Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Ellen Gross Landau, “LK: A Study of Her Early Career (1926–1949)” (Ph.D. thesis), Newark: University of Delaware, 1981; FVOC, “The Genesis of JP: 1912 to 1943” (Ph.D. thesis), Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1965; May Natalie Tabak, “A Collage” (unpub. ms.), n.d.

  Fritz Bultman, “Hans Hofmann” (lecture), Hirshhom Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., Nov. 1976, in Bultman files; LK (lecture), International Affairs Building, Columbia University, New York, Oct. 5, 1983.

  Fritz Bultman, int. by Irving Sandler, Jan. 6, 1968, AAA; Lillian Kiesler, int. by Ellen Landau, Feb. 27, 1979; LK, int. by Barbara Rose, July 31, 1966, AAA; LK, int. by Dorothy Seckler, Dec. 14, 1967, Apr. 11, 1968, and Nov. 2, 1964, AAA.

  Interviews

  Peter Blake; Paul Brach; Fritz Bultman; Jeanne Bultman; Giorgio Cavallon; Herman Cherry; Deborah Daw; Ted Dragon; Ray Eames; Muriel Francis; B. H. Friedman; Esther Gersing; David Gibbs; Seymour Glickman; CG; Janet Hauck; Harry Holtzman; Richard Howard; Gerome Kamrowski; Rusty Kanokogi; Lillian Olaney Kiesler; LK; Maria Piacenza Kron; Ellen Landau; Ernestine Lassaw; Ibram Lassaw; John Lee; John Little; Beatrice Ribak Mandelman; Mercedes Matter; Donald McKinney; George McNeil; George Mercer; John Bernard Myers; May Tabak Rosenberg; Ronald Stein; Ruth Stein; Michael Stolbach; Steve Wheeler.

  NOTES

  Date of arrival and legend of conception: Ruth Stein; see also Landau, “LK,” p. 19, citing LK files. Shpikov: Gersing. Typical station departure: Howe, p. 35. “A person gone”: Marcus Ravage, q. in Howe, p. 35. Financial problems and malnutrition: Feingold, p. 115. Steerage tickets: Steerage from Bremen to New York in 1903 cost $33.50; the cost of getting to Bremen “perhaps half again as much”; Howe, p. 33.

  Pogroms: Feingold, p. 117. Kishinev incident: Feldstein, p. 110. Impact of Russo-Japanese War: Feingold, p. 119. Joseph a tobacco peddler: Ruth Stein. Shuka: B. H. Friedman, introduction to Whitechapel Gallery, “LK,” p. 5. “Troublesome trifling”: Howe, p. 11. “Tall and slender”: Abraham Cahan, q. in Feingold, p. 122. Ellis Island: Jewish immigrants called it the Isle of Tears; Feingold, p. 122; the Krassners arrived on a Dutch ship, the Ryndam; Landau, “LK,” p. 19. Jerome Street: The address was 546 Jerome Street. Fish and produce market: LK later referred to it as a “food shop,” but as Ruth says, “they were in the fish business.” “Nasty, little slum”: Q. in McCullough, p. 201; Riis was referring specifically to neighboring Brownsville.

  Scale of emigration: Feingold, p. 120: 1,562,800 between 1881 and 1910. Bringing the shtetl along; paternal role among Jews: See Howe, pp. 172–73. Character of Joseph Krassner: Ruth Stein. “Whom one did not speak to”: Paraphrase of Elizabeth Stern, q. in Howe, p. 173. Moody and introspective: Ronald Stein. “Assert the moral right”; “if we needed”: Ruth Stein. Father remaining in synagogue: Rose, p. 13: “The Krassner family followed the classic pattern: Father Joseph was an introspective, sensitive man rooted in the Talmudic tradition of critical inquiry and philosophical debate. He owned a small produce store in Brooklyn, which was essentially run by his wife Anna, a practical, outgoing woman of strong character and constitution. Typically in such families, the women took care of the business and worldly affairs”; see Howe, pp. 8–11.

