by Gail Levin
Mark prescribed for Pollock a regimen of salt baths, a highly restricted diet, injections of copper and zinc, followed by analysis of his urine and blood samples. Against Mark’s instructions, Pollock continued to drink alcohol, but he also consumed Mark’s own soy-based emulsion at a cost of $200 a month.39 Pollock responded badly to these treatments, exclaiming: “It’s like being skinned alive. And instead of putting lead in my pencil, he must have taken some out.”40
From the beginning of their relationship, Krasner had filled in for Pollock’s brother Sande as Jackson’s caretaker and protector. Yet in dealing with Pollock’s emotional problems, she gradually slipped into behavior that is now often termed “codependency.” Though initially their needs had seemed compatible, as Pollock put her under growing pressure, her health began to break. She suffered from colitis and other painful digestive problems that stress exacerbated. She had become so enmeshed in his addiction that everything he did affected her. As he turned increasingly to greater and greater amounts of alcohol, her life became more and more about trying to stop his drinking. As his caregiver, she was constantly tied into his destructive behavior. His needs, which may have initially appealed to her wish to be maternal, had by now become suffocating.
In the early-morning hours on December 29, 1951, after a night of drinking, Pollock was driving home alone in his Cadillac, going down the dark roads toward his house in Springs. At the Louse Point intersection on Old Stone Highway, he lost control of the big car and veered off the road, catching several mailboxes and continuing onto the other side, hitting a utility pole and a tree. The accident destroyed the car, but Pollock was able to walk away from the wreckage.41 Now his drinking was compromising his safety. On March 30, 1952, Pollock wrote to Ossorio, “My experience with Dr. Mark which got more involved each weak [sic] until a crisis last week—I’m still a little dazed by the whole experience.”42
Ossorio recalled Pollock telling him that Mark said “he should eat no fowl that can’t take off at fifty miles an hour, such as wild duck, and his range of understanding was enough to see the humor in it.”43 In Paris Ossorio had befriended the avant-garde painter and sculptor Jean Dubuffet and amassed a collection of his work. Meanwhile he was actively pursuing his interest in Asian culture, including Japanese art and Zen, and it’s possible he discussed Zen concepts of “action” with Pollock.
Among the books Ossorio acquired that year was Langdon Warner’s new The Enduring Art of Japan.44 Warner was a Harvard professor, Asian art expert, and onetime student of Okakura Tenshin, a Japanese scholar who became the first head of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ Asian art division in 1910.45 Warner was a raconteur, and he taught art history at Harvard when Ossorio was a student.46 Ossorio found Warner’s book and his teachings very valuable because they introduced him to Zen and to Daisetz T. Suzuki’s 1934 book, Introduction to Zen Buddhism, a book much read in art circles in New York during the 1950s.47 In his book Warner wrote, “In the practice of putting down their paintings in ink on paper Zen artists discovered that the principle of muga (it is not I that am doing this) opens the gate for the necessary essential truth to flow in. When the self does not control the drawing, meaning must. The principle runs all through Zen teachings especially where action is involved.”48
The concept of action also surfaces in Harold Rosenberg’s article “The American Action Painters,” which appeared in Art News in December 1952. Rosenberg wrote, “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined.”49 Rosenberg’s work on this landmark article, in which he first coined the term “action painting,” appears to coincide with the publication of Warner’s new book.
Around the time Rosenberg released his article, Pollock decided to leave Parsons’s gallery as soon as his contract expired at the end of 1951. He had become disappointed by her failure to sell his paintings. Nonetheless, Parsons asked Pollock to remain until May 1952 so that she could try to get some business from his last show. That spring he moved to Sidney Janis’s gallery, which was planning to give Pollock a solo show. Janis wrote Pollock that Greenberg had “reacted very nicely to your new things.”50
Pollock’s move to Janis proved traumatic for Krasner, who lost Parsons as her dealer. Parsons recollected, “I know that Lee…was upset when I decided not to continue showing her work. But, as I told Lee, it had nothing to do with thinking she wasn’t a very fine painter, it was that the association was too painful.”51 As for Krasner, she later reported that these words from Parsons “put me into such as state of shock. I couldn’t paint for nine months.”52
This loss for Krasner cannot have helped her relations with her troubled husband.
