Jackson Pollock: veiling the image 9781780429731, 1780429738

Table of contents :
Content: ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
DEDICATION
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION
Reproductions
Titles of Paintings
Biographies
Historical Context
Portraits
Cycles
THE MYTH OF THE ARTIST COWBOY
Birth
Cody
Fiction
The Real McCoy
Stranger Than Fiction
The Pollock Family
Religion
Pollock the Cowboy
Family Politics
Early Veils
The Advent of Abstract Expressionism
The Early Influences
Pre-teen Art Education
Uprooted Again
Teenage Years
Early Vision of Career
Roots of Alcoholic Behaviour
Benton
American Art
The Need for an American Artist
The Movie: Pollock
Dean of Art
Lee Krasner Guggenheim's Early SightingsGuggenheim's Autobiographies
Closing of Art of This Century
One-Man Shows
Guggenheim's Profits
Farmhouse
The Studio Floor
Blue Poles in PollockSquared
Farmhouse
The Studio Floor
Blue Poles in PollockSquared
Pollock-Krasner House
Theosophy
Coming of Rage
Inarticulate Communicator
Technique Described
The Orozco Mural
New York City
Benton Revisited
Legends
Old Friends
Benton as Role Model
Art Students League
Writing Home
Father's Death
New York Again
Rita Benton
Seeking Money
Advent of Originality
The Mexican Muralists Trying to Unveil the Image of PollockSiqueiros
Unusual Paints
Eureka!
Meeting Krasner
Psychoanalysis
The Drunk
In the Shadow of Picasso
Classic Influences
Other Influences
Originality
STRUGGLING DURING THE EARLY YEARS:MAKING ENERGY VISIBLE
Political Issues
Greenwich Village
Rebirth
Moby Dick
Peggy Guggenheim
Howard Putzel
Suicides
Reviewing Influences
"I Am Nature."
Shift of Influence Centres
A New Process
The Advent of Fame
Automatism
Surrealists
The Unconscious
Money Matters
First One-Man Show
Pattern Within the Pattern
Beginning to Change the World
Mural Pollock's SensitivityKrasner's Productivity
The Atomic Age
Global Art Village
She-Wolf
Guardians of the Secret
Less Popular Works
Holiday
Between One-Man Shows
Second One-Man Show
Cincinnati Again
Third Solo, Second at AOTC
Broadening the Horizon
Marriage
Productivity
Creative Block
The Gestural Veiling
Stealing the Soul
Final AOTC
Betty Parsons
Life Magazine
Easel versus Mural
Lucifer
Very Active Year
'In' the Painting
Signature
In the Mood
Out of the Web
Music
Alcoholism
Seventh One-Man Show, Second at Parsons
Pollock, the Sculptor
Tony Smith
Alfonso Ossorio The 'Intrasubjectives'Abstract Expressionism
BRILLIANT PEAK YEARS: ART AS SELF-DISCOVERY
Venice
Number 1A, 1948
Lavender Mist
All-Over
Clement Greenberg
John Graham
Harold RosenbergEarly in his career, Rosenberg
Despair and Technical Maturation
'The Irascibles'
The Irascibles' Photo
Shows in Italy
New Yorkers versus Parisians
No Chaos
Hans Namuth
Relapse
Parsons Revisited
Pollock in Vogue
Unveiling the Image
The Club
Communication skills
Pollock: Number One
The Composite
Less Veiled: More Shows
Convergence
Tracking Blue Poles
More International Exposure

Citation preview

Pollock Veiling the Image

Donald Wigal

Text: Donald Wigal Layout: Baseline Co Ltd 127-129 A Nguyen Hue Fiditourist, 3rd floor District 1, Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam © Parkstone Press USA, New York. © Confidential Concepts, worldwide, USA. © Pollock Estate / Artists Rights Society, New York, USA. © Daros Collection, Switzerland / Artists Rights Society, New York, USA, p. 196 © Barnett Newman / Artists Rights Society, New York, USA, p. 132 © Mark Rothko / Artists Rights Society, New York, USA, p. 235 © Ruth Kligman, p. 246 © Willem de Kooning Estate / Artists Right Society, New York, USA p. 235 © Adolph Gottlieg Estate / Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris, p. 220 © Robert Motherwell Estate / Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris, p. 135 © Rudolph Burckard / Artists Rights Society, New York . ADAGP, Paris, pp. 242-244 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced or adapted without the permission of the copyright holder, throughout the world. Unless otherwise specified, copyrights on the works reproduced lies with the respective photographers. Despite intensive research, it has not always been possible to establish copyright ownership. Where this is the case we would appreciate notification. ISBN: 978-1-78042-973-1

J

P

ackson ollock Veiling the Image

Donald Wigal

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The author acknowledges Ruth Kligman; Athos Zacharius; the Art Chronicles of the Smithsonian; Jerry Saltz, Village Voice art critic; photographer Robin Holland; artists James Cullina of ArtSleuth, Bob Stanley, Kathy Segall, and Bill Rabinovitch; authors Carmel Reingold, James Robert Parish, George Sullivan, Susan Waggoner, and William Kuhns; agents Stephany Evans, Elaina Zucker, Robert Markel; Barlow Hartman and Mercedes Ruehl; James Yohe of Ameringer/Yohe/Fine Art; Tina Dickey, editor of the Hans Hofmann Catalogue Raisonné; Maggie Seildon of Jason McCoy Gallery; Cheryl Orlick of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery; Bradley D. Cook of Indiana University Archives; Jennifer Ickes of the New Orleans Museum of Art; Isabelle Dervaux, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, National Academy Museum; Verity Hawson, Lillian Kiesler, Cornelia Sontag, Bérangère Mardelé, and Eliane de Sérésin of Parkstone Press; for research support, Bro. Frank O’Donnell, Edie LaGuardia Hansen, Dr. Mark Cooper and Gene Carney; Vera Haldy for German translation; Herbert Verbesey and Gerard Sullivan for the Latin dedication; Antonio Bautista, Michael Morris; Cheryl Murray of Entertainment Law Digest; also, Alternative Research for online research; Richart Taylor and his Jackson Pollock center at the University of Oregon. Thanks to Catherine O’Reilly for her dedication, generosity, meticulous and expert editorial input on this and a dozen books over the past 25 years.

