They returned to Fireplace Road, in Springs. The house they had seen the previous week had been sold but another had become available. The Victorian farmhouse, built in 1893 by Henry Hale Parsons, stood two and a half stories, with pale-brown shingles and a wide-eaved roof. In back, wetland meadows stretched for nearly a mile before sloping off into the waters of Accabonac Creek. To Pollock and Krasner it was a perfect country house, complete with five grassy acres and a small barn that could be converted into a studio. The house had neither heating nor plumbing, but these were minor details to the excited young couple. No obstacle seemed insurmountable at the moment, not even the $5000 price. After making a few inquiries, they found a local bank willing to give them a mortgage of $3000 if they could produce $2000. Pollock and Lee had forty dollars between them.
Back in New York, Lee paid a visit to Peggy Guggenheim, who was sick in bed with the flu. Lee told her all about the dream house in Springs, then mused wistfully, “If only I had two thousand dollars.” Peggy Guggenheim reminded Lee that she ran a gallery, not a bank.
Lee returned the next day. She told Peggy Guggenheim she felt sure that Pollock would stop drinking if he moved to the country. “Why don’t you get a job?” Peggy Guggenheim suggested. Lee said she couldn’t get a job because she had to paint. “Why don’t you go ask Sam Kootz for the money?” Peggy asked sarcastically, referring to an art dealer who had opened up a gallery down the street earlier that year and to whom several of her artists had already defected. So Lee went to talk to Sam Kootz. Sure, Kootz said, he’d be happy to lend Lee the money—providing, of course, that Pollock switched to his gallery. Lee brought the news back to Peggy Guggenheim. She exploded. “How could you do such a thing? And with Kootz of all people! Over my dead body you’ll go to Kootz!”
Peggy Guggenheim eventually agreed to lend them the $2000, for the simple reason that “it was the only way to get rid of Lee.” She worked out a new two-year contract with Pollock effective March 1946. Pollock’s monthly stipend was raised from $150 to $300, with Peggy Guggenheim subtracting $50 a month until the loan was paid off. In exchange she acquired ownership of his entire output save for one painting a year, which Pollock was allowed to keep for himself. (This contract became the basis of a well-publicized lawsuit in 1961, when Peggy Guggenheim charged that Pollock had defrauded her by failing to turn over fifteen paintings created during the two-year period. She sued Lee for $122,000. The suit dragged on for four years before Peggy Guggenheim decided to drop the charges and accept in settlement two Pollock paintings then worth $400.)
That October, a few weeks before their move, Pollock and Lee decided that they wanted to get married. As one who could be thoroughly conventional in matters of social conduct, Pollock felt it would be wrong to live together without the sanction of marriage in the conservative community of Springs; the neighbors might take offense. Lee agreed, and one day she asked him when they’d be going to City Hall to apply for a marriage license. “City Hall?” Pollock said. “That’s a place to get a dog license. This has got to be a church wedding or else no wedding at all.”
Lee, who had been raised as an Orthodox Jew, was adamantly opposed to marrying in a church. Pollock was sympathetic and offered to get married in a synagogue. Lee set about searching for a rabbi willing to marry them, but she couldn’t find one, and arguments erupted. She felt exasperated by Pollock’s insistence that they be married by a representative of organized religion—any religion. It seemed irrational to her, for as far as she knew, Pollock’s parents not only failed to observe their faith but were “anti-religious—that’s a fact.” In later life she once commented that Pollock wanted to marry in a church to compensate for the lack of churchgoing in his childhood.
As to the question of whom they should ask to serve as the two witnesses to the ceremony, Pollock entrusted the matter to Lee. She eventually decided on May Rosenberg, a close friend of hers, and Peggy Guggenheim, who she felt should be included for business reasons. One never knew with Peggy, Lee reasoned; she might be insulted if they didn’t ask her to participate, and surely they didn’t want to alienate Pollock’s patron. Besides, Lee thought, if Peggy served as a witness, maybe she would offer to give them a reception. It would be good for Pollock’s reputation.
Bubbling with excitement, Lee walked over to Tenth Street to see May Rosenberg. “Jackson wants to get married,” she told her, “and he wants you to be a witness.”
