That first summer in Springs everything filled Pollock with wonder, no matter how banal. “I pulled a ligament in my elbow,” he wrote to Ed Strautin, “—so have learned to wipe my ass with my left hand—an entirely new sensation.”
One by one, Pollock befriended his neighbors, whose initial suspicions about the painter from New York evaporated once they got to know him. One of his neighbors was an elderly woman named Mrs. Pigeon. By the time Pollock set off on his daily outings she had usually managed to finish a wash and hang it up on a clothesline. To Mrs. Pigeon’s delight, Pollock would stop by on his bicycle and act astonished that she had accomplished so much in the morning.
Pollock occasionally visited the George Sid Miller dairy farm, which was a few hundred yards north of his property. He didn’t have much to say to the dour old farmer but got along well with his farmhand Charlie. The two men could spend hours in the horse stable smoking cigarettes and admiring the animals. One day Charlie stopped into Dan Miller’s general store and told its proprietor: “That old Pollock, lazy son-of-a-bitch, ain’t he, Dan?” The grocer asked Charlie what he meant. “Why,” Charlie said, “I never see him do a day’s work, did you?” A few days later Dan Miller told Pollock that Charlie had called him a lazy son-of-a-bitch. Pollock was amused. “Instead of being offended,” Miller once said, “he loved Charlie all the more. That’s the kind of guy he was—he was a tremendous man.”
With the arrival of summer Harold and May Rosenberg moved out to Springs from their apartment on East Tenth Street. They lived on Neck Path, around the corner from the Pollocks, and the two couples saw one another often. Pollock got along reasonably well with Rosenberg, an imposing, voluble, dark-haired poet who already had an appreciable reputation as an art and literary critic. Though trained to be a lawyer, he had been writing for Partisan Review since the late thirties and had gotten to know most of the artists in New York when he had worked on the Project as a mural painter. Compared to Greenberg, who had a polite, self-effacing manner, Rosenberg was as mighty in person as he was in his writing. He stood six feet four, spoke in a booming voice, and was a dazzling conversationalist with a knack for coining memorable phrases. (While working part time in advertising, he came up with the idea of Smokey the Bear.) He was “one of the intellectual captains of the modern world”—to borrow from Saul Bellow, whose protagonist Victor Wulpy is transparently modeled after Rosenberg.
Pollock and Rosenberg admired each other immensely, but both were too stubborn to admit it. They were fond of exchanging insults. Pollock used to say that Rosenberg’s ideas got in his way as a critic. Rosenberg countered that Pollock painted “like a monkey.” The critic was a frequent visitor to the Pollock household, and on a typical visit wouldn’t even wait to sit down before taking note of one of Pollock’s paintings and launching into a lecture. In his loud voice he might relate the painting to any one of a number of his favorite topics, ranging from the Eighteenth Brumaire to Kierkegaard’s “despair of the aesthetic” to the teachings of Hans Hofmann. As Rosenberg talked, Pollock would become saturnine, and it was only a matter of minutes before he uttered his familiar accusation that Rosenberg knew nothing about painting and was “full of shit.”
Pollock seemed to delight in rousing Rosenberg to anger and tended to behave rambunctiously in his presence. May Rosenberg recalls an afternoon when the two couples were driving to the beach and Pollock threatened to urinate in the car if Rosenberg didn’t pull over. “You will wait until I pull over,” Rosenberg said like a stern parent, prompting Pollock to whine that he couldn’t wait. On another occasion, in the middle of a dinner party at the Rosenbergs’ home, Pollock drunkenly started harassing his host. “That’s a lot of shit!” he shouted repeatedly, rudely interrupting a serious discussion. Rosenberg tried to ignore him but finally became exasperated and told him firmly: “You have clearly had too much to drink. What you need now is not to go on interrupting but to go upstairs and take a nap.” Like a penitent child, Pollock smiled sweetly and headed upstairs.
