Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Blue and Black, Lee Krasner, 1951–53, 58” × 82½”

  Each new success for Lee sent tremors through Jackson’s fragile world: “She wasn’t pushing Pollock as much anymore,” says Harry Jackson. “She was pushing Lee now.”

  Soon after Hans Namuth began photographing Jackson, Lee insisted that he come to her studio as well. “I should have made more of a fuss over her from the start,” says Namuth. “As it was, we had unpleasant scenes together, so I came to take her picture, too.”

  That left only Jackson’s family.

  The idea of a Pollock family reunion had been in the air for years, ever since Stella’s move to Deep River in 1944. With Sande in Connecticut, Jay in New York, Jackson in Springs, and Frank frequently in town on business, only Charles was missing. But a Pollock family reunion without Charles was unthinkable. It wasn’t until 1950, when Charles moved back to New York and rented a summer house in Sag Harbor, only twelve miles from Springs, that plans were laid. Within a month, Frank Pollock loaded his wife Marie and his eight-year-old son Jonathan into a 1950 Pontiac in Los Angeles and struck out across the country with typical Pollock abandon (“My dad drove eighty or a hundred miles an hour the whole way,” Jonathan recalls); Jay and Alma left their apartment in the city, and Sande brought his family and Stella from Deep River. On a sunny weekend in July, they converged at the farmhouse on Fireplace Road. It had been seventeen years since they were last together.

  For Jackson, the reunion was the culmination of a year of celebrity, the last stop on the backward path that fame had allowed him to retrace and rechart; a chance to coax from his family the attention he had sought and won in the larger world; a chance, finally, to win the approval of the only audience that ultimately mattered.

  The prospect terrified him. As the weekend approached, he couldn’t sleep or work. Lee watched with mounting concern as he laid and relaid elaborate plans, one minute dreaming of a “triumph over his family,” the next minute plagued by nightmares “that it would be a bust.”

  Saturday, the first and only full day of the reunion, began with introductions. Charles, Elizabeth, and Marie met Lee for the first time. The scattered grandchildren discovered one another. For Charles’s ten-year-old daughter, Jeremy, “it was being part of a huge family for the first time.” While the children explored the house (they were more fascinated by Lee’s mosaic table than by Jackson’s paintings) and Accabonac Creek, Jackson took his brothers on a tour of the studio. In the afternoon, all five brothers led the grandchildren into the backyard for a game of baseball. Over Jonathan’s objection that baseball was “a boys’ game,” Sande’s daughter Karen, a “husky” nine-year-old, took the field alongside her father. Two-year-old Jay (who later renamed himself Jason), too young to play, spent the afternoon on Stella’s knee, where he remained most of the weekend. The daughters-in-law took advantage of a flawless summer day and drove to a nearby beach. When the groups reunited that evening at the tables that had been pulled together in the center of the big room, Stella and Lee served a “Christmas feast in July” crowned by a massive roast. The table talk was far more animated than it had been seventeen years before. “There was a lot of laughter and jesting and reminiscing about boyhood events,” recalls Elizabeth. Except for the paintings on the walls—many of which Jackson had hung especially for the occasion—and the conspicuous absence of alcohol, it was a “typical family reunion. “There wasn’t any bickering or anything,” recalls Jeremy. “Everyone seemed to get along pretty well.” After dinner, the tables were cleared and pushed back in place and a wrought-iron settee pulled out in front of Jackson’s Arabesque for picture-taking: first the entire family, with Stella in the center holding Jason and Charles beside her; then Stella with just the daughters-in-law; then Stella with just her sons; then Stella with just her grandchildren. Sitting proud and rock-like in her black lace dress while the others shifted seats around her, even Stella smiled for the camera.

  Behind the Rockwellian tableau of smiling faces and family unity, however, was a tangle of emotions as deep and dense as any of Jackson’s painted skeins.

  Despite her girlish grin, Alma Pollock had almost refused to attend. She had never forgiven Jackson for his drunken cruelties or Lee for her arrogance on their trips into New York in the late forties. “When they stayed over at the apartment for one of his openings, Lee would borrow clothes from Alma and then just keep them,” recalls Jay—in much the same way Jackson had “just kept” the collection of Indian blankets. Neither Jay nor Alma said anything, of course, but they had stopped visiting Springs long ago and, at Alma’s insistence, spent the reunion weekend with Charles in Sag Harbor to avoid staying an unnecessary moment in Jackson’s house.