DEDICATION I dedicate this work to these colleagues with whom I share a common bond. They generously made my work this past year possible: Tom Brenn, Paul Cibrowski, Joe Clark, Richard Csarny, Jim Cullina, Gene Carney, Jim DeVito, Joe Fagan, Bill Gannon, Brian Griffin, Bob Higdon, John Kane, Mel Kubander, Joe LaSala, Joe Manzo, Joe Maurer, Charlie Miller, Bob Moriarty, SM, Frank O’Donnell, SM, Andy Oravets, Frank Poliafico, Bob Schult, Bruce Segall, Rhett Segall, John Spellman, Brian Trick, Herb Verbesey, Joe Wessling, Ken White, and Jim Wolf. Gestas cum sociis res meminisse juvat. (It delights me to remember all the things we shared together). — Donald Wigal Manhattan, 2005

CONTENTS Foreword

7

Introduction

9

The Myth of the Artist Cowboy

17

Struggling During Early Years: Making Energy Visible

105

Brilliant Peak Years: Art as Self-Discovery

183

The Genius of His Gesture: Involving Art and Others in His Self-Destruction

217

Appendix

248

Bibliography, Selected Resources and Notes

249

Index

254

The writer has tried to be accurate in referencing. However, there are very likely errors here, especially in the chronological order of events, and the titles and dates of works. For the first two years or so after publication, corrections and updates may be available in English from [email protected].

Abbreviations AbEx AOTC Benton Guggenheim Krasner MoMA Pollock

Abstract Expressionism Art of This Century, Manhattan Thomas Hart Benton Peggy Guggenheim Lee Krasner Museum of Modern Art, Manhattan Jackson Pollock

FOREWORD

E

ach of the four sections of this book refers to a span of at least ten years. Each subsection, usually covering one year,

opens by noting historical events relative at least indirectly to Pollock, or offers some significant backdrop to his life. Events named within that year are not necessarily presented here in strict chronological order. This book should not be relied on for trying to create a strict chronology of details. Although several interviews and over twenty biographies of Pollock were referred to while researching this work, when referring to ‘Pollock’s biographers’ without specific names, the reference is to the extensive work of Naifeh & Smith. Likewise, ‘de Kooning’s biographers’ always refer to Stevens & Swan. ‘Peggy Guggenheim’s biographer’ always refers to Mary V. Dearborn.

8

INTRODUCTION

F

ifty years ago the artist Jackson Pollock died, but he lives on in his biographies and especially in his

work. However, much of his genius was expressed by how he veiled the visible while he unveiled the invisible. A survey of the main events of Pollock’s life might lift some of the veils from his troubled soul and his

“It is just a matter of time and work now for me to have that knowledge a part of me. A good sevent y years more and I’ll make a good artist.”(403) – Age 20

amazing work, as well as explain somewhat his turbulent times. However, this overview offers no definitive explanation for either Pollock’s behaviour or his genius. It is intended to offer an opportunity to stand before the man and his oeuvre and be perplexed by the negatives, in awe of the positives, and aware of the ambiguities. However, it may be that by veiling himself and his art as he so uniquely did, Pollock paradoxically revealed much of his interior life, thereby making it possible to see and better understand therein something of his spiritual journey – if not also something of the universal human journey. Many of the events of Pollock’s life and much of his radically new art proved to be mystical yet profane, ugly yet awesome. At times the artist, like his art, appears to be innocent, graceful and sensitive. At the same time his life and art might seem to be crude, macho and abrasive. The biographer Andrea Gabor observes him to be “brilliant and naïve, gentle and aggressive, vulnerable and destructive.” She observes, “Few artists… seemed to personify the masculine excesses of the era more completely than Jackson Pollock who came to represent an archetype of unbridled artistic vitality.” (427) The cycles of Pollock’s life and art at times overlap, as they are sometimes seen as a child-man, angelbeast, and creator-destroyer. Many observers of his work are kept at a distance by what is ugly and yet pulled into what is beautiful in the realities of the artist’s rugged presence and his brilliant achievements. At the same time his private, self-destructive compulsions and isolation ironically drove him to his highly public end fifty years ago. Several interesting sub-themes in Pollock’s life are not developed here, including his relationship with his brothers’ families, his love of dogs, and his fascination with old cars, and speeding. Rather, one purpose of this concise overview of Pollock’s life and this selection of reproductions of some of his works is to help put his works into an historical context. However, what Pollock said of his The She-Wolf is surely true of his works in general: “Any attempt on my part to say something about it, to attempt any explanation of the inexplicable, could only destroy it.” Yet, some viewers probably need help in reaching that point where art is experienced simply as art, ideally with some knowledge of it as well. Some fans of Pollock’s art in particular might prefer to know nothing of the artist’s turbulent life. The following biographical sketch is presented especially for those for whom such knowledge enhances viewing. There are also art lovers who find scientific analysis of art helpful, while other viewers do not. For the former, consideration could be given to Richard Taylor, the professor of physics at the University of

Untitled (Self-portrait), 1931-1935.

Oregon. His crucial and amazing studies are of fractal expressionism and the so-called chaotic processes in

Oil on gesso on canvas, mounted on fibreboard, 18.4 x 13.3 cm,

the work of Pollock (107).

The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York.

9

Reproductions For many readers the reproductions, no matter how elegant, are at best like postcards reminding them of

“I’m just now getting into painting again and the stuf f is really beginning to f low. Grand feeling when it happens.”(426) – Age 36

