That night, the fear had driven him to the town dump with Clement Greenberg. “He said he’d had a terrible nightmare,” Greenberg later told a friend about that night. “He was at the edge of this cliff and his brothers were trying to push him off.”
That same summer in Iowa City, Iowa, less than two hundred miles from Tingley, the huge mural Jackson had painted for Peggy Guggenheim’s apartment entrance hung in the mural studio at the University of Iowa. Peggy had tried to give it to Yale before returning to Europe, but the offer was spurned. Now it was suspended high up near the ceiling of the cavernous studio, poorly lit, noticed only by art students like Cile Downs who gave it an occasional, derisive glance. The rafters above it were also home to a covey of sparrows that “let go their droppings all over it,” Downs remembers. “We thought that was appropriate. In fact, we laughed about how it was getting better and better with every plop.” In Washington, D.C., a young painter named Gene Davis decided he couldn’t afford the Pollock painting he had bought at Parsons’s gallery and took it to the mailroom at the office where he worked to be wrapped and returned. “The attendants laughed when they saw it,” Davis recalls. “They said it looked like bird droppings.” And at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, an anonymous visitor left an angry note in the guest book: “Parsons must be nuts to insult the great name of art with crap. It isn’t funny any more. This is the stupidest crap I have ever seen. Shit to Pollock.”
Far from converting Jackson’s critics, the parade of publicity following the Life article had driven most of them either to open ridicule or to clandestine resentment. It was easier to cope with the former: the letters to Life suggesting that a child could do better; a letter from a man in West Palm Beach, Florida, who claimed he created better abstract paintings by cleaning his brushes on the garage door; another from a would-be master in Arlington, Virginia, who claimed that he could out-Pollock Pollock “at the rate of one every five minutes.” The article’s lead question had triggered a deluge of derisive mail, which Life gleefully published:
Sirs:
Is Jackson Pollock the greatest living U.S. painter? No!
Frank Carselli, Holley, N.Y.
Sirs:
…Is he a painter?
Fred Boshaven, Jr., Grand Rapids, Mich.
Sirs:
Why use the word “living” so loosely?
Peggy Dobbratz Abernethy, Vergennes, Vt.
Jeannette Rattray, the editor of the East Hampton Star, openly defying the celebrity madness that had swept Jackson into social acceptability among the Guild Hall set, wrote in a 1950 editorial that her five-year-old niece “had spilled a bucket of paint over a piece of canvas and that the result was hailed as ‘one of Pollock’s best.’” When Jackson read the article, Roger Wilcox remembers, his only comment was “Well, the world is full of worms pretending to be people.” But the criticism definitely “stirred him up,” according to Wilcox. “All this stuff came down to Jackson’s work being a deliberate sham, a put-on, and he was always sensitive about being called a phony.”
Behind closed doors, dealers and reviewers who were reluctant to criticize Jackson openly contributed to the undercurrent of ridicule. Alfred Barr, who had praised Jackson’s paintings in print and supported the museum’s purchase of She-Wolf, continued to snipe in private, criticizing “the decorative qualities of the internecine allover pattern” and dismissing those of his colleagues who claimed to find more serious meanings in Pollock’s work. Curt Valentin stood by his earlier assessment that if Pollock was good, he was blind, and Charlie Egan took Clement Greenberg aside to ask: “You don’t really take Pollock seriously, do you?” Others favored the more circumspect approach of William Shawn, editor of the New Yorker, who rejected Berton Roueché‘s proposal to turn his interview with Jackson into a full-fledged profile, saying, “Let’s wait and see what happens to his reputation.”
