Nothing Lee or Janis or Still or anyone did, however, could lift Jackson from his despair or put him back to work. Only one person could do that. By now, he was obsessed with her. If he couldn’t work, he said, it was because “the idea, or the image, of his mother came over him so strongly that he’d see her.” He complained of dreaming about her, of seeing her across a field and running toward her only to be cut off just short of her embrace. The months of dreaming and drinking and self-destruction, of railing and posturing across Long Island Sound for her attention, eventually found their way onto canvas. In the worst days of a stormy winter, both inside and outside, Jackson began work on a huge canvas. For the first time in two decades, he prepared sketches—the most telling sign of his faltering self-confidence. On the right side of a five-by eleven-foot expanse, he drew a giant Picassoid head in black outline; on the other side, a huge, limp-breasted woman, squatting on her haunches, a geyser of black paint shooting up from between her legs. It was the same terrifying female he had painted twenty years before surrounded by six skeletal males. The face, too, he had painted before. It was his own face, the face of a frightened young boy, one eye staring out from the Ryder-like gloom, the other obscured. Only now the face was a trembling outline of age and exhaustion, the staring eye a vacant, tearless tracing of resignation. Jackson called the painting Portrait and a Dream.
The Deep, 1953, oil and enamel on canvas, 86¾” × 59⅛”
Throughout the early winter, between binges and hangovers, he worked and reworked both images: disguising the woman behind an angry veil of drips and splatters; adding color—his favorite yellows and reds—and detail to the face on the right. Obscuring one, exploring the other. “He fooled around with it a lot,” recalls John Cole, who watched the painting evolve, “and it was up on the wall, up and down, up and down”—just like Jackson that winter, up and down, up and down. When Ruth Stein saw the painting, she suggested calling it Man Against the World. Lee quickly corrected her: “You mean, The World Against the Man.” To Parker Tyler and Charles Boultenhouse, who visited the studio, Jackson explained his own vision. “He indicated that it was a painting of great anguish,” recalls Boultenhouse, “that it represented a terror of the void.” The all-providing Stella, unreachable as ever, was all that stood between Jackson and the void. Or perhaps she was the void.
In December 1953, the plea went out again.
This time, however, Jackson’s brothers hardened against him. The winter’s antics, including drunken and abusive phone calls to family members, had stiffened their resolve to deprive him of Stella. “Jackson’s latest demonstration surely proves that we were foolish to even hope in that direction,” Jay wrote Charles in December. In an apparent effort to outflank his brothers, Jackson and Lee boycotted Christmas in Deep River and arranged directly with Stella for her to come to Springs in January. When Charles got wind of the plan, he decided the time had come to put an end to the months of internecine warfare. He drove to Deep River and sat down with Stella, Sande, and Arloie. Soon afterward, he reported the meeting to Frank in California:
Portrait and a Dream, 1953, 4‘10⅛” × 11‘2½”
Mother had planned to go to Springs soon after the holidays. I went up to persuade her not to go, but to stay on at Sande’s instead.
Jack is in one of his nasty moods and I’m convinced doesn’t really want Mother there. I don’t think we can count on him for any help. Also I don’t think Mother ought to be exposed to his irrational behavior.
Arloie and Sande both want Mother to remain. Of course there are difficulties, but I do not see how we can avoid them.
Jackson tried desperately to reverse the decision in a series of frantic phone calls, but it was hopeless. To the world, he may have been the Life painter, but in a confrontation within the family, Jackson was still Jackson and Charles was still Charles.
On every side, it was, at best, a temporary solution. Sande and Arloie protested that they were “glad to have mother back with them,” but other family members suspected “they may be just accepting a condition just knowing that there is no other answer.” With Arloie eight months pregnant, Stella apparently decided it was the wrong time to press her case further. “Mother’s whole attitude has shown a marked change for the better,” Sande wrote Charles when the holiday dust had cleared. “She seems more relaxed, at ease with the children and more nearly like herself.” But in her letters to Charles, Stella resumed her vicious attacks on Arloie and shrill demands for more money. “Loie is the one that is selfish I would be ashamed to ask for money if I was in her place. … I will need some money this month.”