Pollock’s conflicts, his disappointment with his dealer, and his frustrated desire to have a child, despite his total disregard for the responsibilities involved in parenthood, fueled his anger at Krasner, who seemed to deny him his wishes. Hence he displaced some of his resentment by flirting in public with other women in their circle, especially those younger and more attractive, such as Mercedes Carles Matter. Often this behavior, then escalating, occurred in front of Lee.
Mercedes was a woman so desired that sleeping with her conveyed status among New York artists. Mercedes was no ingénue—she liked to drink with the boys at the Cedar Bar (aka the Cedar Tavern) and to flirt with them at the Club, where liquor flowed freely and dancing was wild.53 Cynthia Navaretta, who also frequented the Club, recalled Mercedes as very striking, self-confident, and “a pirate with everyone’s husband.”54 Though Krasner chose to avoid the Club and the Cedar, she could not keep Pollock away from either place.
The possibility that Jackson not only had flirted but had become sexually involved with Mercedes has been dismissed along with the indiscreet boasts he made about his sexual escapades. Though discounted as mere bravado, some of Pollock’s claims appear to have been true. Rita Benton, the wife of Pollock’s favorite teacher, Thomas Hart Benton, told Gene Thaw (coauthor of the Pollock catalogue raisonné) that she gave the young Pollock “his baptism of fire in bed.”55
By 1951, Mercedes was having an intense affair with Harold Rosenberg. Both Mercedes and Rosenberg had histories of multiple lovers and were married to long-suffering partners. She had already had well-known liaisons with Gorky, Hofmann, George McNeil, and Philip Guston. Though Mercedes usually went for a man because she admired his art, Harold was an exception.56 Rosenberg, for his part, usually had affairs with women art writers, but he was not opposed to propositioning young women artists.57
Harold and Mercedes, both dexterous and experienced at deceiving their paramours, had met each other’s match. Mercedes was able to tease Rosenberg with her other liaisons in the art world, but none would have had the same impact on him as her admiration for and public flirtation with Pollock, whom Life magazine had already turned into a celebrity and who was on his way to becoming a cultural icon.
In surviving fragments of Rosenberg’s journal for May 1951, he wrote about his affair with Mercedes, while fending off her “rage”: “She believes that I do not love her and cannot be cured of the pain of having read in my notebook that an affair is the conquest of the strange & that one wills to return to his wife as to himself.”58
In these same pages, he remarks how much he admired the fiction his wife was then writing; he repeatedly documents his own heavy drinking and the resulting hangovers; he comments on his friendship with Bill de Kooning, which was then so close that Rosenberg could stop by unannounced at all times of the day and night, inviting himself to join Bill and Elaine at parties to which he had not been invited.59
At the time of the journal, Rosenberg was about to depart for Paris, where his wife, May, had taken their daughter, Patia, to get away from his too-conspicuous affair with Mercedes. In June Rosenberg noted that he “had felt disturbed after leaving M [Mercedes] but today I hardly thought of her excep
t very distantly. May’s letters are very cheerful & discerning.”
On June 16, Rosenberg reported that Herbert Matter was uttering nonsense when he said that Clement Greenberg “had a high opinion of me, liked me, etc.” Though Herbert Matter described Greenberg as “pathological” and attributed his problems to alcoholism, Rosenberg still concluded “that C [Clement] never had an idea under any condition & is essentially empty & rattle-brained.”60
Greenberg and Rosenberg were competing with each other to be the greatest art critic of their time. Because Greenberg had premised his own authority on discovering and promoting Pollock, Rosenberg saw that he could take Greenberg down a peg by denigrating Pollock. Whether or not Lee believed that Mercedes’s flirtation with Jackson had concluded in a sexual encounter, she must have felt betrayed by her friend’s intimate involvement with Rosenberg, whom she saw as trying to subvert Pollock’s status. In any case, the two former friends had become estranged.
