Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Another visitor during the pre-summer lull was Tony Smith. With the Geller mural finished and no new works yet begun, Jackson had ample time to indulge Smith’s Irish charm and vaguely sexual blandishments. After the collapse of his latest effort to arrange a mural commission, Smith wasted no time in finding some new way to insert himself into Jackson’s career. He revived the plans, abandoned the previous summer, for a car trip west to drum up sales. Between recitations from Finnegans Wake, musings on Catholic theology, and monologues on art and architecture, he urged Jackson to “do some really big paintings,” to return to the scale of the Guggenheim mural, with or without commissions, as a way of showing collectors the potential of mural-size works.

  It wasn’t until Alfonso Ossorio returned from the Philippines in May, however, that Smith found the opening he was looking for. Having spent the winter with his devoutly Roman Catholic family, Ossorio found the return to secular New York unusually wrenching. At a dinner party hosted by Gerald Sykes and Buffie Johnson, his indignation boiled over. “Can you imagine?” he shouted, pounding the table. “There isn’t a single private chapel in all the Hamptons! Not one!” The outburst led to a meeting with Tony Smith, another devout Catholic, at which Ossorio commissioned a design for a private chapel to be built “somewhere on Long Island.” Smith urged that Jackson be commissioned to paint murals for the project, and Ossorio, who was always eager to help the Pollocks, enthusiastically agreed. “I was very excited by the enormous possibilities inherent in mural decoration,” Ossorio recalls, “and I knew it was one of Jackson’s interests, too.” For the time being, no one talked about siting or cost or sponsorship. “It was not a specific building for a specific spot,” says Ossorio, “it was a brilliantly symbolic idea that could be produced very simply or very grandly. It was a kernel, an acorn, from which trees would grow.”

  It was a spring of grand visions—an ideal museum, a symbolic chapel, mural commissions out west—to which Jackson added one of his own. Peering through the Plexiglas walls of Peter Blake’s model museum at the tiny wire and plaster pieces set amid scaled reproductions of his paintings, Jackson had begun to harbor a new ambition. Soon after arriving in Springs in March, he arranged to use Roseanne Larkin’s pottery studio in East Hampton. There, hunched over the little wheel and wearing an apron, he produced a series of small, receptacle-like sculptures in terra-cotta. “They were an attempt to make abstractions in pottery,” recalled Lawrence Larkin, “an attempt to get two-dimensional painting into a three-dimensional piece.” Larkin remembered that Jackson’s hands were “very delicate, but so big,” working the clay. “He had wonderful control.” After only a few sessions, Larkin pronounced him a “great artist.”

  But after six months of celebrity, being merely a great artist or a great sculptor wasn’t enough. Jackson had set his sights higher. He wanted David Smith’s title, also conferred by Greenberg, of the greatest sculptor in America. “From the start, Jackson’s idea was to do sculpture that was going to be greater than David Smith’s,” recalls Reuben Kadish, “that was going to raise him up that other notch so that he could be both the greatest painter and the greatest sculptor.” Whether he was dissatisfied with the results at Larkin’s studio or, perhaps, intimidated by David Smith’s one-man show at Marion Willard’s gallery in April, Jackson abandoned the effort after only a few sessions. Like the other grand visions of the spring, however, the ambition to make his mark as a sculptor continued to haunt him.

  Jackson was still having trouble “getting into painting again” when the first summer people began to arrive in mid-April. “The first signs of spring are here,” Lee wrote Ossorio, “[and] I don’t mean the many things breaking through the earth, or the frogs, or birds, but the early comers.” Since the previous summer, the Life article and the triumphant November show had moved Jackson from the social margins to the “A” guest list. Old friends eagerly reasserted old claims; mere acquaintances scrambled for a place on Lee’s crowded calendar; and the East Hampton elite—most of whom had been, at best, cordial in previous summers—vied for the honor of introducing “the Life painter” in their respective circles. In July, even the board of Guild Hall relented and, despite the fisticuffs of the previous summer, mounted an exhibition, “10 East Hampton Abstractionists.” Although the show included first-time appearances by Robert Motherwell and James Brooks, all eyes were on Jackson, whose “incomprehensible drippings” had, according to one account, “just emerged in all their threatening glory.” Soon afterward, Eloise Spaeth, a prominent East Hampton art patron, organized a “field trip” to Jackson’s studio. “We went in a huge bus,” recalls one of the guests, Betsy Zogbaum. “The Spaeths invited us to come down because they wanted us introduced to Jackson and his work.” On Fireplace Road, Lee, with growing confidence in Jackson’s sobriety, threw a cocktail party for the busload of visitors.

