Jackson Pollock

by Deborah Solomon

  The stage, in the late 1940s, became the Betty Parsons Gallery, which was once described by Greenberg as “a place where art goes on and is not just shown and sold.” When Pollock joined the gallery in May 1947 he was one of a group of young Americans who were in roughly the same position. Most had started their careers during the Depression and had worked on the Project. After fifteen years or so they were still poor, still unknown, and still living downtown in cold-water flats. But the history of art was about to be rewritten. Within the next three years Pollock, Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Barnett Newman would paint their signature images and unveil them before the public at the Parsons Gallery. In 1947 Still showed his jagged vertical forms set against dark color fields. In 1948 Pollock showed his “drip” paintings. In 1950 Rothko showed his floating rectangles, and Newman showed his “zip” paintings—flat color fields seared by thin, vertical stripes. Later the four painters would be grouped, along with several others, under the rubric of Abstract Expressionism—the term had already been used by Robert Coates in The New Yorker—but their paintings resembled one another only in the most general ways. They each painted large, virile, single-sign images that expressed, as Rothko once said half jokingly about his own art, “basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.” Parsons nicknamed the group the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

  From the day he joined the Parsons Gallery, Pollock was set apart from the other painters by the recognition he had received from Clement Greenberg. They had read in The Nation that Pollock was “the strongest painter of his generation,” an appraisal that understandably irked the rest of the so-called generation. Pollock’s occasional visits to the gallery tended to heighten the resentment. He came in from Springs to attend many of the openings but only to alienate people by insulting the shows. Parsons later said that he divided all exhibits into one of two categories—“awful” or “terrible.” While this is surely an exaggeration, the sculptor Herbert Ferber had said of Pollock that “he wasn’t the sort of artist to compliment someone else’s work.” He seemed to enjoy his coveted status as the best of the young Americans and pretended that he had no need for anyone’s friendship or approval. One day Bradley Walker Tomlin, a genial artist from Syracuse, New York, who was one of the pioneers of “allover” painting, asked Pollock a simple question: how did he keep his pigments from running together? “I can’t tell you that,” Pollock said angrily. Tomlin recognized in his comment the defensive posturing of a painfully insecure man, and the two of them became good friends.

  Not everyone was as willing as Tomlin to indulge Pollock in his adolescent behavior. The best-known painter at the gallery after Pollock was Rothko, and the two geniuses did not get along. Rothko was large and stocky, with a high, balding forehead and deep-set brown eyes that peered at the world through thick glasses. His suicide in 1970 has given rise to the caricature of a doomed, solitary figure, and Rothko in fact did have a tendency toward moodiness. He hated critics and curators and called the Whitney Museum “a junkshop.” He once wrote that exhibiting a painting is a “risky and unfeeling act. . . . How often it must be permanently impaired by the eyes of the vulgar and the cruelty of the impotent who would extend their affliction universally!” But Rothko was considerably less high-sounding in ordinary conversation. He was an affectionate, generous friend to many artists, which helps explain why he resented Pollock. Rothko considered the star of the gallery a self-promoter who cared about little else than furthering his own reputation. As he wrote to Barnett Newman in June 1947: “Pollock is a self contained and sustained advertising concern.”

  Newman did not share this opinion. Whenever anyone picked on Pollock, Newman stood up for him. “Jackson doesn’t need anyone to help him paint his pictures,” Newman used to say, a comment that pleased Pollock enormously. Although Pollock was not a defender of Newman’s art, he was fond of “Barney” Newman, a warm, gregarious intellectual with a hefty build and a thick, flowing mustache. Newman considered himself an anarchist, but like most anarchists, he was constantly organizing groups. He ran for mayor of New York in 1933, on the platform of improving parks and creating a Department of Clean Air. He and Pollock both liked baseball and used to go to Ebbets Field together to root for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

