote. “In Pollock there is absolutely none, and he is not afraid to look ugly—all profoundly original art looks ugly at first.” If other critics responded unfavorably, they were not looking closely enough, Greenberg implied; they were the dupes of their own parochial tastes. What mattered was not whether a painting pleased the eye—the average eye is naive and indolent—but whether it was “original,” a determination that required not just a trained eye, but a clairvoyant eye—Greenberg’s eye. For a generation of American artists, like Lee Krasner, trained to imitate the already digested and accepted, Greenberg had turned the world upside down, and Jackson, the complete original, was now on top.

  But even Greenberg’s paean couldn’t lift Jackson’s spirits. Unlike the critics, Jackson knew how much time and how little artistic distance separated the Guggenheim mural from Night Ceremony. He knew how quickly most of the paintings had been produced, how relatively shallow and stingy of imagery they were—how much better they could have been. He must have known, too, that, Greenberg’s accolade notwithstanding, the second show wasn’t the prodigal, cathartic event that the first had been. (Years later Greenberg himself admitted that his review of the 1945 show was, in part at least, a delayed reaction to the first show.) Such realizations—combined with the lack of sales—drained the juice from Greenberg’s praise and left Jackson disconsolate. Even money lost its reparative power. When his contract came up for renewal in April, Peggy reluctantly agreed to double his monthly allotment in exchange for all the paintings he produced in the coming year minus one. But here, too, Jackson could believe that the largesse was partly a lie. Baziotes and Motherwell had defected to Sam Kootz’s new gallery in February, and Peggy was desperate to keep Jackson from joining them.

  By May, the pent-up frustrations, disappointments, and self-doubts of the previous year had reached the flash point.

  When Phil Goldstein returned to New York in 1945, he was no longer Philip Goldstein, he was Philip Guston. Four years of teaching in Iowa City, Iowa, where Jews were still a rarity, had persuaded him to finalize a change he had been contemplating since high school when he signed his cartoons “Phil Goldy.” The years in Iowa had reshaped his art as well. Influenced both by a Regionalist hegemony in the Midwest and his wife Musa’s taste for sentimental subject matter, he had painted a series of allegorical works culminating in a large canvas filled with harlequins and wide-eyed children called If This Be Not I—a title taken from Musa’s favorite Mother Goose story about an old woman who lost her identity.

  Guston’s transformation shocked his old friends in New York. On the WPA, his accessible subject matter and accomplished brush had made him a frequent prizewinner. But in the four years since, the New York art world had changed and Guston’s new works looked to many like provincial curiosities, best described by a term Clement Greenberg had recently added to the critical vocabulary: “kitsch.” When his exhibition (with titles like Halloween Party and Sentimental Moment) opened at the Midtown Galleries in January 1945, it still won the enthusiastic plaudits of the traditionalists who had once dominated the Project. Juliana Force gave his paintings “a place of honor” at the Whitney Museum on Eighth Street, and a group of critics and writers, when asked to name “living masters, American or foreign,” who were “headed for immortality,” put Philip Guston at the head of their list. But in the increasingly powerful avant-garde community, his quaint canvases had become an embarrassment to those who knew him and a laughingstock to those who didn’t.

  To Jackson, Guston had always been a lightning rod for frustration and envy as well as admiration. Ever since Manual Arts—when Guston could draw and Jackson couldn’t, when Guston had girls and Jackson didn’t—he had been the Charles figure against whom Jackson could act out his deep store of childhood resentments. For more than a decade, Jackson had suffered his successes—his artistic encomiums, beautiful wife, and paying jobs—as personal affronts, galling reminders of Jackson’s own shortcomings made almost intolerable by Guston’s overweaning ego. “Phil was in competition with everybody,” says Herman Cherry. “Whether it was personally or artistically, he was going to top everybody. He had fantastic ambition.” Now, with the success of If This Be Not I, Guston was once again enjoying the fruits of success that Jackson felt should have been his.

