Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  If, as the summer of 1953 approached, Jackson felt increasingly isolated and embattled, he blamed it on one man: Harold Rosenberg.

  The trouble had begun almost a year before on a late summer evening at the Rosenbergs’ quaint, brown-shingled house on Neck Path. Normally, Lee would have refused the invitation, especially at a time when Jackson’s behavior was unpredictable, but the Rosenbergs had invited not artists this time but writers, friends from Harold’s literary circle at the Partisan Review, and Lee may have hoped to enlist some fresh critical support for Jackson’s faltering cause. Whatever her calculation, she must have regretted it. The conversation, loftily moderated by Rosenberg, quickly turned to dense abstractions and, just as quickly, lost Jackson. Drinking sullenly in a corner, he began to punctuate the discussion with “What a lot of shit,” and “horse piss.” Finally, after ostentatiously ignoring him for a while, Harold turned to Jackson and said in his most patronizing voice, “Listen, Jackson. Don’t you think you’ve had enough to drink? What you need now is to stop interrupting and go upstairs and take a nice nap.”

  As soon as Jackson, too drunk to take offense, left the room, Lee erupted in a blinding rage. The whole evening had been a trap, she concluded. Rosenberg had deliberately invited Jackson that night in order to humiliate him. She had seem him do it before: pump Jackson full of liquor, then wait for him to make a fool of himself. She leapt to her feet and tore into the snickering Rosenberg. “How dare you!” she roared. “How dare you? He’s a famous man and you speak as if he was just anybody.” Rosenberg stood up, rising to his full six feet four inches in exaggerated indignation. “Don’t tell me who’s famous,” he said in his high, raspy voice. “But if there’s going to be anyone famous here, it’s me and not that drunk upstairs.” The other guests broke into laughter. Lee stormed out of the room.

  Soon afterward, Rosenberg set out to make good on his threat.

  He had been frustrated and disillusioned with developments in the art world for some time. The artists he had long advocated, Baziotes and Hofmann, were still mired in relative anonymity. His writings on the subject had been ignored by all but a few. The “Intrasubjectives” show had come and gone and hardly left a mark. As a frequent guest of Robert Motherwell, he had partaken of Motherwell’s general disenchantment with the direction of the art world (away from him) and with Jackson’s ascendancy in particular.

  Nothing galled Rosenberg more, however, than the rise of Clement Greenberg. Rosenberg felt he knew, more than most, what a charlatan Greenberg really was. He had known him in the thirties, when, still a very blank slate, Greenberg had accompanied Igor Pantuhoff, that White Russian pretender, to Hofmann’s school and to galleries and museums for a quick education. May Rosenberg, who had first sent Greenberg to Lee Krasner “to take him around and tell him about art,” thought even less of him. Now they were confronted with the sorry spectacle of the same Clement Greenberg—“that mediocrity,” May called him—wielding definitive power in the world of avant-garde art, dictating who was great and who wasn’t, ignoring good artists and deifying drunks with half-baked Kant and flabby theories on the historical inevitability of abstract art. (Rosenberg later described Greenberg as “a tipster on masterpieces, current and future.”) He had undoubtedly heard the horror stories from artists like Willem de Kooning, at whose dinner table Rosenberg was a frequent guest and from whom he learned much of what he knew about art. Greenberg had come to de Kooning’s studio and, pointing at various pictures, announced, “You can’t do that, and you can’t do that.” De Kooning had thrown him out, but many artists were not so brave. Meanwhile, Rosenberg—the breathtaking intellect, the “glittering phrasemaker,” poet, polemicist, philosopher—labored in relative obscurity. To May, who adored her husband despite his philandering, it was infuriating; to Harold, deeply mortifying. On a trip between New York and East Hampton that summer, a friend recalled him “lamenting, with great humor, his own lack of success.” By the end of the summer, the humor was gone. He was determined to topple Greenberg and, by association, “that drunk upstairs,” Jackson Pollock.

