Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Lee did what she could to control the damage, calling hostesses in advance to urge them to serve nonalcoholic punches, keeping a sharp eye on the bar at parties, appointing friends to watch over Jackson in her absence. She even began to buy liquor for him, bringing home a quart of whiskey every day—“to keep him off the road,” she said. But when trouble came, as it invariably did, she no longer leapt to Jackson’s rescue. By the winter of 1952, she had learned to “dissociate herself from [Jackson] when he became too troublesome,” according to a friend, “appearing only when it was necessary to commandeer forces to put him to bed.”

  Lee’s primary concern was no longer Jackson; it was his art. After an unproductive summer and a drunken fall, with only a few months remaining before his first show at the new gallery, Jackson had virtually nothing to show. She had stalled Janis by promising him his pick of the paintings, old and new, but soon he would insist on visiting the studio to see for himself. She knew, even if Jackson didn’t, that the upcoming show was crucial to his faltering reputation. “She tried everything to get him painting again,” recalls Clement Greenberg. “She ran around saying, ‘Jackson’s not painting!’ as if that was all that mattered, and to hell with everything else, like his drinking. The whole effort was so misguided.”

  Friends noticed the change in Lee. Gone was the unreserved support, the selfless debasement of previous years. She was “increasingly hard” on her charge. Some even thought they saw in her new approach “an attempt to establish some separation.” “She nursed him with an iron hand,” observed Betty Parsons. The art, Lee seemed to have decided, was the only thing that made the reveries and rages tolerable. When Jackson and Lee came to her house for dinner that fall, Dorothy Miller remembered seeing Jackson covering his face “in agony” every time Lee looked at him. “Don’t look at me like that,” he begged her, “don’t look at me like that!” “I think she hated him,” said Miller.

  Lee was no longer part of the solution, she was part of the problem—perhaps, Jackson must have wanted to believe, the whole problem. Perhaps Ruth Fox had been right after all. Hadn’t Tony Smith been telling him that “Lee wasn’t the best person for him”? Hadn’t Gerald Sykes said that “he would have to drink twice as much if he were married to Lee.” Even Ted Dragon, one of Lee’s allies, believed the Pollocks “saw too much of each other,” comparing them to the lovebirds he once kept. “They killed each other off,” says Dragon. “And when I asked the aviaries in New York what to do, they said, ‘Well, of course, they’re lovebirds; they’re famous for that. They’re too much together.’”

  Jackson had a more direct solution. He would abandon her before she abandoned him. Probably not consciously, but with all the grim determination and resourcefulness of a willful act, he set out to drive Lee from his life.

  Their relationship, which had been in turmoil for the past year, now turned into open warfare. After years of hiding their differences (with uneven success), Jackson began to lash out at Lee in public, telling her, “Go fuck yourself woman, I’ll do what I goddamn well please” when she corrected him, and calling her “whore,” “slut,” and “an ugly goddamn woman” in front of friends. On the rare occasions when guests visited, Jackson would walk with them out to the porch “in order to have some time alone, to carry on his own special little relationship without Lee,” according to one friend. “He was doing little things like that all the time to Lee.” Without telling her, he gave away to visitors the little found objects from the beach that she set out around the house. Lee would have to call the next day and ask for them back. Anything to hurt her. When the guests were gone, the real fireworks began. Neighbor Elwyn Harris recalled hearing screams coming from the house late into the night. Ruth Stein, Lee’s sister, was astonished to find the domestic scene on Fireplace Road transformed into “a championship fight.” And when Ruth’s son, Ronald, asked to visit, Lee told him forthrightly: “You won’t be able to take it.” Convinced she was exaggerating, Ronald came anyway. “She was right,” he remembers. “I couldn’t take it. Day and night, continuous abusiveness. I never realized arguing could achieve that level. From the moment you woke up, twenty-four hours of tremendous, abusive, yelling fights.” Where four years earlier he had seen good-humored ribbing, Harry Jackson now found “tremendous hate, all kinds of deep, deep resentments, a Milky Way of pros and cons.” Eventually, even a disagreement over cigarette brands could spark a conflagration. When Jackson ran out of his Camels, even in the middle of the night, he would drive to the store rather than smoke Lee’s Chesterfields.