the art itself, for which there is admittedly no perfect substitute. It was suggested the first two plates be represented in the actual size of the artwork, because those works are small. However, it should be pointed out that plates are often not in proportion to the actual size of the art works; small and large works might appear to be about equal in size on these printed pages. In one Pollock biography, for example, a reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica is one-third the height of Pollock’s Birth, reproduced on the facing page. However, the actual height of the Picasso work is three times the height of Pollock’s Birth. The chronology of main events presented here generally follows the order presented in dozens of published biographies, albeit other facts and especially the order in which Pollock’s works were actually completed might differ. Historical chronology here is often sacrificed for thematic development. Titles of Paintings Asked about the numbered titles of Pollock paintings, Lee Krasner said Pollock’s focus was to have people appreciate the pure painting rather than to be distracted by the titles. In the August 1950 New Yorker interview Pollock explained, “I decided to stop adding to the confusion…” caused by word titles. However, subsequent works were sometimes numbered, sometimes given word titles, sometimes both. The same work might be in different exhibitions under different titles. The alphabetical listing at the end of this work is primarily of the titles as in each exhibition, rather than to the paintings, although some consolidation has been attempted. For complete data see the four-volume Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings and Other Works, edited by Francis V. O’Connor and Eugene V. Thaw, and published by Yale University Press (1978), with a supplement published by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in 1995. Often the words in the titles of Pollock works have little, if anything, to do with the painting. For example, see the commentary below in the section on 1943 about the painting Moby Dick. Gallery owner Betty Parsons added the letter A to some titles, indicating they were probably exhibited but not sold in 1948. However, they may also not have been painted in the year indicated in the title. Subsequent titles would include numbers, words, and combinations thereof, some with and some without dates included in the title. Moreover, neither numbers nor dates imply a chronological order. The titles are listed in chronological order by the years the paintings were done, if known, or the year named in the title. Included in titles presented here are the two sets in series, Sounds in the Grass and Accabonac Creek. Over fifty Pollock works are untitled, but some of those have a year in their title, while a year has been assigned to others. Biographies Unlike formal biographies, this one occasionally refers to fictional or poetic works which allude to Pollock’s real life. However, it should be acknowledged that these fictional accounts are less reliable than authoritative biographies and at times they are admittedly outrageous. However, the most fanciful, such as the poem Jackson Pollock by Frank O’Hara, or the Bill Rabinovitch movie PollockSquared (2005), can get to truths rarely touched on by facts alone. Such fiction might, however, propose certain helpful links between known facts. This book attempts to distinguish known facts from the fictions with each reference, while acknowledging that sometimes fiction

The floor of Jackson Pollock’s studio, The Spring, East Hampton,

can be more insightful than facts alone. For the many actual biographical references consulted, a

Long Island.1998.

bibliography is presented as the first group of footnotes.

10

11

The She-Wolf, 1943. Oil, gouache and plaster on canvas, 106.4 x 170.2 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Birth, 1938-1941. Oil on canvas, 116.4 x 55.1 cm, Tate Gallery, London.

12

13

14

Historical Context Some of the statements made by Pollock’s contemporaries throughout this review of his life and work do not seem extraordinary or even noteworthy today, but it should be acknowledged that they were first made years before the legacy of Pollock was well established. Some statements were even prophetic in their envisioning of the artist’s success at a time when only supportive relatives and a small circle of friends knew him. Some of his contemporaries not only saw the potential of the artist, but many risked their reputations by supporting him. It was especially true of his artist brothers, as well as Thomas Hart Benton, Lee Krasner, Howard Putzel, Peggy Guggenheim, Clement Greenberg and James Johnson Sweeney. The following pages offer a brief profile of each of these influential people who generally supported Pollock. This overview, like previous biographies, movies, plays, and commentaries on Pollock’s work and art probably also falls into the pattern political commentator David Walsh sees in the script of the Ed Harris movie Jackson Pollock. Walsh notes, “(The movie) assembles a number of biographical details, without ever making profound sense of them.” (297) However, that movie, like this and other biographies, can leave most of the judgmental exercises up to the readers and viewers. Most Pollock observers predictably try to find the personal psychological causes for his tortured life. For example, this overview includes the characteristics of alcoholism, and also refers to the findings of psychiatrists and presents the results of studies such as that by pioneering Pollock researcher Francis V. O’Connor. Walsh commented, “A desperate need for approval usually forces one into doing that which is recognizable.” He also noted Pollock’s need for approval “…bordered on the psychopathic.” However, Walsh stresses Pollock’s problem and, more generally, that of Abstract Expressionism and post-war American painting, was in great part due to the dramatic and difficult political environment of the mid-twentieth century. He indicates specifically the effects of the growth of Stalinism in the Soviet Union and the Communist parties around the world, the nature of Trotsky’s opposition to Stalinism and the tragic fate of the Socialist revolution, as well as the conservative trend of the nature of post-war American society (296). Portraits Brief profiles of key figures in Pollock’s life can help paint a background against which the life of the artist might be seen in some historical context. Thumbnail sketches of those key people named above are offered throughout this book, along with notes on Willem de Kooning, Matta, Ruth Kligman, and Frank O’Hara. Cycles Pollock’s styles overlapped between cycles. Like the early works of many creative minds (in Pollock’s case, his work before c.1947), they are praised at the time of their creation. Critics then typically downgrade them mainly because subsequent works are even greater. Similarly, works after a peak period (for Pollock after c.1950) are seen as of less value. However, a convincing case can be made to show even the less successful work in Pollock’s oeuvre would have earned him a permanent place in the history of art. Pepe Karmel observes, “What appeared to observers of the 1940s and 1950s as a relatively seamless evolution (of Pollock as an artist) was now broken into three distinct phases: the early work, the ‘classic’ drip paintings, and the late work.” The term ‘drip’ is only used here when quoting others, as it was not a term preferred by Pollock or Krasner. While respecting Karmel’s three cycles, this book considers Pollock’s life in four sections: The Myth of the Artist Cowboy Struggling During the Early Years: Making Energy Visible

Untitled (Scent), c.1953-1955.

Brilliant Peak Years: Art as Self-Discovery

Oil and varnish on canvas, 99 x 146 cm,

The Genius of His Gesture: Involving Art and Others in His Self-Destruction

Los Angeles, CA, Collection David Geffen.

15

16

THE MYTH

OF THE

ARTIST COWBOY

In 1912, the SS Titanic sank. Picasso was only twenty-two, but his Le Moulin de la Galette and The Two Sisters of nearly ten years before, as well as his recent Harlequin, were already well known.

Birth The year Jackson Pollock was born was the year Democrat Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) became the U.S. president. However, the policies of the next Democratic president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945), would most directly influence Pollock and the art world. Coincidentally, catastrophic maritime disasters fell in both the year of Pollock’s birth and the year of his death. The former tragedy was the sinking of the S.S. Titanic in 1912 during her maiden voyage to New York City; the latter was the sinking of the Andrea Doria in 1956. The major news story of the year 1912 was undoubtedly the sinking of the S.S. Titanic during her maiden voyage. In other news, Arizona and New Mexico became states that year. However, the events of 1912 which would influence Pollock most directly included the publishing of C.G. Jung’s The Theory of Psychoanalysis, and the popularity of works by Picasso, such as that year’s The Violin.