Rosenberg was also able to build his own authority by promoting Bill de Kooning over Pollock. After all, Rosenberg had already been sleeping with de Kooning’s wife before he got together with Mercedes. Though she loyally promoted Bill, Elaine de Kooning was as spirited and as sexually active as Mercedes. And Bill paid no attention, because he was preoccupied with loves of his own.
Ultimately for Rosenberg, his weapon against Greenberg was his pen. His agenda did not escape the young artist and critic Paul Brach, who accused him of trying to bring Jackson down. Rosenberg implicitly confirmed Brach’s accusation, replying, “You’re a smart kid.”61 What escaped Brach and Pollock’s biographers alike was that Rosenberg’s strike at Pollock was inevitably colored by his emotions over his affairs with both Mercedes and Elaine.
Mercedes was jealous of Elaine. Rosenberg noted in his journal, “I was quite drunk & reluctant to go to bed tho she [Mercedes] was hoping I would not go to the Club, since Elaine was there.”62
He went instead to the Cedar Bar and the next day reported, “M [Mercedes] was in a terrifying state this morning because I had ‘gone to E [Elaine de Kooning]’ at the Cedar.”63 Mercedes, venting her jealousy of Elaine to Harold, had to have realized that her own high regard for Pollock, as well as her history with both Pollock and Krasner, provoked Rosenberg, even while he tried to undermine Greenberg. It is not clear if Mercedes saw Rosenberg’s swipe at Pollock as collateral damage in her affair, or as something that added value to the power of her own conquests.
In the meantime, as Krasner and many others were well aware, Elaine had begun a long-term affair with Thomas Hess, the powerful critic and editor of Art News, though she continued to see Rosenberg long into the late 1950s and 1960s.64 In their biography of de Kooning, Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan state: “Many, in fact, believed that [Elaine] chose to sleep with the two critics in order to promote her husband’s career. That act of devotion was, however, unnecessary; they were already committed to de Kooning.”65 It should be noted that these biographers fail to account for the fickleness of critics, whose loyalties do not necessarily last forever.
Krasner was among those who believed that Elaine slept with the two powerful critics as part of her strategy to promote her husband’s work.66 Krasner not only disapproved of the kind of marriage Elaine and Bill had, in which both partners pursued sexual relations with others, but she was especially offended by Elaine’s sexual liaisons with the two critics because they came to favor Bill’s work over Jackson’s.67
If the gossip about all these infidelities was not enough for Krasner to bear, she also had to be hospitable to another beautiful and much younger woman painter—Helen Frankenthaler, who was Clement Greenberg’s new girlfriend. The couple arrived as the Pollocks’ houseguests in the summer of 1952. At the time, Frankenthaler was in her early twenties, literally a generation younger than Krasner and Greenberg. She was the daughter of a New York superior court judge from a well-established German-Jewish family, the kind that often looked down on poor Russian-Jewish immigrants like Krasner’s parents and older siblings or, for that matter, Greenberg’s parents. A photograph of the foursome on the beach in East Hampton documents the visit and shows a slender Krasner looking tiny next to Frankenthaler’s more buxom figure.68 Frankenthaler’s threat to Krasner, however, was not as a glamorous younger woman artist who might try to take her famous husband away from her, but as one who would respond to Pollock’s example and method, then enjoy the status afforded by her brief acquaintance with him. Frankenthaler became linked to Pollock’s celebrity and style, but Greenberg, not Pollock, was her ticket to fame. By 1961, the artist Morris Louis, a Greenberg disciple, remarked that Frankenthaler served as “a bridge between Pollock and what was possible.”69
Krasner, however, took these challenges in stride and kept her focus on helping Pollock get ahead. She was responsible for arranging his first solo show at the Janis Gallery (located across the hall from Betty Parsons at 15 East Fifty-seventh Street) from November 10 to 29, 1952. Janis, who had known Krasner since before he published his 1944 book, Abstract and Surrealist Art, recalled that Pollock had dropped by his new gallery in 1948. “At the time he was showing with Betty Parsons, so I didn’t say anything. Finally he left. Then, almost five years later, Lee Krasner came to us and said that Jackson was no longer with Betty Parsons and he was looking for a new gallery.”