  “She was all business”: Ruth Stein. Anna married at eleven: Ruth Stein: “My mother says she doesn’t think she was twelve when she was married. It was not so unusual—getting married very young, often at eight or nine years.” One child died: Named Riva. Lifting heavy boxes; “doing all the things”: Kanokogi. Irving at home: B. H. Friedman, introduction to Whitechapel Gallery, p. 5. Strain of mysticism in family: See Munro, p. 104. Pesa: Solomon, p. 112. Storms: Solomon, p. 111.

  Longing for Russia: “The shock of transplantation and the sheer ugliness of the new environment lent to Old World life a golden glow,” writes Feingold (p. 123). Oedipal triangle: According to Howe (p. 176), “the Oedipal romance was peculiarly Jewish, perhaps even a Jewish invention.” “Any member of the family”: LK, q. in Nemser, p. 83; see Gibbs. “A smattering of English”: LK, q. by Gibbs. “Like living in some little ghetto”: Q. by Gibbs. “An oddball”; “an outcast”: Q. by Dragon. Early desire to leave home: Gibbs, recalling LK. Ruth’s name changes: Ruth Stein. Photo of Lee and Ruth: In possession of Ruth Stein. “Work-until-you-drop”: Kanokogi. Relatives showing off Ruth: Kanokogi; Ruth Stein.

  Lee promenading as child; “a social call”; Lehmans, Granvilles: LK. Irving dominating home: Ruth Stein: “Our father was very passive. He just allowed Irving to take over. And believe me, Irving enjoyed it.” Lee reading fairy tales: LK. Coaxing friends to read to her: Friedman; Howard. Listening to Caruso recordings: LK. Irving and Lee both “tough”: Decades later, in the course of analysis, Ruth discovered that a pathological fear of horses (“If my mother knew there was a horse within two miles, she was inconsolable,” says Ruth’s son, Ronald), dating from childhood, was actually a legacy of her life with Lee and Irving. “I was afraid to walk into a strange room because I thought there might be a horse in there,” she recalls. “At night, I would be terrified that a horse was following me up the stairs. Then the analyst found out who my horses were. The horses were Daddy, Irving, and Lee. I had three horses that were killing me.” The immovable object”: Ronald Stein. “I crashed”: Q. in Nemser, p. 83.

  “Jesus Christ [was] the Lord”; “he just wasn’t mine”: Q. in Gratz, “After Pollock.” “Condition of slavery”: Josephson, p. 25. Neighbors considered mundane: McKinney, recalling LK; see Josephson, p. 17. “Colliding”: LK. Copying advertisements: Solomon, p. 111. “Haphazard”: LK. “Sounded more alive”: Friedman, p. 67. Painting of Queen Isabella: LK. Graduating from P.S. 72; rejected by Washington Irving: Landau, “LK,” p. 21.

  Urge to security: Josephson, pp. 17–18: “We might be of mixed English, German, Irish and French ancestry, or Jewish, yet the prevailing ‘Protestant Ethic’ of middle-class America seemed to possess all our parents alike. They were anxious and mainly preoccupied with all that was material and useful in ‘getting ahead.”’ Capital of Jewish culture; “Paris of the East”: Ibram Lassaw. “The graphic arts”: Q. in Howe, p. 574. Objects used in worship: Howe, p. 578. “Outside the boundaries”: Howe, p. 574. Families against career in art: The sculptor Jo Davidson heard from his father that to be an artist was to be “a loafer, a perpetual pauper, an absolutely useless person;” q. in Howe, p. 574. When Lassaw told his father of his plans to become an artist, “he thought I was crazy. He said, ‘You’ll starve to death.’ He thought I was ruining my life.” Cherry, who grew up in a Jewish family in Philadelphia, heard from his parents, “over and over, ‘How will you make a living?’” Guston’s parents, according to Cherry, “wanted him to become a furrier, because his whole family was furriers. They were dead set against him becoming an artist.” In 1915, Tom Benton’s old friend John Weichsel established an essentially Jewish People’s Art Guild; Howe, p. 581. In 1917, the Educational Alliance reopened art classes after a twelve-year hiatus, and it soon attracted such future luminaries as Ben Shahn, Adolf Gottlieb, Louise Nevelson, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko; Howe, p. 577. Eventually, some Jewish artists—Shahn, Weber, the Soyer brothers—also turned their attention to Jewish subjects, but only after having immersed themselves in the styles of French art, many of them in Paris itself; Howe, p. 580. Even if Weber painted Hasidic Dancers or The Rabbi, even if Shahn did illustrations for the Haggadah (Howe, p. 581), the artistic vocabulary used to depict these Jewish subjects was never precisely Jewish. And as Harold Rosenberg was later to write, “Style, not subject matter or theme, will determine whether or not paintings should be considered ‘Jewish’ or placed in some other category”; q. in Howe, p. 582. The most that Howe and others have been able to find was “Some tonality of ‘Jewishness’” in the paintings of Raphael Soyer and others (Howe, p. 584)—nothing more than an “aura,” “tone,” “posture,” “inflection.” And even this was to be lost as a younger generation, struggling to come up with original styles, managed to create art that no longer imitated European sty
les, but that, in its originality, no longer reflected the aspiration toward Jewish styles; Howe, p. 584. “Into the gentile unknown”: Howe, p. 574.

