Through the interviews, entertaining, and other distractions of celebrity, the studio had remained quiet since the previous fall. “I’ve been out to so many parties,” Jackson complained to a friend, “I don’t feel like a painter any more.” For Jackson, whose art always followed closely the ups and downs of his life, the delay was a source of increasing frustration: the triumphs of the previous year had yet to find their way onto canvas. Finally, in late May, still riding the crest of Lee’s support, friends’ adulation, and public attention, he began to paint again.
37
RECOLLECTIONS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD
When the vast reservoir of ambition and confidence that had been slowly accumulating in the ten months since the Life article finally burst onto canvas, the explosion was so powerful that small canvases could no longer contain it. Jackson had to have space.
Tony Smith had exhorted him repeatedly to “think big,” arguing that “great art demands an appropriate scale.” Peter Blake’s model museum sat conspicuously on a worktable in the corner of the studio, its miniature murals and mirrored walls a continual reminder of the possibilities of scale. There was persistent talk of mural commissions in California. (Howard Putzel had been wrong about large paintings: great art on a grand scale could be commercially viable. The Geller mural was proof of that.) Meanwhile, Greenberg continued to prophesy the death of the easel picture, and Lee repeated her Wild West rhetoric about the “spaciousness” of Jackson’s paintings. Surrounded by talk of size—both of paintings and of reputations—Jackson rolled his bolts of white cotton duck further and further across the studio floor, testing his new confidence in the expanding void.
The first big painting of the summer was Number 28, 1950, a dense latticework of aluminum and white over blushes of rose and yellow with thin loops of black meandering across the rigorously allover field, puddling and smudging, doubling back, thinning almost to nothing, leaving an erratic trail, like explorers lost on a glacier of silver and white. At 5′8″ by 8′9″, it was the largest canvas Jackson had created since the Guggenheim mural six years earlier. But it was only the beginning. While Number 28 was still drying, he began another, larger work. Despite the size (7′3″ by 9′10″), he worked slowly, close to the surface, spreading thin layers of tan, teal, silver, and white on the unsized canvas, stringing tiny lines and sprays of small drops over a few square feet at a time, then moving on, stepping around the edges, straddling the corners to reach toward the center, until the allover image began to accumulate in a series of fine-mesh layers. There were some grand gestures—great thoroughfares of black through the hazy complexity of colors—but after each gesture would come more complexity, showers of blue and ticker tapes of white, dabs of green and cream-colored nebulae barely distinguishable from the raw canvas. As the colors crossed and blended and obscured one another—green into tan across a line of black, white into black with a speck of blue, often mixing wet in wet—new colors emerged: gray-green, pink, and deep purple. In weeklong cycles of painting and drying that continued through most of June, the huge image grew both denser and lighter as the skeleton of black lines almost disappeared behind a luminous pastel cloud. Jackson called it simply Number 1, 1950, but Clement Greenberg, seeing the painting from a distance, was struck by its lavender glow—the result of the interplay of pink and blue-black—and suggested calling it “Lavender Mist.”
Gothic, left, Arabesque, top right, The Key, right
Lavender Mist proved that Jackson could work on a size canvas commensurate with his new ambitions. Yet, for all its glorious effusive energy and exquisite detail, it was in one way still unsatisfying. Seen even from just across the studio, the delicate lines and loops and sprays of paint he had labored over were obscured in a cloud, the interwoven colors lost in their own halations. More than a single “great” painting, he had created a wall of little ones. Only the size of his canvas had changed, not the scale of his vision. He remained obsessed with concealment, with filling space instead of opening it. For years, he had been obscuring his imagery, abhorring the void: reluctant, except in rare instances, to leave canvas untouched. Always another layer of paint, a few more flicks or lines or puddles or drops to calm the fear that his imagery, his lack of draftsmanship, his demons, any part of himself, would be left exposed. That fear, as deeply rooted in the past as his ambitions, now posed the final obstacle to those ambitions. To make the leap to large-scale paintings—his own measure of greatness—he would have to loosen the veil.