Their first summer in Springs, Pollock and Lee entertained frequently. Clement Greenberg came out for the July Fourth holiday and was followed by various relatives, the art dealer John Bernard Myers, and Ed Strautin, their former neighbor of Eighth Street. Friends have consistently described Pollock as a gracious, accommodating host who seemed to enjoy having company. He was fond of taking visitors for a tour of his property as well as to his studio to look at his work. And he also liked to cook for his guests. While he was never an avid eater himself—smoking and drinking had the predictable adverse effects on his appetite—Pollock took pleasure in the ritual of preparing a meal. One of his specialties was spaghetti and meat sauce prepared according to a recipe he had learned from Rita Benton. But even “Rita’s Spaghetti” was something of an extravagance to the impoverished couple, and they were much more likely to serve a clam dish made with clams they had caught in the bay behind the house. John Bernard Myers recalled the sight of Pollock coming through the back door with a bucket of fresh clams, looking rather pleased. Back in the kitchen, he knifed them opened with noticeable deftness. “The movement of knife into shell never faltered,” Myers has written. “He seemed to open each mollusk with a single jab and slice.”
Pollock’s main project that summer was preparing the barn for use as a studio. For starters, he had the barn moved from behind the house to the northern side of the property, so that it wouldn’t obstruct the view of the bay. Cleaning out the barn took all summer. The previous owner of the property, a land surveyor, had left the barn cluttered with heaps of broken machinery and scrap metal, and Pollock seemed to enjoy sorting through it. He discarded the machinery but kept the scrap metal, piling it up neatly in the backyard with plans of using it someday for sculpture. The small brown barn (it measured about eighteen by twenty-four feet) had neither heat, insulation, nor electricity, and Pollock decided he would leave it that way for the time being, even if it meant he could paint only when it was light out. His renovations to the barn were modest. He built cabinets and shelves for his materials, boarded up a window, and cut a new window that was above eye level so that he wouldn’t be distracted by the view. On the walls of the barn he hung his own paintings.
At the end of the summer Pollock moved into the barn to prepare for his fourth show at Art of This Century. The result was fifteen new paintings that belong to two series—Accabonac Creek, which was begun in the upstairs bedroom, and Sounds in the Grass. In spite of the titles the paintings contain no overt references to the landscape. The strongest of his 1946 works mark a critical juncture between the “veiling the image” style of his past and the “drip” paintings he began the following year. Shimmering Substance (Fig. 22), which is widely regarded as a key transitional work, is a small, bright painting composed of hundreds of curling yellow and white brushstrokes, the cursive gestures packed tightly together to form a mesh of sensation. Paint is applied in thick, buttery textures, as if squeezed directly from the tube. While it is possible to make out some dark images hovering beneath the surface, Pollock doesn’t allow them to become identifiable. He has “veiled the image” so thoroughly that the veil has become the image. In other words, Sounds in the Grass: Shimmering Substance is totally abstract.
This in itself, of course, was not a breakthrough. An artist such as Mondrian, whom Pollock admired enormously, had long ago rejected representation in favor of pure abstraction, searching for ideals based on the simplification of shapes and colors. For Pollock, however, abstraction was not a philosophical choice but a last resort, the only hope left for forging a vehicle that could fully accommodate his emotions. It took him sixteen years to arrive at a style that was totally abstract, and that he felt ambivalent about abandoning the human figure seems certain. (Even Picasso never completely gave up the figure, for fear that his work would degenerate into meaningless pattern.) But by 1946 Pollock had no choice. He felt hampered by the human figure, for it prevented him from recording sensation as quickly or intensely as he exp
erienced it. And so he did away with recognizable imagery in favor of direct expression. It would later be said that Pollock stripped painting to its fundamentals, exploiting the two-dimensional limitations of his medium for maximum effect. But Pollock thought no more about defining his medium than he did about formulating theories or founding a movement. He turned to abstraction not to define the limits of art but to escape them.
After finishing Shimmering Substance Pollock invited Lee into the barn to look at the painting. “That’s for Clem,” he told her. He knew that Clement Greenberg would admire the work, which, like the mural he had painted for Peggy Guggenheim, was an “allover” painting. Unlike a conventional painting, with its illusion of deep space, an “allover” painting consists of undifferentiated forms dispersed evenly across the picture surface. There are no breaks in the composition, and the only way to take in the painting is all at once. Rather than being an imitation of something else, an “allover” painting is an object in its own right. It is utterly self-contained and doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is. This distinction between painting as a window on reality and painting as its own reality was one of the crucial issues to the founders of modern art, and it is for that reason that Pollock felt Greenberg would admire his latest work. He was right.