  “A combination”: Howe, p. 265. “Quiet and modest”: Howe, p. 268. Shop girl or teacher: Howe, p. 266. Not allowed any opinions: Paraphrased from Rebecca Kohut, q. in Howe, p. 265. “The progression”; “came to value”; “some were even drawn”; “a niche of privacy”: Howe, p. 266. “A woman alone”: Anzia Yezierska, q. in Howe, p. 269. Family hardly noticing Lee: LK: “[Art] meant nothing to them. Art only severed me further from my family;” see LK, q. in Nemser, p. 83. Name changes: Rose, p. 33; the change took place about 1935. LK: “It just seemed one more letter to sign when you made your signature.” But family members like Ruth viewed the change as “a symbolic divorce from the past.” “A mauve sweater”: Q. by Stolbach.

  Decorating lampshades: Landau, “LK,” p. 21. Lee flunked every course that year; Nemser, p. 83. Admitted to Washington Irving: LK, int. by Dorothy Seckler, Nov. 2, 1964. “I am going to pass”: Q. by LK, q. in Nemser, p. 83; LK, int. by Dorothy Seckler, Nov. 2, 1964. Giving small paintings away: LK; John Lee. “Terrible rush”: Kazin, p. 4. “[It] revealed a style”: Josephson, p. 26. Moving to Manhattan: There was one false start. For a few months in 1926, Lee returned to Brooklyn and lived with Ruth and her new husband at their home at 557 Jerome Street; Landau, “LK,” pp. 21–22. Lee’s next oldest sister, Rose, had died, and according to Jewish custom, it was up to one of her unmarried sisters to marry her widowed husband and care for her two daughters. When Lee, the obvious choice, refused to marry her brother-in-law, fifteen-year-old Ruth dutifully stepped forward. When Lee returned to Manhattan for good, it was to an apartment near Fifth Avenue and Fifteenth Street; Landau, “LK,” p. 25. “Coming over the bridge”: Q. by Gibbs.

  Alcove system: LK, q. in Nemser, p. 83. Hinton finding Lee’s work “messy” and promoting her: LK, int. by Landau, Feb. 21, 1980, q. in Landau, “LK,” pp. 22–23. “In utter disappointment”: LK, int. by Seckler, Nov. 2, 1964. “I’m going to promote”: Hinton, q. by LK, int. by Seckler, Nov. 2, 1964. Perard; hired by Perard to make drawings: Landau, “LK,” p. 23. “Victor Perard was the first one”: LK. Class at the Art Students League: Rose, p. 18. “Disdainful of her work”: LK. “Infuriated”; “drew strength”: Mercer. Modeling for Dykaar: (1886–1933); his most famous sculptures were of Calvin Coolidge and Eugene V. Debs; see Landau, “LK.” p. 39. “Was no place for a young artist”: LK. Academy accepting Lee: Landau, “LK,” p. 25.