Knowing that in recent years Pollock had had a show every year, Janis asked her, “Don’t you think, Lee, that the market is rather saturated with Pollock’s work?”
She responded, “Sidney, the surface hasn’t even been scratched.”
“And how right she was!” he recalled. “Anyway, we got together, Lee and I, and we had a verbal contract, and we gave Jackson his first show…a magnificent show. He had changed from his ‘drip’ image to a kind of impasto, pigment surface, and it was more figurative, but still had the Jackson Pollock bite. The show wasn’t too successful.”70
Janis did point out that later he was able to sell some of these same paintings to museums. Greenberg, who by now felt Pollock’s “inspiration was flagging,” declined to review the show at Janis.71 In the New York Times, however, Howard Devree was more positive about Pollock than he had ever been before, comparing some of his new work to that of Kandinsky. He saw what he called a “source of inspiration with a use of deep space instead of obsession with mere surface.”72 Devree’s opinion meant much less to Pollock and Krasner than Greenberg’s silence, which really pained both of them.
A week after the Janis exhibition, Pollock’s “first retrospective show” took place at Bennington College in Vermont, organized by Greenberg, who had handpicked eight paintings for the show. He had also written a note for the catalogue (a folder). His belief in Pollock is clear, though he had his own idea of Pollock’s strengths: “Most of the paintings on view are major works, major in a way that very little American art has been up to now. That is, they determine the main tradition of painting at their point in time.”73
Krasner and Pollock borrowed Ossorio’s station wagon to drive up to Bennington for the opening, accompanied in the car by Greenberg and Frankenthaler. They planned to make an unhurried trip, stopping at the home of the sculptor David Smith and Jean Freas in Bolton’s Landing, New York, on Lake George. Greenberg later told a biographer that Krasner had a “tantrum” after he, Pollock, Smith, and Frankenthaler spent a long time in Smith’s studio having drinks and looking at his new work.74 Krasner must have panicked, fearing that Pollock would be too drunk to show up at his own opening. She insisted that they leave at once for Bennington without touching the carefully prepared supper.75
According to Freas, the Pollocks stopped in Bolton’s Landing because a reporter for “the March of Time was coming” and expected to film both artists. Freas also described Krasner’s arrival “wearing a fur coat—because by then they were getting some recognition—and I had made this really nice meal and so forth. And she said, ‘Oh, we couldn’t possibly eat here.’ Pollock was—if you even spoke to him he’d turn red. H
e just—and he looked thoroughly miserable, he was sober.”76 If, however, as Greenberg recalled, Pollock had already been drinking, Freas might have been wrong.
Krasner’s insistence that Pollock stop drinking in Bolton’s Landing offended Freas, who in retrospect appears to have been naive: “At this point they were like—she was calling every shot, and he stayed wherever Mama said. She was very ambitious, which I don’t—I’m not rebuking her for that—but she was very nasty, to me—and I know why she was nasty: because I was young and pretty, and she was—I think she may have been the ugliest woman I’ve ever seen. The god that made her was not kind to her. She was behind the door when the looks—she had this quivering upper lip, like this, and—I don’t know what she became later on, but I know she had this trembling, thick upper lip.”77
Freas said that Krasner was “very tough. You talk about tough. Whoa! She was the toughest woman in the art world. No question about that.”78 A generation younger than Krasner, Freas had just graduated from Sarah Lawrence two years earlier. Freas married Smith, bore him two daughters, and then divorced.79 As “Jean Smith,” she later became a TV journalist and writer, but she never competed as an artist with David Smith, even working in the same arena, as Krasner did with Pollock.