The Art of Rivalry

by Sebastian Smee

  When it came to art, Gorky was ruthless and unsentimental. He held himself to high standards, and knew the difference between what was great and what was fake. (“Aha, so you have ideas of your own!” he said when he first saw de Kooning’s work. “Somehow,” recalled de Kooning, “that didn’t seem so good.”)

  Throughout the ’30s, Gorky’s attitude—extravagant, high-minded, honorable—bolstered de Kooning, who came to revere him as an older brother. So it’s no surprise that many observers have found a connection—one wants to call it a fraternal connection—between de Kooning’s exquisite Self-Portrait with Imaginary Brother and a famous, and heartbreaking, Gorky painting, The Artist and His Mother. That work, which exists in two related versions, is based on a 1912 photograph, which shows the artist with the woman who sired and nurtured him. The photograph was sent to Gorky’s father, who had earlier emigrated to America, perhaps as a reminder of their existence, a plea not to forget about his family back in Armenia. (He had in fact met another woman and started a second family in the United States.) Events in the meantime overtook Gorky and his mother. During the Armenian genocide, their town was besieged, and they were sent out on a death march. Gorky’s mother died of starvation, in her son’s arms, in 1919. After his own emigration to the US, Gorky found the photograph in a drawer in his father’s home, and painted the two versions of The Artist and His Mother from it.

  Both pictures—de Kooning’s drawing and Gorky’s painting—are double portraits. And in both, the subjects meet the viewer’s gaze with doleful, haunted eyes, profoundly cognizant of loss.

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  TO DE KOONING, GORKY was the embodiment of integrity. So he was dismayed to discover, after a decade of close companionship, that his friend, his brother-in-arms, secretly harbored social ambitions. In early 1941, Gorky was introduced to Agnes Magruder, the wealthy daughter of a naval commodore, through de Kooning and his own future wife, Elaine Fried. They fell in love and married that same year. As a consequence, Gorky suddenly found himself mingling with an affluent uptown crowd, even as de Kooning continued to labor in obscurity and near-destitution. The dissonance was too much for Gorky, who essentially dropped de Kooning, befriending instead the patrician European Surrealists who had moved en masse to New York during World War II.

  De Kooning let him go, but privately nursed a lingering hurt—a sense of dismay that echoed, perhaps, the dismay of his own half brother Koos all those years ago. “To see Gorky sail away into the world of privilege,” wrote Stevens and Swan, “represented for de Kooning nothing less than the loss of his American brother.”

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  UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF BENTON, Pollock had finally begun to acquire some skills. The older man was looking for students who were not merely good at making faithful copies, but could communicate dynamism and movement. In Pollock’s clotted and half-baked attempts—coastal landscapes; nighttime scenes with dancing flames; strange, expressive dreamscapes involving animals and human figures—he saw promise where few others did. “I want to tell you I think the little sketches you left around here are magnificent,” he wrote to Pollock. “Your color is rich and beautiful. You’ve the stuff old kid—all you have to do is keep it up.”

  Benton dedicated extra time to Pollock, appointing him class monitor (to exempt him from paying tuition) while he and Rita continued to treat him as one of the family. As the Depression ground on, Pollock kept sketching and kept attending classes. He met José Clemente Orozco, the Mexican artist whose Prometheus mural he had traveled to see with Charles at Pomona College, and who was now working on murals with Benton. But Benton departed the league at the end of 1932 to work on a major mural commissioned by the state of Indiana. And then, early the next year, Jackson’s father LeRoy became ill and died back in LA. The brothers—Charles, Frank, and Jackson—could not afford to go back for the funeral.

  LeRoy’s death triggered a period of excruciating anguish and confusion for Jackson. He seemed to be losing father figures and actual fathers, along with brothers, every other month. When in 1935 Charles moved with his wife, Elizabeth, to Washington, DC, to work with the Resettlement Administration, Jackson hitched himself to Sande. The two younger brothers moved into an apartment at 46 East 8th Street, where Jackson was to stay for the next ten years. He remained in the house even after Sande married his girlfriend, Arloie Conaway, early in 1936.