  The Pollock family reunion, 1950. Left to right, top row: Jackson, Lee, Jay, Alma, Sande, Elizabeth; middle row: Arloie, Frank, Stella with Jason, Charles, Marie; front row: Karen, Jeremy, and Jonathan.

  Behind his tentative, go-along smile, Frank Pollock had a lot of worries on his mind. His son Jonathan had been pronounced “seriously ill” by doctors just before the trip east; his job at a nursery was producing pitifully little income and even less fulfillment; and, partly as a result, his marriage was showing signs of strain. Marie Pollock had made no secret of her disappointment when Frank quit school in 1933, effectively abandoning his dreams of being a writer. “He wrote like Ernie Pyle,” says Marie, “only better. But he didn’t have the drive.” She had tried to push him into journalism, “but he would have had to start at the bottom,” she recalls, “and he was too proud for that.” Since then, Frank’s life had been a series of bootless compromises—not unlike Roy Pollock’s. “Frank looked the most like his father,” says Marie, “but they were alike in other ways. They both ended up disappointed men.”

  Like Frank, Sande had surrendered his artistic aspirations for a life of family and job. Almost ten years later, neither had brought the promised rewards. At forty, he was still the tautly strung teenager, “obsessed with being a he-man”; a scrapper who awoke every morning to a strict regimen of push-ups and chin-ups. “It wasn’t for the exercise,” says one family member. “He was just tense, filled with aggression and strain from the moment he got up.” In his eyes, however, and in the deep lines around them, the strain had begun to show. His secret defense work at the Pratt-Reed plant in Deep River left him exhausted, irritable, vulnerable to alcohol, and, for inexplicable reasons, persistently ill. Financially, his lot had improved little since the Project days. Between two children and Stella’s profligacy, he still couldn’t afford a house for his family. Meanwhile, Stella and Arloie continued to wage their subterranean war. In her letters to family, Stella fulminated against her daughter-in-law, accusing her of expropriating the money sent by the other brothers to help with Stella’s upkeep—money that Stella considered her own. She suspected that Arloie tolerated her presence only because of these supplements to the family’s meager income. “I[t’s] not me, [it’s] the money,” she complained to Charles. “They have borrowed till I am down to my last dollar. No money comeing in so they have to feed the kids [with] the money you sent.” At the beach the Saturday of the reunion, the other daughters-in-law commiserated with Arloie. “Something was said about Mother Pollock,” Arloie remembers, “and they all said to me, ‘I don’t know how you stand it. How can you stand to have her in your home all the time?’”

  Preoccupied with Sande and working to earn extra money, Arloie had virtually abandoned her children to Stella’s care—with troubling results. Sande had wanted Karen to be “his precious little girl,” the sister he never had. Instead, she had turned out to be a precocious, overweight tomboy who, by her own account, “wasn’t pretty enough.” Jason, on the other hand, was too pretty: an “exquisitely beautiful little boy” everyone agreed, so pretty that when Stella let his hair grow into long golden curls, people mistook him for a girl. From birth, he had been Stella’s baby: he called his grandmother “Mommie” and his mother “Loie.” Sande had wanted a cowboy for a son, but Stella h
ad already determined that Jason would be a musician when he grew up.

  The seventeen intervening years had been particularly unkind to Charles. At forty-eight, he looked and moved like a man twenty years older. Behind the fleshy, unsmiling mask, unseen by his still-admiring brothers, he was already wrestling with an old man’s regrets. Under Benton’s influence, he had clung to Social Realism too long. Out of misguided pride and the need to support his family, he had avoided the Project, missing the central social and creative experience of the decade. Finally, at the very moment when the New York art world began to explode, he had left for Michigan to teach calligraphy to college students. “He had missed out on the big movement,” says Frank, “and he knew it. He bewailed the fact that if he hadn’t settled for security, his work would have become more important. He would have developed along with the rest of the New York School. He would have become an abstract painter sooner.” As early as the early forties, Charles was already beginning to feel the cumulative effect of so many wrong turns. In 1942, he suffered an artistic and emotional “breakdown.” Abandoning his teaching position, he embraced nonobjective painting and returned to the site of his childhood triumphs, Arizona. “I spent months in the desert painting,” he recalls, “trying to erase all those years of Social Realism.”