  Barnett Newman could always be found at the gallery on Saturday afternoons, standing around talking to visitors. He was a brilliant conversationalist, fluent in such wide-ranging topics as ornithology, geology, linguistics, and particularly primitive art. His rivals accused him of being an ideologue, which once prompted Newman to remark that “aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds.” By late afternoon on Saturdays, Newman had usually managed to attract a small group of artists to the gallery. No one could compete with his conversation, but there was one painter who could silence it. Pollock liked to annoy Newman. He’d listen attentively as Newman spoke, nodding his head in agreement and then interrupting suddenly. “Barney, you know what I think?” he used to say. “I think you’re a horse’s ass.” In Pollock’s vocabulary, the phrase was a compliment.

  Besides Newman, the only other artist at the gallery whom Pollock became very close to was Tony Smith, a large, bearded, erudite architect and sculptor who was in charge of hanging all the shows. The two men had first met several years earlier at a party in the Village, and Smith’s first impression had been of a “sullen, intense, miserable” person who made him think, I’ve got to get out of here. I can’t stand that guy. But he felt very different on his second meeting with Pollock, and they quickly developed a friendship of quiet understanding and affection. Smith often drove out to Springs for the weekend. He and Pollock could spend hours at the kitchen table talking about nothing. “He was always telling me the local news,” Smith has recalled, “what everyone was doing, people I had never heard of. He would give me a thumbnail sketch to fill me in. He seldom talked about art, but when he did it was often in relation to his own community. . . . He’d mention some old lady, or a retired broker, who had taken up painting. I would say, ‘What of it? What the hell difference does it make to you?’ ”

  Betty Parsons could never quite relax in Pollock’s presence. On his visits to the gallery he tried to make conversation with her, but she sensed his discomfort, and it made her nervous. Pollock often asked Parsons about her travels. He wanted to know what Europe was like. He asked her about the Orient too, and his questions struck her as odd. “There was a desperation about him,” Parsons once said. “When he wasn’t drinking, he was shy, he could hardly speak. And when he was drinking, he wanted to fight. . . . I would run away.”

  A few months after Pollock joined the gallery, Betty Parsons visited him in Springs one day to help plan his upcoming show. Barnett Newman and his wife Annalee, who worked for the New York City Board of Education, drove her out. In the evening Pollock and Lee and their guests sat down on the living room floor and sketched together, experimenting with fine-nibbed Japanese pens that Newman had brought as a gift. Parsons watched closely as Pollock drew. At first his drawings were graceful. But soon he was pushing too hard on his pen and the point broke. He broke three pens in a row. He became angry, cursing the pens that would not do what he wanted them to.

  “He had tremendous drive and passion,” Parsons once said, “and it was too much for him. Whatever he did wasn’t enough. Some people are born with too big an engine inside them. If he hadn’t painted, he would have gone mad.”

  In August 1947, three months after he joined the gallery, Pollock returned to the barn to prepare for his first show at the Parsons Gallery. His frustrations vanished the moment he began to work. “I’m just now getting into painting again and the stuff is really beginning to flow,” he wrote to his friend Louis Bunce at the end of August. “Grand feeling when it happens.”

  He worked steadily through the end of the summer and the fall. As the weather grew chillier he could hear the wind coming through the cracks in the barn and feel the cold air streaming in. By October he was heating the barn with a
pot-bellied kerosene stove and bundling up in layers of clothing; his customary outfit was a thermal shirt, a sweat shirt, and a hip-length dungaree coat. Lee worried constantly that the kerosene stove would cause a fire. The small wooden barn even smelled flammable, pungent with the greasy scent of oil and turpentine. Tubes and cans of paint lay open on the wide-planked wooden floor. Dozens of paintings leaned against the walls. Lee suggested to Pollock that he store his finished works in racks, but Pollock insisted on keeping his work within view. As he painted he could look up and see his earlier work: past informing present. His 1947 paintings grew out of his past art but broke with it too; in some ways they broke with the entire history of art.

