Jackson Pollock

by Deborah Solomon

  The summer was not without friction. Lee resented that Pollock had invited his family to visit. When his mother and brother Sande and sister-in-law Arloie showed up in late August for a two-week visit she had them stay at a motel rather than put them up at the house. And she didn’t get along with Pollock’s friends either. One day Pollock introduced her to Bernard Schardt, a former classmate of his from the League who was also summering in Provincetown. Schardt and his wife immediately sensed that “Lee didn’t think we were good enough for her,” and the two couples never got together again. Such was Lee’s devotion to Pollock’s career that she had no time or patience for people who couldn’t help him get ahead. But like most artists’ wives, she was a gracious, charming hostess to collectors, art dealers, and anyone else who could advance his career. That summer she invited Howard Putzel to spend two weeks in Provincetown. He had just left his job at Art of This Century and was planning on opening his own gallery that fall. Putzel stayed in the house.

  Besides inviting his family for a visit Pollock also extended an invitation to Ed and Wally Strautin, an older couple who had once been his neighbors on Eighth Street. Ed was a house painter and Wally was his wife. “So let us hear from you—telling, you will be up,” Pollock urged the couple at the end of August. “It is really grand now not quite as warm as it was—but still damned swell swimming.” The couple never visited, but the invitation stands as a reflection of Pollock’s hospitality.

  Back in New York, Pollock was feeling sufficiently composed to consider taking on a new project. He listened with interest when his friend Reuben Kadish suggested that the two of them try making prints under the guidance of Stanley William Hayter. A British-born artist, Hayter had an appreciable reputation as a master printmaker, painter, and the founder of a workshop called Atelier 17, which was then located on Eighth Street. He was highly esteemed among the Surrealists for his so-called automatic engravings, in which sweeping rhythms of line give off an illusion of spontaneous creation. Hayter’s workshop was patronized by many of the Surrealists, which made it the sort of clubby place that Pollock tried to avoid. But Kadish felt sure that Pollock could benefit from Hayter’s instruction. “I inveigled Jackson into trying it,” Kadish recalled, “because I thought his work had a kinship to Hayter’s prints.” His opinion was shared by an Art News critic who had noted, two years earlier, that Pollock resembled Hayter “in his general whirling figures.”

  In the course of the next six months or so Pollock visited Atelier 17 on many occasions. Most of the time he went in at night, after the other artists had departed. He sometimes stopped by in the afternoon, but only if the workshop wasn’t crowded. The sculptor Peter Grippe (who took over Atelier 17 when Hayter returned to Paris), was once working on a print when he glanced up at the window and saw Pollock standing outside. He was peering in, looking to see who was there. Then he walked away.

  At Hayter’s workshop Pollock learned how to make engravings. He worked mainly with a burin, a short angled steel tool used to cut lines into metal plates. It was slow, tedious work. If Pollock applied too much pressure to the burin, the point broke. If he didn’t apply enough pressure, the plate swung around into another position. The eleven engravings he completed at the workshop reveal his difficulty with the technique. His lines are generally awkward and labored, as if he drew them with his left hand. “He wasn’t happy with the prints,” recalled Reuben Kadish, who helped Pollock pull a few trial proofs. Hayter, who also helped Pollock print proofs, suggested that he consider printing editions, but Pollock wasn’t interested. He took the plates home and dumped them in a corner of his studio. They would be printed posthumously when Lee discovered them two decades later.

  Pollock’s earlier experiences with printmaking had been equally unfulfilling. During his years on the Project, he had occasionally visited the printing workshop of Theodore Wahl, on Minetta Lane. “Jackson wasn’t very serious,” Wahl recalled. “He’d come up and say, ‘I want to do a lithograph.’ I’d flip him a stone, and he’d make a lithograph. He’d come back six weeks later, and it was the same thing. The problem with Jackson and printmaking is that you have to stick to the medium in printmaking—it’s very technical—and Jackson couldn’t stick to the medium.” One day Wahl left Pollock alone in the workshop for a few hours. By the time he returned Pollock had abandoned his lithograph in frustration and helped himself to some tubes of oil paints from the storage closet. He was sitting at a small wooden table peacefully absorbed in a painting he was working on. As Wahl drew closer he was dismayed to realize that Pollock was using the tabletop as his painting surface. Wahl was furious and threw him out of the workshop.