  Harold Rosenberg

  Although a lawyer by training and better known for his poetry and literary criticism, Rosenberg, like Greenberg, had done some painting himself, once submitting a “respectable” sketch of Pilgrims and Indians for a WPA post office mural. Also like Greenberg, he enjoyed the notoriety that came so easily to him in the largely unintellectual artists’ community—so much so that even after moving to Washington, D.C., to edit the WPA’s American Guide Series, he returned to New York every weekend. A lifelong Francophile, he exulted in the arrival of the Surrealists, especially Breton, whom he considered one of his few intellectual equals. But Rosenberg was too smart not to see the fundamental contradiction between the Surrealists’ view of art as the ultimate expression of the artist’s individual consciousness and his own Trotskyite view of art as a political tool, a contradiction that evoked the much larger confrontation between existentialism and Marxism. To Rosenberg, these two worldviews represented “two dogs barking up the same metaphysical tree”—namely “the situation of the individual protagonist in a historical drama.” After the war, Rosenberg converted to anti-Communism and dropped his Marxist rhetoric but his obsession remained basically unchanged: how could an individual survive and not be overwhelmed by the homogenizing tide of the mass media? How could an artist create independently of mass culture? Robert Motherwell, another admirer of Breton, was asking similar questions, although he phrased them in a more overtly ambitious way: “The artist’s problem is with what to identify himself.” As early as 1944, Motherwell had used what was essentially an existentialist argument (“Painting is therefore the mind realizing itself in color and space”) to defend a formalist view of art. About the same time, Rosenberg saw an article on Dada by Richard Huelsenbeck, a militant leader of the German Dadaist movement, arguing that “literature should be action … made with a gun in the hand.” According to Motherwell, Harold “fell in love with” Huelsenbeck’s article and decided to include it in the lone issue of Possibilities.

  In the same issue (which also included a public statement by Jackson), Motherwell and Rosenberg joined in an introduction that posited the artist’s existential ecstasy as the ultimate political statement. “If one is to continue to paint or to write as the political trap seems to close upon him he must perhaps have the extremest faith in sheer possibility.” In 1948, Rosenberg took the argument another step more explicit. The artist, because he “work[ed] directly with the materials of his own experience,” was the only unalienated worker in America: the new revolutionary hero. And in order to “free himself from the past,” as Marx required, he was called upon to “mak[e] a new self through his actions.” Rosenberg had announced this new theory to the art world in his introduction to the “Intrasubjectives” show at Sam Kootz’s gallery in 1949 (“The modern painter … begins with nothingness. That is the only thing he copies. The rest he invents”) but, weighed down by Kootz’s deadly title, the show—and Rosenberg’s theories—quickly sank out of sight.

  By the early 1950s, such ideas had filtered down from the philosophical heights into the hands of polemicists like Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still where they were transformed into radical dicta about the importance of the act of painting and the artist’s responsibility to resist mass culture and commercialism. Newman especially, furious over the fate of his shows, had tried to transform the sour grapes of failure into the wine of philosophy: “It doesn’t matter if anything sells,” he told anyone who would listen. “It only matters that you paint. The act of painting is everything.” By this route, and in this greatly simplified form, the ideas had even reached the ear of Jackson Pollock. In fact, Jackson and Rosenberg had discussed the issue at least once prior to the winter of 1952. Parroting Newman and Still, Jackson offered a garbled version of the importance of the “act of painting” on a train trip across Long Island.

  Whatever Rosenberg’s sources, the result would be his own: a
product of his unique, if paradoxical, gifts for synthesis and obfuscation.

