Jackson Pollock

by Deborah Solomon

  By the time his show closed, on December 15, Pollock was drinking heavily again. Lee had once believed that she could nurse and nurture him into abstinence but was beginning to acknowledge that his pattern of behavior could not be broken: the surge of creative activity, the surrender to alcohol. The cure, if it existed, was not within her, and she sought outside help. Earlier that year she had taken Pollock to see Ruth Fox, a therapist on Lexington Avenue who specialized in alcoholism. The therapist put Pollock on a drug called Antabuse, which, when combined with alcohol, induces wretched nausea. Pollock took the drug but also kept drinking.

  By the end of 1951 Lee was willing to consider any treatment, no matter how far-fetched. She listened hopefully as Dr. Elizabeth Hubbard, the homeopathic physician whom Pollock had been seeing sporadically for more than a decade, told her about a chemist by the name of Grant Mark, on East Sixty-fifth Street. He had recently invented a formula for “total well-being” called Grant Mark’s Emulsion, which was made out of various organic substances including guano—bird droppings. Pollock was willing to try it. For the next three months Lee poured her husband a cold glass of emulsion at breakfast and dinner, making sure that he consumed the prescribed amount of one quart per day. Once a week Pollock drove to the chemist’s office to pick up another seven quarts. The bills ran into the hundreds of dollars. On one of his trips to the doctor Pollock stopped off for a drink before returning to Springs and arrived home drunk. Lee met him at the front door. “Where’s the emulsion?” she asked. Pollock realized he had left the seven bottles in New York but couldn’t remember exactly where. He and Lee tried to figure out where they might be, for the substance was too expensive to forget about. But they never found the missing bottles. Of his experience with Grant Mark, Pollock wrote to Ossorio the following March, “I feel I have been skinned alive.”

  Pollock and Lee had returned to Springs a few days after his show came down; Lee reasoned that if she got him out of the city, perhaps he would not drink. But being in Springs turned out to be no better than being in New York. Night after night, holed up in the farmhouse, Lee watched her husband get drunk. When he ran out of beer, he got into his battered Cadillac and drove to Dan Miller’s to buy another six-pack, and for Lee, watching him get into the car was even worse than watching him drink. She was afraid that he would have an accident. She started buying the beer herself, stacking it by the case in the kitchen.

  Pollock was having terrible nightmares. One night he dreamed that he was standing on a high structure and his brothers were trying to push him off. Another night he dreamed that he was looking at a vacuum cleaner when suddenly it became one of Peggy Guggenheim’s Lhasa terriers. The dog attacked him and made a hole in his stomach. A third dream involved a car crash. “Two cars,” he wrote, “—the one I am driving rams into the first car which my wife has left and run away from. Between the two wrecked cars is a dead boy.”

  Three days after Christmas, at ten o’clock at night, the East Hampton police station was notified by telephone of an automobile accident in Springs. A patrolman was sent to the scene. “Weather clear,” the police report begins. “Jackson Pollock . . . driving a 1941 Cadillac Conv . . . went off North side of road, hitting three mailboxes (in triangle of intersection) of Louse Point Road . . . hitting telephone pole #30 with right front wheel, continuing on for 55 feet in a SW direction, hitting a tree head on.”

  The East Hampton Star ran the story on page one. “Jackson Pollock, Artist, Wrecks Car, Escapes Injury.”

  14

  Blue Poles

  1952

  By January 1952 Pollock had become exasperated with Betty Parsons. His paintings were not selling, and as Parsons was the first to admit, “I never pushed sales very hard. Most dealers love the money. I love the painting.” Such blithe indifference to the financial side of her business was understandably unnerving to Pollock, who, unlike his dealer, did not have a wealthy family to fall back on. Besides, as he had recently learned, Parsons could be penny-pinching despite her claims to the contrary. She had been squabbling with him over money since the previous spring, when Pollock, in an attempt “to get out of my financial mess,” had considered applying for a mural commission. Parsons promptly reminded him that her status as Pollock’s art dealer entitled her to a share of his outside earnings: “If you cannot give me 15%, then give me 10%, if not 10%, 5%,” and so on. The matter dragged on for months, with Pollock complaining to a friend that “Betty sailed last Sat. . . . As usual there was no time to plan or discuss things.” The Betty Parsons Gallery, once described by Greenberg as “a place where art goes on,” had become a place where arguments went on.