In Springs, Jackson managed to finish the last of the paintings he needed to fill the February show at Janis before falling apart. In a phone call to Stella, one of dozens that month, he told her that the new works had turned out “better than he expected.” The rest of the month was lost. By February 1, the day of the opening, Lee was so desperate that she called Tony Smith in Germany and asked him what to do. Jackson was threatening suicide again. Smith, who had always minimized the dangers of Jackson’s drinking, wrote back: “When I heard your voice, Lee … I was suddenly back on the track, with all its potential tragedy, but not despair.” The solution, said Smith, was for both Jackson and Lee to visit him in Germany. “Jackson would be mad for the health food stores here,” he joked, “… so you would feel right at home improving everyone’s diet.” Lee found nothing amusing in her plight. It was everything she could do to shepherd Jackson successfully through the opening where, according to Peter Blake, people were not interested in seeing “what kind of spectacle the pictures make, but what kind of spectacle the artist is going to make.” Lee didn’t trust Jackson long in New York. After only a week at MacDougal Alley, they retreated to the cold isolation of Springs where, at least, the Model A had the grace to freeze up occasionally and Jackson’s rages could be confined to the kitchen. He did return to the city once, briefly, to meet Sande, who had decided, at the last minute, to see the show.
The reviews, although extremely generous, put Jackson in an untenable position: to accept the critics’ comfort, he would have to embrace their rejection of his earlier work. In the Herald Tribune, Emily Genauer welcomed the show as “a real step forward in Pollock’s development” (“they’re really painted, not dripped!”), but dismissed the previous paintings as “empty and pretentious wall decorations.” In an otherwise adulatory review in Arts & Architecture, James Fitzsimmons criticized Jackson’s drip technique for being “limited” because “it excluded too many resources of the medium, too many levels of the mind and sensibility.” Stuart Preston, in the Times, hailed “the happy advance over the impersonality of much of his early work.” In Art News, Tom Hess expressed relief that Jackson had “return[ed] to some of his earlier statements” and emerged from the purifying fire of “his now-famous abstractions of poured and interlaced webs.” Most galling of all, undoubtedly, was the New Yorker, which detected “touches of Motherwell” in Easter and the Totem.
Clement Greenberg, perhaps out of sympathy, chose not to review the Janis show that year. He did, however, tell Jackson privately that he thought the recent works were “soft,” “forced,” and disappointing; that he, Pollock, had “lost his stuff” and now, bereft of inspiration, was only repeating himself. Greenberg liked Easter and the Totem and Greyed Rainbow, and thought “he was onto something in The Deep, but just missed it.” But overall, he stuck to his earlier assessment that Jackson had “had a phenomenal ten-year run, but it was over.”
The collectors, it seemed, sided with Greenberg: not a single painting sold from the show.
By spring, Jackson had hit bottom—or what seemed liked bottom. He told Greenberg that “this time, he wasn’t going to come out of his drunk.” The battle over Stella had left his family shattered. Arloie’s baby was stillborn. Sande, whose faltering print shop barely paid the bills, complained of “terrible headaches” from the chemicals he used, but, as always, kept working. Stella, who had gai
ned weight during her long bout with arthritis, suddenly began to lose it at a perilous rate, alarming her doctors. Closer to home, Lee’s colitis, which had flared up from time to time since the mid-forties, recurred with a vengeance, leaving her weak and gaunt and easy prey. One snowy night after they had gone to bed, John Cole and his wife heard a frantic knocking at their door. “It was Lee,” Cynthia Cole recalls. “She was all agitated and excited saying, ‘John, come, come, Jackson’s dead! Jackson’s dead!’” Cole threw on his clothes and drove Lee back to the house, where they found Jackson lying on the kitchen floor. Just when Cole began to think that he “had really done it,” Jackson “popped up from the floor and burst out laughing. It was kind of cruel.”