“Harold and I would love to be witnesses,” May Rosenberg told her.
“No,” Lee said, “not Harold, just you.”
Next Lee went up to Fifty-seventh Street to talk to Peggy Guggenheim, who said she’d be happy to be the second witness. But then a week later she realized that she had previously agreed to meet a collector for lunch on the day of the wedding. She told Lee she couldn’t be a witness. “Besides,” she said, “you’re married enough.”
When Lee told Pollock that Peggy Guggenheim had backed out, Pollock said he was backing out too. If the wedding was going to be this complicated, the wedding was off. Lee ignored him, and she and May Rosenberg took care of the details. “I got out the phone book,” May Rosenberg recollected, “and called every church listed. When they heard that an Orthodox Jew was marrying a Presbyterian, they weren’t interested. Finally I tried the Dutch Reformed Church. They agreed to do it. I told them we wouldn’t be having any people and we needed a second witness. They thought I was from out of town. Who in New York doesn’t have two friends?”
On October 25, 1945, at one in the afternoon, Jackson Pollock and Lenore Krassner were married in a ten-minute ceremony at the Marble Collegiate Church, at Fifth Avenue and Twenty-ninth Street. May Rosenberg served as a witness. The second witness was August Schulz, a janitor who worked at the church. After the ceremony May Rosenberg took the newlyweds to Schrafft’s for lunch.
The first Monday in November 1945 Pollock and Lee packed their belongings into a meat truck they had borrowed from May Rosenberg’s brother, a butcher, and drove the hundred or so miles from New York to Springs. The rural hamlet would later become part of the most fashionable art colony in the country, but in 1945 the southern fork of Long Island was frontier territory compared to places like Woodstock or Provincetown. Its best-known painters were long gone. William Merritt Chase and Childe Hassam had settled in Southampton in the late nineteenth century, when painting from nature was still the object of art. Thomas Moran, who died in 1926, once had a studio in downtown East Hampton, where he painted panoramic views of the Rocky Mountains. The area was discovered by Surrealists during Word War II, when André Breton, Max Ernst, and their friends could often be spotted at Coast Guard Beach. As for the hamlet of Springs, the first settler from the New York art crowd was Harold Rosenberg. He liked to point out that he purchased his house in the year “1944 B.J.—Before Jackson.”
Pollock and Lee spent their first months in Springs making their new house habitable. They tore down walls and turned the first floor of the house into one big room. The floor was painted white enamel, which reflected the light and filled the room with brightness. Together they decorated, hanging paintings on walls, plants from the ceilings, and copper pots on the pegboard in the kitchen. They collected stones, shells, driftwood, glass shards, and curiously shaped gourds and displayed their finds on window ledges and tabletops. The upstairs had three rooms, one of which was sunny and spacious and faced Accabonac Creek. They chose it as their bedroom, furnishing it simply with twin beds and a heavy oak chest. A second bedroom, which faced north and looked out on treetops, became Pollock’s temporary studio. Within a year he would move out into the barn.
Neither the fresh coats of paint nor the modest decorations could ease the harsh conditions under which Pollock and Lee spent their first winter in the country. The ramshackle farmhouse was chilly and drafty, and their only source of heat was a coal-burning stove in the kitchen. At night the house got so cold that the water in the toilet sometimes froze, and Pollock would have to melt it with a blowtorch in the m
orning. To make matters worse, it was hard to get coal for the stove, since wartime shortages persisted even though the war was over. “No coal as yet and wood burns like paper at $21 a cord,” Pollock noted in a postcard to Ed Strautin, his former neighbor on Eighth Street, soon after his arrival.
In spite of the hardships, Pollock’s earliest letters from Springs reveal a profound fondness for his new surroundings. “I opened the door this morning and never touched ground until I hit the side of the barn five hundred yards away,” he wrote in the postcard to Strautin. “Such winds. It’s all very nice, tho a little tuff on a city slicker.”
His enthusiasm did not waver as the winter months wore on. “It was good to get your Xmas card,” he wrote to Louis Bunce, who was now teaching art in Portland, Oregon. “How have you been—? how is the painting coming?—how about the west?—Lee and I are trying the country life for a while—we really love it here—a good feeling to be out of New York for a spell.”