  Soon after V-E Day, May 7, 1945, Sande gave a party at the Eighth Street apartment for the “old gang”: friends from the Art Students League, the WPA, and California, many of whom had recently returned from the war. Caught in New York between the Midtown show in January and the Carnegie Institute’s annual competition in October (in which he would take first prize), Guston joined his old friends. It wasn’t long before the fireworks began. “The drinking got heavier and heavier,” recalls Harold Lehman, who also attended, “and the noise got louder and suddenly there was Jackson, muttering and trying to express himself—you know how the tongue thicken
s with liquor. He suddenly got up and yelled at Phil: ‘Goddamn it, I won’t stand for the way you’re painting! I won’t stand for it!’” Lehman, who was standing with Guston at the time, remembers that he was “thunderstruck.” Jackson’s words—which had been on everyone’s mind—sucked all other sound from the room. “[Phil] was really stricken,” Lehman recalls. “You could see it in his face. … He had already begun to see himself as being passed by, being behind and out of date. Jackson’s explosion merely brought it to the surface in front of all the people who meant something to him.” There are various accounts of what happened next. Guston later told friends that Jackson threatened to throw him out a window, triggering a long-drawn-out fistfight in which the two artists almost killed each other. Lehman remembers Guston standing in shocked silence until the sounds of the party slowly rose and closed around him. Other witnesses maintain that Guston “broke down and cried.” No one else remembers a fight. (Some would later claim that as a result of the confrontation in Jackson’s apartment, Guston abandoned the sentimentalism of If This Be Not I and began experimenting with abstraction.)

  By the middle of 1945, Lee was desperate. The winter binges and incidents like the one with Guston had convinced her that Jackson needed to be rescued both from his friends and from himself.

  She began by insisting that he marry her. After three years in which, by her own admission, she had been “absolutely against it,” she suddenly issued “an ultimatum—either we get married or we split.” Lee later attributed her startling reversal to the death of her father—“At that point it just snapped and suddenly I wanted to be married.” But she had never felt constrained by her father’s orthodoxy and, in the thirties, had lived openly with Igor Pantuhoff, allowing her family to believe they were husband and wife. Lee also described her betrothal to Jackson as a whirlwind affair (like their first meeting): “I said [to Jackson] ‘You will have to make the decision.’ He said to me, ‘I have made the decision. We get married.’ I asked, ‘When shall we go to City Hall to get our license?’” In fact, from the day in November 1944 when Joseph Krassner died to the day the license was finally secured in October 1945, the process took more than eleven months.

  In the meantime, Lee laid plans to take Jackson away for the summer. She had rediscovered the terrible truth that Charles and Sande had learned a decade ago—that Jackson fared even worse than usual in the city heat. Yet, after the disaster of the previous summer, another trip to Provincetown was out of the question.

  In early July, Reuben and Barbara Kadish packed their two children, three bikes, and one dog onto “the Cannonball” at Pennsylvania Station for a summer on the eastern tip of Long Island where they had sublet a beachside “shack” from Bill Hayter. They left believing that Jackson and Lee would be spending the summer on the Cape. Soon after they arrived, however, a letter came. “They wrote saying that they were going to find it impossible to go to the Cape this year,” Kadish recalls. After talking it over with his wife, Kadish issued an invitation. With more than a month of the summer already gone, Jackson accepted eagerly, “cleaned up his brushes,” sublet the Eighth Street studio to Sande’s old friend James Brooks, just back from the war, and hopped the first train east. Lee, although wary of Kadish, was relieved to leave the city and finally to have Jackson more or less to herself.

  For Jackson, it was an idyllic summer. The little house sat at the edge of Gardiners Bay, so close to the water that high tide lapped at the foundations and fish were sometimes left stranded at the kitchen door. From within a few steps of the front porch, they could see Accabonac Harbor to the west, ripe and untended like a virgin continent, and, to the east, the bay, the sound, and the ocean beyond, differentiated only by the quality of light they reflected. A soft, briny breeze swept through the old board walls and boled curtains, carrying the distant sounds of fishing boats and the bells at Barnes Landing. The house itself was “very tiny and very shabby,” according to Barbara Kadish, with a leaky roof, hand-pumped water, and no electricity, but Jackson spent too little time indoors to care. In the mornings, he and Kadish would wade out into the chilly water, trailing aqueous clouds of mud as they searched the bottom for clams—just as Rita Benton had taught him. Later, after a few beers on the porch when the sun was at its highest, they would climb crazily into the rowboat and zigzag out to where the waves started and catch some fish for dinner. “One time he caught a blowfish,” Kadish remembers. “That blowfish started puffing up and popping around in the boat, and Jack got so excited he was jumping up and down like a kid. I thought he was going to jump right out of the boat.”