  Arriving at the academy: Landau, “LK,” p. 25. Description of academy: Cavallon. “We looked at each other”: LK, int. by Seckler, Apr. 11, 1968. “I was very busy”: LK, int. by Seckler, Nov. 2, 1964. Cavallon, a fellow student at the academy, generously says, “everybody was an average student there.” Probation: Solomon, p. 112. “Rarely got along”: Cavallon. “A nuisance”; “impossible”: Raga, “We Interview LK,” p. 31. “Smart-alecky”; “too sure of herself”: Landau, “LK,” p. 28, citing LK, int. by Landau, Jan. 15, 1979. Many of Lee’s “offenses” seem trivial in retrospect, and indicate that the academy was even more stubborn than Lee. On December 7, 1929, for example, she was suspended for two days for substituting, without permission, a painting of a still life of a fish for the mandatory drawing in Charles Courtney Curran’s life drawing class; Barbara S. Krulik to Landau, Sept. 26, 1979, q. in Landau, “LK,” p. 28. “This student”: Note by teacher in National Academy of Design file, q. in Solomon, p. 112.

  Summer in Long Island: LK. Nielsen’s reaction to Lee’s work: LK. “That’s a dirty trick”: Q. by LK, q. in Nemser, p. 84; see Campbell, “Of Lilith and Lettuce,” p. 63. Judges skeptical: Rose, p. 15. “His reaction”: Q. in Nemser, p. 84; see Lawrence Campbell, “Of Lilith and Lettuce, p. 63. “Painting figures”: Solomon, p. 112; Landau, “LK,” p. 28. Trip to the Heckscher Building: Landau, “LK,” p. 31, citing LK, int. by Landau, Feb. 21, 1980. “Painting in Paris”: Jan. 19–Feb. 16, 1930. “Really hit”: LK, int. by Seckler, Nov. 2, 1964: “The experience came through directly, not through an intellectual source. Nothing was said, but the after-effects were automatic.” Incident at the academy; “brightly-checkered”; “No!”; “I can’t do anything”: Q. in Campbell, “Of Lilith and Lettuce,” p. 63. Lee Krasner described another such incident when a new female model applied for work: “She was wild. Her face was white, her hair was orange, she had purple eyelids and black around the eyes.” As class monitor, Lee booked her immediately—“even though she wasn’t exactly Academy stock.” When the instructor, Leon Kroll—one of the more open-minded teachers on the faculty—saw the model, he demanded loudly, “Which one of you is the monitor?” Lee defiantly raised her hand. Kroll stalked to her easel, took one look at her painting, and screamed, “Young lady! Go home and take a mental bath!” “By now I suppose I must have seemed to [them] like some smart-aleck kid,” she later said, “trying to imitate the French and show them all up”; q. in Campbell, “Of Lilith and Lettuce,” p. 63.

  The fact is that there was no consistent antagonism toward Impressionist painting at the National Academy of Design in 1929. Several members of the faculty, including Lee’s drawing instructor, Charles Curran, had adapted its lessons in their own landscapes of the period; Landau, “LK,” p. 40 n. 31, referring specifically to Curran’s Rose Bower of 1923 and Ivan Olinsky’s The Bathers of 1928. Thus Lee’s protests that her portrait owed nothing to the French painters she so admired—“I had simply tried to paint what I saw” (q. in Campbell, “Of Lilith and Lettuce,” p. 63)—are difficult to accept. When it was pointed out that one of her own teachers, Curran, had adapted the new style in his paintings of the same period, she insisted that she had never seen Curran’s paintings; Landau, “LK,” p. 40 n. 31.

  Relationship with Pantuhoff: It must have begun by early 1930, says Ronald Stein, because Igor painted a portrait of Joseph Krassner at that time. Prix de Rome: According to one academy official, it was only the “equivalent of a Prix de Rome”; letter from Barbara S. Krulik to Landau, Sept. 26, 1979, q. in Landau, “LK,” p. 34. But Busa, Cavallon, Rosenberg, and Lee called it a Prix de Rome. Because of the turn in his style, Lee later said, “Igor’s work was all right, but I didn’t have enormous admiration for him.” At the time, however, friends such as Cavallon remember, she was wildly impressed with his talents.