That Thanksgiving, Pollock’s mother came from Connecticut to visit them, and her stay was the social highlight of his first season in the country. It was a quiet, solitary time for him, particularly because he did not own a car and had to limit his travels to places he could visit on foot or on a bicycle. But he did have one friend who lived nearby. Robert Motherwell owned four acres in East Hampton, where he was building a house from a Quonset hut with the help of the noted French architect Pierre Chareau. While working on the hut Motherwell was staying in a rented farmhouse in Springs. He and his wife Maria, a Mexican dancer, would stop by the Pollocks’ a few times a week to drive them into town for groceries, and occasionally the two couples had dinner together.
Other than the Motherwells, Pollock had little contact with his neighbors during his first few months in the country. Springs was a close-knit community of about 360 people, and most of the families had been there for generations. They socialized regularly at meetings of The Springs Village Improvement Society, The Springs Brotherhood Society, and The Springs Chapel Society, the last of which sponsored weekly bingo games. Pollock, as one might expect, elected not to join any of the community groups, but he did meet a few of his neighbors at Dan Miller’s general store, where farmers and fishermen congregated to drink pop and exchange gossip. The local residents, or “Bonackers” (named for Accabonac Creek), were curious about their new arrival. They had learned a little bit about him from Mrs. Elwyn Harris, who shared telephone number 492-002 with the Pollocks and knew that the quiet painter from New York could be surprisingly loquacious. “He used to drink a lot,” Mrs. Harris once said, “and tie up my line talking to his artist friends from New York.” Springs was one more place where Pollock was never quite at home.
Pollock’s third one-man show at Art of This Century was scheduled to open in March 1946, only four months after he had moved to Springs. He prepared for it in an upstairs bedroom. The inconvenience of having to work in cold, cramped temporary quarters with a plumber installing pipes in an adjacent bathroom and an occasional field mouse peeking in did not seem to hamper him. That first winter he completed eleven new paintings as well as some gouaches, working with speed and sureness and apparent indifference to the change in his surroundings.
Troubled Queen (Fig. 21), a large vertical painting that measures about six feet high, is a violent picture that shows two decapitated heads emerging from a thicket of slashing lines. One of the heads is a triangle pierced by a single eye. The other head is heart-shaped, with two square eyes, a smear of a mouth, and a troubled expression that suggests she is the queen of the painting’s title. And she has good reason to be troubled. She appears to be suffocating, as if choked by the fat, zagging lines and broken arcs that glut the picture surface and squeeze out any semblance of space. Paint is jabbed on thickly, enhancing the sense of airlessness that pervades the painting. It’s as if the artist feels entrapped by the style in which he is working, and one senses Pollock’s eagerness here to dispense with figurative images and achieve a means for direct and spontaneous expression. The title of the painting—as well as such other titles as The Little King, White Angel, High Priestess, Moon Vessel, and Circumcision (named by Lee)—carries poetic or mythological weight, but the poetry lies in the crude handling of paint rather than in the subject matter.
Pollock’s third show at Art of This Century (April 2–20) opened to disappointing reviews. Only two critics bothered to review it, and neither was particularly admiring. Clement Greenberg, writing in The Nation, confessed to feeling let down by Pollock’s latest work and thought that none of the pictures in the show measured up to certain of his earlier works. But Greenberg still managed to come through with praise: “What may at first sight seem crowded and repetitious reveals on second sight an infinity of dramatic movement and variety. One has to learn Pollock’s idiom to realize its flexibility. And it is precisely because I am, in general, still learning from Pollock that I hesitate to attempt a more thorough analysis of his art.”
