The Art of Rivalry

by Sebastian Smee

  Pollock was in his tiny bedroom, recovering from yet another binge. His art may have been growing more and more interesting with each year, but his personal circumstances seemed tawdrier than ever. He had only recently recovered from a period of such heavy drinking and wayward behavior that Sande had had to admit him to a psychiatric hospital. To make things worse, Sande and his wife, Arloie, who had just had a baby, were talking about leaving New York. (Arloie had previously sworn to Sande that she would never bear a child while Pollock was living with them.) In early May 1941, Pollock’s psychiatrist, Dr. de Laszlo, had written to the draft board describing Pollock as “a shut-in and inarticulate personality of good intelligence, but with a great deal of emotional instability who finds it difficult to form or maintain any kind of relationship.” Stopping short of diagnosing schizophrenia, she nonetheless noted “a certain schizoid disposition” in him. After a psychiatric examination at Beth Israel Hospital, Pollock was classified 4F—unfit for military service. None of this had been good for his self-esteem. He was feeling more isolated than ever.

  When he came to the door to let Krasner in, she recognized him from their earlier encounter. Even in his hungover state, he struck her as virile, earthy, and authentically American in a way that she—a Jewish girl from Brooklyn intent on escaping her background—found irresistible. “I was terribly drawn to Jackson,” she later recalled, “and I fell in love with him—physically, mentally—in every sense of the word. I had a conviction when I met Jackson that he had something important to say. When we began going together, my own work became irrelevant. He was the important thing.”

  Reginald Wilson, an old painter friend of Pollock’s, once said that Pollock “accepted any space that opened up to him.” He was describing Pollock’s dangerous manner of driving a car, but the insight applied equally to his swarming style of painting and also to his relationships. He accepted the space that Krasner now sacrificed to him. She gave up painting, and didn’t try returning to it until the summer of 1948.

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  BEFORE THE MCMILLAN SHOW opened, Krasner took Pollock to see a man she felt he should know about. A Dutchman. Talented. Charismatic. Devoted to painting. A man she had once found as irresistible as she now found Pollock. De Kooning’s studio was on West 21st Street. The couple walked over and Krasner introduced her new man, the “cowboy” painter born in Cody, Wyoming. Two different men, two very different voices: de Kooning with his rough, Dutch drawl; Pollock with his nasal midwestern cadences. Neither man was inclined to say much at all, and Krasner, who had put the humiliation of her early encounter with de Kooning behind her, was probably the one trying hardest to carry the encounter. Back in Rotterdam, as he fretted and fantasized, de Kooning had liked the romantic idea of the American West. Here, now, was a real-life representative of it. He couldn’t help but be intrigued. Pollock, for his part, was alert to the effect that the story of his origins could have on people who were looking for something “authentic,” for an antidote to East Coast urban malaise, and he knowingly played it up. “I have a feeling for the West,” he told an interviewer the following year: “the vast horizontality of the land, for instance.”

  And yet this first, potentially momentous encounter between two artists who would go on to change the face of twentieth-century art somehow misfired. Krasner’s recollection was blunt: “I don’t think either of them was very impressed.”

  People other than de Kooning were, however, beginning to be impressed by Pollock, and Krasner’s estimation of him was soon buttressed by the opinions of others. No opinion, in these early days, was more important than Graham’s. The three artists—Graham, Krasner, and Pollock—were one night walking from Graham’s apartment when they encountered the artist and architect Frederick Kiesler, a friend of Graham’s. “This is Frederick Kiesler,” said Graham. “And this,” he said, turning to Pollock, “is Jackson Pollock, the greatest painter in America.”

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  IN OUR OWN HEDGED and skeptical times, the midcentury avant-garde art scene’s obsession with “greatness”—with who was great, with who was up and who was down—can be exasperating, grating, even comical. Who did these people think they were? Who were they trying to convince?

  Yet “greatness” was undoubtedly a preoccupation—a kind of idée fixe—among New York’s fledgling artists, critics, and dealers at the time. It fed rivalries even as it fostered camaraderie. In the broadest cultural sense, it was a function of optimism, of a largeness of vision that saw potential and grandeur wherever it looked. Drawn precipitously into the global war, its very survival at stake, America itself was increasingly absorbed by the question of its own latent greatness, its potential to mend and remake the world in its own image. Artists were as keyed in to this as the rest of the nation.