  “Every so often,” de Kooning once said, “a painter has to destroy painting. Cezanne did it. Picasso did it with cubism. Then Pollock did it. He busted our idea of a picture all to hell.”

  In the summer of 1947 Pollock produced the first of his so-called “drip” paintings.* Not the least among his innovations was the technique by which they were created. Instead of using an easel, Pollock placed his canvas on the floor and applied paint from sticks, trowels, and hardened brushes. He walked around the canvas as he worked, tossing paint from all four sides. At some point Pollock realized that he would not have to stop to dip the stick into a can of paint if he poured the paint directly from the can. So he placed a stick in a can of paint, tilted the can, and allowed the pigment to run down the stick and onto the canvas. Sometimes he tilted the can just a bit to produce a slow, dribbling line. Sometimes he tilted it at sharper angles so the paint fell faster and landed harder, forming a puddle. He experimented with a wide range of paints—artist’s oils, industrial enamels, plumber’s aluminum paint, and, most often, ordinary house paint, which he chose because of its fluidity and low cost.

  One of the most common misconceptions about Pollock’s working methods is that he produced his “drip” paintings almost instantaneously. To the contrary, he tended to work in stages. It was not unusual for him to interrupt work on a canvas and tack it to a wall in the barn so that he could contemplate his next step. Sometimes he waited a few days before returning to the painting, sometimes weeks. In the meanwhile he worked on other paintings; he was always working on more than one painting at a time.

  Pollock was not the first painter to employ the technique of dripping paint. Several critics believe he got the idea from Siqueiros, who as early as 1936 was laying his canvas on the floor and splattering Duco from a stick to help generate images. Other critics say the idea came from Hans Hofmann, who in 1940 enlivened the surface of a painting called Spring with an overlay of drips. And surely Pollock knew that Max Ernst, while visiting Matta’s summer house in Cape Cod in 1941, had filled a tin can with paint, punctured a hole in the bottom, and swung it over a canvas; his “oscillation” paintings were exhibited by Betty Parsons at the Wakefield Bookshop in 1942. By no means was Pollock the first to drip, but he was the first to use the technique as a means of making a major creative statement.

  A lot can be said about Pollock’s technique, and a lot has been said. What is by far the most relevant point was made by Pollock himself in an unpublished interview in 1949. “I don’t have any theories about technique,” he said. “Technique is the result of saying something, not vice versa.” As to what his paintings said, Pollock never specified.

  The seventeen “drip” paintings that Pollock produced in 1947 generally consist of dense, tangled arrangements of tossed and flung lines. At first, in a picture such as Galaxy, Pollock spattered paint to obscure an image that had begun as a human figure. But soon the spattering took over, and images started evolving out of the flow of paint. Cathedral (Fig. 23), a large, vertical painting in which hundreds of looping black lines arch against a whitish ground, hints at the soaring quality of later work. In Full Fathom Five Pollock embedded actual objects in the wet paint: a key, a comb, the caps from tubes of paint, a handful of tacks, cigarette butts, burnt matches—mementos of the painting’s creation as well as metaphors for its status as a real physical object whose meaning lies entirely in the use of materials. There is an amazing sense of movement in these paintings as countless linear rhythms and tensions counteract one another to form an indivisible whole. The only way to look at a “drip” painting is all at once.

  The key element in the “drip” paintings is line, as opposed to color or form. As many critics have pointed out, Pollock was essentially drawing in paint, or endowing the painted line with the immediacy and spontaneity one tends to associate with pencil sketches. His line is novel not only because of the way it is applied but also because it doesn’t define shapes or mark the edge of a plane—the two traditional functions of drawing. Instead it travels freely, following its own path as it breaks away from the tedious conventions of description and illustration. Color is of secondary importance and rarely calls attention to itself. Pollock generally avoided strong, saturated hues in favor of black, white, and aluminum, which evoke the monochromy of pencil sketches and serve to dramatize the linear quality of his work.