  Shortly before Charles’s departure for Washington, Jackson had signed up for the Works Progress Administration, or WPA—the government program that kept thousands of artists (including for a time de Kooning) employed during the Depression. Joining meant a reliable salary (it started at $103.40 per month) in return for producing approximately one painting every two months. (The obligation fluctuated according to the work’s size and the artist’s normal rate of production.) The arrangement helped Pollock. But he was barely capable of meeting his quota. His drinking became heavier and more destructive, and then, ominously, in the fall of 1936, he wrecked a car that Charles had signed over to him.

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  POLLOCK HAD HIS FIRST encounter with Lee Krasner just a month or two later. Krasner was born in Brooklyn in 1908, the daughter of Ukrainian Jews who had fled pogroms and massacres to seek refuge in America in the new century’s first decade. In her teens she had taken to art, studying at the Women’s Art School of Cooper Union, in Greenwich Village, and then uptown at the National Academy of Design. After going with her classmates to see a show of modern paintings by Picasso, Matisse, and Braque, she began—like de Kooning—to kick against her conservative training, and she soon fell in with the small but expanding group of American modernists, part of a downtown scene that was sustained and held together by the WPA.

  Krasner would later become Pollock’s girlfriend and wife, the most important figure in his adult life. They were together from 1941 until Pollock’s death in 1956. Their relationship was messy, and particularly toward the end they were the kind of couple who, for all their obvious reliance on each other, nonetheless seemed bent on mutual destruction. And yet they enjoyed many periods of happiness, and no one seems to believe that Pollock would have enjoyed the brief but stupendous success he did without Krasner in his corner (and just as often, right there in the ring with him). She was his greatest champion.

  But their first encounter was anything but auspicious. At the time Pollock was deep into one of his periods of extended binge drinking. He would spend long nights rambling from bar to bar in lower Manhattan, yelling and shouting, urinating ostentatiously in the snow (“spraying the stream from side to side,” according to one friend, “and bellowing, ‘I can piss on the whole world!’ ”), and picking ill-advised fights, then waiting to be rescued—as he was, time and again—in the early-morning hours by Sande. He was on the cusp of a major breakdown—a menace as much to others as to himself. And he was drunk again when he came across Krasner at an Artists Union party. Having clumsily cut in on the man she was dancing with, Pollock rubbed his pelvis against her leg, whispered a bald invitation to sex in her ear, and repeatedly stepped on her feet. Krasner responded by slapping him, hard.

  But the funny thing about Pollock was that he had an instinct—as many helplessly dependent men do—for turning bad situations back in his favor. Taciturn, thwarted, often belligerent, he nevertheless possessed the ability to charm. “He’d start a fight and then try to get out of it,” recalled his friend Herman Cherry. “It’s like insulting somebody, then going up and kissing them and saying ‘Oh, I didn’t mean it.’ ” He would flash a smile, apologize with effusive sincerity, even resort to flattery—whatever it took (assuming he wasn’t too drunk). Not only women but men would be disarmed, and thrilled, too, by the volatility behind these sudden reversals. Pollock, said another friend, Reuben Kadish, “had a way of firing the situation.”

  Whatever he did or said that night, Krasner seems to have relented, and her initial hostility toward Pollock was tempered. She may or may not have gone home with him that night; there are differing accounts. B
ut it was five years before she saw him again. That second time she fell for him quickly. But in between, it so happened that she developed a prolonged and painful crush on another artist living in New York: Willem de Kooning.

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  LOOKING BACK AT DE KOONING in the 1930s, it’s clear that he was on his way to greatness of some kind. He was ambitious; he was utterly in earnest; he was freakishly gifted. And yet for many years his way ahead remained obscured. Struggling against the riptides of influence, he spent a lot of time thrashing about and failing to finish things. He was quivering with potential—everyone who came into his orbit sensed it. But what he had actually achieved amounted to very little. He was broke. He spoke broken English. And, by leaving Holland so precipitously all those years ago, he had severed himself from both his family and his cultural patrimony. He never regretted this. But his general frustration was palpable. According to Denby, friends would say, “Listen, Bill, you have a psychological block about finishing; you’re being very self-destructive, you ought to see an analyst.” De Kooning would laugh in response. “Sure, the analyst needs me for his material, the way I need my pictures for mine.”