  Pollock was not a master craftsman. His efforts at printmaking turned out to be no more rewarding than his earlier efforts at sculpture and collage. The more technical a medium, the more difficulty he seemed to have. His hands were not graceful; his fingers were large and thick. His right hand was missing part of the index finger lost in his boyhood accident with an ax. It was almost as if his hands got in the way of his art, preventing him from recording sensation as quickly as he experienced it. Genius is often defined as a range of ability, but Pollock’s genius lay in his narrow, obsessive need to escape the technical demands of art. The medium he chose was painting, but even as a painter, he needed to escape the rules of his craft. Appropriately, he soon would invent a painting method that freed his hands from contact with the canvas.

  In the fall of 1944 Pollock began to prepare for his second show at Art of This Century, scheduled for the following March. The twenty or so paintings belonging to this period are generally considered less successful as a group than his 1943 paintings, but it is easy to be sympathetic to them when one takes account of what Pollock was aiming for. At this juncture he turned his attention to questions raised by his mural—mainly, how could he achieve the “allover” intensity of the mural while freeing his art from the constraints of the human figure? Over the next two years Pollock continued to paint the human figure while subjecting it to decompositions of frightening intensity. The result finally was that the towering totems in his mural were broken down into anatomical fragments, such as disembodied eyes that glare from the interstices of abstract images. Pollock was struggling toward abstraction, or pure painterly expression. By breaking down the symbolic figures that had inhabited his art since he first saw Guernica five years earlier, Pollock also can be said to have been struggling, on a psychological level, to dispense with Picasso’s influence. His 1944–46 paintings are the most violent of his career.

  Among the paintings dating to this period are five untitled works that have horses as their subject, and they appear to have been inspired by the equine imagery in Picasso’s “bullfight paintings.” A painting that has been catalogued as Horse (Fig. 19) shows a mournful-looking horse lying on the ground, trying to raise itself on its forelegs. Clearly the beast has been injured. At Pollock’s hands, Picasso’s creation has been twisted and truncated and made to suffer both anatomical and spatial dislocations. Even the use of color is violent, with purples, reds, and golds colliding senselessly. Picasso often said that one must destroy in order to create. Of course he didn’t mean that one must destroy Picasso, but that was the project that Pollock seems to have set for himself in Horse and many other works.

  One of the better-known paintings from this period is There Were Seven in Eight (Fig. 20), a large horizontal canvas that measures about twelve feet long. The image consists of a wiry tangle of lines set against a background of densely packed forms. The lines, which do not delineate anything, slash the picture’s surface with unruly force, and one senses Pollock’s eagerness to be able to express himself here solely through line. As in his Mural, Pollock apparently started this work by painting eight totems, and parts of them are still visible; eyes, heads, and various anatomical fragments hover in the background. Seven in Eight, which is hard not to find labored and overwrought, was difficult for Pollock to complete. He kept going back to it, over a period of sev
eral months, to rework the surface. When Lee came into his studio one day and suggested that the painting looked finished, Pollock disagreed. He said he was trying to “veil the image,” to cover up any remnants of the figures in the background. He would continue to work in a “veiling the image” style for the next two years, until he had phased out figuration altogether and found a way to express himself through line alone.

  In the year that had passed since Pollock had completed his mural hardly anyone had seen it, for the simple reason that it was hanging in his patron’s apartment. But Peggy Guggenheim was eager to show it off to the public, convinced that it represented the high point of Pollock’s career. On March 19, 1945, she held a reception at her apartment to coincide with the opening of Pollock’s second show. More than a hundred guests showed up, and their reactions to the mural were predictably varied.