  Yet the preoccupation with “greatness” also grew out of something pinched and negative. Modern art in those days was, truly, a minuscule concern. Barely more than a handful of dealers were trying to sell it, and even they had only vague inklings about who might buy it. And so the fight for primacy among New York’s artists was partly a symptom of just how isolated and ignored they felt. If worldly rewards are scarce, otherworldly values come into play.

  Graham’s flattering introduction of Pollock may have been offhand—a spontaneous overflow of high spirits and enthusiasm—but it was rocket fuel for Pollock’s fragile ego. And it had no less an effect on Krasner: Within a year, she was introducing Pollock to Clement Greenberg, the critic who would do more than any other to advance Pollock’s reputation, in exactly the same way. “This guy,” she said, “is a great painter.”

  Greenberg took her seriously. He had spent many hours in the late 1930s talking about and looking at art with Krasner, and these sessions together had played into Greenberg’s decision to turn from literary criticism to art criticism. His early ideas about art were deeply inflected by hers. And so pretty soon, Greenberg had joined the chorus that had started with Krasner and then drawn in Graham. In a review published in The Nation that would ignite Pollock’s career, Greenberg described Pollock as “the strongest painter of his generation and perhaps the greatest one to appear since Miró.”

  Such accolades meant a lot to Pollock, but they meant just as much to Krasner. For her, it was vindication, proof that her instincts were sound—and even more, that the sacrifice of her own artistic ambitions to Pollock’s was worthwhile. Together, the two of them formed a potent, extraordinary double act, and for several years Krasner succeeded in turning Pollock’s life around. Faced with his helplessness, but fired by his almost astral ambition, she devoted herself to looking after him and to advancing his career. Many looking on were dismayed. “It was such a shock,” recalled Bultman, “that a woman so strong could subordinate herself to that extent.”

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  AT THE END OF 1942, Pollock unleashed three paintings in quick succession—Stenographic Figure, Moon Woman, and Male and Female—that were his first major breakthroughs. Bold, sinuous shapes or totemic figures, inspired in part by Picasso, were combined with repeating patterns and an overlay of scribbled notation. The results had real presence. They were unfussy. What they showed was obscure, coded, hard to decipher. But they had the immediacy and urgency of direct feeling.

  Up until this point, Pollock had been involved in a long struggle to find a way forward—a way that felt true to his instincts and inspirations, but sidestepped, or somehow transcended, his problems with drawing. He had taken up doodling. He had made exploratory, free-associative pictures for his analyst. He had explored automatic writing and experimenting uninhibitedly in different media. He was attracted to the idea that success would come to him in a flash of inspiration rather than through sweat and toil, via intuition rather than dogged calculation.

  Now, finally, it was as if something within Pollock had clicked. He had finally found a gear that had traction, and was no longer pedaling in air.

  For large portions of his life, he had been a deadbeat, a no-hoper, a drain on all thos
e around him. He borrowed money. He crashed cars. He bummed cigarettes and drinks. And he relied entirely on the generosity, the almost saintly forbearance, of his brothers and their wives. As an artist, with one eye on his older brothers—and especially on Charles—he had continually talked himself up. But it was obvious to almost everyone that he was not technically gifted, and that this lack of aptitude at drawing compromised everything he tried to do in paint. There were other failures, too—above all, his inability to stay off the drink. The members of his family hoped for the best, but they inevitably feared the worst. The worry was unending.

  One can only imagine, then, what it must have been like for Charles, Frank, and Sande Pollock, for Tom and Rita Benton, for John Graham, and indeed for de Kooning (who was now well aware of Pollock, although their social contacts were only intermittent), to watch as Pollock—allied now with Krasner—turned everyone’s expectations upside down.

  The success, when it came, came all in a rush. There were several good angels involved, smoothing the way. But, apart from Krasner, none played a more prominent role than the flamboyant and headstrong collector and socialite Peggy Guggenheim.