  On Sunday afternoons throughout the unusually hot and sultry summer, guests chosen from Lee’s extensive lists would gather on the aluminum lawn chairs behind the Pollock house for clams and beer. Jackson would lead a small party out into the shallows of Accabonac Creek to dig for lunch while Lee circulated among the guests quoting from the latest reviews and fishing for sales. Returning with a tubful of clams, Jackson would treat the crowd to a display of knifesmanship. “As [we] sat around,” one guest later recorded, “Jackson knifed open several dozen clams (with what seemed to be superhuman speed) and placed them in fine order on plates. The movement of knife into shell never faltered. He seemed to open each mollusk with a single jab and slice.” Surrounded by admirers, Jackson delighted in such occasions when the roles of celebrity and host merged. “He wasn’t a smiler as a rule,” recalls Betsy Zogbaum, “but that summer it seemed like he was smiling every time I saw him.”

  The most prized invitations that summer were to Lee’s dinner parties. They were small gatherings, seldom more than eight, a size that allowed Lee to control the conversation and keep an eye on Jackson. The guest lists were a careful mix of painters, potential collectors, and critics, including regulars from previous summers (Clement Greenberg, Peter and Vita Peterson, John and Josephine Little, Gerald Sykes and Buffie Johnson, Valentine and Happy Macy) and relative newcomers (Saul Steinberg and Hedda Sterne, Gina and Alexander Brook, Wilfrid and Betsy Zogbaum, Constantino and Ruth Nivola, Clyfford and Patricia Still, and a young painter from Texas, Joe Glasco). Old friends often brought guests of their own, eager to leapfrog into Jackson’s orbit. John and Josephine Little brought Lillian Olaney and Alice Hodges from the Hans Hofmann school. Olaney’s earlier hostility toward Jackson, like that of so many other critics, had mysteriously melted since their last meeting. “We were very warm toward each other on that visit,” she recalls fondly. Greenberg brought his latest female companion, a young painter named Helen Frankenthaler who had graduated from Bennington the year before. John Myers, an ambitious young writer—whose presence confirmed the Pollocks’ new social acceptability—brought Tibor de Nagy, a Hungarian émigré who ran a “professional” marionette theater. The Pollocks were won by de Nagy’s European reserve (a perfect foil for Myer’s gossipy flamboyance) and, over the summer, arranged a performance for his troupe at a church in Bridgehampton. Jackson also made a marionette—cut out of wood, covered with canvas, and “gaily painted.” He also contributed a story about a Pueblo Indian boy called “The Fireboy” that de Nagy adapted into a play. “Jackson loved to tell this story about a little boy who wanted to be initiated into a famous clan,” de Nagy remembers, “but he had to do three heroic things before he could become famous.”

  Despite the rush of socializing, not everyone saw more of Jackson than before. Some old friends were conspicuously missing from Lee’s guest lists: Harold and May Rosenberg, Reuben and Barbara Kadish, Roger and Lucia Wilcox, James and Charlotte Brooks—in short, anyone who had known the other Jackson Pollock: the pre-1948, pre-tranquilized, pre-celebrated, pre-Life Jackson Pollock. “Lee was very full of entertaining and having the right people in,” says Ch
arlotte Brooks, “so we saw less and less of them.” There were exceptions: John Little, whose icy propriety could be trusted and who had a past of his own to hide; Clement Greenberg, who had as much at stake in Jackson’s reputation as Lee did. But otherwise, almost all the visitors to Fireplace Road in the summer of 1950 came to see a star.