  Pollock was not alone in his dissatisfaction with Parsons. Rothko, Newman, and Clyfford Still felt she had opened up the gallery to every second-rate painter who had ever asked for a show and that concentration on a few good artists—mainly themselves—would yield better financial results. They asked her to drop almost everyone else from the gallery, a request that went ignored. One by one, artists began threatening to leave the gallery. Pollock wasn’t just bluffing. At the end of January, a few weeks after his contract expired, he informed Parsons that he had no intention of signing a new contract with her. Furthermore, if she couldn’t sell his paintings, he would sell them himself; he wanted all the paintings in her possession returned to him immediately. Such impulsive demands made Parsons “very anxious,” as she wrote to Pollock on January 31. She insisted that he stay with her at least until May, which would give her a chance to sell the paintings from his last show.

  Pollock’s disputes with Parsons were his way of venting his frustration over a problem that was not her fault: no one wanted to buy his paintings. In spite of Pollock’s reputation, there were very few serious collectors in the fifties, and a handful at most were willing to speculate in contemporary American art. In short, there was virtually no market for Pollock’s work, and as Greenberg often tried to explain to him, “Since Manet, the best art has never gone over fast.” This explanation was of no consolation to Pollock. For years critics had been announcing with a grandiosity worthy of Barnum that New York had replaced Paris as the center of contemporary art—yet what exactly did this mean if he couldn’t sell his paintings? In Europe he was even less appreciated. His first one-man show in Paris opened in March 1952, at the Studio Paul Facchetti, a photography studio and gallery on the Rue de Lille. Of the fifteen works on exhibit only two sold, and adding to this indignity was the fact that the owner of the gallery did not return his paintings or pay him for the ones that had sold until Pollock sent a friend into the gallery a year later to see to those details.

  In May 1952 Pollock left the Parsons Gallery for one that seemed to offer better prospects. The Sidney Janis Gallery was located across the hall from Parsons at 15 East Fifty-seventh Street, but the two galleries had little in common other than their address. Janis, a short, bespectacled, one-time shirt manufacturer from Buffalo, New York, was a prosperous businessman who dealt mostly in blue-chip European moderns such as Mondrian, Léger, and Kandinsky. Pollock had already exhibited in two group shows at the gallery—he and Lee had exhibited together in a show called “Man and Wife”—and he knew that Janis, though occasionally gimmicky, at least had a flair for generating publicity and attracting wealthy collectors. No one could say that Janis wasn’t enterprising. A few months earlier Lee had mentioned casually to Janis that her husband was looking for a new dealer. “Do you think the market for Pollock has peaked?” he wondered. “It hasn’t even been scratched,” Lee insisted. Janis scheduled a show for Pollock for November of 1952.

  It has often been said of Betty Parsons, half-jokingly, that she lost interest in an artist as soon as he became successful; Janis, to the contrary, made his reputation by waiting for an artist to become successful before inviting him into the fold. In the next few years many of the artists at Parsons, including Rothko and Still, would follow Pollock across the hall to the Janis Gallery. Parsons was indignant at the exodus from her gallery but
helpless to stop it. In the end she couldn’t even hold onto the physical space her gallery occupied. In 1963 after accusing Janis of convincing their landlord to have her evicted—which Janis vigorously denied—Parsons sued the landlord. She lost, and Janis took over her space.