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  GUGGENHEIM HAD COME TO New York with her lover, the Surrealist artist Max Ernst, in July 1941. She had shipped her collection of modern art—it included works by Picasso, Ernst, Miró, Magritte, and Man Ray—ahead of her earlier that year. Her father had gone down with the Titanic in 1912, leaving a very useful inheritance—although it was small change when compared with her fabulously rich relatives. Her uncle was Solomon Guggenheim, who went on to establish, with Hilla von Rebay, the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, later to be renamed the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, in New York. Peggy had fallen in love with artists and bohemia while working in a bookstore in Paris in the early 1920s, and had since become friends with the likes of Marcel Duchamp, Constantin Brancusi, Man Ray, and Djuna Barnes (whose novel Nightwood had been written under Guggenheim’s patronage). In London, she had opened her first gallery, called Guggenheim Jeune, where she showed work by Jean Cocteau, Wassily Kandinsky, and Yves Tanguy, among others. She saw herself, increasingly, not just as a gallerist but as a kind of impresario. She began planning the creation of a museum for modern art in London. The outbreak of war derailed that idea, so she shifted the site of the proposed museum to the Place Vendôme in Paris. But then the Nazis invaded France. Just days before they reached the French capital, Guggenheim fled to the south of France, and from there, several months later, to America.

  In New York, little more than a year after her arrival, she opened a new gallery, Art of This Century, with considerable fanfare. The building occupied two spaces on the seventh floor at 30 West 57th Street, not far from the fledgling Museum of Modern Art. At first, Guggenheim showed only work by her European émigré friends, mostly Surrealists (she and Ernst had married by now). She was not much interested in the American modernists. But she had an assistant, Howard Putzel, who believed passionately in Pollock and now tried to persuade Guggenheim to give him a show.

  Guggenheim was skeptical. When Putzel put forward Stenographic Figure for inclusion in a juried group show for young artists, Guggenheim appraised it in the company of her five fellow jurors, among whom were Marcel Duchamp and Piet Mondrian. The painting was dominated by an arresting bright blue, with a receding black, windowlike rectangle. An undulating, polenta-colored swathe crossed the canvas horizontally. Two totemic figures are seated at a table. The dominant one, at left, is a Picassoid female figure with outstretched, oversized arms and a face constructed of bold strokes, both curved and angular. She has one big, frightening eye and an open maw, red with black teeth. Indecipherable notation, akin to shorthand or a mathematician’s hasty blackboard cogitations, is loosely scrawled across the surface.

  Guggenheim was unimpressed. But Mondrian seemed to have other ideas. A few moments later, unnerved by his continuing absorption in the work, Guggenheim spoke up: “There is absolutely no discipline at all. This young man has serious problems…and painting is one of them. I don’t think he’s going to be included.” But the reticent Mondrian was not to be steamrolled. “I’m not so sure,” he finally said. “I’m trying to understand what’s happening here. I think this is the most interesting work I’ve seen so far in America…You must watch this man.” Since Guggenheim’s admiration for Mondrian ran deep, she didn’t need extra convincing. She included Stenographic Figure in the show, which, when it opened, received strong notices. Robert Coates, The New Yorker’s art critic, was one of the reviewers, and he reserved special praise for Pollock: “We have a real discovery,” he wrote.

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  POLLOCK WAS LAUNCHED. Toward the end of that same, momentous year—1943—Guggenheim (persuaded by Duchamp, Putzel, and others) offered him his first solo show. She gave him a contract, too—something no other American modernist enjoyed. It guaranteed him a regular, much-needed income, and it included a commission to paint a mural for Guggenheim’s apartment. Pollock was working as a janitor at Hilla von Rebay’s Museum of Non-Objective Painting. To prepare for the show, he quit that job, tore down the wall separating his studio from Krasner’s, and got to work.