It was inevitable that the ridicule and resentment would eventually penetrate the cordon Lee had thrown around Jackson. She couldn’t protect him from plain-spoken Bonackers like Ed Cook who, along with many locals, subscribed to the theory that Jackson painted with a broom. “People around here were always making jokes about his paintings,” says Cook. The plumber Ed Hults thought it “crazy” that anyone paid good money for “one of those messed up road maps.” Harder to dismiss was the cold reception among local art patrons. Jackson may never have heard Phyllis Geller call his mural for her dining room “a piece of junk,” but the message was the same whenever a collector came through the studio that summer and left conspicuously empty-handed. Donald and Harriet Peters, who bought avant-garde paintings by the dozen, “wouldn’t touch a Pollock. I was an innocent,” recalls Harriet Peters (later Mrs. Esteban Vicente), “brought up, shall I say, a middle-class girl, and Pollock frightened me so intensely.” Joe Liss resisted repeated inducements from both Lee and Jackson to buy a painting, adding a room onto his house instead. He did, however, bring his brother-in-law, Harold Kovner, a Manhattan real estate investor, to the studio. “Jackson was at work on the floor,” Liss recalls, “and was polite. When we left the barn I said [to Harry], ‘You ought to buy that painting.’ And he said, ‘I’m not going to buy the painting of some idiot who paints on the floor!’” Jackson offered a drawing to Stewart Klonis, a former schoolmate at the Art Students League who visited that summer, but Klonis, now the League’s executive director, wouldn’t take it. “I didn’t see anything in his work,” Klonis recalls. “I thought it was terrible.” Leonard Bocour refused to accept two of Jackson’s paintings in payment of a paint bill. (For someone as sensitive as Jackson, such personal, firsthand slights always stung, regardless of critical accolades or gallery sales.) Even those few patrons like Lawrence Larkin who supported Jackson felt the backwash of skepticism and scorn. “Maidstone Club friends and even Guild Hall patrons thought we had our Pollock painting as a joke or to be kind,” Larkin recalled. Jackson may have been a media phenomenon, a conversation piece at lawn parties, the summer’s sensation, but to many his art was still at best a charity, at worst a joke.
But the real terror in Jackson’s nightmares didn’t come from abusive letters, subversive critics, bemused Bonackers, or chary collectors. It came from his fellow artists. In the interplay of past and present that was Jackson’s emotional life, they were the brothers who spoiled and envied him, pampered and flattered him, even as they pushed him closer to the edge. “He was uncomfortable with other artists,” says Conrad Marca-Relli. “He felt that they were either envious of him, or they hated his work, or they thought he was a phony, and all that made him distrust them.”
Jackson’s fears were justified. At a time when most avant-garde artists still worked in obscurity and held jobs to support themselves, his isolated, conspicuous success—both critical and financial—triggered a backstage storm of jealousy and rancor. “The myth of the great artist,” says Paul Brach, “somehow diminished the rest of us. He is the sun and we are the black hole.” Fellow artists who were friendly, even flattering, in public, privately derided him as “that wildman,” or “the freak,” or simply dimissed him as “irrelevant.” Hans Hofmann, who was particularly “embittered” by Jackson’s ascendancy, accused him of stealing the drip method, while others repudiated the method entirely, calling it “brash and heartless.” “Those pictures that we think are so marvelous today,” recalls Nick Carone, “then everybody thought were wild and overindulgent.” Like many artists, Reginald Marsh expressed his contempt for Jackson’s art by parodying it, creating his own drip painting and entering it in a show in Burlington, Vermont, as a joke. An old classmate from Manual Arts composed a poem: “He’s a follower of Glop, the god of drip and drop …” At a party in Chilmark, Martha’s Vineyard, the same summer, Thomas Craven accused Jackson of drinking a gallon of paint, then standing on a ladder and urinating. Tom Benton laughed appreciatively and wrote much the same thing in the second edition of his autobiography the following year. Phil Guston, furious at being eclipsed by his old high schoo
l classmate, called Jackson a “nonartist.” “Guston felt he was the painter,” recalls Carone. “He felt he was so accomplished and Jackson was inept and untalented, that he couldn’t draw, that he was trying to be shocking. Then suddenly the art world is adulating this person that he considered a hanger-on and nobody cares much about him.” Nobody, it seemed, cared much about Robert Motherwell, either. For years Motherwell had been “bragging that Jackson Pollock couldn’t draw” and predicting confidently that “within five years he [Motherwell] would be hailed as America’s foremost painter.” By the summer of 1950, Jackson’s success had forced Motherwell to rethink those ambitions.