  That fall, as he labored over successive drafts of an article for Art News, Rosenberg must have soon realized his dilemma. His long-evolving theory of the artist as existential hero, American pioneer, man of action, and political revolutionary led inexorably to one artist: Jackson Pollock. Who else but Pollock the westerner, Pollock the ice-breaker, the risk-taker, hurling himself at the canvas, Pollock as immortalized in Namuth’s blurred “action” photos—who else could Rosenberg cast in his central role? Pollock, in fact, had already nominated himself in his Possibilities statement (which Rosenberg had a heavy hand in editing): “When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It is only after a sort of ‘get acquainted’ period that I see what I have been about. … [T]he painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.” The other candidates for the part—de Kooning, Motherwell, Baziotes, Gorky—were either too cerebral and considered in their technique, too tied to European precedents, or simply too European. But—and here was the heart of the dilemma—Rosenberg didn’t like Jackson’s paintings. Not only that, he despised his drunken antics, dismissed his intelligence (later calling him “incapable of sustained mental effort”), and deeply resented his celebrity.

  A lesser mind—or, some would say, a more honest one—would have recoiled at such a contradiction. But Rosenberg saw it as a challenge worthy of his supreme intellect: to define a new movement in art without endorsing, or even naming, its primary exemplar; to impugn Jackson’s celebrity while applauding his methods; and finally, to topple Greenberg’s critical regime without undermining the art it had brought to prominence. Only a critic who, like Breton, cared more about ideas than about paintings would have attempted it. Rosenberg relished it.

  “The American Action Painters” appeared in the December 1952 issue of Art News just days after Jackson’s Janis show closed. The argument opens with a bold, memorable stroke:

  At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze or “express” an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.

  The painter no longer approached his easel with an image in his mind; he went up to it with material in his hand to do something to that other piece of material in front of him. The image would be the result of this encounter.

  But directness and clarity soon give way to Rosenberg’s contradictory agenda. Without naming names, he refers to Jackson as “one of the leaders of this [new] mode,” and even describes “action painting” in such a way that it clearly evokes Namuth’s pictures of Jackson at work: “Since the painter has become an actor, the spectator has to think in a vocabulary of action: its inception, duration, direction—psychic state, concentration and relaxation of the will, passivity, alert waiting.” But, adds Rosenberg, there is more to action painting than just action. To be truly vanguard, the action must arise from a “personal revolt”—a liberation not only from the object but from art itself, from society, and from the past: in short, a personal and political revolution. Each painting reenacts the drama of liberation; each is an act of self-creation. Here again, as Rosenberg must have realized, no artist met the criteria more persuasively than Pollock. No artist had poured out his inner world, his “private myths,” more convincingly. No artist’s work was more “inseparable from [his] biography.” No artist had risked more. No artist had cut his ties to the past, to inherited “Value” of any kind, with such anguished finality.

  But there was yet another hurdle: “The test of any of the new paintings is its seriousness,” writes Rosenberg, “and the test of its seriousness is the degree to which the act on the canvas is an extension of the artist’s total effort to make over his experience.” Even if an artist “took to the white expanse of canvas as Melville’s Ishmael took to the sea,” even if he arrived at his style after a wrenching-personal/political revolt and reenacted that revolt each time he painted, he still had to be serious. Existential angst wasn’t enough; sincerity was the key.

  According to Rosenberg, this was the test that Jackson failed. Still without using names, the article ridicules Jackson’s recent turn to mysticism, saying such a turn produces “easy painting[s]” and “unearned masterpieces.” If an artist is merely a mouthpiece for the “Mystical,” says Rosenberg—pulling Still and Newman into his net—if the artist’s personal struggle is no longer a part of the dramatic dialogue on canvas, then the artist’s life (his “daily annihilation”) becomes merely decoration and the art, merely “apocalyptic wallpaper.” He assails the “megalomania” inherent in the artist’s claim that the Mystical speaks through him. Such an artist confuses the “sensation of having acted” with the true artistic act and therefore his art communicates nothing except a signature. His paintings cease to be “the emblem of a personal struggle,” and the painter ceases to be a true artist. He becomes instead “a ghost inhabiting the Art World.” The implications for Pollock are unmistakable. “The man who started to remake himself,” Rosenberg concludes, “has made himself into a commodity with a trademark.”