  The solo exhibition produced by this unexpected gush of industry was a financial flop. Only one drawing sold. But it garnered reviews in no fewer than eight publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Sun, Partisan Review, and The Nation. Suddenly, it seemed, people were paying attention to modern art. “Extravagantly, not to say savagely romantic” was how Edward Alden Jewell described Pollock’s paintings in the Times. To Coates, in The New Yorker, Pollock was “an authentic discovery,” while to a reviewer in Art Digest the artist was “out a-questing…he goes hell-bent at every canvas…plenty of whirl and swirl.” Other critics were less persuaded: Henry McBride, in the Sun, compared the works to “a kaleidoscope that has been insufficiently shaken.” But it scarcely mattered. Never before in America had a young modern artist been showered with so much attention.

  In May 1944, Alfred Barr, the influential curator at the Museum of Modern Art, overcame his reservations about Pollock and acquired his painting The She-Wolf for $650. And in March of the following year, Guggenheim gave Pollock a second show at Art of This Century. It was in his review of this show that Greenberg called Pollock “the strongest painter of his generation.”

  “I cannot,” concluded the critic, “find strong enough words of praise.”

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  DE KOONING WATCHED ALL this unfold with some envy—but also with gathering excitement. He was already forty, eight years older than Pollock. He had sold exactly one painting up to this point. The worldly success that now swirled around Pollock reminded him of his own precariousness and isolation. And yet unlike many of his fellow painters, he did not begrudge the younger man his unlikely triumph. He was seeing more and more of Pollock on the downtown scene, and they got along well. He knew Pollock had struggled to get to this point, and he admired his personality—his independent ways, his “contempt for people who talk.”

  What’s more, de Kooning saw clearly what was going on. He sensed that Pollock’s success was the kind that, with any luck, would rebound and bring benefits to him. There was a buzz building around modern art—art, what’s more, that was being turned out not by some supercilious European Surrealist with patrician airs, but by a young, wild, and previously unknown American. This was crucial. Pollock’s paintings, noted a reviewer in ARTNews, after his first show, “are free of Paris, and contain a disciplined American fury.”

  “Pollock was the leader,” de Kooning said later. “He was the painting cowboy, the first to get recognition…He had come much further than I. I was still seeking my way.”

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  POLLOCK FINALLY HAD WHAT he wanted: Measurable success. Proof against the naysayers.

  And yet, this first worldly breakthrough—which, when compared with the crashing wave of fame it foreshadowed, was but a ripple—still felt frustratingly precarious. All the ac
claim and all the encouraging reviews had failed to translate to sales. Pollock’s contractual arrangement with Guggenheim inspired jealousy among fellow artists, but it was hardly lavish: It kept him and Krasner on a financial knife-edge. Former comrades, meanwhile, from the heavily politicized WPA days bitched and bellyached behind Pollock’s back, which in turn only fueled his insecurities, increasing the pressure he felt to build on his success, and forcing him back to the bottle.

  The commission to paint the mural for Guggenheim was a particular trial. As Pollock prepared for the challenge, he found he was blocked. He procrastinated endlessly. The night before the deadline, he had not even begun. Krasner went to bed that night convinced that the mural would never be completed and that, as a consequence, they would lose Guggenheim’s patronage.

  But the cliff-edge scenario culminated in a famous triumph: Pollock painted the whole work—180 square feet of canvas—in a single night. The result was dazzling: a rhythmic, edge-to-edge configuration of looping, hooked forms in black overlaid with lines in different hues, some of them almost fluorescently bright, each layer confidently carving out space even as neighboring marks roll over it. The work resembled nothing else that had been painted up to that time, either in Europe or in America. It was a triumph of spontaneity, intuition, and risk—a triumph (despite the anguish that led up to it) of nerve.

  And yet this success, too, took its toll. At the party to celebrate the mural’s installation, Pollock got riotously drunk. He ended up wandering into Guggenheim’s living room and urinating in the fireplace.

  The psychic turbulence that had plagued him for so long persisted, and in some ways intensified under the pressure of mixing with Guggenheim’s uptown circle of wealthy collectors, European artists, and miscellaneous bohemians. Having drawn Pollock into her intoxicating but confusing social world, Guggenheim then tried to seduce him (her amorous tastes were notoriously indiscriminate). The result was a clumsy encounter, a one-night stand that Pollock chased down with another frenetic episode of bingeing.