“Yes, the modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.”(406) – Age 38

Cody On 28 January, 1912, Paul Jackson Pollock was born on Watkins Ranch in Cody, Wyoming. The town is in the northwest area of the state, about fifty miles East of Yellowstone National Park. The state is widely known as ‘the cowboy state’ and was part of the legendary Wild West. When Jackson’s parents moved there, the town had about 500 residents (334). Pollock’s earliest experiences were in the atmosphere of myths and romanticising of the Old West. The town of Jackson’s birth was founded only six years before the Pollock family moved there by Colonel William ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody (1846-1917). He was, and probably still is, the state’s most famous historical figure. Dozens of places in the area bear his name. He was an internationally-known buffalo hunter and showman, a promoter – and even creator – of some of the most legendary images of the ‘Wild West’ culture of the United States. Cody needlessly slaughtered 6,570 buffalo. It was a time when sensitivity to animal rights and macro-views of ecology were generally not yet cultivated. At the time of Jackson’s birth, Buffalo Bill was nearing the end of his life. In a unique way Pollock would carry on the spirit of some of Cody’s most exciting pioneering, rebellious and wild images, as well as myths about legendary American cowboys. Although Pollock spent only his first few months as an infant in Cody, he didn’t correct people who presumed he had lived in that truly Western town until he arrived in New York City. The Pollock-like character in Updike’s Pollock-inspired novel Seek my Face (2002) was, “…always telling people he had been a cowboy and it was a lie but his body looked it.” (429) Willem de Kooning’s biographers state, “Pollock’s self-destruction had a kind of grandeur that many in the art world respected. Pollock seemed a purely American figure, an authentic visionary, cowboy, and maverick.” (189) Fiction The Updike title alludes to the verse in Psalm 27: “You speak in my heart and say, ‘Seek my face.’ Your face, Lord, will I seek.” The psalmist and novelist, as well as biographers, want to unveil the image of their subject, yet they know, ultimately, the image will remain a mystery. However, Updike also veils his subject, Jackson Pollock, but doing so only thinly. For example, some names in Updike’s novel are more obvious allusions, such as Onna de Genoog representing Willem de Kooning, or Hackmann for Hofmann. Seamus O’Rourke is nearly an anagram for Mark Rothko. Updike’s main character is named Zack McCoy in the novel. The novel’s name for the artist is an allusion to both the artist’s familiar first name (Jack) and his father’s actual last name (McCoy). The Real McCoy Apparently only Pollock’s family called him Jack (146), and he signed at least one letter ‘Jacks’ (384). In 1930, Pollock dropped his first name, Paul. Years later his wife, Lee Krasner, would refer to him, even in his presence, as Pollock. McCoy was the birth name of Jackson’s father, LeRoy. After the death of LeRoy’s parents, in 1897, he was taken care of by a family named Pollock. Ten days before his twenty-first birthday LeRoy was adopted by the Pollocks. He then took on the name Pollock. Later he asked a lawyer to have his name changed back to McCoy, but doing so would have been too expensive (383).

Reflection on the Big Dipper, 1947. Oil on canvas, 111 x 92 cm, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Composition with Pouring II, 1943. Oil on canvas, 64.7 x 56.2 cm, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

Male and Female, 1942. Oil on canvas, 184.4 x 124.5 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.

17

18

19

“No chaos, damn it!” (413) – Age 38

Stranger Than Fiction While biographies don’t often include fiction in their resources, there are novels, plays, and movies about Pollock which do, with the usual caveats, help weave over certain holes in the veils that partly cover the subject. A reviewer for Time Magazine felt the Updike novel was lovely and wise (63). In fact, Updike’s very imaginative portrait of Pollock not only reveals some details more clearly than most serious biographies, but, unfortunately, also collates facts with tabloid rumours concerning alleged homosexuality, affairs and illegitimate children of the artist. More than a few Pollock fans believe the novel, like sensational tabloid headlines, perpetuates unsubstantiated myths unnecessarily. Some feel there is really enough violence, shock and dissipation in the facts, without exaggerating them. There is also another highly imaginative novel of Pollock’s life: Top of the World, Ma!, by Michael Guinzburg. The novel presents several of the same events from Pollock’s life as Updike’s novel (30). The title refers to a line spoken by actor Jimmy Cagney in the 1949 movie White Heat. The original line is, “Look at me now, Ma! Top of the world!” The line would certainly have been appropriate for a successful Pollock to say to his own mother at the height of his career. The Pollock Family Jackson was the youngest of five boys in the family of LeRoy McClure Pollock (1876-1933) and Stella May (18751958). His brothers were Charles Cecil (1902-1988), Marvin Jay (1904-1986), Frank Leslie (1907-1994), and Sanford ‘Sande’ LeRoy (1909-1963). An abbreviated family tree is provided. According to Jackson’s sister-in-law, Elizabeth, Jackson’s mother wanted all five of her sons to be artists of some kind. She considered them potential geniuses. However, in a letter to Charles, Sanford said he thought the emotional problems their brother Jackson had “date back to his childhood, to his relations with the family and our mother.” (145) The facts about the Pollock family and its origins tell something about their youngest son, ‘the cowboy’. He continued the mythology of his roots. His brothers – who experienced Cody and the Western culture longer than Jackson – seemed to have moved on, more able than Jackson to adopt and adapt to their new environments. Because of Jackson’s rebellious temperament and drive for individual and independent expression, it is possible he might not have cared to retain the urban cowboy tendency had any of his brothers continued the cowboy role. Throughout his life Pollock would mention growing up in Cody; however, he actually spent less than his first ten months in the town before the family moved to National City, near San Diego, California. The move would be the first of several during Jackson’s youth. For example, after only eight months in National City the Pollock family moved. In 1913, at age thirty-seven, LeRoy bought a truck farm in Phoenix, Arizona. He sold it only four years later, and then moved the family to Chico, California, where he bought and sold another farm, and then bought a hotel in Janesville. During his first decade, Jackson lived in six different houses as his father tried job after job, without much success, in three states. In California alone the Pollock family lived in eight different places. Religion Pollock’s parents were originally from Iowa, the state just West of Jackson’s birth state of Wyoming. They were Presbyterians of Scottish and Irish origin, their ancestors had been Quakers, but they did not indoctrinate their children into any religion. Apparently none of the Pollock boys could remember whether Jackson had been baptised. Updike reminded his readers that Quakers don’t baptise. In a 1929 letter to Charles and Frank, Jackson confessed he had “dropped religion for the present,” even though the year before he had been deeply impressed with Theosophy. Stories from the Christian Gospels would appear in only a few of Jackson’s drawings, which mainly reflected his studies of classic artists, including El Greco. The fact that Jackson had not been baptised would become an issue at the time of his marriage. However, it was he, not his wife, Lee Krasner, who wanted to have a church wedding. Lee had been raised in the Jewish faith.

