Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  So the Pollock family sat in the second pew, leaving Lee alone in the spotlight. The other mourners were surprised at how little emotion she showed. One described her expression as “enigmatic.” “It made me think I must be feeling worse than she did,” recalled Gina Knee. “I decided she must be holding something back: relief.” Lee had asked Clement Greenberg to give the eulogy, but when Greenberg insisted on saying a few words about Edith Metzger—“the girl Jackson killed”—Lee turned instead to the Reverend George Nicholson, pastor of the Amagansett Presbyterian Church, who read a passage from Romans 8 which many of the mourners found awkwardly irrelevant. In the middle of the service, someone in the jammed, sweltering chapel let out a long, plaintive wail. Those in the back and at the windows thought it was Lee. But it was Reuben Kadish.

  A smaller group of mourners gathered after the service at the Green River Cemetery where Lee had bought three adjacent plots on the high ground at the far end of the cemetery under some trees. At the graveside, Lee once again chose to stand alone. Charles, Frank, Sande, Reginald Isaacs, Ben Heller, and James Brooks (wearing Jackson’s dark suit) served as pallbearers. By the end of the short service, many were in tears. Sande and Reuben Kadish, who were standing near Jackson’s whimpering dogs, wept uncontrollably. Willem de Kooning and a few others lingered until the gravediggers uncovered the mound of sandy soil and began shoveling it into the hole.

  Pollock’s gravestone. © Susan Wood

  A few days later, Jeffrey Potter hauled the biggest stone from the pile in Jackson’s backyard and placed it on the grave as a marker. But Lee didn’t think it was big enough. After days of searching, John Little finally found one that was—a huge forty-ton boulder that lay mostly buried near the East Hampton town dump. It was one of the “glacial erratics” that studded the area, a chunk of granite brought from far away by some ancient ice sheet and deposited here, incongruously, in the potato fields of Long Island: a monument to timeless, ineffable forces of nature. Jeffrey Potter dutifully dug it out and, with a giant winch and a team of men, wrestled it onto Jackson’s grave, taking care not to crush the coffin.

  Soon after the funeral, Stella Pollock left Deep River and returned to Tingley, Iowa, to care for her brother Les—the task she had left off sixty years before. “I just had to do something for a change,” she wrote a relative. “After Jackson was killed it was such a shock. … He is gone and we cant bring him back his work is over and he is at rest but we cant forget him.” Not quite two years later, on April 20, 1958, Stella Pollock died in a hospital in Creston, Iowa. The cause of death was listed as “circulatory problems in her legs,” but when the four surviving Pollock brothers gathered in Tingley for her funeral, they learned that Stella had killed herself by refusing to eat. “She made a decision, a conscious decision that she wasn’t going to live any more,” says Charles. “After Jack died, she just stopped wanting to live.”

  Five years later, in December 1963, Sande lay dying of leukemia in a Boston hospital. Years of working with chemicals in a secret government defense plant and a lifetime of duty and frustration had taken their toll. But “he was a fighter right up to the end,” according to Charles, who sat by his bedside during the final days. On the last night before they turned off the life-support machines, in a reverie, Sande thanked Charles for sending the copies of the Dial to Orland. “He said they meant a lot to him and Jack,” Charles remembers.

  Arloie was at his bedside, too, and when the end finally came, she breathed a sigh of relief, then slipped quietly out the door. In the privacy of her room, she uncoiled her extravagant hair, letting it fall to her waist, removed all of her clothes, closed herself in the shower, and wept inconsolably.

  Lee Krasner lived for another twenty years, during which she produced the biggest, boldest, most brilliantly colored works of her career, many of them derived from Jackson’s Easter and the Totem, and most of them painted in Jackson’s studio. To the end, she continued to collide with family and friends and with the art world, looking in vain for another match. On June 20, 1984, at the age of seventy-five, riddled with arthritis and almost completely alienated from the world, she lost her energy for more collisions and died. The death certificate cited “natural causes.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Two writers working for seven years each on the same book can run up more debts than the Federal Government. In those years, we have spoken to more than eight hundred people—many of them three or four times, often for hours, sometimes for days at a time. Their words fill more than eighteen thousand pages of transcripts. For those who choose to calculate such things, that puts us approximately ten million words in their debt, of which we have repaid on the preceding pages a scant quarter million or so. In a woefully inadequate but well-meaning effort to make up the shortfall, we would like to list the names of all those who made this book possible and deserve to share the credit—but not the blame—for its contents.