  In New York, seven years later, he was still trying to reverse the mistakes of the previous decades. He had rented a studio on Third Avenue and arranged a show at the Circle Gallery. But now there were new obstacles to overcome: a disintegrating marriage to an increasingly embittered and shrewish wife; an unfamiliar, competitive art world; and the new burden of celebrity attached to the name Pollock. On his arrival in New York in the midst of Jackson’s triumphs, Charles had decided not to show under his own name. One Pollock in the art world was enough. So he called himself “Charles Pima,” after the tribe of Arizona Indians. At the reunion, he said nothing about the past or about his new identity, but, according to a friend, “inside, he boiled. It didn’t show outwardly, but he boiled inside from a sort of injustice done to him.”

  In the midst of so many failed lives, Jackson’s success stood out in galling contrast. Everywhere his brothers looked, they saw its fruits: in the cut of the dinner roast, in the freshly painted guest room, in the elegant Herter Brothers carpet in the living room, in the new furnishings, bathroom fixtures, and garden plantings. On every table Jackson had stacked copies of magazines—Life, Art News, Art Digest—with articles about him and reviews of his work carefully marked. “Must be great to be talked about in the newspapers and magazines,” Jay commented. The walls were covered with his paintings, including two of his favorites, Gothic and Arabesque. What signs of prosperity his brothers couldn’t see, Jackson eagerly reported. He led them around the property and shared his plans for buying the adjoining lots. In the studio he talked prices and galleries and reputation, at one point bragging: “I’m the only painter worth looking at in America. There really isn’t anybody else.” Pointing to Lavender Mist on the studio wall, he said to Frank, “Buy that painting for 15,000 and one day it will be worth 100,000.” (Frank’s wife, Marie, remembers that “at that time I can assure you we did not have 15,000 cents, let alone dollars.”) To his hard-pressed brothers, Jackson’s eagerness smacked of arrogance. “I think the fact that we were there didn’t make a damned bit of difference to him,” recalls Frank. “He was still Jackson Pollock, you know.”

  Where Jackson’s self-promotional campaign left off, Lee’s began. She slipped easily from her role as “gracious hostess” to that of salesman, quoting reviews and prices, and incongruously urging purchases on Jackson’s strapped brothers as if they were well-heeled collectors. If a family member stared too long at a painting on the wall, she would sidle up and whisper its price. “One of the things that bothered us,” recalls Jay, “was Lee’s attitude: We hadn’t produced anything, but Jackson had, and our only purpose in life was to buy his paintings so he could live. We ought to sacrifice so he could create. That was her attitude.” The brothers also sensed, beneath the facade of hostess and promoter, Lee’s deep antagonism. In the reunion portrait, she stands in her smart summer dress, disconnected from those around her, her lips pursed in impatience, her eyes filled with ennui. “She had Jackson under her control,” recalls Frank, “and she wanted no interference from his side—from his brothers or his mother. She just put up with us. Her attitude was ‘It’s only a matter of time and they’ll be gone and we’ll be back to normal.’” Soon, the family’s initial skepticism—“They didn’t know what to think of her,” Jeremy recalls—turned to cordial hostility.

  Even more rankling to the brothers than Jackson’s arrogance or Lee’s disdain was the sight of Stella “sitting in silent adoration” of Jackson’s success. Had she forgotten the endless family crises, the crossfire of distraught letters, the public displays, the hospitalizations, the family embarrassments? They hadn’t forgotten. Nor had they forgotten that for all his talk of hundred-thousand-dollar sales, Jackson had never contributed to Stella’s support. For an entire decade, he had lived off his family, never holding a job for long, never showing any gratitude, taking money and food and giving in return only headaches and sleepless nights and scenes in the gutter. And now that he had money, he was spending it on reshingling his studio, “opening up” the living room, and refurbishing the guest bath while Sande struggled in a tiny apartment to maintain solvency and domestic peace with occasional help from his older brothers. “Jack was making more money than any of us,” says Frank, “and I don’t think he had ever sent a dime to Stella or Sande.”