Easter and the Totem, 1953. Oil on canvas, 208.6 x 147.3 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

20

Pollock the Cowboy A 1927 photo of fifteen-year-old Jackson taken by Lee Ewing is the only one showing him posing in Western garb. It contributes significantly to the myth of Pollock as a cowboy. But there are also photos showing he would occasionally wear formal attire and pose like a young European royal, with a jaunty walking cane in hand. In fact, the translator of a German biography referred to these quaint photos, commenting on the young man at the time, “…cultivates dandyish attire.” (123) After filming his movie Pollock, director Ed Harris regretted the famous ‘cowboy’ photo wasn’t shown more clearly in the film. (45) The photo is seen only briefly, and off to the side of an early scene showing Pollock’s Eighth Street apartment in Greenwich Village, Manhattan.

21

The Flame, 1934-1938. Oil on canvas, mounted on fibreboard, 51.1 x 76.2 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

22

Perhaps because of America’s admiration for the pioneers of the country’s West and the mythology of the American cowboy, Pollock often seemed to be forgiven for his crude behaviour. Some observers might even say this tolerance extended to his reckless drunken driving, if not also to its ultimate consequences. Minutes before his death while driving drunk, a policeman who knew Pollock would unfortunately overlook his drunken state. Like some of the rough-edged characters of Western fiction, Pollock would live out a boisterous and often crude Wild West spirit, especially in the bars of lower Manhattan. Meanwhile his brilliant art would intoxicate sophisticated viewers in the world’s most civilised museums (290). In fact, the art world would be influenced forever by Pollock’s unique, important and indelible contribution. Even during his lifetime, Pollock had become the new benchmark to which the art world would refer, as they began to consider modern art as ‘before,’ ‘contemporary with,’ or ‘after’ Pollock. Pollock’s influence is still notable fifty years later. In a review of the first showing of the early efforts of Italian painter Carla Accardi, in Manhattan in 2005, Roberta Smith of The New York Times notes the paintings of Accardi include impressive works from the mid-1950s. Her fields of scattered and overlapping circles and signs, rendered in white or yellow and black, “…suggest a controlled response to the work of Jackson Pollock.” (389) Not all references back to Pollock reflect an understanding of what his method was about. During the 2004 U.S. presidential election campaign, Daniel Okrent, the public editor of The New York Times spoke of what he saw as poor management of the paper’s coverage of the campaign. He compared its chaos to a “…pattern adapted from Jackson Pollock.” The title of his article was How would Jackson Pollock Cover this Campaign? (378).

“I’m just more at ease in a big area than I am on some thing 2 x 2; I feel more at home in a big area.”(406) – Age 38

Family Politics Walsh noted Pollock’s father, LeRoy, had been a socialist and his son became one too. As Pollock’s biographers also note, LeRoy supported socialist labour leaders and “celebrated at the news that the workers of Russia had taken control of their government.” Of his five sons, two would become active in the labour movement and one would join the Communist party. The other two became artists and had less strong political interests (300). Early Veils The distinction between the authentic and the fabricated Pollock began even in the artist’s lifetime. Pollock himself kept the myth alive that he was an unsophisticated cowboy. The country was eager to hear about cowboy legends. The popularity of the image was seen in pop culture through many movies and novels containing Western themes, as well as ‘country and western’ songs which were accepted into the mainstream parade of hits. It is likely most Americans can trace their images of the Old West back to movies, especially those made by John Ford (Sean Aloysius O’Feeny), who was born in Maine in 1895. He devoted about half of his prolific output to the American Western genre. According to his friend, Ted Dragon, Pollock enjoyed going to weekly Western or science-fiction movies, for which their affluent friend, Alfonso Ossorio, would pay (318). It is very likely Ford directed most of those Westerns. These movies probably played at least as big a role in Pollock’s image of the Old West as did his few early years living in Western states. Western themes even appeared in classical music, including Aaron Copeland’s music for ballets in the 1940s. In the 1940s, several Broadway musicals and, in the 1950s, many television programs, were based on Western themes. Of course these programs were rarely documentaries and did not reflect much of the reality of the pioneering days of the Western states. Steven Spielberg’s 2005 twelve-hour series, Into the West, is a remarkable exception. The eastern, or Big City, version of the cowboy evolved into the rebellious young men of the 1950s, not unlike Pollock’s real personality. Even fellow painters compared Pollock to Marlon Brando’s brooding character, Stanley Kowalski, in the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire. Commentators saw in the artist what might have been the playwright’s inspiration. Tennessee Williams and Pollock had become friends in 1944, several years before the 1951 play. Benton painted a portrait of the original theatrical cast of the play in 1948. Some commentators see the physical lines of the main character in Benton’s sketch for The Poker Party scene from the play as being those of the young Pollock (224). The play has had several revivals, including the version performed in February 2005, again on Broadway. After the wife of Pollock’s friend, Tony Smith, left him and went to Europe with the playwright Tennessee Williams in 1950, the lonely Smith spent even more time at the Pollock house. Tennessee was often seen on his bicycle going to and from the Pollock house. Williams’ play, The Rose Tattoo, and his novel, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, both critical successes, were released that year. In 1913, Freud’s Totem and Taboo was published. In Paris, Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps premiered. The pioneering Armory Show in Manhattan shocked the art world with seminal examples of postimpressionism and cubism.

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Number 1, 1949, 1949. Enamel and metallic paint on canvas, 160 x 259.1 cm, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Rita and Taft Schreiber Collection.