  First, of course, is Lee Krasner Pollock. Despite deteriorating health and a general intolerance for writers, she spoke with us seven times before her death in 1984, providing many insights into facets of Jackson’s life to which she alone could bear witness. In addition, her nephew, Ronald Stein, gave us access to a cache of Lee’s papers never before seen by researchers. To supplement our interviews with Lee, we sought out those few friends in whom she confided, both before and after Jackson’s death. We also discovered, to our surprise, that while she rarely spoke with candor to interviewers from newspapers and magazines based in New York, she could be surprisingly frank with out-of-town journalists—the result, apparently, of a lifelong New York provincialism.

  Jackson’s brothers, Charles, Jay, and Frank, spent many days with us and provided the most enjoyable moments of the last seven years. (Frank even joined us on a road trip to visit some of the Pollocks’ childhood homes.) It cannot have been altogether pleasant for them to have two more writers interviewing them about their youngest brother—a brother who, even in success, was not notably generous toward them. Still, they were exceedingly generous and kind to us, as were their wives: Sylvia (Charles), Alma (Jay), Marie (Frank), and Arloie (Sande), as well as Charles’s first wife, Elizabeth. Jackson’s nieces and nephews were also very helpful: Jeremy Capillé, Karen Del Pilar, Francesca Pollock, Jonathan Pollock, and Jason McCoy. (Jason, who later became a close associate of Lee’s, was especially generous with his profound knowledge and understanding of the works of both his aunt and his uncle.) We join all the Pollock family in mourning the recent deaths of Jay and Charles.

  Lee’s sister, Ruth Stein, though not as contentious as Lee, proved equally articulate and had a remarkable ability, while relating family stories, to call her sister back to life. Our thanks also to Ruth’s son, Ronald Stein; Lee’s niece, Rena Kanokogi; Lee’s sister, Esther Gersing; and Esther’s son, Seymour Glickman.

  We wish to thank Ruth Kligman for being so generous with her time and for allowing us to reproduce the photographer of her with Jackson, taken on the day of his death. Thanks also to Ruth for allowing us to use material from her memoir, Love Affair: A Memoir of Jackson Pollock, in Chapter 44.

  Several close friends of Jackson’s, at various times in his life, were of inestimable assistance, notably Peter Busa, Nicholas Carone, Reuben Kadish, and Roger Wilcox.