  Then he began to hit her.

  Lee always denied that Jackson, even at his wildest and most drunken, ever abused her physically. The most she admitted was that “his feelings toward me became somewhat ambiguous.” “There was never any physical violence,” she avowed years later. “He would just use more four-letter words than usual. Or he would take it out on the furniture.” At the time, however, no one who knew them was surprised when it finally came to blows. She had been afraid of him, afraid of his anger, for years. He had probably hit her occasionally in the past with the back of his hand, in a passing fury, roaring drunk. In the fall of 1952, however, she began appearing with black eyes and bruises. Houseguests remember seeing her in the morning, after a night of screamed recriminations and strange noises, with bruises on her face and arms. Harry Jackson, who thought Lee had “asked for it” many times, saw Jackson “get fed up and drunk and knock the old woman into the next room. Oh, shit,” says Harry, “he kicked the piss out of her two or three different times when I was there.”

  One stormy night, in the middle of a dinner party, the lights blinked out, whereupon Jackson, already drunk and in an incendiary mood, “lost his temper and threw everybody out of the house.” With a bottle of bourbon in one hand and a candle in the other, he stalked through the darkened house to the kitchen and returned with a six-inch butcher knife. “I’m gonna kill you,” he roared at Lee. “I’m gonna kill you.” It was the ultimate solution, the miracle cure that would solve all his problems.

  After that night, or another like it, Lee decided she could no longer handle Jackson by herself. If he was ever to paint again, she needed help from the only person who might still be able to control him, the person whose mistakes she had inherited, the only person whose abandonment he still feared: Stella Pollock. Not long afterward, she called Stella in Deep River. “You did it to him,” she fumed, “now you come and take care of him.”

  Stella arrived in mid-October, still suffering from the rheumatism and bursitis that had plagued her all year. She found Jackson and Lee in a state of utter exhaustion—the months of fighting had taken their toll. “They both have colds,” she reported to Charles, “… and Lee has an infected eye.” With Stella watching him, Jackson quit drinking and began to work. It was too late for the luxury of inspiration, even if he was confident it would come. He needed paintings for the November show, now less than a month away, and he needed them immediately. He began by cannibalizing the past, taking an old allover painting that had been “finished” for almost a year and adding a few calligraphic swirls in black; covering a year-old, black-and-white figurative painting with quickly applied layers of red, yellow, blue, and white to evoke the intricate skeins of previous years. Retreating from the psychological brinksmanship of the black-and-white show, he turned again to the safety of color—“He has some nice paintings lots of color this year,” Stella wrote Frank. There was no time—and perhaps no energy—for innovation. Even the handful of entirely new paintings, like Number 12, 1952, betray Jackson’s haste, exhaustion, and faltering self-confidence. He agonized over a mammoth canvas that he had begun the previous spring with Tony Smith and worked on intermittently since (once with an additional assist from Barnett Newman). He entered and reentered it “many, many times,” according to Lee. “[He] just kept saying, ‘This won’t come through.’” Finally, desperate to rescue the image (and the expensive Belgian linen), he added eight vertical blue poles evenly spaced
across the length of the dense, encrusted, overwrought surface, using a six-foot length of two-by-four as a guide. With the addition of several small stained canvases and at least five black pourings from the previous year (with the dates altered), Jackson had just enough paintings, twelve, for the show that opened at Janis’s gallery on November 10.

  No one knew better than Jackson how short he had fallen. As the opening approached, he was increasingly nervous and apprehensive. A quick trip to Deep River in early November did little to calm him. Only days before he was due in town to finish hanging the show, he arranged for friends to drive him because “he was so nervous he didn’t trust himself behind the wheel,” John Cole remembers. When he finally did arrive, he disappeared almost immediately, showing up later that night at Janis’s gallery, drunk, defensive, and barely able to hold a hammer. The hanging dragged on until four the next morning. The next day at the opening, everyone seemed to agree the show was “good-looking.” Janis played the collectors “like a fine musician,” according to one observer, telling them “you’d better buy now if you want to buy a painting you want.” Not everyone admired his tactics—Reuben Kadish called him “a sharpshooter”—but almost everyone admired his results. Stella couldn’t come to the opening, so Lee arranged for Elizabeth Wright Hubbard to take her place, standing over Jackson to ensure his sobriety. Halfway through the evening, however, Franz Kline suggested, “Jackson, let’s get out of this place and have a drink,” and no one saw them again for the rest of the night.