  Pollock’s departure from the Parsons Gallery signified the end not only of the gallery’s most adventurous days but of the larger adventure of Abstract Expressionism. The major discoveries had all been made, and what was once the radical vanguard was beginning to seem quite familiar. So entrenched was Pollock’s reputation that when he participated that spring in a prestigious group show at the Museum of Modern Art called “14 Americans,” the critics were bored. “The edge is gone,” lamented Art News editor Thomas Hess. “We say: ‘Yes, Jackson Pollock . . . it’s about time he got here.’ ”

  One spring afternoon Pollock visited the Parsons Gallery to remove his unsold paintings from storage and carry them across the hall to his new gallery. Maybe Janis would be able to sell them, but maybe not, and for the moment it did not really seem to matter. Even if he never won a wide audience, he at least had one friend who appreciated his gift. Late that afternoon he telephoned Tony Smith and asked him, “Can you come up to the gallery and help me?” Smith, who was surprised by the request since Pollock rarely asked for help with physical work, arrived a few minutes later. Pollock met him by the elevator and led him into the storage area, where he picked up a painting, Number 25, 1951, a self-portrait in black. He returned to the hallway, pushed the elevator button, and waited for the doors to open. He shoved the painting at his friend. “Here,” Pollock said, “get out of here.”

  Judging from the many items about Mr. and Mrs. Jackson Pollock that appeared in The East Hampton Star throughout the spring and summer, the local townspeople may well have concluded that the town’s most celebrated couple had an enviable existence. Together they exhibited at Guild Hall, won prizes, hosted at least one reception, and donated their paintings to deserving civic causes, such as The Springs Village Improvement Society, which held a raffle in August. The winners of the raffle, according to the newspaper, came away with “a bicycle, an automobile tire, a Polaroid camera, an electric iron, an electric whipper, and to Lionel Jackson of East Hampton, a Pollock painting.”

  In reality it was a strained, anxious period for both painters. One of their many problems was that Lee no longer had a place to exhibit her work. Parsons had recently told her that if Pollock insisted on leaving the gallery, she too would have to leave. “I still respect you as an artist,” Parsons had told her, “but it is impossible for me to look at you and not think of Jackson and it is an association that I cannot have in here.” The news was a “very severe shock” to Lee, who could not help wondering whether her status as Pollock’s wife explained not only why she was dropped from the gallery but why she had been invited to exhibit in the first place. Her confidence was completely undermined, and a year would pass before she was able to paint again.

  For Pollock, getting down to work was even more of an ordeal. On one hand, he was eager to start painting again, for his move to the Janis Gallery had galvanized his competitive instincts. But for the first time in almost a decade no direction seemed clear to him. In the early months of 1952 he attempted a few “black” paintings, reworking his style of the past year as if hoping it might provide some clues to what he should do next. But the “black” paintings did not lead to any new developments. The more time he spent in his studio, the more anxious he became.

  His friends tried to help him but to no avail. A particularly pathetic incident occurred one night after Pollock telephoned Tony Smith and said that he was feeling very depressed. Smith arrived in Springs a few hours later and found Pollock alone in the barn. He was holding a long carving knife and drinking bourbon. The kerosene stove was lit, with flames shooting from the end of the pipe toward the roof. “For crissakes, Jackson,” Smith told him, “put it out.” Pollock put out the fire but only to relight it a few minutes later. On the floor of the barn lay an unfinished painting. “What have you got here?” Smith asked, noticing that the work was unlike any others. It consisted entirely of circles, applied with a very light touch, and it made Smith think of something that George Grosz had once said: “A painter who works in circles is near madness.”