  At age forty, Jackson was still the favored child—Stella’s baby—and, as on the Phoenix ranch, his brothers hardened against him. Their resentment found an easy target in Jackson’s art. “The family thought he was pulling everybody’s leg,” recalls Jeremy. “They didn’t take him seriously as an artist.” “I was never able to turn any somersaults about any of Jack’s paintings,” says Frank. Following Jackson through the studio, Jay just smoked his pipe and shook his head. “It was something entirely new, and I couldn’t recognize it,” he recalls. “It didn’t seem to fit what I thought art was.” To the Pollocks, Charles was still the painter in the family. The fact that he chose to hide his resentment behind a mask of affability and quiet drinking only made them more sympathetic. Whatever the magazines said about Jackson, his brothers still shared Elizabeth’s conviction that “when posterity finally judges value, Charles is the one who’s going to be seen as the great artist of his time.”

  On Saturday night, in a last, desperate bid for his family’s approval, Jackson pulled out a copy of Bruno Alfieri’s article in L’Arte Moderna, which had just arrived in the mail and, with Lee at his side, tried to translate it for his guests. “Do you know any Italian?” he asked as he began, knowing, of course, that no one did. “That was the center of interest as far as Jack and Lee were concerned, and I guess they assumed the rest of us would find it fascinating,” recalls Marie Pollock. “They made telephone calls to see if they could find anybody who spoke Italian and could translate it all the way through. They were reading it aloud and trying to figure out what it said.” The battle line was drawn when the rest of the family turned to a game of anagrams on the other side of the room. Most, like Frank, resented that this obscure Italian article “was of paramount importance to Jack, rather than the fact that his family was gathering for the first time in seventeen years.” But Jackson continued to repeat fragments of the review in broken Italian as if a crowd were listening. “He was determined to make us hear,” says Frank—especially the part that compared him to Picasso. “Several times throughout the evening I heard a repeated refrain of ‘povero Picasso, povero Picasso,’” recalls Marie. I thought that was very funny. It was written in the article and I kept hearing it in the background. He was clearly gloating over the expression, and he kept repeating it all night.” But the family was no longer listening. At one point, Alma turned to Jackson in exasperation and asked, “Is Picasso more im
portant than your family?”

  The triumph Jackson so desperately wanted had turned into a debacle. Instead of reshaping the past, he was reliving it. In the family portrait taken the same night, Jackson stands at the far edge of the group, farthest from Stella, his head drawn back stiffly, his mouth slack, his eyes filled with fear. Seventeen years earlier, he had caught the same look in a self-portrait: the look of a frightened, emaciated, hollow-eyed child, struggling to conceal his terror as he stares in the mirror, confronts the void, and feels himself falling into it.

  Jackson never recovered from the reunion. He spent the rest of the summer “terribly withdrawn,” Peter Blake remembers, convinced that his fellow artists, family, and even Lee had abandoned him. Increasingly, all that mattered to him were the affects of celebrity—the house, the flatterers, the grand visions. More so than ever, he became obsessed with his reputation, with his image as a great artist. When Berton Roueché‘s piece appeared in the August New Yorker, he gloated for days and insisted that Lee send a copy to each of his brothers. The family may have scattered, but Jackson was still locked in battle, still determined to show them that he was not just the greatest artist in America but the greatest artist in the Pollock family as well. The energy of that obsession propelled him through One and, in August, Autumn Rhythm. For a while, it even displaced alcohol—the lifeline he had always reached for in the past. But if the means was different, the end was the same: self-obliteration.

  In August, Hans Namuth suggested making a movie of Jackson painting. “[It] was the next logical step,” he argued. “Pollock’s method of painting suggested a moving picture—the dance around the canvas, the continuous movement, the drama.” By now, Jackson, too, was more interested in drama than in art and eagerly agreed. The result was a crude, seven-minute, black-and-white film taken with Namuth’s wife’s hand-held Bell & Howell. The best Namuth could say about it afterward was that it “reveal[ed] the continuity of Pollock’s method of working”—in short, it moved.