  Much more important, if less publicized, than the Janis show was the retrospective that opened a week later at Bennington College in Vermont.

  Jackson and Lee drove through the gray November landscape of western Massachusetts in Alfonso Ossorio’s station wagon. When they arrived at Bennington, they were directed to an old carriage house that had been converted into a dance studio. Inside, lined up against the weathered tongue-in-groove paneling, were eight of Jackson’s greatest paintings, exhibited together for the first time: Pasiphaë and Totem II, from the days on Eighth Street before they were married; The Key, from a time when he was still struggling with a brush and the electric images from his past; Number 2, 1949, sixteen feet of dazzling white swirls; the huge loops and sumptuous simplicity of Autumn Rhythm; the uneasiness of Number 9, 1950; the figures emerging in Number 2, 1951; and finally the exquisite drawing of Echo. It was Jackson’s first retrospective, but the effect was more than that of a backward glance over the shoulder. To Jackson, after a year of creative impoverishment, the demeaning search for a gallery, and the last-minute scramble to fill the Janis show, it was a long, elegiac gaze into a past that must have seemed as distant as the Phoenix ranch.

  Lee and Jackson with Helen Frankenthaler (far left), Clement Greenberg (center), and Helen Wheelwright (seated) in Bennington, Vermont, 1952

  Paul Feeley, who had arranged the show with the help of Tony Smith and Gene Goossen, and his wife Helen hosted a party after the opening. Clement Greenberg and Helen Frankenthaler attended, along with most of the Bennington faculty. Jackson, dressed in black suit and tie—“like an undertaker” —stood apart from the crowd, “virtually motionless,” in a trance, his elbow propped on the mantelpiece throughout the evening. When Goossen tried to engage him in conversation, he responded with monosyllables. But this time alcohol wasn’t to blame—Helen Feeley had put Lee in charge of the bar. When a stranger unthinkingly offered him a drink, Clement Greenberg intervened: “Jackson, layoff.” “Nothing doing,” Jackson said, then added, “You fool.” At that moment, Greenberg felt the same foreboding he had felt in the car outside the East Hampton train station; he heard the same bitter resignation in Jackson’s voice: “Only fools won’t accept the inevitable.” This time, however, he felt no pity, only outrage. “When he called me a fool I was furious,” Greenberg recalls, “and I was off of him for a couple of years. I didn’t say it, but Jackson sensed it. … Besides, he had become, if not famous, at least notorious, and I suppose the battle had been won.”

  The retrospective, Greenberg’s anger, even the grim November weather, all seemed to convey the same ominous message. Earlier, Greenberg had put it into words when he said he thought the Janis show was “wobbly,” that all artists “have their run” and Jackson’s “ten-year run was over.” Even Lee had said it. “When you were off booze in ‘49 and ‘50, look what you did!” she told him. “But since then, back on booze, do you do real pictures?” Worst of all, Jackson knew it was true. According to Greenberg, “He knew it was over, that he’d lost his inspiration.” He even knew that Blue Poles, for all his agony, “wasn’t a success.”

  In the weeks before the show, Jackson had gone to The Creeks and stared for hours at Lavender Mist, “as if trying to find something,” according to Ted Dragon. At Bennington, surrounded by the “real pictures” from his past, he must have wondered if it was lost for good.

  41

  AGAINST THE WORLD

  Jackson spent the rest of the winter in a petulant funk: drunk, despondent, and mad at the world. Work was out of the question. He could tell himself it was because of the weather, or because of a head cold that lingered for months, or because George Loper, the retired circus clown, was shingling and insulating his studio and the infernal pounding made it impossible to concentrate. Whatever the reason, his art had come to a dead stop.