  Among the viewers was Clement Greenberg, of The Nation. He admired the mural enormously. “People said it just went on and on like glorified wallpaper,” he later said. “I thought it was great.” Seeing the mural marked a decisive moment in Greenberg’s intellectual life. It was then that he realized that Pollock was something more than just a talented painter; he was nothing less than the one American artist who could give expression to the complex innovations of European painting while still managing to look quintessentially American. “I wanted to see somebody come along,” Greenberg explained, “who could match the French so we could stop being minor painters over here.” In Pollock he found him, an artist who had not only assimilated Picasso but had gone on to challenge him. Pollock, he believed, was the legitimate heir to the modernist tradition in art.

  The two men became close friends. With Pollock’s encouragement, Greenberg began stopping by 46 East Eighth Street on a regular basis to look around his studio and see how his work was progressing. A painter himself, Greenberg had grown up in the Bronx, the son of Polish immigrants, and had started drawing at the age of four. “I copied everything,” he once said. “I got pretty good at working from nature.” After studying literature at Syracuse University, he started his writing career as a literary critic but turned to art criticism in the forties, writing reviews for The Nation and longer, more theoretical pieces for Partisan Review. He had great confidence in his own opinions, which gave him an air of authority in spite of his ordinary appearance and polite, sometimes clumsy manner. On his visits to Pollock’s studio Greenberg was always terse in his appraisals. “Mmm,” he might say, admiring a painting, “that’s good.” He provided Pollock with essential support at a time when few people realized how good Pollock was.

  Reviewing Pollock’s recent show, Greenberg was ardent in his praise. “Pollock’s second one-man show at Art of This Century establishes him, in my opinion, as the strongest painter of his generation and perhaps the greatest to appear since Miró. . . . There has been a certain amount of self-deception in School of Paris art since the exit of cubism. In Pollock there is absolutely none, and he is not afraid to look ugly—all profoundly original art looks ugly at first.”

  But no other critics seemed to like the show—not the few who reviewed it. Maude Riley, writing in Art Digest, confessed straightforwardly: “I really don’t get what it’s all about.” Parker Tyler, writing in the Surrealist magazine View, likened Pollock’s designs to “baked macaroni.” Robert Coates, of The New Yorker, an early admirer of Pollock’s work, didn’t bother reviewing his second show and neither did the critic of The New York Times.

  By the time Pollock’s second show closed, none of the paintings had sold. And in spite of the flurry of publicity he was still fairly obscure. “At this time,” Greenberg explained, “Ben Shahn was considered the best living American painter, and he sold.” Pollock, by comparison, had yet to be invited to participate in such routine art events as the Whitney Museum “Annuals,” yearly surveys of contemporary art that generally featured well over a hundred artists. That Greenberg had singled out Pollock as “the strongest painter of his generation” had little effect on his reputation, for Greenberg had no more of an audience than Pollack did. Five years would pass before Pollock and his tiny supporting cast traveled from the periphery of the art world to center stage.

  Figure 1. Camp with Oil Rig, undated. (Courtesy Mr. and Mrs. John W. Mecom, Jr.)

  Figure 2. Self-Portrait, undated. (The Pollock-Krasner Foundation)

  Figure 3. Going West, undated. (National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Thomas Hart Benton)

  Figure 4. Albert Pinkham Ryder, Sentimental Journey. (Courtesy Canajoharie Library and Art Gallery)

  Figure 5. Thomas Hart Benton, Moonlight Over South Beach. (Courtesy Sotheby’s, Inc., New York)

  Figure 6. Thomas Hart Benton, The Ballad of the Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley, 1934. (Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas)

  Figure 7. Mural study for Greenwich House, detail, undated. (Courtesy Charles Pollock)