  For Pollock the “drip” paintings were a vindication. As one who had been obsessed from childhood with his inadequacies at drawing, he finally had become the draftsman of his ambitions. It is worth recalling that at the age of eighteen, in his first written appraisal of his work, Pollock had confided to his oldest brother: “my drawing i will tell you frankly is rotten it seems to lack freedom and rythem.” The comment is rather remarkable in that no painter is better known for the freedom and rhythm of his draftsmanship than Pollock. The technique of dripping paint allowed him to create a flowing, continuous, gigantic line, a kind of superhuman calligraphy that brought his sense of drawing into harmony with the scale of his ambitions.

  Soon after he had finished preparing for his show, Pollock was visited by Ralph Manheim, a translator of German literature, and his wife, who lived nearby in Springs. As was his customary practice, Pollock invited his visitors into his studio. When Manheim learned that the paintings had yet to be titled, he volunteered a few suggestions, and within a few hours he and his wife Mary had titled the majority of the works. Many of the titles relate to the idea of metamorphosis, such as Alchemy, Prism, Sea Change, and Full Fathom Five (the last two from Shakespeare). Titles such as Phosphorescence, Shooting Star, Magic Lantern, and Comet seem to have been inspired by the ubiquity of aluminum paint, the color Pollock used most often after black and white.

  The first written appraisal of Pollock’s “drip” paintings apparently came from his mother. She visited Springs for Thanksgiving and was impressed by the paintings in the barn. “Jack was busy getting his paintings stretched for his show which is the 5th of Jan,” she noted to one of her children, “he has done a lot of swell painting this year.”

  In January 1948 Pollock and Lee came to New York for the opening of his show at the Parsons Gallery. The debut of his “drip” paintings turned out to be an abysmal disappointment, arousing little interest from either critics or collectors. The seventeen paintings on exhibit were priced as low as $150, but only one sold (the purchaser was a friend of Peggy Guggenheim’s). Friends stopped by the gallery to offer their congratulations but couldn’t afford to buy anything. One day Herbert Ferber, who also exhibited at Parsons, asked Pollock whether he would be willing to trade a “drip” painting for a Ferber sculpture. “Sure,” Pollock told him, “pick any one you want.” Ferber picked Vortex, one of the smaller paintings in the show. (“I didn’t want to seem greedy,” he explained.) Under the terms of his contract Pollock was allowed to keep one painting for himself. He chose Lucifer, the largest painting in the show, but later had to give it away to settle an outstanding doctor’s bill. After the show closed, Pollock’s first “drip” paintings were shipped to Peggy Guggenheim. In the next few years she gave away all but two to museums in such places as Omaha and Seattle.

  The critical reaction was surprisingly tame. Newspaper reviewers simply ignored the show. While commentary appeared in four magazines, none of them ran r
eproductions, so the public had no idea of what the paintings looked like. The only admiring critic was Clement Greenberg, but once again his review was probably unintelligible to most readers. He seemed more interested in his death-of-the-easel-picture theory than in the art it described and never mentioned Pollock’s new technique. “Since Mondrian,” Greenberg wrote in The Nation, “no one had driven the easel picture so far from itself; but this is not altogether Pollock’s doing. In this day and age the art of painting increasingly rejects the easel and yearns for the wall.”

  The three other critics who reviewed the show didn’t know quite what to make of it. They all agreed that the paintings possessed vitality but wondered whether they meant anything. Robert Coates, of The New Yorker, one of Pollock’s earliest admirers, felt that while some of the paintings “have a good deal of poetic suggestion about them,” there are times when “communications break down entirely.” An unsigned reviewer in Art News was also ambivalent, admiring Pollock’s use of aluminum paint and the “beautiful astronomical effects” it produced while concluding that his work suffered from “monotonous intensity.” Alonso Lansford, the reviewer for Art Digest, described the work as “colorful and exciting,” though he kept his comments short as if waiting to hear what others thought before committing himself: “It will be interesting to see the reactions to his present exhibition.”