Pollock and Lee visited New York for two weeks when his show opened at the beginning of April. They had been gone from New York only seven months, but the city to which they returned was a different place. The war was over, and New York was no longer the home of the international avant-garde. The Surrealists had gone back to Europe, and Peggy Guggenheim was planning on closing the gallery and joining them. Paris was still the fountainhead of modern art, “and every move made there is decisive for advanced art elsewhere,” Greenberg wrote in 1946. Once again American art students were signing up to study at the Académie Julian or Bourdelle’s Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and older painters who had started their careers during the Depression, when they had been too poor to afford the obligatory stint in Montmartre, were planning extended trips abroad. Pollock, by comparison, had no interest in going to France. “Everyone is going or gone to Paris,” he noted to his friend Louis Bunce. “With the old shit (that you can’t paint in America). Have an idea they will all be back.”
In the three years that had passed since Peggy Guggenheim had arranged to give Pollock his first show, she had added the names of many other young Americans to the gallery roster. Baziotes had his first show in October 1944 and was followed that fall by Motherwell and the sculptor David Hare. Mark Rothko had his first show in January 1945. So too there were shows by Charles Seliger, Richard Pousette-Dart, Robert De Niro (the actor’s father), and Janet Sobel, a grandmother from Brooklyn. There were so many shows by American artists that some of the Europeans had left the gallery in disgust and gone to Samuel Kootz’s place down the block. To Pollock, who kept abreast of the goings-on at the gallery, the art of his American contemporaries was of definite merit, which helps explain his sentiment that New York had become as vital an art center as Paris. “Baziotes, I think, is the most interesting of the painters you mentioned,” he noted to a friend that spring. “Gorky has taken a new turn for the better. . . . Gottlieb and Rothko are doing some interesting stuff—also Pousette-Dart.”
But his strongest praise was reserved for primitive art. “The Pacific Islands show at the Museum of Modern Art [“Arts of the South Seas”] tops everything that has come this way in the past four years.” One wonders what show he was thinking of four years earlier—perhaps the American Indian show that he had seen with John Graham in 1941.
During their trip to New York, Pollock and Lee stayed at their former apartment at 46 East Eighth Street, their pied-à-terre for the next five years. The front part of the apartment had been taken over by James Brooks, a reserved, soft-spoken painter from St. Louis who had worked on the Project during the thirties and had recently returned to New York after three years in the army. Pollock liked the quiet midwesterner but ended up angering him practically every night by coming home drunk and causing a stir. Jay Pollock, who had taken over the other half of the apartment, would calm things down. Jay had played football in high school, and Jackson knew better than to antagonize his older brother. “Jack would get pie-eyed and start arguing,” Jay once said, “but I told hi
m right off I wouldn’t stand for that kind of thing. Jack sometimes looked like he was real aggressive, but he was chicken.” But Jay was willing to indulge his kid brother in other ways. One day Jackson asked Jay whether he could have a collection of Navaho blankets and rugs that his brother had purchased in a crafts shop in Los Angeles, offering to give him a painting in exchange. Jay agreed to the trade, even though he knew he would never take the painting because he was not an admirer of Jackson’s work.
Back in Springs, Pollock felt anxious. His last show had closed on April 20, 1946, and his next show was scheduled to open on January 14, 1947, leaving him less time than usual to prepare. He couldn’t blame the poor scheduling on Peggy Guggenheim. He had specifically requested that she try to give him one more show before she closed her gallery, even if it meant having to return to his studio and produce a new body of paintings before he was quite ready. Faced with the pressures of the studio, Pollock’s house in the country and the work it demanded of him suddenly became a burden. “The work is endless—and a little depressing at times,” Pollock complained the first week in June. “Moving out here I found difficult—change of light and space—and so damned much to be done around the place. But I feel I’ll be down to work soon.”
But he did not get down to work, at least not immediately, allowing himself to be diverted by the pleasures of the country. He settled into a relaxed routine that consisted of sleeping as late as eleven, lingering groggily over a breakfast of coffee and Camel cigarettes, and setting off at about noon to fritter away the day. Almost every afternoon he rode his bicycle to the nearby Bossey farm, on Accabonac Road, to pick up groceries, such as butter and milk. On one of his visits to the farm he impulsively bought a baby billy goat, which he put in his backyard and allowed to nibble at the grass. On another visit he picked up a puppy, a white mongrel with wide patches of black around the eyes. He named it Gyp, after the dog of his childhood, and took it along on his daily outings in Springs.
Jackson Pollock Page 17