  By comparison, Greenberg proves easy to dispose of. Because the new painting “has broken down every distinction between art and life,” says Rosenberg, “it follows that anything is relevant to it. Anything that has to do with action—psychology, philosophy, history, mythology, hero worship. Anything but art criticism. … The critic who goes on judging in terms of schools, styles, form, as if the painter were still concerned with producing a certain kind of object (the work of art), instead of living on the canvas, is bound to seem a stranger.” Elsewhere, in ever more thinly veiled references, Rosenberg calls Greenberg “a professional enlightener of the masses” and a member of the “taste bureaucracy.” He has betrayed vanguard art, says Rosenberg, joining forces with a commercial establishment that uses vanguard artists, but neither appreciates nor, ultimately, wants them.

  What is needed, of course, is “a new kind of criticism,” Rosenberg maintains, one that recognizes “in the painting the assumptions inherent in its mode of creation,” one that counterbalances the “obtuseness, venality, and aimlessness of the Art World.” What is needed is “a genuine audience—not just a market … understanding—not just publicity.” Enlightened criticism and an understanding audience, of course, can come only from “the tiny circle of poets, musicians, theoreticians, men of letters, who have sensed in their own work the presence of the new creative principle.” In short, from Harold Rosenberg.

  Fortunately for Rosenberg, few artists bothered to read the article closely and even fewer understood it. When Paul Brach confronted him with the truth —“I think you wrote that article just to tear down Jackson”—Rosenberg replied, with an inscrutable smile and a gangster-like snarl, “You’re a smart kid.” Others may have missed the grand strategy, but they understood the article well enough to know that it had almost nothing to do with painting. Gerome Kamrowski considered it “so full of bullshit that you didn’t know if he was talking about painting or some social event.” “It was all such a lie,” Nicholas Carone lamented. “At least Greenberg had an eye.” In the process of gerrymandering his theory to exclude Jackson, Rosenberg had created a definition of action painting so abstract, so abstruse that it no longer had any relationship to what artists—any artists—were actually doing. Was it realistic to expect critics to begin judging art as action, looking over artists’ shoulders from inception to completion? How was it possible to distinguish between “the automatic, the spontaneous, the evoked,” and the merely accomplished? Who would grade an artist’s “seriousness?” Had Rosenberg merely replaced the hated “good or bad” test of Greenberg with his own equally arbitrary “sincere or insincere” test, different only in that Harold Rosenberg would administer it?

  Some of Rosenberg’s fellow intellectuals at the Partisan Review saw the article as a curious, slipshod excursion into
irrelevance. William Barrett warned: “It may not be the best thing in the world for the concrete mind of the painter to drink too deeply of the waters of ideology, especially when dispensed by so subtle a hand as Rosenberg,” who, according to Barrett, “had the bewildering habit, even while he dazzled you, of leaving any subject more complicated and puzzling than when he took it up.” Lionel Abel considered the article “not only unclear, but wrong,” especially in its definition of action. Just as Rosenberg had accused modern art of being neither “modern” nor “art,” “action painting,” it turned out, had nothing to do with either action or painting.

  What it did have was a catchy title.

  As a polemic, as a crowd-pleaser, as an artifact of the very culture it castigated, “The American Action Painters” was, ironically, a roaring success. (Not surprising given Rosenberg’s twenty years of experience on the Advertising Council inventing such icons of popular culture as Smokey the Bear.) The phrase “action painting” buzzed through the December shows up and down Fifty-seventh Street and permeated holiday parties, provoking “numerous and inflammatory discussions and debates,” according to one account. It may not have been exactly the reception Rosenberg anticipated, but he had certainly accomplished his primary goal. “He was determined to get noticed,” recalls Roger Wilcox, an occasional visitor at the Rosenberg house in 1952, when the article took shape, “to do something sensational. He said he was just as happy if he got lots of praise for it or lots of criticism. Just as long as people were talking about it. He wanted attention.”