  The other interviewees who were generous with their time and recollections, who provided us with information, or who supported us in other important ways, were Mary Abbott, Lionel Abel, William Abel, Gretchen Adams, Ann Allen, Sam Allen, Lawrence Alloway, Delores Ambrose, Ruth Ann Applehof, Pamela Arceneaux, Margaret Louise Archbold, R. L. Archbold, Dore Ashton, Susan Ball, Susan Barker, Sally Bartolotta, Carey Bartram, John I. H. Baur, Ethel Baziotes, Eleanor Becker, Madelon Bedell, Mimi Behrfeld, Leland Bell, Charles Bennett, Ward Bennett, T. P. Benton, Thomas Floyd Benton, Bill Berkson, Paul Biber, Catharina Biddle, Livingston Biddle, Pat Bigler, Leroy Birch, Nell Blaine, Peter Blake, Gabe Bloomenthal, Norman Bluhm, Leonard Bocour, Mary Lincoln Bonnell, Grace Borgenicht
, Nicole Bouche, Charles Boultenhouse, Margaret Bouton, Finley Bown, Ruby Boyd, Paul Brach, Ramona Bradley, Walter Brandes, Myrtle Branstetter, Billy Breckenridge, Ernest Briggs, Ruth Brine, Alexander Bacon Brook, Charlotte Park Brooks, James Brooks, Lee Bryant, David Budd, Fritz Bultman, Jeanne Bultman, Eda Bunce, John Bunce, Olga Burroughs, Polly Burroughs, Marietta Bushnell, Marie Butler, Reginald Cabral, Nicolas Calas, Adele Callaway, John Callison, Lawrence Campbell, Stephen Campbell, Fred Cannastra, Lynn Cannastra, Pat Carlton-Ramakrishnan, Mary Carey, Catherine Carlin, Matthew Carone, Caroll Carr, Blanche Carstensen, Cecil Carstensen, Peg Cassidy, Leo Castelli, Donnelly Leo Casto, Alvi Cavagnaro, Giorgio Cavallon, Herman Cherry, Pari Choate, Paul Christopher, Terry Citarella, Bill Clark, Betty Clausen, Stuart Cleek, Margaret Coe, Cynthia Waterbury Cole, John Cole, Mary Coles, Oscar Collier, Mike Collins, Joseph Conlon, Shirley Connell, Edward Cook, John Cook, Lois Anderson Cook, Marjorie Cook, Marie Cooley, Clare Cooter, Edith Cooter, Robert Cooter, Steve Cotherman, Irene Crippen, Alexandra Cromwell, Gilbert Crowell, Alan Curl, Anne Cybowski, Michael Dalton, Sr., Whitney Darrow, Jr., Gene Davis, Glenda Davis, Hazel Finch Davis, Deborah Daw, Fielding Dawson, James Dawson, Martha Anderson Dawson, Emile de Antonio, Elizabeth de Cuevas, Sylvia de Cuevas, Kay Deering, Dorothy Dehner, Joseph Delaney, Josephine Del Deo, Salvatore Del Deo, Joseph DeMeio, Tibor de Nagy, Christie Dennis, Violet Staub de Laszlo, Rudy De Santi, Hester Diamond, Thomas Dillon, Dane Dixon, Mary Louise Dodge, David Dozier, Marjel Dozier, Ted Dragon, Elizabeth Duncan, Anita Duquette, Ray Eames, Anne Edgerton, Norma Edwards, Tamaria Eichelburg, Josephine Eighme, Margaret Eighme, Marietta Eighme, Betty Ellison, Ruth Van Cleve Emerson, Mary Ellen Engle, Werner Engel, Tom Enman, Jimmy Ernst, Julie Espinoza, Lisa Farrington, Mary Ann Fast, Richard Fast, Nina Federico, Morton Feldman, William C. Fellersen, Herbert Ferber, Ira Ferguson, Thomas Hornsby Feril, Marie Ferre, Rae Ferren, Margaret Fetty, Leslie Fiedler, Lyman Field, Jeffrey Figley, Daisy Finch, Helen Finch, Randall Finch, Sylvia Fink, Louis Finkelstein, Minnie Fitzgerald, Sara Fitzsimmons, Audrey Flack, Phyllis Fleiss, Christopher Fluhr, Lisa Fonssagrives, Xavier Fourcade, Muriel Francis, Abby Friedman, B. H. Friedman, Sanford Friedman, Gottlieb Friesinger, Louis Fusari, Edward Garza, Jerome Garza, Emmanuel Ghent, David Gibbs, Joe Glasco, Arnold Glimcher, Grace Glueck, Augustus Goertz, Julia Goldsmith, Bertram Goodman, Cynthia Goodman, Robert Goodnough, Eugene C. Goossen, Ron Gorchov, Fred Gorstein, David Graham, Jane Graves, Clement Greenberg, Balcomb Greene, Pamela Grettinger, Joel Gribetz, Chaim Gross, Renee Gross, Isidore Grossman, John Gruen, Robert Gwathmey, Barbara Hale, Niki Hale, Robert Beverly Hale, Richard Hall, Catherine Halleman, Marion Halperin, Helen Halverson, Fowler Hamilton, Milo Hamilton, Mildred Hanney, Grace Hartigan, Jane Hartsook, Lois Hartzler, Gary Hassell, Janet Hauck, Francis Hayden, Christine Heag, Ben Heller, Dora Heller, Eleanor Hempstead, Joseph Henderson, Allan Herrick, Clair Heyer, Hazel Heyer, Rebecca Hicks, Dorothy Hitt, Sheila Hoban, Kristin Hoermann, Renoda Hoffman, Harry Holtzman, Budd Hopkins, Carolyn Hopping, Ettabelle Horgan, Axel Horn, Ora Horton, Zetta McCoy Houston, Richard Howard, Elizabeth Wright Hubbard II, Merle Hubbard, Robert Hughes, Vivienne Allbright Hughes, Estelle Hulse, Edward Hults, Ted Hults, Roger Humphries, Edys Hunter, Kermit Hunter, Sam Hunter, Laurence Hurlburt, Mary Anne Hurley, Jill Hutchinson, Max Hutchinson, Reginald Isaacs, Harry Jackson, Ken Jackson, Mary Jackson, Ralph Jackson, Sr., Ward Jackson, Larry James, Sidney Janis, Paul Jenkins, Earl Johnsmeyer, Buffie Johnson, Joyce Johnson, Keith Johnson, Philip Johnson, Wesley Johnson, Jr., Wesley Johnson, Sr., Wilbur Johnson, Emily Jones, Mervin Jules, Barbara Kadish, Thomas Kadomato, Jacob Kainen, Gerome Kamrowski, Shizuko Kato, Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., Nathaniel