Greenberg was the only critic to review Pollock’s 1947 show, but such was his ardor that it almost compensated for the lack of interest among other critics. “Jackson Pollock’s fourth one-man show in so many years at Art of This Century,” he wrote in The Nation in February 1947, “is his best since his first one and signals what may be a major step in his development.” The rest of the review was probably incomprehensible to the readers of The Nation, who had not yet developed an ear for Greenberg’s formalism any more than they had developed an eye for Pollock’s art. Readers must have wondered what Greenberg meant by his coneluding remarks: “Pollock points a way beyond the easel, beyond the mobile, framed picture, to the mural, perhaps—or perhaps not. I cannot tell.”
With those few words Greenberg introduced his famous death-of-the-easel-picture theory. He believed that Pollock was not just a great painter but a historical force that could free modern art from its subservience to Cubist tradition. Greenberg, who had started his writing career during the radical thirties, applied Marxist ideas about historical inevitability to painting. He defined the evolution of art since Manet in terms of the gradual elimination of illusion and felt that Pollock’s primary accomplishment consisted of going beyond Picasso and Braque; he eliminated more illusion than they had. The Cubists had flattened out space while continuing to differentiate between shapes. Pollock’s “all-over” paintings, with their even dispersion of accent and emphasis, broke down all hierarchical distinctions. “The dissolution of the pictorial into sheer texture,” Greenberg wrote in Partisan Review in 1948, “into apparently sheer sensation, into an accumulation of repetitions, seems to speak for and answer something profound in contemporary sensibility. Literature provides parallels in Joyce and in Gertrude Stein.”
Though Greenberg is now known as one of the chief theoreticians of postwar art criticism, his writings were mocked and scorned in the forties. His colleagues at Partisan Review made fun of him. Philip Rahv, the magazine’s coeditor, felt that Greenberg was overly dogmatic and that the reason he was pushing Pollock so hard was that he expected to ride in on his success. Delmore Schwartz, who had studied philosophy in college, was suspicious of Greenberg’s ideas. Greenberg often cited Kant’s theory of beauty in support of his formalism, prompting Schwartz to start a nasty rumor that Greenberg had read only the first thirty pages of Kant’s work. When the magazine’s publisher suggested at a staff meeting one day that Partisan Review award an annual prize for literary achievement, James Johnson Sweeney, a member of the advisory board, provoked a burst of laughter by proposing, “Give the winner an easel painting!”
It was not only at Partisan Review that Greenberg was subjected to insult. When the mass-circulation magazines began to take note of the new art on Fifty-seventh Street, it was Greenberg, not Pollock, who was the focus of the publicity. In December 1947 Time reported that Greenberg had recently singled out Pollock as “the most powerful painter in America” in an article for the British magazine Horizon. Bewildered by Greenberg’s appraisal, Time ran a picture of Pollock’s painting The Key (reproduced upside down) beneath the sarcastic headline “The Best?”
Pollock of course was grateful for Greenberg’s support, and he didn’t begrudge him his theories. To Pollock theories were like titles, reassuring the public that his paintings meant something while freeing him from the tedious task of having to specify what that meaning was. When Pollock applied for a Guggenheim fellowship in October 1947, he was asked to propose a project. His statement reveals Greenberg’s influence, if not his direct participation. “I believe the easel picture to be a dying form,” Pollock wrote, “and the tendency of modern feeling is towards the wall picture or mural. I believe the time is not yet ripe for a full transition from easel to mural. The pictures I contemplate painting would constitute a halfway state, and an attempt to point out the direction of the future, without arriving there completely.”
Thomas Benton, whom Pollock had asked to write a letter of recommendation, was understandably perplexed by the project Pollock proposed but had no doubts about his originality. “Very much an artist,” Benton wrote of his former student. “In my opinion one of the few original painters to come up in the last 10 years. Gifted colorist. Whether or not he lives up to what he intends, money would not be wasted. Highly recommended.” Greenberg and Sweeney also wrote recommendations.