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White Light, 1954. Oil, enamel and aluminium paint on canvas, 122.4 x 96.9 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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The Advent of Abstract Expressionism

“I think they {laymen} should not look for, but look passively – and try to receive what the painting has to of fer and not bring a subject matter or preconceived idea of what they are to be looking for.”(406) – Age 38

During Pollock’s pre-teenage years, culture shocks (such as those coming from Freud, Stravinsky, and Dada) seemed to be preparing the world for him. Ryder and other predecessors died in 1917. They were yet to be admired by the young Pollock, while others whom he would look up to including Matisse and Picasso were already flourishing. The decade was also the advent of the basic documents of Jungian psychology which would influence the behaviour and work of the future artist intimately. In 1913, post-impressionism and cubism were introduced to the New York art world at the Armory Show in Manhattan. The resulting culture shock paved the way for the jolt of seeing the brilliant results of Pollock’s creative gesture which were still several years away. The large mural-like paintings he would create would similarly revolutionise how the world experienced art. The shock in the galleries would be similar to the reaction in the concert hall that same year to Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps. The visual art scene in Europe was preparing the world for a similar revolution in popular culture. The surprise would be that the ice would be broken in America – by a very unlikely cowboy-like rebel. In 1914, Tennessee Williams was born. In 1915, Marcel Duchamp showed his first Dada-type paintings. In 1916 Matisse (1860-1954) showed The Three Sisters. In 1917, C.J. Jung published Psychology of the Unconscious. Picasso created Surrealist objects for a ballet. Albert P. Ryder (b.1847), who developed a technique of painting sweeping strokes with a palette knife, died. In 1918, Joan Miró had his first exhibits. In 1919, Hans Arp and Max Ernst showed collages. Arp explored Dadaism through sculpture and ‘chance’ forms. Ernst sought to express the subconscious. In 1920, C.J. Jung published Psychological Types. In Cologne, visitors were encouraged to destroy the paintings in a Dadaist exhibition. In 1921, Oskar Kokoschka exhibited expressionist paintings. Jazz dominated American popular culture.

The Early Influences In 1921, Jackson’s brother Charles moved to Los Angeles to take a job at The Los Angeles Times. He also enrolled in the Otis Art Institute and sent home issues of the art magazine, The Dial. Over forty years later, on his deathbed, Sanford would thank Charles for sending copies of The Dial. “He said they meant a lot to him and Jack,” Charles remembered (327). Later Charles also sent American Mercury (1924-33), the controversial literary magazine published by Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956), who was a columnist on The Baltimore Sun, from 1906 until his death. These publications brought visions of East Coast sophistication to the young artists. The magazines also included reproductions of contemporary European art the young Jackson probably saw as he watched the older boys read about the Paris School, which was the rage. His life-long interest – some biographers say his obsession – with Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) could have begun with seeing these magazines sent home by Charles. In 1922, James Joyce’s Ulysses was published in Paris. Copies sent to the U.S. were destroyed by the U.S. post office. In 1923, the Dada movement ended. Picasso showed in Neoclassicism, Surrealism, and Expressionism. The New York Prohibition Enforcement Act was repealed. The tri-state conclave of the K.K.K. was held in Kokomo, Indiana, and was noted in a mural by Benton.

Pre-teen Art Education In 1922, Jackson’s father moved the family again to another farm at Orland, California. The next year they moved to a farm near Phoenix, Arizona. Jackson attended the Monroe Elementary School there, but he stayed for only a few weeks. He visited Native American reservations with his brothers for the first time. Untitled, 1944. Gouache, ink and wash on paper, 57.1 x 77.8 cm, Private collection.

Soon thereafter he was initiated into the traditions of Indian culture. He saw how the native artists integrated raw materials into their painting and other art. Their works were typically abstract or at least included abstract designs. Moreover, they worked on areas which were flat to the ground. Eighteen years later Pollock would visit an exhibit titled Indian Art of the United States at The Museum of Modern Art

Untitled (Woman), 1935-1938.

(henceforth referred to as MoMA) where he observed how Navajo artists made sand paintings on the floor.

Oil on fiberboard, 35.8 x 26.6 cm,

He would refer to both of those experiences ten years later when asked about the origins of his famous

Nagashima Museum, Kagoshima City, Japan.

technique of gestural painting. According to New York art reviewer Mark Stevens, a teacher enjoyed asking students what the best abstract

Untitled (Naked Man with a Knife), c.1938-1940.

art ever made in America was. They would predictably reply, “Pollock.” However, the teacher would correct

Oil on canvas, 127 x 91.4 cm,

them, noting, “You forgot the Navajo women.” The teacher was, as Stevens points out, referring to the Indian

Tate Gallery, London.

weavings they did, creating rugs “…as visually powerful as a modernist painting.” (103)

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T.P.’s Boat in Menemsha Pond, c.1934. Oil on metal, 11.7 x 16.2 cm, New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain.

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Going West, 1934-1935. Oil on gesso on fibreboard, 38.3 x 52.7 cm, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington.

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“I’m very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you’re painting out of your unconscious, f igures are bound to emerge. We’re all of us inf luenced by Freud, I guess. I’ve been a Jungian for a long time.”(407) – Age 44

In 1924, Picasso was in an abstract period. Piet Mondrian advocated a ‘peripheric’ view, lacking a central point of focus.

Uprooted Again The decentralised art of Mondrian, receiving attention in the mid-1920s, has been described as presenting “…a grid-based city without a distinct center or downtown.” (453) He was reflecting the unsettled era, one in which the teenage Pollock would begin his awareness of the art world. In 1924, the Pollock family moved back to Chico for a while, but then they moved the next year to Riverdale, a suburb of Los Angeles. Jackson attended Riverdale High School, but did not adjust well to the students or the classes. In 1925, Picasso showed Three Dancers. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was published. The New Yorker magazine began. In 1926, Claude Monet (b.1840) died. At age twenty-two, Willem de Kooning came to the United States from Rotterdam. Chicago-style jazz invaded Europe.