Crueler was yet to come.
The summer of 1954 brought no respite from the feelings of isolation and loneliness. The war with the Rosenbergs heated up immediately, although, on the all-important party circuit, Lee was at a disadvantage. She had virtually stopped giving parties, and Jackson had virtually stopped receiving invitations. At beach parties and open houses, even those hosted by May Rosenberg, she would appear just long enough to be noticed, then demonstrate her disdain with a conspicuous exit. “Lee was very cagey about that sort of thing,” recalls Roger Wilcox. Jackson occasionally joined the battle, pulling up to the Rosenbergs’ house late at night and roaring into the darkness: “I’m the best fucking painter in the world!”
Meanwhile, the stream of young painters continued to bypass Fireplace Road. On the rare occasions when they did show up—and Lee let them pass—Jackson offered little in the way of guidance or inspiration. If in a good mood, he might look at their work and say “very in’eresting.” (“That was always his ‘out,’” recalls Ted Dragon. “If you showed him a van Gogh, it was ‘in’eresting.’”) If in a bad mood, he would try to intimidate them (“What the fuck is your involvement?”) or turn them away with a terse “Fuck off.” (“Why bother with those kids?” he once asked Clement Greenberg.) A few of “those kids,” like Nicholas Carone, braved the chest-beating. “I wasn’t going to take that shit from anybody,” recalls Carone, “so I said, ‘Who the hell do you think you are, talking to me like that? I’m a painter, too. You don’t know my work, so what the hell are you talking about?’” For Jackson and Carone, it was the beginning of a fast friendship. But for most young artists, like Larry Rivers, Jackson’s work was increasingly “impossible to separate from his social personality.” The combination of his surliness and Lee’s machinations produced an anti-Pollock backlash everywhere in the artists’ community. On the party circuit and on the beach, “Jackson was being mauled,” recalls Paul Jenkins. John Marquand, a young writer who rented a house on the dunes in Wainscott, “picked up the feeling a great deal that summer—‘Jesus, look at Jackson, he’s gone to hell.’ They were all rooting for their man.”
Their man, of course, was Willem de Kooning.
That summer, de Kooning moved from Leo Castelli’s big house on Jericho Lane to considerably more modest quarters in a Victorian house in Bridgehampton called the “red house” or the “oxblood house” for its distinctive color. Together with his wife Elaine, Franz Kline, Nancy Ward, and Ludwig Sander, another painter, de Kooning set up his studio and quickly resumed the frantic social pace of the previous summer: drinking, roughhousing, talking, entertaining, and occasionally painting. “The house was just madness,” Elaine de Kooning later recounted. “It attracted people like a little pile of honey attracts flies. … It was a kind of pleasant but nightmarish summer, parties every night, entertaining in the way a nightmare could be entertaining. … I mean a tremendous amount of social life. … There is such a thing as too many friends, too much talk, too much booze, too much of a good thing.”
The party may have changed venue, but Jackson still wasn’t invited. Chastened by their experiences the previous summer, de Kooning and Kline avoided the house on Fireplace Road, and Lee flew into a rage at the mere mention of de Kooning’s name. But Jackson couldn’t stay away. Rather than be left out of the party, he would defy Lee and drive the twelve miles from Springs to Bridgehampton, only to receive a gate-crasher’s welcome: cordial but cool. According to Joan Ward, Nancy’s sister and a frequent guest at the red house, the residents “would flee in all different directions when they heard the Model A approaching. Nobody wanted to see Jackson. He was too rough company. He was too demanding.” In the evenings, if he hadn’t had too much to drink, he would quietly slip upstairs and join them in front of the little black-and-white television set where de Kooning devoured old movie westerns and cowboy serials. More often, drunk and provocative, Jackson would grab two or three beers from the refrigerator, down them in seconds, then challenge someone, anyone, to a wrestling match. “If he got an arm lock on somebody and he felt he had the leverage, he could be really mean,” recalls Ward. “He had a lot of anger inside looking for a way out.”