  There were pleasures on the leeward side as well. Back up the Amagansett-Springs Road, only a few minutes by bike, the dunes and scrub oak of Louse Point gave way to potato fields and, a few miles farther on, the little town of Amagansett. With the Kadish’s dog running alongside, Jackson and Reuben would race down the narrow road, only recently paved, and into town for supplies, mail, telephone calls, and as much beer as they could balance on the back of a bike. The bicycle circuit usually included a stop at Harold and May Rosenberg’s place on Neck Path, where Jackson doted on their three-year-old daughter, Patia. On weekends, Bill Hayter and his wife Helen would come down from town for clamming, barbecuing, and Lee’s incomparable clam chowder. David Slivka took the train out from New York and stayed one night, sleeping on the porch. Robert Motherwell was building a house in the neighborhood, but Jackson saw him only once all summer, “bicycling somewhere.” “There was a respectful exchange between them,” Kadish remembers. But from the porch at Louse Point, Motherwell’s maneuverings and Guggenheim’s parties—even Howard Putzel’s fatal heart attack on August 7—seemed as far away as the war in the Pacific. A few days later, when the strange, garbled news came that a new bomb had been dropped on Japan and the war would soon be over, Jackson was lying on the beach and didn’t even open his eyes.

  Lee didn’t share his serenity. The summer had rescued Jackson from New York, but it hadn’t rescued their relationship. “She thought the summer was going to be a very therapeutic thing for Jack,” recalls Kadish. “That it was going to be a cure-all, that they were going to have this romantic thing, walking along the beach, that he’d never want to be doing any drinking, that he’d never want to carouse or separate himself from her ever again.” Instead, unable to drive a car and unsteady on a bike, she spent most of the summer in and around the little fishing shack, cooking, talking with Barbara Kadish, and tending the Kadish children—all activities which, according to Reuben, “she couldn’t stand.” What walks along the beach Jackson did take were usually with Kadish and, as Lee feared, hardly a day went by when the two men didn’t drink. Jackson wasn’t sleeping in doorways, as he would have been in New York, but he wasn’t working either. “She was furious that whole summer,” recalls May Rosenberg, “because Kadish and Jackson were doing some drinking. They were playing games, laughing, and telling jokes, instead of painting.”

  When they agreed to reshingle her leaky roof, Rosenberg remembers, “the first thing they asked for was a beer. Then they got up on the roof and started tearing everything up until they were sitting on the exposed beams with their legs hanging down, joking and laughing and banging away at it. Before you know it, they had to have more beer.” The party lasted only until Lee arrived. “She caught me passing some beers up to them,” May remembers. “They were perfectly grown up men—they could have gone and gotten beers for themselves. But she was absolutely livid.” Lee spent much of the summer livid, playing Aunt Polly to Jackson’s Tom Sawyer and Kadish’s Huck Finn. When the two “boys” fell while trying to race their bikes through a patch of fresh tar and came home covered with it, Barbara Kadish laughed. Lee stewed. When Barbara finally coaxed Lee into the boat to do some fishing, a sudden storm caught them and began blowing them out toward the ocean. “She didn’t know how to row, and it looked bad for a while,” Barbara recalls. “I got us back safely, but when we hit the beach, Lee was ready to faint. … She wasn’t very phys
ical.”

  A storm was one of the few things that Lee couldn’t blame on Reuben. If Jackson drank too much, it was because Kadish drank with him; if he became “impossible” when drunk, it was because Kadish “always found a way of excusing him”; if he was playing jacks in the street or doing handiwork for the Rosenbergs instead of painting, it was because Kadish encouraged him. “She blamed Stella, she blamed Sande, she blamed me, she blamed everybody around the countryside,” Kadish remembers. (Later, Lee would take revenge on the Kadishes by using her most powerful weapon, her ability to reshape history by telescoping or omitting events and people she found disagreeable. In subsequent interviews, she reduced the six weeks with the Kadishes at Louse Point to “a weekend.” In 1956, she banished Kadish from Jackson’s funeral and backed down only when the Pollock family threatened to boycott the services if Kadish was not permitted to attend. In hate as well as love, she knew no moderation.)