Teenage Years Pollock’s difficulty with social communication during adolescence was displayed early, for example after he enrolled at Riverside High School in 1927. Letters from his father expressed concern about his son’s inability to get along in school. In March 1928 Jackson stopped attending Riverside, where he was apparently expelled for fighting. Jackson, while still a teenager, moved with his mother and brothers Charles, Jay, and Sanford to Los Angeles in 1929. His father remained in Riverside and his brother Frank moved to New York. The rebellious teenager was expelled twice from yet another school, Manual Arts High School. One of these times it was not for physical fighting, but for participating in a student protest against school policies. He would later also be let go from his school’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps after an altercation with an ROTC officer. The overall effect of these frequent moves possibly contributed to the future artist’s life-long sense of unrest, instability, and difficulties in social groups. On the other hand, he might also have learned something about adaptability. Early Vision of Career Before being expelled in 1929, Jackson met young men who would become his companions: Donald Brown, Reuben Kadish, Jules Langsner, Harold Lehman, Leonard Stark, Manuel Tolegian, and especially Philip Guston. Kadish would prove to be a very important link to the artist’s future fame. Kadish’s later friendship with Howard Putzel was to be a seminal link to the most influential figures of the art world, specifically Peggy Guggenheim. At an age when most American high school seniors were still considering college or several possible careers after years of education, Pollock already knew classes in art, especially in drawing and sculpture, were preparing him for his career. However, he admitted in letters to his brothers that he was filled with doubt and lacked selfconfidence. In one letter the young Pollock notes, “As to what I would like to be, it is difficult to say. An artist of some kind. If nothing else I shall always study the Arts…” He was aware, however, that his drawing skills were rather minimal (309). While some of his letters to his brothers during these years are available, none of his drawings from high school appear to have survived.

Bird, 1938-1941. Oil and sand on canvas, 70.5 x 61.6 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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Roots of Alcoholic Behaviour LeRoy found work in Riverside, California. During the summer of 1927 and the three years which followed, Jackson and his brother, Sanford, also worked there with their father, doing topographical surveys of the Grand Canyon. Later Jackson would note the vast landscape of the West influenced his artistic vision. When he finally obtained his own property, one of the first changes he made was to move a barn so he could see more of the distant horizon. His sense of the ‘all over’ quality of a view was evolving. Although he was only fifteen, Pollock began working with men for whom drinking alcohol was a daily routine. His experience with excessive drinking began at that time. Addiction to alcohol would last the rest of his short life, with only a few sober periods. Even at very inappropriate times and places, Pollock would act out the rugged and often anti-social brawling he learned in his early days with the older cowboys, while working with his father and the Grand Canyon crew. Pollock would always remain, as Guggenheim biographer Mary V. Dearborn expressed it, “…a raw, uncouth, barely socialised child of the hardscrabble American West, yet possessed of an explosive talent.” (264) As Guggenheim remembered, Pollock “became one might say devilish”, on social occasions (42).

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Number 13A, 1948, (also called Arabesque), 1948. Oil and enamel on canvas, 94.6 x 295.9 cm, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.

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Later in letters to his sons, LeRoy expressed regret he had not been a more positive influence on his five sons. On the negative side, his alcoholism influenced the boys, Jackson in particular. While drinking with the older men during these years, Jackson displayed early symptoms of his alcoholism. In 1930, Pollock wrote to his brother Charles, describing youth as “this so-called happy part of one’s life,” stating it was to him “a bit of damnable hell.” (438)

“Sculpturing I think is my medium, I’ll never be satisf ied until I’m able to moul d a mountain of stone, with the aid of a jackhammer, to f it my will.”(403) – Age 20

In 1927, Edward Hopper (1882-1967) showed Manhattan Bridge. Sound began to be added to commercial movies.

Benton The great Thomas Hart Benton was most famous for his distinctive style and large mural paintings. However, in his essay for a Benton exhibition in 2004 at Hammer Galleries, Dr. Henry Adams reminded viewers that Benton also, “…produced abstractions in every decade of his career and was teacher and life-long friend and supporter of the Abstract Expressionist painter, Jack Pollock.” (433) Benton’s important series of articles for Arts Magazine in the 1920s about abstract design was titled, The Mechanics of Form Organization in Painting. Adams pointed out that while Benton’s regionalism fell out of favour in America to Abstract Expressionism, his principles as laid out in those essays were, ironically, followed by the foremost Abstract Expressionist painter, his beloved student, Jackson Pollock (434). Benton’s distinctive regionalist style of mural was an easy target for parody. A New Yorker cartoonist in 1945 spoofed the notion of showing some ordinary act of labour as a grand and heroic pose. In his cartoon a farmer complains no real work will get done if all the men do is stand around in heroic poses as they admire the tobacco leaves (459). It was probably in the wake of his politically-focused work that Benton was sometimes called a social realist, but his artistic style would be more properly and often called regionalism, not realism in any sense like that which preceded Impressionism abroad. In 1926, Jackson’s brother Charles moved to Manhattan and began classes, five days a week, at the Art Students League with Benton. Four years later Jackson moved to New York and also studied under Benton. So began one of the major influences on the young artist. Pollock fell under the close tutelage of Benton, and over the years they gradually formed a love-hate relationship regarding their art. Benton was a leading proponent of American regionalism, but also introduced Pollock to the Italian masters. Pollock caught the itch about which Benton spoke in his best-selling memoir. After the death of his father, Pollock said he was “moved by a desire to pick up again the threads of my childhood. To my itch for going places there was injected a thread of purpose which, however slight as a far-reaching philosophy, was to make the next ten years of my life a rich texture of varied experience.” (435) Police records document that once while staying with the Bentons, Pollock was arrested for drunkenness and disturbing the peace. However, a Pollock work from an earlier time of comparative sobriety, Cotton Pickers, was shown at the temporary galleries of the Municipal Art Committee. It most obviously shows the influence of Benton in style as well as subject matter, but in some details already showed a desire to break from that regionalism. In his final letter to his father in 1933 (394), Jackson called Benton “the most important Contemporary American painter.” Ironically, that was the kind of praise that would eventually be applied to Pollock himself in a few years. Even though they disagreed about styles and philosophies, Benton would remain an unwavering supporter of Pollock. Benton involved his family and friends in Monday night ensembles. He himself played the harmonica and developed an original system of musical notation for harmonica which is still used (55). He also taught Pollock the basics of playing the harmonica, which the young artist never mastered. Benton used Pollock as a model for some of his paintings. For example, Pollock posed for the sketch used for the harmonica player in The Ballad of the Jealous Lover on Lone Green Valley (1934). The sketch and the mural are presently at the University of Kansas Museum of Art. The sketch is signed ‘Portrait of Jack Pollock as a young man. Benton.’ (It is said in some biographies nobody called the artist ‘Jack’ except his close family.) By 1934, Benton was, in effect, already part of Jack’s extended family. Pollock said, “My work with Benton was important as something against which to react very strongly, later on… Better to have worked with him than with a less resistant personality who would have provided a much less strong opposition.” (312) Concerning major early influences of Pollock’s art, nearly all resources mention the importance of Benton, as does the Funk & Wagnalls New Encyclopedia, for example (27). Most sources also mention the importance of the Mexican muralist, Siqueiros. However, very few resources mention Siqueiros and the Navaho sand paintings. John Walker, the curator emeritus of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., mentions those two major influences, but does not mention the Benton influence on Pollock’s early art (118).