In applying for the fellowship Pollock was asked to answer several questions. Have you any constitutional disorder or physical disability? “None,” Pollock wrote. Give a list of the scholarships or fellowships you have previously held. “None,” he wrote. State what foreign languages you have studied. “None.” Of what learned, scientific, or artistic societies are you a member? “None.” In what field of learning, or of art, does your project lie?
“Creative painting,” Pollock wrote.
He was not awarded the fellowship.
11
“Grand Feeling When It Happens”
1947–48
By 1947 Peggy Guggenheim was eager to close her gallery and return to Europe. She felt disillusioned by her six years in New York. Her husband, Max Ernst, had run off to Arizona with a young painter named Dorothea Tanning, and many of the artists to whom she had given their first one-man shows, such as Mother-well and Baziotes, had left Art of This Century for other galleries. Furthermore, for all her efforts to promote Pollock, his reputation remained negligible. The Museum of Modern Art had failed to include him in its important 1946 exhibition “Fourteen Americans,” and his pictures had never really sold; she was stuck with so many of them, she started giving them away so she wouldn’t have to ship them back to Europe. Among the paintings she decided to part with was Mural, which she gave to the University of Iowa after several other institutions, including Yale, had said they didn’t want it. (Years later, after Pollock had become famous, Peggy Guggenheim tried to get the mural back by offering the college a Braque, but to no avail.) To add to her problems, she was under contract to continue paying Pollock three hundred dollars a month for one more year, and she felt she couldn’t leave New York until she had found an art dealer willing to take over the contract. But no one was interested.
Many art dealers had opened galleries along Fifty-seventh Street in the years following the war, but only two or three were showing the work of the American avant-garde. One of them was Sam Kootz, a tall, affable southerner who had opened his gallery at 15 East Fifty-seventh Street in 1945. Kootz had already proved his commitment to the vanguard by showing Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, and Byron Browne, even if it meant selling Picassos from his back room to keep the gallery solvent. But for all his enthusiasm for American art, Kootz told Peggy Guggenheim that he wasn’t willing to take on Poll
ock. To put it frankly, he said, he didn’t want to work with an alcoholic. Only a few weeks earlier Pollock had staggered into the gallery on a Saturday afternoon and drunkenly shouted, “I’m better than all the fucking painters on these walls!” Kootz had asked him to leave.
Across the hall from Kootz was Betty Parsons, a trim, energetic artist and art dealer, with wide-set blue eyes and short gray hair that framed a strong face. Parsons had started her dealing career in the early forties from the basement of the Wakefield Bookshop, where she gave Saul Steinberg his first show and listened sympathetically to almost every artist who sought her attention. Steinberg once drew a portrait of Parsons as a cocker spaniel, with a high, philosophical forehead and a slightly worried expression; it is a measure of her open-mindedness that she thought it was a good likeness.
Parsons considered herself lucky to have opened her gallery just before Art of This Century closed, in time to inherit many of the artists who had shown there. She gladly volunteered to take on Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Hans Hofmann. Pollock, however, posed a problem. She could not allow herself to take over his contract with Art of This Century and assume the responsibility of paying him thirty-six hundred dollars a year when it was inconceivable that his annual shows would gross that much. Peggy Guggenheim was willing to compromise. She said she would continue paying Pollock’s monthly stipend until his contract ran out if Parsons would just give him a show. Parsons felt she had no choice. As she put it, Pollock “was dumped in my lap because nobody else would risk showing him.”
In May 1947 Peggy Guggenheim closed her gallery. She eventually settled in Venice, where she purchased the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, converted the servants quarters into galleries, and opened her own museum. She spent the rest of her days riding the Grand Canal in her private gondola, sleeping in a sterling silver bed designed by Alexander Calder, and acquiring a reputation among the Venetians as the “last duchess.” If her departure from New York marked the end of her adventures among the avant-garde, the same could be said of André Breton, who had returned to Paris to find that Existentialism had replaced Surrealism as the prevailing intellectual rage. Surrealism was dead in Europe. In New York the movement seemed to pass into instant eclipse with the closing of Art of This Century. The exit of the Surrealists from New York after the war cleared the stage for a new avant-garde.
Jackson Pollock Page 18