Jackson had good reason to feel anger. At home, Lee was once again slipping from his grasp.
The drift had begun inconspicuously more than a year before when, in the heat of the battles over action painting, she began to build a small network of friends outside the art community. Jane Graves, John Cole’s sister, the granddaughter of a Maidstone Club founder and proprietress of a small antiques shop in East Hampton, was the first of Lee’s new circle. On one of the many evenings when Jackson deserted her, Lee had called Graves and asked her to spend the night. “She told me the dog was sick,” Graves recalls, “and she didn’t want to be in the house alone with him.” The two women made supper and talked into the morning hours. Graves found her new friend “very smart and very sharp.” After that, Lee used their friendship as a respite from the wars, both with the art community and with Jackson, a way of reconnecting with the larger world from which she had cut herself off. “We never talked about art or painting or Jackson,” recalls Graves. “We talked about girls’ things: clothes and people and gossip.”
Lee Krasner in 1949. © Arnold Newman
It was Graves who directed John Cole to Jackson to test his interest in a commercial fishing venture. The talks came to nothing, but Lee took advantage of the opening to add Cole’s wife, Cynthia, to her circle. Pregnant for the first time and left alone for days during her husband’s long fishing expeditions, Cynthia Cole needed Lee as much as Lee needed her. “John’s whole vocabularly at the time consisted of ten words, all of which had to do with fishing,” she recalls. “Lee was vibrant and interesting and eager to be friendly, although high strung.” With Cole, Lee shared her apprehensions about Jackson’s drinking and found, to her comfort, that Cole felt the same anxieties about her husband.
In the summer of 1953, Cole introduced Lee to Patsy Southgate, an extraordinarily attractive young woman—a “Grace Kelly, a real American beauty,” according to Nick Carone—who had been Cole’s best friend at Chatham Hall and a classmate at Smith. Their sons, Marshall and Luke, had been born only one day apart. Lee and Southgate, as different as they seemed, soon developed a special bond. To Lee, Southgate was New England, Protestant, patrician, and gorgeous, everything that Lena Krassner had always found so exotic and appealing. To Southgate, Lee was “a role model,” whose competence and mettle contrasted sharply with her own mother’s “inability to boil an egg.” With such deep sympathies, Southgate quickly cast herself in the role of Lee’s champion and defender. “I found Lee in a state of collapse,” she says, “lusting for companionship.” Pushing her son in a stroller down Fireplace Road, she visited Lee almost every day, offering comfort, admiration (when the two women went shopping together, Southgate complimented Lee’s “really sexy body”), and exhortation. “I took Lee’s side strongly from the point of view that This Woman Is Not Being Treated Fairly,” she said later.
But Lee and Southgate shared another, deeper trait: masochism.
Like a number of young men in the early fifties, Southgate’s husband, Peter Matthiessen, had come to the South Fork pursuing “images of courage and manhood,” according to Cynthia Cole,
“and to get in touch with fundamental things.” Weaned on the writings and widely publicized exploits of Ernest Hemingway (The Old Man and the Sea appeared in 1952 and won the Pulitzer Prize the following year), Matthiessen had already followed Papa to Paris where he helped found the Paris Review, then to Spain where he “did all the Hemingway things,” according to Cole. Now it was time to follow Santiago down to the sea and confront the elements. “Peter actually became a commercial fisherman to live up to the Hemingway machismo myth,” says a close friend. With the machismo, inevitably, came Hemingway’s chauvinism. Like Lee, Southgate, for all her beauty, had suffered her share of destructive competition at Matthiessen’s hands and felt psychologically abused. When they drove together, he would tell her to crouch down in the car whenever they passed a group of Bonackers “so that he wouldn’t be identified with this classy blonde,” recalls a friend. To avoid competing with him directly, she renounced her ambition to be a writer; yet on those occasional mornings when she awoke with an idea for a story, she would come home that night to find he had already used it. When Southgate decided to try painting instead, “the following day Peter was painting something,” according to Cynthia Cole. “There was a history of this kind of competition and her giving in to it.”
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