  Nonetheless—or in some ways precisely because of the heroic nature of his struggle—de Kooning had acquired an outsized reputation for seriousness and authenticity among New York’s nascent avant-garde. His fellow artists revered him and sought out his company. It helped that he seemed self-effacing, sincere, and supportive of others—and that he had a mischievous sense of humor. Women, in particular, loved him. With his Dutch accent, his gruff good looks, and his physical charisma (he was short but well built), he churned up little storm systems of ardor wherever he went.

  Krasner likely learned about de Kooning through her boyfriend at the time, the society portraitist Igor Pantuhoff. She and Pantuhoff had both studied under Hans Hofmann, the hugely influential German émigré who was a champion of modernism, of Matisse and Picasso, and of abstraction. Krasner, like many others, was susceptible to Hofmann’s ideas. She was already, at this stage, a much finer artist than Pantuhoff. Her discerning eye, her brilliant, intuitive color sense, and her devotion to modernist precepts had won her plenty of admirers in avant-garde circles of the 1930s.

  Pantuhoff, for his part, found it easier—and more rewarding, both financially and sexually—to turn out stylized society portraits on commission. His good looks and his exotic, amorphous background (he claimed to be a White Russian—an opponent of the Bolshevik Red Army during Russia’s post-revolution civil war) attracted Krasner. But he was a heavy drinker, he was vain, and he had a mean streak. “I like being with an ugly woman,” he said, in reference to Krasner, “because it makes me feel more handsome.”

  Krasner was independent and resolutely bohemian. She disdained conventional notions of femininity. She was not pretty, as such, but many men found her sexy: She was forthright and flirtatious, and seemed hungry for physical contact. She “had a great deal of aggressiveness and she came on strong with men,” according to the artist Axel Horn. Yet for all her independence and talent, Krasner had a tendency to subordinate herself to her male partners, and she put up with behavior many women would likely find atrocious. She tolerated Pantuhoff’s cruelty, as she would later put up with Pollock’s endless tantrums. According to Fritz Bultman (who may have been right, but may not): “The masochistic part of Lee loved every minute of it.”

  Despite his success with more conventional art, Pantuhoff liked to feel he was part of the small but burgeoning modernist circle, and he kept a close eye on artists he admired. One of them was the émigré Dutchman de Kooning. Pantuhoff owned a study of one of de Kooning’s WPA murals; he kept it on the wall in his studio, where Krasner would have seen it often.

  The affair between Pantuhoff and Krasner gradually disintegrated, largely because of Pantuhoff’s infidelities. And as it did, Krasner became quietly—and then not so quietly—besotted with de Kooning. She encountered him intermittently on the downtown scene, and Pantuhoff would often speak about him. She was impressed by what she saw, and before long she was smitten. She was heard describing him as “the greatest painter in the world.” And then, at a New Year’s Eve party, well lubricated by alcohol, she chose to make her move. In a playful, affectionate mood, she seated herself on de Kooning’s lap. He appeared to play along. But then suddenly, without warning—and just as she was about to kiss him—he thrust his legs apart, causing her to crash to the floor. Humiliated, Krasner nursed her bruised ego back to fighting health with a brisk series of drinks. Thus fortified, she began spraying de Kooning with insults. Her friend Bultman eventually intervened, pushing Krasner into the shower with her clothes still on and turning on the taps.

  Krasner never forgot that night. And she never forgave de Kooning.

  —

  POLLOCK MAINTAINED A CLOSE connection with the Bentons up until 1937, and would spend several weeks each summer with Tom and Rita in Martha’s Vineyard. Since 1935, Tom had been teaching and working in Kansas City. But they stayed in touch, and the older artist’s advice and encouragement still counted for a lot.