  People puzzled by Pantuhoff’s stories: Fritz Bultman. Description of Pantuhoff: Fritz Bultman; Jeanne Bultman; Francis; Rosenberg; Ronald Stein; Ruth Stein. “Without a cent”: Kiesler. Photo with Lake: Ronald Stein; Sterne. Claims to noble blood: Rosenberg; Landau, “LK,” p. 35, citing Barbara S. Krulik to Landau, Sept. 26, 1979, and interviews. Seven years old: Born Sept. 22, 1911. Fleeing to Turkey; studying in Paris: Fritz Bultman. Florida businessman: Francis: The man was Woody Kaylor. Lincoln: Ronald Stein. Description of Pantuhoff: Busa. “[She] said only a man”: Rosenberg; see also LK. Moving in with Pantuhoff: Rosenberg. Among young male artists, having a wife or lover on the city payroll as a teacher was considered “a bonus miracle”; Rosenberg, “Art Project,” in “A Collage,” p. 188. CG: “Barney Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, and William Phillips, the editor of the Partisan Review, all had teachers for wives. High school teachers in those days made good money.” Busa recalls a joke from the 1930s: “How do you become an artist? First, you marry a teacher.”

  “Withdraw from the field”: LK. Decision to become a teacher: “I decided I would teach in the New York City high school system. So I went to CCNY to get my pedagogic credits”; q. in Nemser, p. 84. Bright stockings; evening dress; nun’s habit; makeup; feathers; wig: Little. Sparkle and gaiety: Bultman. “A kind of arrogance”: Kiesler, int. by Landau, Feb. 27, 1979. “Animal energy”: Kiesler. Books on Picasso: At least one of the books on Picasso was Henri Mihaut’s Picasso (Paris, 1930); Landau, “LK,” p. 35, citing Mercer, int. by Landau, Oct. 30, 1979. He also gave her a copy of Jean René‘s Raoul Dufy (Paris, 1931). Introducing Lee to Gorky and de Kooning: Rosenberg; Bultman, int. by Sandler, Jan. 1, 1968.
“Igor sort of struggled”: Mercedes Matter. “How much you get paid”: Q. by Little. Amorous adventures: In the midst of their relationship, Pantuhoff was busy making conquests among many different women, including a Cape Cod barkeeper; Little. Complaints of snobbery: Ibram Lassaw: “He thought of himself as closer to the nobility than he was, and therefore as socially superior to most of the clods that were around him.” Drunken insults; moral lassitude: Cavallon recalls that Pantuhoff offered to help Gorky sell his work and persuaded him to do a sketch, then persuaded Cavallon to make a frame for it: “When he came to pick it up, he liked it, but when I told him it would cost five dollars, he said, ‘Oh, jeez, I forgot my pocketbook.’ I never did get paid, and Gorky—who never got his sketch back—didn’t either. Pantuhoff was that type of person—very low, very disgusting.”

  “I like being”: Q. by Bultman in Potter, p. 65. Sharing apartment with Rosenbergs: Rosenberg; the single man was a pharmacist whose name no one recalls. Visits to Greenlawn: Ronald Stein; Ruth Stein. Entire neighborhood entranced: Ronald Stein. Family believing they were married: Ronald Stein; Ruth Stein. We couldn’t locate records of such a marriage, or of a dissolution. It is hard to believe, however, that Lee would never have disabused her relatives of the notion in the many years that followed, long after they would have ceased being shocked. Ronald Stein (probably closer to Lee over a longer period of time than anyone in her life after JP’s death): “I think that it lasted an extremely short time, and it was a formal marriage, and [there was] some sort of a formal dissolution of the marriage.” Some acquaintances, such as Abel, also assumed they were married, when there was no reason to try to create such an impression; McNeil: “People didn’t pay any attention to private lives.” Studying at CCNY; waitressing: LK, lecture, Columbia University, Oct. 5, 1983. “No part of teaching”: LK, int. by Landau, Feb. 21, 1880, q. in Landau, “LK,” p. 44. Lee at front of line for PWAP: LK.