Kaz, Marjorie Keene, Chris Keller, Carlton Kelsey, Barbara Kiburz, John Kiburz, Lillian Olaney Kiesler, Ari Kiev, Lincoln Kirstein, Ruth Kligman, Stewart Klonis, Esther Klotz, Craig Klyver, Carolyn Knute, George Koerner, Hilton Kramer, Mary McClure Kreuzer, Maria Piacenza Kron, Patsy Jean La Bay, Lilly Kuida, Melvin Lader, Ellen Landau, Doug Langdon, Ernestine Lassaw, Ibram Lassaw, Minnabelle Laughlin, Margie Lawrence, Berthe Pacifico Laxineta, John Lee, Mark Lee, Harold Lehman, Adele Lerner, Joe LeSueur, Gail Levin, Carl Lightner, Donald Lightner, Helen Lightner, Joseph Liss, Millie Liss, Terry Liss, Jacqueline Little, John Little, Josephine Little, Mildred Lowe, George Long, Cile Downs Lord, Iris Lord, Sheridan Lord (confirmation only), Eleanor Lynch, Donna Mack, Irma Macon, Dale Maddux, Ron Magliozzi, Beatrice Ribak Mandelman, Conrad Marca-Relli, Charlie Marder, Karleen Marienthal, Edna Martin, Irving Markowitz, John Marquand, Maria-Gaetana Matisse, Roberto Matta, Peter Matthiessen (confirmation only), Herbert Matter, Mercedes Matter, Charlie Mattox, Patricia Maye, Jack Mayer, Barbara McCandless, Dean McClure, Donald McClure, Margaret Ann McClure, Paul McClure, Robert McDaniel, Joseph McGie, Marie McGilvrey, Evelyn Minsch McGinn, Dudley McGovern, Eleanor McKee, William McKim, Hazel Guggenheim McKinley, Donald McKinney, Gordon McMurphy, William McNaught, George McNeil, Kynaston McShine, Norman Mead, Joseph Meert, George Mercer, Ted Meriam, Janet Michaelieu, Robert Michels, Wallace Milam, Dorothy Miller, E. Roger Miller, George Sid Miller, Howard Miller, Sheldon Miller, Sylvia Miller, William Miller, Arthur Millier, Jr., Sarah Millier, John Millwater, Al Minnick, Miki Minsch, Akinobu Mori, Carol Mori, Laverne Mori, Atsuko Moriuchi, Gunji Moriuchi, Gilbert Morrill, Vince Moses, Elizabeth Mudgett, Rose Muliere, Lee Mullican, Lucia Hurtado Mullican, Lewis Mumford, Sophia Mumford, Franklin Murphy, Jean Murray, Eva Myer, John Bernard Myers, Sam Naifeh, Hans Namuth, Steven Nash, Elizabeth Nelson, Terence Netter, Annalee Newman (interviewed by David Peretz), Constantine Nivola, Linda Nochlin, John Nopel, Barbara Novak, Lorraine O’Dell, Margaret Oglesby, Douglas Ohlson, Gordon Onslow-Ford, Frank Orser, Nicole O’Shea, Alfonso Ossorio, Frances Overholtzer, Wayne Overholtzer, Marina Pacini, Martin Pajeck, Raymond Parker, Hester Grimm Patrick, Tom Patterson, Philip Pavia, Jane Pearce, Lori Pellissero, David Peretz, Cula Perry, Gustaf Peterson, Olga Peterson, Vita Peterson, Kay Pettit, Eleanor Piacenza, Santo Piacenza, Elinor Poindexter, Charles Porter, David Porter, Neal Primm, Jay Pullins, Tim Purdy, John Queenan, Arthur Railton, Harry Rand, Peggi Randolph, William Rayner, Becky Reis, Milton Resnick, Merrill Rueppel, Francis Riddell, Ellen Schreck Rifley, Joyce Ritter, Ed Robertson, Selden Rodman, Patricia Rolf, Dorothy Rosamond, May Tabak Rosenberg, Patia Rosenberg, Charles Rozaire, Harriet Rubin, Grant Rusk, John Russell, David Ryffe, Lucia Autorino Salemme, Irving Sandler, Martica Sawin, George Schaefer, Miriam Schapiro, Nene Schardt, Abraham Schlemowitz, Arlene Schnitzer, Lucile Schoppe, Jon Schueler, Charloma Schwankovsky, Nancy Schwartz, Rachel Scott, Dorothy Seiberling, Mary Kay Simkhovitch, Edwin Sharp, Jim Shepperd, Gertrude Shibley, Kathleen Shorthall, Stefa Siegel, Jim Sleeper, David Slivka, Graziella Smith, Jane Smith, Marvin Smith, Nancy Smith, Thomas Smith, Joseph Solman, Ruth Solyer, Herman Somberg, Syd Solomon, Wayne Somes, Stephanie Sonora, Carol Southern, Patricia Southgate, Eloise Spaeth, Christopher Spingarn, Marshall Sprague, Saul Steinberg, James Stephenson, Hedda Sterne, Margot Stewart, Bayrd Still, Frances Stinchfield, Michael Stolbach, Cathy Stover, Wally Strautin, William Swafford, Gladys Swearingen, James Johnson Sweeney, Russ Sweet, Margaret Taft, Allene Talmage, Roy Tarbt, Tom Tarwater, Judy Throm, Janet Tidrick, Clayton Tirking, Araks Tolegian, Aram Tolegian, Michael Tolegian, Jane Tomassian, Abigail Little Tooker, E. Fuller Torrey, W. Lester Trauch, Evelyn Porter Trowbridge, Jock Truman, LeRoy Tucker, Marcia Tucker, Karl Turnquist, Ralph Turnquist, Wally Tworkov, Lee Tyson, John Van Alstine, Esteban Vicente, Harriet Vicente, Marta Vivas, Catherine Viviano, Margaret Viviano, Jean Volkmer, Lucy Voulgaris, Lee Vrooman, Elsie Wackerman, Otto Wackerman, Ellen Waggoner, Doris Wagner, Samuel Wagstaff, Theodore Wahl, James Wall, Lillian Wahrow, Helen Walker, Eleanor Ward, Joan Ward, Sandra Weiner, Karen Weiss, Wendy Weld, Hazel Hawthorne Werner, Steve Wheeler, Helen Wheelwright, Enez Whipple, Jane Wickiser, Lowell Wilbur, Donna Jean Williams, Dorothy Williams, Helen Finch Wilson, Reginald Wilson, Cathy Wirtala, Judith Wolfe, Shirley Wood, Susan Wood, Mary Woods, Irene Worth, Barbara Woytowiez, C. L. Wysuph, Athos Zacharias, Leonard Zick, Jr., Elizabeth Zogbaum.