In the next painting, he did just that. With only a broad housepainting brush and a bucket of black enamel, he hurled himself at a 8′10″-by-15’ expanse of unsized, unforgiving canvas. Instead of sprays and filagrees, he poured great ropes of black as thick as fists, winding them into dense knots, then out again, across the stark white field to form new knots. Instead of working from one small area to the next, he roamed over the canvas all at once, his arm sweeping behind him as he giant-stepped from one side to the other. On his knees, arm outstretched toward the center, hands black to the wrists, he unfurled thick ribbons of paint in a single gesture, tipping the can of paint as he passed to quicken or slow the flow. The lines rose and fell, twisted and coiled, dividing like arteries or ending abruptly in bursts of black. Where there had been delicate webs, he wound dense, taut, capillary tangles; where there had been pastel clouds, he flooded the line with turbulent pools; even the droplets, flung from a heavily laden brush, fell full, round, and final on the canvas, each one distinct from across the room. This was the calligraphy of arrogance. Not since the Guggenheim mural had he worked so quickly or so confidently, combining—in what became known as Number 32, 1950—the calligraphic nuance of earlier, smaller works like Number 23, 1949 and Number 26, 1949, works that explored the drip technique in blown-up detail, with the bravura compositional control of complex paintings like Number 1, 1948.
Finally, the vision matched the scale.
In late summer, with that vision firmly in his eye, Jackson completed in quick succession the two largest and, by consensus, greatest paintings of his career. Number 31, 1950, later called One, was, like each masterpiece of the summer of 1950, bigger than the last. At 8′10″ by 17′6″, One marked both a return to color and a retreat from the black-and-white brinksmanship of Number 32. Like Lavender Mist, it was a soft web of tan, blue, lavender, and white spinning around a black calligraphic skeleton like the one laid bare in Number 32. As in Lavender Mist, Jackson created the image through accumulation: layers of paint in infinite variations of line and puddle and interpenetration. Every corner of the vast canvas displays his virtuoso control of the drip technique: thick rivulets of black bordered by thin stains of gray-green and pink, islands of bright blue and teal overlain with threads and specks of pure white, each color and form, to the tiniest fleck, miraculously distinct and assured. Yet, for all the similarities of color and style, the scale is radically changed. The deep skeins in One don’t merge into solids as they do in Lavender Mist; the colors don’t dissolve into pastel clouds. The skeleton of great dancing loops beneath the web remains clearly visible, tying the vast image together in a single long-winded calligraphic statement.
But it wasn’t until the next, and last, major painting of the summer, Number 30, 1950, later called Autumn Rhythm, that Jackson was able to combine the naked simplicity of Number 32 with the reassuring complexity of Lavender Mist, his aspirations to greatness—and the scale appropriate to them—with his need to conceal. Like the miniature murals in Peter Blake’s model museum, which he gazed at for hours, Autumn Rhythm looks as though it had been conceived and executed all at once by some giant hand. A cat’s cradle of black stretches across the entire 17′8″ expanse of unsized canvas; heavy lines run in unbroken arcs from top to bottom, almost nine feet, while smaller lines fling themselves halfway across the canvas in great aerial loops. Wisps of white and tan float through the loose fabric of black without obscuring it. Sprays of teal blue, only a few, insinuate themselves at the margins. Raw canvas breaks
through everywhere. Jackson had finally found a new handwriting, one with the scale and openness to serve his grand ambitions even as it continued to conceal the inspired unspooling of memories that gave each larger-than-life loop its pitch and moment.
Number 32, 1950, enamel on canvas, 8′10″ × 15’
In achieving scale, however, Jackson had lost much else. The bilious yellow of the Guggenheim mural, the acidic green of Full Fathom Five, and the harsh orange of Tiger had been replaced by the easy pinks and creams and blues of Lavender Mist; the jarring rhythms of Circumcision and White Cockatoo by the assured balance of Number 32; the fiery insistence of Number 5, 1948 by the unmitigated loveliness of One; the dark Ryderesque tangle of Alchemy and Lucifer by the lucidity of Autumn Rhythm. At the moment of its greatest triumph, Jackson’s art had betrayed its greatest weakness. In reaching for scale and control, he had lost the unruliness of his vision, the critical core of torment that had propelled his art for two decades. After three years, pouring, dripping, and flinging paint had become too easy: the paint submitted too readily, the lariats landed where they were flung, the lines thickened and thinned, ebbed and flowed too obediently.