The Life article had given artists something to fight about. “There had been such a dearth in American art for so long,” says Herman Cherry. “Nobody had a chance. Then, suddenly, there was an opening, and everybody wanted to make it through that small opening, and they were all pushing and crawling over each other. There were tremendous egos. It was raw, really raw. Everybody was fighting for their place, and ambition was flying high.”
But there was another reason, besides frustrated ambition, that so many of Jackson’s fellow artists resented his success; another person who shared responsibility for the jealousies that fueled his paranoia, haunted his social encounters, and propelled him into the night to find solace at the edge of a garbage dump. That other person was sitting next to Jackson in the car that night.
Clement Greenberg once observed that people only contracted the diseases they deserved. “I never met a person with cancer,” he said, “who didn’t ask for it.” The theory was typically Greenbergian: simple, muscular, symmetrical, seductive. It also helps explain why, by the summer of 1950, many avant-garde artists held him in such contempt. Despite his early championing of their cause, despite his future as the most influential art critic of the twentieth century, Clement Greenberg had nothing but contempt for artists.
“To be an artist is to be pompous,” Greenberg would later declare with characteristic certitude. “Painters are less cultivated than writers and therefore pretentious in ways writers know enough to avoid.” He was fond of the phrase “as stupid as a painter,” and frequently lamented that “all artists are bores.” When asked why he spent much of his career in their company, he answered: “Before analysis, I had a faculty for hanging around people I didn’t like.” His judgments of individual artists, even those whose work he supported, were curt and supercilious. Mark Rothko was “a clinical paranoid … pompous and dumb”; Jacques Lipchitz, “a south Balkan work maître”; Marc Chagall, “a Yiddish theater version of genius”; Adolph Gottlieb, “a pantspresser”; Arshile Gorky, a “violent anti-Semite”; Franz Kline, “a bore.” Hans Hofmann was “tiresome”; Clyfford Still, “pretentious”; Fairfield Porter, “uncommonly obtuse”; Barnett Newman, “boring”; and Willem de Kooning, “tedious beyond belief.”
Greenberg had been the intellectual bully of the art world ever since moving from the tougher neighborhood of literary criticism about 1941. As early as 1944, he had assailed “the extreme eclecticism” of the American art scene, calling it “unhealthy” and suggesting darkly that “it should be counteracted even at the risk of dogmatism and intolerance.” Over the next few years he followed his own advice, championing abstract art, espousing a new critical agenda—color, surface, line, paint quality, flatness—and waging a fierce guerrilla war against the still dominant influence of the Surrealists, whom he accused of trying “to restore ‘outside’ subject matter” and of “confus[ing] literature with painting.” At a time when few critics took avant-garde art seriously, most artists were willing to overlook such dogmatic excesses. Greenberg alone seemed to appreciate their “ferocious struggle.” “[The artist’s] isolation is inconceivable, crushing, unbroken, damning,” he wrote in 1947. “That anyone can produce art on a respectable level in this situation is highly improbable. What can fifty do against a hundred and forty million?”
By 1950, however, both Greenberg and the art world had changed. Due largely to Greenberg’s efforts and Jackson’s media success, the legitimacy of abstract art had been established. Uneasy in victory, Greenberg withdrew to an even narrower and more dogmatic claim: what American abstract painters were doing “was not merely another interesting experiment; it was the right and historically inevitable—right because historically inevitable—direction in which painting must now move.” In other words, abstract art, as defined by Greenberg, was “the only significant style for this time and place.” The fierce, Talmudic zeal that had been directed toward the defense of abstract art was now turned on the artists themselves.