  Figure 8. T.P’s Boat in Menemsha Pond, undated. (The New Britain Museum of Art; gift of T. P. Benton)

  Figure 9. Seascape, 1934. (The Pollock-Krasner Foundation)

  Figure 10. Untitled (Naked Man with Knife), undated. (The Tate Gallery, London)

  Figure 11. Eskimo mask, Hooper Bay Region of Alaska. (University Museum, University of Pennsylvania)

  Figure 12. Birth, undated. (The Tate Gallery, London)

  Figure 13. Stenographie Figure, 1942. (The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Mr. and Mrs. Walter Bareiss Fund)

  Figure 14. Male and Female, 1942. (Philadelphia Museum of Art; gift of Mr. H. Lloyd)

  Figure 15. Vasily Kandinsky, Striped, 1934. (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum)

  Figure 16. The She-Wolf, 1943. (Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York)

  Figure 17. Composition with Pouring II, 1943. (Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution)

  Figure 18. Pollock in front of the portable mural commissioned by Peggy Guggenheim. (Courtesy Archives of American Art)

  Figure 19. Horse (Private collection)

  Figure 20. There Were Seven in Eight, ca. 1945. (The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Mr. and Mrs. Walter Bareiss Fund and purchase)

  Figure 21. Troubled Queen, undated. (Private collection)

  Figure 22. Sounds in the Grass: Shimmering Substance, 1946. (The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Mr. and Mrs. Albert Lewin and Mrs. Sam A. Lewisohn funds)

  Figure 23. Cathedral, 1947. (Dallas Museum of Art; gift of Mr. and Mrs. Bernard J. Reis)

  Figure 24. White Cockatoo, 1948. (Private collection)

  Figure 25. Pollock pretends to paint Number 32, 1950 for photographer Rudy Burckhardt.

  Figure 26. Number 24, 1951, 1951. (Private collection)

  10

  The Springs

  1945–46

  In August 1945 Pollock and Lee took the train to East Hampton to spend a few weeks with their friends Reuben and Barbara Kadish. The Kadishes were renting a two-room fishing shack in Amagansett, a tiny village near the eastern tip of Long Island. While the house was not very comfortable—it was small and cramped, with a leaky roof and no piped water or electricity—any inconveniences were more than compensated for by the splendor of the surroundings. Pollock took immediately to the area, with its pristine beaches and flat, tranquil land, and his vacation was a happy time for him. “I just remember this lovely person and what a nice time we all had,” Barbara Kadish once commented. To her husband Pollock was an endearing friend. One day the two men went fishing, and Pollock hooked a blowfish. As he reeled it out of the water the fish puffed up. “Jack was jumping up and down,” Kadish recalled. “He was so excited.”

  The Kadishes had rented the summer house with hopes of purchasing their own house in the area, and though Pollock had no such intention, one day he and Lee accompanied their hosts on a house-hunting outing. A real estate agent showed them a farmhouse on Fireplace Road, in the hamlet of The Springs. As Lee was looking around the house she started thinking that maybe she and Pollock should move t
o the country. Certainly it would help him overcome his drinking, she thought, as he seemed so relaxed in the country. But when she suggested that they sublet their Eighth Street apartment and rent a house in Springs, Pollock looked astounded. “Leave New York?” he said. “Are you crazy?” Lee admitted it was a preposterous idea. “I don’t even know why I said it.”

  But moving to Springs no longer seemed crazy after Pollock returned to his hot fifth-floor walk-up on Eighth Street. The moments of well-being he had enjoyed in the country vanished upon his return, and he began to think seriously about moving to Long Island. Several people he knew were already living out there. The critic Harold Rosenberg had a summer place in Springs, and Robert Motherwell had recently bought some property in East Hampton, where he was building a house.

  Within a week Pollock had made up his mind: he and Lee were buying a house in the country. Lee was surprised by his decision. “Jackson,” she reminded him, “we have no money to buy a house. Have you gone out of your mind?” The next morning they were on the train.