As early as the previous summer Jackson had shown signs of uneasiness with the drip technique. In paintings like Out of the Web, Number 13,1949, Number 6,1949, and Small Composition, he had begun to explore new directions, escape routes from what was often, even then, an exercise in composition and color. Rough biomorphic shapes, brushwork, and texture reappeared. He experimented with materials. But the Life article and the success that followed had cut off escape. Instead of moving on, he was drawn back into an easy style that increasingly threatened to turn into a rote exercise. As early as 1940, Bill Baziotes had warned Jackson about just such a trap, and the word that he used, “phony,” was more and more in Jackson’s conversations, its full implications muzzled only temporarily by the celebrity-driven obsession with scale.
Autumn Rhythm (Number 30,1950),8‘10 ½” × 17′8″
Outside the studio, the gifts of success proved equally ambiguous. The tide of celebrity was too strong for Jackson to resist, his roots in reality too shallow, his childhood needs too deep. Beset by admirers, protected from criticism, and cut off from the past, he soon succumbed to the adulation that swirled around him. Years of insecurity and self-doubt dissolved, leaving only a spoiled child eager to claim center stage. When David Smith came to visit in midsummer, Jackson announced confidently: “Look, Dave, you’re the best sculptor and I’m the best painter.” To Grace Hartigan he bragged, “Everyone’s shit but de Kooning and me.” Some thought even the references to Smith and de Kooning were only a pretense of modesty. “At bottom, [Jackson] thought everybody stank but him,” Betty Parsons later recalled. “He thought he was the greatest artist ever.”
As the greatest, he owed debts to no one. He gave up going to museums to see the old masters because, according to Clement Greenberg, “he didn’t want to repeat their mistakes.” “I showed Jackson a book of colored reproductions of Rubens landscapes,” Greenberg recalled. “He looked through it and said, ‘I can paint better than this guy.’” Greenberg was “pissed and appalled.” So was Peggy Guggenheim when Jackson stopped sending her announcements and reviews. “I gathered Pollock was becoming very important in America,” she wrote, “… but he is so ungrateful that they never even answer letters or thot [sic] to send me Life magazine.” (In fact, in preparation for the Life article, Jackson had specifically requested that Peggy’s early support not be mentioned.) When, in May 1950, Sam Kootz offered to show paintings by the Irascible Eighteen, Jackson led the refusal. Tony Smith had convinced him that his works deserved to be seen “in large scale,” that for them to be framed and treated merely as art objects in Kootz’s small gallery would diminish them and reduce his stature as a great artist. The message was clear: just as he no longer needed Rubens or Picasso, Jackson no longer needed Guggenheim, Kootz, or even Parsons. More and more, he left dealing with them to Lee. “He didn’t want to stoop to such things,” says Hedda Sterne. “They bored him.”
Mugging for the camera
It was in the midst of this deepening obsession with his image as a great artist that Jackson met a young photographer named Hans Namuth. A refugee from Germany whose reaction to the November Parsons show had been “hostile,” Namuth, too, was more interested in Jackson’s image than in his art. It was only because Alexey Brodovitch, his teacher at the New School and art director at Harper’s Bazaar, called Pollock “the most important artist around today” that Namuth approached Jackson at the opening of “10 East Hampton Abstractionists” at Guild Hall on July 1. Namuth’s family had rented a house in nearby Water Mill, and he needed a photographic project for the summer. “I thought it might be a good idea,” he suggested to Jackson, “if you let me come and photograph you while you are painting.” Jackson not only agreed but promised to start a new painting especially for Namuth’s visit.
One weekend soon afterward, Namuth arrived at the Fireplace Road house with two loaded Rolleiflexes. Lee and an exhausted-looking Jackson met him at the door. “I’m sorry, Hans,” Jackson said, “there’s nothing to photograph because the painting is finished.” Crestfallen, Namuth followed them to the studio where a freshly painted canvas covered the floor. After a few moments of silence, according to Namuth’s story, Jackson picked up a can of paint and began to work again—“as if he suddenly realized the painting was not finished.” For the next half-hour, Jackson flung paint on the canvas while Namuth’s camera clicked, pausing only once every two rolls for reloading. When Jackson finished, Lee, who had watched the entire performance approvingly, flattered the young photographer with a bold lie: “[She] told me that until that moment,” Namuth wrote, “she had been the only person who ever watched him paint.”