A self-described “child prodigy,” Greenberg had once dreamed of becoming an artist himself. When his ambitions were frustrated by a disapproving father, he sought vindication of his own creativity in the creativity of others. He treated artists as wayward children to be remolded and “set right.” “For Clem, all of these artists were sort of tabula rasa,” says Miriam Schapiro. “In other words, he on some level was the genius.” Disdainful of their intelligence, he felt free to ignore the artists’ own representations as to what their art “meant,” forcing the paintings to conform to the criticism rather than the reverse. Many artists suspected that he would have preferred to do away with artists altogether. “He pushed his theories to the point where gradually the artist would disappear from the painting,” says Herbert Ferber, “and the painting would be nothing but paint and a support for the paint.” On studio visits he was blunt and dismissive—“like an impatient parent,” according to one artist. His eyes moved rapidly from painting to painting as he pronounced his verdicts: “That one’s a mistake!” or, even more devastating, “That’s really good,” thereby negating everything else in the studio. He proffered not just specific criticisms but general advice on types of images, palettes, brushwork, and styles. He told Adolph Gottlieb to abandon the black-and-white images he had borrowed from Miró and “lead from his strength, which was color.” According to one story, when he discovered a telephone book on which Franz Kline had cleaned his brushes, creating a series of oil sketches in heavy black strokes, he announced, “That’s what you should do.” (Years later, as executor, he would allow the paint to be stripped from the sculptures in David Smith’s estate because “Smith was no colorist.”) Even outside the studio, “Clem wanted to control everything,” says Hilton Kramer, “from picking out who your girlfriends were going to be to what contracts you were going to sign.”
In a community as fractious and verbal as the community of avant-garde artists, Greenberg’s power and increasingly dictatorial style bred resentment and ridicule. While kowtowing in public, in private, artists referred to him derisively as “the grand pooh-bah,” “Pope Clement,” and “God.” “Any time you take a mediocrity with an education,” says May Rosenberg, whose husband would soon challenge Greenberg’s hegemony, “inevitably they want to take charge of the world. They want to tell you how to tie your shoelaces. I never saw a mediocrity with power who was modest.”
But it was Greenberg’s open and largely exclusive alliance with Jackson that really ignited the fire-storm. Greenberg had thrown the golden apple into the crowd, and Jackson, unthinkingly, had rushed to pick it up. “Once Greenberg said [Pollock] was the greatest American artist,” recalls Lillian Olaney, “the whole place exploded.”
Beneath their anger and envy, many artists struggled with darker fears: fears that their world was changing; fears that media attention had given media figures like Greenberg an inordinate amount of power over insecure collectors, status-conscious museum officials, and careerist dealers, “most of whom came from making sweaters and shirts”; fears that the art world was passing out of their hands. Like Norman Bluhm, they remembered a day “when you would walk in to see a show and the dealer would come out and ask you what you thought,” and they feared those days were gone. They feared that Greenberg’s ascendancy was creating “a priest class” of critics and curators to whom words were more important than pictures, who “looked wit
h their ears.” They feared the appearance of what Adolph Gottlieb called “manufactured artists”—artists who were “full of dialectics” but who couldn’t paint. Already there was a corrosive suspicion in the air that “people were getting publicity or notoriety for reasons other than their work,” recalls Conrad Marca-Relli, “that it was all contrived.” They feared that a lifetime of creative struggle no longer counted as much as public relations—“novelty” and “promotability.” They feared that Greenberg was only the beginning, the opening wedge of a commercial imperative that to a generation of artists weaned on the Depression, the WPA projects, the Artists Union, and May Day parades was profoundly alien and disturbing. But most of all, they feared what commercialism would do to them: how they would respond to an art marketplace in which success was a genuine possibility; whether they would become, as Nathan Katz predicted, “like three dogs fighting over one bone.”
In the late fall of 1949, soon after the article on Jackson appeared in Life, their rising fears coalesced into an organization. Meeting in Ibram Lassaw’s studio at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Twelfth Street, a group of about twenty artists, including Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Milton Resnick, Philip Pavia, Conrad Marca-Relli, and Giorgio Cavallon, formed a club and contributed ten dollars apiece to rent a loft at 39 East Eighth Street near University Place. Unable to agree on a name—an ominous hint of things to come—they called themselves simply “The Club.”
Jackson Pollock Page 90