  Nonetheless, what eventually helped Pollock make significant strides as an artist was nothing Benton prescribed. It was a decision to abandon conventional ideals of “skilled drawing” altogether, and instead to embrace chance. More of a gradual and instinctive unfolding than a conscious choice, this new development had many traceable causes. Pollock’s work in 1936 with the Mexican muralist David Siqueiros, who set up a “Laboratory of Techniques in Modern Art” in his New York loft and encouraged experiments with unexpected materials, was one of them. So was his exposure to the Chilean-born émigré Roberto Matta. Promoting the Surrealist idea of psychic automatism, Matta encouraged Pollock and others to draw with blindfolds. His ideas appealed to Pollock, who in 1939 began sessions with a Jungian analyst called Dr. Joseph Henderson. Henderson encouraged him to bring his drawings to therapy, using them as interpretive tools. Jung’s ideas and Siqueros’s and Matta’s techniques all dovetailed with Pollock’s long-standing interest in mysticism, visionary art, and the workings of the unconscious.

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  WHILE HE WAS EXPERIMENTING in this new vein, Pollock came into the ambit of John Graham, a tall, charismatic artist who shaved his head and wore Savile Row suits. Graham had piercing eyes and an arresting, aristocratic manner, and he stirred up Manhattan’s narrow, impecunious milieu of modern artists with his haughty airs and infectious passion for painting. He had met de Kooning back in 1929, and by the mid-1930s was describing the Dutchman as “the best young painter in the United States.” When, a few years later, he met Pollock and began spending time with him, he was similarly impressed. He acknowledged the anarchic, oftentimes puerile side of Pollock’s personality. But he was also the first to see, as de Kooning himself would later admit, that Pollock had it in him to be “a great painter.” “Who the hell picked him [Pollock] out?” asked de Kooning, looking back years later. “It was hard for other artists to see what Pollock was doing—their work was so different from his,” he continued, “but Graham could see it.”

  Graham did more than perhaps anyone else to prod American art out of its provincialism. Graham, mind you, was not his real name. He was born Ivan Gratianovich Dombrowski in 1886, and he came from a family of minor Polish nobles in Kiev. Before the 1917 revolution he served in the czarist cavalry. The Bolsheviks imprisoned him after the revolution, but he was released (he liked to say he escaped), and he came to the United States in 1920. Many of the claims he made about his early life (that he earned a St. George’s Cross, for instance) have the ring of fabrications. But in Moscow, it seems, Graham did become acquainted with many of that country’s best-known avant-garde artists. He had also been a regular visitor to the home of the Russian collector Sergei Shchukin, where he saw works by Matisse and Picasso from the early, most intense period of their rivalry (1906–16). He was impressed in particular by Picasso. The Spaniard became a touchstone not only for him, but now for Gorky, Pollock, and de
Kooning.

  All through the 1920s, Graham had regularly crossed the Atlantic. He was given two solo shows in Paris—an achievement that carried enormous cachet among most American modern artists. And his annual trips played a vital, catalyzing role back in New York. “In the grim Depression years,” wrote Stevens and Swan, “John Graham was a marvelous, other-worldly apparition” who “elevated every occasion he attended.” He also had a perspective on life—a feeling for grandeur—that was exactly what both Pollock and de Kooning craved.

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  IN NOVEMBER 1941, SHORTLY before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Graham began organizing a show that, for the first time, sprinkled the talented American painters he was getting to know among much better-known modernists from Europe, including Matisse and Picasso. It was through this show that Pollock and de Kooning finally met. They and Krasner were among the Americans whom Graham selected for the show, which opened at McMillan Inc., an antiques and fine furnishings store on East 55th Street, on January 20, 1942. Krasner was the only woman in the group. She was to be represented by a painting, since lost, called simply Abstraction, while Pollock was to be represented by Birth, a powerful, congested, vertically oriented work—and probably the most compelling single image he had produced until then. Its splintered and spiraling forms, carved out in black and white, with outbreaks of red, yellow, and blue, were inspired partly by Native American art.

  Looking over the list of her fellow exhibitors, the one name Krasner didn’t recognize—despite their brief meeting years earlier—was Pollock’s. Asking around, she drew mostly blanks. De Kooning simply shrugged. But later, at a gallery opening, Louis Bunce, an artist friend, said he recognized the name. He told Krasner that Pollock lived at 46 East 8th Street, just around the corner from her own studio apartment on East 9th, where she had set up on her own after splitting from Pantuhoff. And so she paid an unannounced visit.