  Inevitably, they saw what they came to see.

  “Entering his studio was like entering a shrine,” said one of the many admirers who filled the house and studio in an unbroken procession that summer. “There was such concentration. He was there like a monk in his cell. You felt the energy and concentration in the place. You wanted to whisper.” They came away talking about Jackson’s “aura,” describing him as “mystical,” “poetic,” “awe-inspiring,” “illuminating,” “other-worldly,” and “sparkling.” Lillian Olaney thought he had “the intensity of a lover,” while another visitor said, “It was as if he were glowing.” To Donald Kennedy, a local boy, Jackson was “gentle and imposing like a Brahmin.” Almost everyone felt “honored” to be in his presence. One visitor compared him to “some sort of noble animal. Like you went into a cage and you could pet that tiger and look at it and be honored to be with it.” Wilfrid Zogbaum approached Jackson “like a student approaching a teacher,” and Joe Glasco, the young painter, “talked to him as an older artist and with great respect, nearly a reverence.” The spring of grand visions had become a summer of flattery.

  Suddenly, everything Jackson said had new meaning, levels of weightiness and perceptivity previously unrecognized. Marta Vivas thought his few contributions to any conversation—“maybe a ‘yes,’ ‘I think so,’ or ‘I agree’ “—were “grounded in another world” and were “the most interesting and profound things said all evening long.” So strong and self-confirming was the aura of celebrity that even Jackson’s long, tranquilized silences flattered him. “You could tell by the look in his eyes that he was not just following the conversation but furthering it in his mind,” says Buffie Johnson. “Not that he came up with any telling remarks really. … A sentence or two was about as far as he would go … [but] he had a very alive face. He participated without saying a word.”

  Into Jackson’s silences, his admirers eagerly poured themselves, attributing to him at various times a knowledge of Roman mythology, James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, the poetry of William Blake and T. S. Eliot, Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, Freud’s Man and the Unconscious, the writings of Pico della Mirandola and Alfred North Whitehead, and American literature in general. Some would say he listened to Bach and Vivaldi, others that he cared only for jazz, still others that his special passion was Gregorian chant. Like his paintings, Jackson had become a mirror into which people peered and saw only their own reflections. To the Harvard-educated Ossorio, Pollock was an intellectual; to Jeffrey Potter, a car buff; to Tony Smith, a lapsed Catholic; to Harry Jackson, a true son of the West; to Clement Greenberg, a formalist champion; to Harold Rosenberg, an existential hero. To Leslie Fiedler, a professor of literature from the University of Montana who visited Springs that summer, Jackson seemed “a kind of artistic Mark Twain.”

  In this process of self-confirmation, Jackson was a willing accomplice; he wanted to be what others wanted him to be. Intuitive, attentive, and hungry for approval, he absorbed just enough from the conversations around him to create the illusion of familiarity: from Tony Smith, a few passages of Joyce; from Ted Dragon, the names of composers and their works; from Harold Rosenberg and Ralph Manheim, names of philosophers and fragments of metaphysics. Just as he had done in the early forties with Freudian and Jungian psychoanalytic theories, just as he had done more recently with Greenberg’s formalist rhetoric, Jackson developed a repertoire of words and phrases and all-purpose generalities that, when framed in long stretches of thoughtful silence, passed for genuine understanding.