In fact, the Pollocks were courting Namuth. For Lee, the promotional value of his dramatic shots of Jackson at work seemed worth the “annoyance” of his unwelcome intrusions and Teutonic hauteur. (As usual, she was right: within a year, Namuth’s pictures would appear in Portfolio, a glossy, large-format “annual of the graphic arts.”) After reviewing the contact sheets from the first session, she granted Namuth virtually unlimited access to the studio—an unprecedented privilege. In July and August, he returned several times, taking more than five hundred photographs over the course of the summer, working “whenever Pollock was in the mood.”
For Jackson, these sessions and the photographs they produced were yet further proof of his claim to greatness. Only two summers before, he had watched as Herbert Matter, another photographer, made a film about Alexander Calder. “At that time he was reluctant to be photographed,” Matter recalls, “but he followed the whole development of the Calder film and was very excited by it.” Now it was Jackson’s turn in the viewfinder. Far from ignoring the camera, as Namuth and others later claimed, he reveled in it. As Namuth moved around the studio, lying on the floor, standing on a ladder, dangling from the loft door, kneeling beside the canvas while Jackson worked, the solitary creative act became a historic event. In the narrow alleys of uncluttered floor around the huge canvas, Namuth jockeyed to find the right angle, the right light, and to avoid the flying lariats of paint. Unimpressed by the art, he focused his camera on the artist instead. Jackson’s motions were, as always, “careful and deliberate,” but by slowing the exposure to 1/25 of 1/50 of a second, Namuth could create the illusion of speed and impetuous energy—a simple flick of the wrist to stop the flow of paint from a stick could be transformed into an urgent blur; a step onto the canvas into an inspired lunge; an awkward sidestep into a spontaneous jig; a momentary glance into a trancelike glare. Namuth, whose childhood ambition was to be a stage director, didn’t have to direct; Jackson was an intuitive, compliant actor. He and Lee had reviewed every picture and understood the illusion Namuth was trying to create. “The proofs,” said Namuth, “then as today, reveal a collaboration.”
Outside the studio, away from the props of paint and brushes, Namut
h took a series of portraits. In all of them, the mood was set and the image dominated by Jackson’s face. “His face was the reason I learned to like him sooner than I learned to appreciate his work,” Namuth later wrote. It was a weathered, melancholy face—handsome once—with the look of a local gray-shingled farmhouse too long exposed to the ravages of the South Fork’s sea winds and winter storms: permanently knotted brow; deeply creased and drooping jowls; sunken cheeks and a sinewy neck that betrayed the wasting effects of tranquilizers, cigarettes, and endless cups of coffee. Jackson’s poses, arranged by Namuth, underscored the twin themes of distress and dissipation: sitting on the running board of the battered Model A staring broodingly into the middle distance, leaning against the weathered wall and peeling paint of the studio, lying in the uncut grass staring into the sky, or turning over to gaze at the ground. This was the other half of the image Namuth and Pollock were creating together: the great artist paying the price of greatness. A later commentator called them portraits of “a tormented, agonized man, torn by self-doubt, the victim of an inner Sturm-und-Drang nakedly revealed in his contorted face. … The picture of the romantic Genius, possessed by demonic terribilità.” This was the other side, equally contrived, of the blur of motion around the canvas, the trancelike dance, the lunges and parries of Jackson at work as choreographed by Namuth’s camera. Their air of postcoital lassitude, of exhaustion and withdrawal, only complemented the illusion of “superhuman energy” and cathartic outpouring. Here was the artist caught in rare repose, cooling like a burned-out crater between creative explosions.
A Namuth picture of Pollock at work
It was by no means the first time Jackson had posed for the camera. From the day he first put on Charles’s cap and work shirt, or grew his hair long like Krishnamurti, or dressed up in vest and cane, or stood for a camera in buckskin jacket and cowboy hat, Jackson had been creating images of himself, posturing earnestly for a posterity that he must have believed would someday take note. Now, under Namuth’s direction, he was creating the role of the great American artist. The cowboy boots and ten-gallon hats he had shared with Sande at the Art Students League were gone, but the exaggerated masculinity and western ethos of the “Wyoming Kids” remained. “He loved to be the macho kid,” recalls Ted Dragon. “It was always the blue dungarees, work shirt, rough and tumble—anything to offset the idea of the effete artist, with the flowing ties and the smock and the beret.”
Jackson Pollock Page 88