  If Jackson couldn’t work, nobody could. In January 1953, he stormed into Phil Guston’s show at the Egan Gallery and ripped paintings from the wall, ranting incoherently about “easel pictures” and “embroidery.” Guston, still bent on “topping everybody,” had recently switched from the romantic realist work at which he excelled to delicate, painterly abstractions based, he claimed, on Monet. Many artists dismissed them as halfhearted and derivative at best, opportunistic at worst. “Guston was floundering,” says Nicholas Carone, who attended these early shows. “He didn’t understand the Abstract Expressionist movement. He just wanted success and to be included in the roster of the avant-garde.” Later that spring, Jackson repeated the performance, barging into the opening of James Brooks’s show at Grace Borgenicht, drunk and raving and, according to Borgenicht, “probably jealous.”

  Jackson refused to be cheered by the reviews of the Janis show—reviews that only two years before would have thrilled him. Robert Goodnough called the new paintings “tantalizing” and “ecstatic.” “[They] make the gallery seethe with energy.” He praised “the pure sensuousness of the paint” and “the transcendence of the materials.” Art Digest hailed the “quite magnificent new canvases” and found Number 12, in particular, “tremendously exciting.” In the Times, Howard Devree compared Jackson to Kandinsky and praised the new works as “far more packed with suggestion than anything I have hitherto seen.” After all the accusations of “chaos,” Jackson must have been pleased by Robert Coates’s comment in the New Yorker: “I’ve always felt, underneath the surface exuberance of his work, a strong strain of careful consideration in the formulation of ideas.” But even in the most fulsome review, Jackson could find support for his claim to being misunderstood and unappreciated. Two reviewers had singled out November 12 for special praise, but both identified it as a landscape. Several others congratulated him on his decision to return to color, implicitly rejecting the “excursion” into black and white of the previous year.

  Collectors, who voted with their wallets, virtually boycotted the show. Only one painting sold—the much praised Number 12, to the scion of the Rockefeller family, Nelson. Jackson’s fellow artists criticized him for repeating himself and for “borrowing” from his contemporaries: the large areas of sensuous color in Number 12 from Mark Rothko; the verticals in Blue Poles from Barnett Newman. The consensus seemed to be that he had slipped from his former heights. While Jackson may have quarreled with the reasoning, he accepted the judgment—it was the same one Greenberg and Lee had rendered. It was his own. “He didn’t hold it against us that we didn’t like the show,” Greenberg recalls. “He didn’t make excuses [or
] try to fool himself. He knew it wasn’t what it should have been.”

  At every turn, Jackson fought the praise and savored the criticism. Fan mail—an inquiry about prints and reproductions, an invitation to give a speech at the Cooper Union, a request for an interview from a Harvard undergraduate—could only have reminded him of better days. When Dorothy Miller wrote to inform him that Peggy Guggenheim had given Full Fathom Five to the Museum of Modern Art, he could only complain about how dealers and collectors had ignored and mistreated him in recent years. Where, for example, were the fifteen paintings he had sent to Paris? Where were the proceeds from the sales? Even the news in January that his show had been voted the second best one-man show of 1952 by the editorial staff of Art News failed to penetrate his self-pity. John Little recalls his reaction: “Aw, hell, what the fuck do they know?”

  Jackson wanted Stella. In January, he called her in Deep River and, as much as his Pollock reticence would allow, begged her to come to Springs. She suggested that on her next trip into New York for her regular cortisone injections, she would try to arrange it. When a month passed and she failed to appear, Jackson again sought out Elizabeth Wright Hubbard. In the willfully naive belief that Hubbard might still do some good, Lee let Jackson come into the city unaccompanied one day a week for therapy. As always in the past, he made a beeline from Hubbard’s office to a bar, usually the Cedar Tavern, and drank until closing time. After a night recovering on a friend’s couch, he would return home the next morning.

  In the spring, he demanded Stella again. He called repeatedly, more urgent each time. He offered to come into the city to meet her so she wouldn’t have to travel alone. But each time Stella had an excuse: her knees were too stiff, her rheumatism had flared up again, Sande was working too hard. “It was either rain or snow or too cold,” she wrote Charles. But Jackson must have sensed there was something else, something unsaid, holding her back, keeping them apart.