  In the world beyond Fireplace Road, Lee was his voice—standing at his elbow at parties, smiling, supplying conversation to fill his silences, summarizing the latest review for the huddle of awkward onlookers that invariably gathered around him. “Have you seen Jackson’s new work?” she would ask. “It’s such a marvelous thing.” “Lee always took the initiative in talking to people about Jackson’s work,” recalls Roger Wilcox. “He would just stand by and listen, taking it all in.” At backyard clam picnics, dinner parties, and openings, she exhorted guests to “buy a Pollock drawing; they’ll be valuable one of these days.” She could be charming and sociable, but business, Jackson’s business, always took precedence. “When Jackson had a work in one of my shows, Lee would be very, very friendly,” recalls Eloise Spaeth. “But if not, then she wouldn’t give me the time of day.” On one occasion, seeing a dinner guest admiring a large painting in the living room, she announced firmly: “It’s been waiting here, and it’s not going to leave until we get ten thousand for it.” The guest gasped. On the telephone table, she kept copies of magazines with articles about Jackson. “She had everything arranged,” recalls Buffie Johnson. “You always had to get an operator in those days, so you did a lot of waiting on the phone. Meanwhile she had things arranged there, his write-ups, and the magazines would flip open to the exact page. She left nothing to chance, no stone unturned, in publicizing Jackson.”

  Out of the public eye, Lee guarded Jackson’s privacy and protected him from the past with increasing ferocity. Her task was made easier by the proliferating details of his career: the more people who clamored to see him, to come for dinner or visit the studio, the more ruthlessly she screened them. Only Lee issued invitations, and when the telephone rang, only Lee answered it. “She was keeping people away,” recalls Vita Peterson. “Only a few could get into his studio where he worked.” On the increasingly rare occasions when old friends like Roger Wilcox and Harold Rosenberg came to the door, Lee turned them away perfunctorily. “It would be impossible to create a master,” said May Rosenberg, “as long as [Jackson] was also ‘one of the boys.’”

  If the studio was a shrine, Lee was its high priestess. Even in Jackson’s presence, she spoke of him in the third person and always took care to call him “Pollock,” not “Jackson,” and never “Jack.” In the evenings, when he would take out paper and draw for guests, “he would crumple up a piece of this marvelous handmade paper and throw it on the floor,” recalls one frequent visitor. “Whence Lee would pick it up, unwad it, press it out, fix it all up, preserve every little effort.” For Lee, nothing Jackson did warranted reproach. “No matter what, she never apologized for him,” recalls a friend. If dinner guests arrived and he was still at work, she would announce, “Pollock’s in the studio. I’m sorry, but we’ll just have to dine alone.” If he spent an entire dinner party in embarrassing silence, she would explain: “He doesn’t believe in talking, he believes in doing.” If his insults or profanity offended a guest, she would concede only that he was “being difficult.” If he took too many tranquilizers and passed out at a neighbor’s house, he was entitled to stay where he was. On one such occasion, he urinated on May Rosenberg’s new mattress, but Lee steadfastly refused to apologize. “He can do anything he wants,” she insisted. “He’s a genius.”

  When Berton Roueché, an East Hampton neighbor, came to interview Jackson for the New Yorker in June, it was Lee who met him at the door and, as she did all visitors, ushered him into Jackson’s presence. The two men, both displaced westerners who had already met through Peter Blake, warmed to each other instantly. Ostensibly preoccupied with a boiling pot of currant jelly, Lee hovered around the kitchen table while Jackson “breakfasted” on a cigarette and a cup of coffee. At specific questions about dates and names (when had he moved to Springs?) Jackson invariably turned to her for answers. In a thin show of deference, she would “laugh merrily” before supplying them. “She’s a native New Yorker,” Jackson bragged, “but she’s turned into a hell of a good gardener, and she’s always up by nine.” Lee, in turn, kept the conversation focused on art (“Jackson’s art is full of the West,” she said. “Tha
t’s what gives it that feeling of spaciousness. It’s what makes it so American”) and on business (“Jackson showed thirty pictures last fall and sold all but five [and] his collectors are nibbling at those”). Later, she shadowed them into the dining room where Jackson showed Roueché some of his paintings. When he couldn’t remember the title of a work, she supplied it (Number 2, 1949) along with a lengthy explanation (“Jackson used to give his pictures conventional titles … but now he simply numbers them. Numbers are neutral. They make people look at a picture for what it is—pure painting”). At the end of the interview, it was Lee, not Jackson, who attempted to summarize Jackson’s art: borrowing a phrase from Peter Blake that Roueché would eventually use as the title for the New Yorker piece, she described it as “sort of unframed space.”