  We want also to express our apprecia
tion to those Pollock scholars who made our work so much easier. Without the fine catalogue raisonné by Francis V. O’Connor and Eugene V. Thaw, our research task would have been infinitely more complicated and burdensome. O’Connor’s Ph.D. dissertation on Jackson’s early years, “The Genesis of Jackson Pollock,” and his catalogue for the Museum of Modern Art were also extremely helpful. (Our gratitude, too, to Mr. Thaw—president of the Pollock-Krasner foundation as well as a Pollock scholar—for giving us access to the restricted Pollock-Krasner archives at the Archives of American Art and for his generous permission to reproduce Jackson’s paintings and to quote from unpublished writings by Pollock and Krasner.) Jeffrey Potter’s oral biography of Pollock, To a Violent Grave, not only provided important material, it directed us to key sources from whom we were able to secure similar material for our own use. Also helpful were the interviews in “Who Was Jackson Pollock?” by Francine du Plessix and Cleve Gray as well as those in The Party’s Over Now by John Gruen. Deborah Solomon’s recent biography—begun after we began ours—added some documentary items that eluded us. Love Affair, Ruth Kligman’s memoir of her relationship with Pollock, remains an important source. William Rubin’s many articles on Pollock are probably the most enlightening body of critical writing on his art.

  Most important of all, undoubtedly, was B. H. Friedman’s biography, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible. It was the road map that gave us our bearings in many initially unfamiliar areas of Pollock’s life. Friedman himself, despite disagreeing with us on some points, provided us with gracious and valuable assistance. For Lee Krasner, the two principal scholarly sources were Ellen Gross Landau’s Ph.D. dissertation on Krasner’s early years and Barbara Rose’s catalogue for the retrospective exhibition that she curated for the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. Lee’s dealer and friend, Robert Miller, was also extremely generous with his time, support, and valuable insights.