  As Smith looked around the studio, he realized that Pollock had done virtually no work in the past few weeks. The problem, he thought, was that Pollock was still trying to work in black. “You will never get back to any objectivity,” Smith told him, “unless you go for color.” Partly because Smith wanted Pollock to start working in color again but mostly because he was as drunk as Pollock, he proposed that the two of them make a painting together. He unrolled an enormous sheet of canvas on the floor of the barn and squiggled some orange paint from a tube. Pollock suddenly perked up. “So, that’s how you do it,” he mumbled drunkenly. “Here’s how I do it.” By the end of the night the two friends had sloshed a thick layer of paint on the canvas, which, in Smith’s words, “looked like vomit.” When Smith told Pollock he was going inside the house because he was cold, Pollock said, “I’ll stay here and pray.” He promptly passed out.

  About a month later Tony Smith returned to Springs one Sunday afternoon along with Barnett Newman and his wife. The guests were sitting in the living room when Newman suggested that Pollock take them out to his studio and show them the painting he had made with Smith, thinking it would be fun to see it. But Newman regretted the request as soon as he entered the barn. Emptied paint tubes littered the floor, and bottles of bourbon lay on their sides. The smell of stale smoke hung in the air. It was obvious that Pollock had not returned to his studio since Smith had last visited, and an awkward, embarrassed hush fell over the barn. Newman felt sorry for Pollock and thought to himself that if he could just get Pollock to handle some paint again maybe he’d overcome his block. Newman asked him a question about his technique: how did he manage to squeeze pigment from a tube so that it stretched tautly across the canvas? Pollock offered to demonstrate, picking up a tube of orange and with one hard squeeze forcing its entire contents onto the painting he had started with Smith. Newman too tried the technique, and together the two friends heaped more pigment onto the hopeless painting.

  At the end of the summer, with his show at Janis less than three months off, Pollock returned to his studio and attempted to summon up the will to work that had eluded him for almost a year. For lack of a better alternative, he went back to color, sometimes squeezing it sparingly into the crevices of “black” paintings, sometimes splashing it loosely across large areas. In the mural-sized Convergence he poured rivulets of red, yellow, blue, and white directly on top of a “black” painting and thereby succeeded in burying his style of the past year. But what looked like an escape was in fact another trap. Instead of breaking new ground Pollock had returned to his “drip” style of the late forties. He had begun to repeat himself, a process that was so contrary to his creative instincts that he was virtually incapable of it. In 1952 his output declined. He produced sixteen paintings that year, fewer than half as many as in the year before and fewer than a third as many in 1950. Blue Poles, widely considered one of his greatest paintings, helps explain the difficulties he was facing.

  Blue Poles was conceived after Pollock went back to the painting he had made with Tony Smith and Barnett Newman. By daylight the image looked grotesque, and he knew it would have to be destroyed. But the Belgian linen on which it was painted, measuring roughly seven feet high and eighteen feet long, was too valuable to be discarded (it had cost him about fifty dollars), and he decided he would try to salvage it. One day that summer he repainted the entire canvas, creating a mural-sized “drip” painting that was bluish in tone and dense in texture. After tacking the painting to a wall in his studio for a period of consideration, Pollock decided it “didn’t work.” The painting, though monumental in size, possessed none of the monumental calm of his earlier murals. Its weaving rhythms of paint, instead of
balancing one another, simply sat on the canvas like so much slop. Part of the problem was color. For fear of repeating himself, he had forced himself to work in strong hues, which made it that much more difficult to integrate the disparate parts of the image into a single, overwhelming whole.

  Over the next few weeks, in at least six work sessions, Pollock tried to save the painting. “This won’t come through,” he told Lee many times, despairing at his inability to recapture the coherence of his earlier work. Finally, in frustration, Pollock tried a solution that he had not used in more than a decade. He superimposed eight vertical “poles” on the image, spacing them at equal distances and tilting them slightly at opposing perpendicular angles. The massive blue poles, with their rough, cragged edges, accomplished what his “drips” alone no longer could; they charged the painting with a formidable sense of order and restraint. For Pollock Blue Poles was a victory, but a narrow one. His creative powers had begun to dissipate, and the device of the “poles” attests to his desperation as surely as the invisible under-layers by Newman and Smith.