Untitled (Naked Man), c.1938-1941. Oil on plywood, 217 x 60.9 cm, Private Collection.

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Number 11A, 1948, 1948. Oil, enamel and aluminium paint on canvas, 167.6 x 83.8 cm, Private Collection.

Number 14, Gray, 1948. Enamel on gesso on paper, 57.8 x 78.8 cm, Yale University Gallery of Art, New Haven, Connecticut.

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“The modern artist, it seems to me, is working and expressing an inner world – in other words – expressing the energ y, the motion, and other inner forces.”(406) – Age 38

The influence of the master Benton on the early styles of Charles and Jackson is obvious in the young men’s early efforts, but in Jackson’s it became less obvious as he matured. In the Ed Harris movie, Pollock, observant viewers will notice the reproduction of a work by Charles, very much in the style of Benton. It is seen hanging on the older Pollock’s kitchen wall. American Art There is a widely accepted opinion that the movement championed by the British scholar, Sir Herbert Read, and which gave American painting a new international status, did not originate in America or begin with Pollock. This theme is repeated throughout Read’s final work, Concise History of Modern Art (109). His work was written only months after Pollock’s death. Read lacked the advantage of hindsight, yet his early statements are valuable at least for that reason, as they had not yet been influenced by many other commentaries. Read said, “It is impossible to establish national boundaries for modern painting.” He then quoted Pollock, from his famous reply in 1944 to a questionnaire published in Arts and Architecture. “The idea of an isolated American painting,” Pollock said, “seems absurd to me just as the idea of purely American mathematics or physics would seem absurd… The basic problems of contemporary painting are independent of any country.” (83) Even so, no less than the distinguished John Walker said, “Pollock was the most original painter America has produced.” (118) The Need for an American Artist In a 1991 interview with the Willem de Kooning biographers, Milton Resnick summed up the need in American art circles during Pollock’s day to have a great authentic American artist. It was the advent of Pollock’s entrance as the American artist they had been waiting for, but they were most likely not expecting a cowboy. He was, de Kooning thought, “the American glamour boy in art. …who were they going to go to – a Dutchman, an Italian, a Jew, a Greek? Where’s the American? He filled the bill.” (430) De Kooning later recalled: “Pollock was the leader.” He was the painting cowboy, the first to get recognition. Peggy Guggenheim was crazy about him. She bought things from him during the war recalled de Kooning (431). However, some post-mortem ‘revenge’ could be offered as, for example, in 2005 when de Kooning’s Sailcloth (1949), made before his famous satirical Woman series began, was expected to sell for $9-$12 million at Christie’s (344).

Number 26A, 1948: Black and White, 1948. Enamel on canvas, 208 x 121.7 cm, Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

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The Movie: Pollock Reference is made here to the Ed Harris movie several times because it follows the authoritative tome by Naifeh & Smith to which Harris had obtained the movie rights. However, the movie is a biographical entertainment which obviously isn’t a documentary. In contrast, the Hans Namuth 1950 ‘documentary’ film, supposedly showing the typical work method of Pollock, might be more acting and posing than cinéma vérité. The awardwinning Harris movie is widely known. In its review of the best movies of the year 2000, Time Magazine notes Ed Harris “never lets his exhibitions of Pollock’s inexplicable gift soften or redeem the artist’s monstrousness.” The review concludes there has never been a more biographical film of an anti-hero than this one. However, have there been many artists since Beethoven with a greater contrast between the depressed artist and his inspirational art? However, not all critics praise the film without reservation. Walsh and other critics believe the historical dimension of Pollock’s life is absent in Harris’ film. Some critics feel the film is much too narrow in its approach and fails to address many factors which influenced his life and work. While it deals with psychological issues and his response to social situations, it does not present his political history and social aspirations which surely also had to have a profound impact on his life (295). Ed Harris began painting in the early 1990s, which certainly helped prepare him to play the role of Pollock so convincingly, especially during the painting scenes. In an interview Harris explains, “I’ve been painting and drawing off and on since I became committed to making this film. I had a little studio built so I’d have enough floor space to work on larger canvases.” (45). Walsh observes the Harris movie is “so narrowly focused and so limited in its approach that the most essential truths about Pollock and his circumstances are permitted to escape.” Marcia Gay Harden was given the Oscar for best supporting actress for her role as Krasner, but some critics agree with those who felt Harris should have been given an Oscar for directing, if not also for lead actor. Before the Harris movie, a film referring to Pollock’s life was being thought of. It might have starred Robert De Niro (as Pollock) and Barbra Streisand (as Krasner) but it did not develop (180). In the Harris movie, Harden, not a native of Brooklyn like Streisand, very effectively takes on a Brooklyn accent, especially for the early scenes of the movie.

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Number 28, 1950, 1950. Oil, enamel and aluminium paint on canvas, 172.7 x 266.7 cm, Collection Muriel Kallis Newman, Chicago.

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The famous Life photo of a hostile-looking Pollock foreshadows the attitudes of the roles of restless rebels (with or without causes) played by actors. Barnaby Ruhe plays the mature Jackson Pollock in PollockSquared. Actor Richard Simulcik, Jr., in his publicity poses for the 1997 play, Number One: A Pollock Painting, also effectively captures the Pollock-like attitude and the arrogant pose (139). In promotional Polaroid photographs for his 1986 play, One Gesture of the Heart, actor/director Victor Raphael also looks somewhat like Pollock, sans dissipation and anger (385). However, Ed Harris surely captures the image of Pollock perfectly, and had a big advantage because in the movie he physically looks like the painter of the 1940s. Moreover, Harris amazingly learned the gestural technique and does an uncanny reincarnation of Jackson’s famous action painting Dance.

“I’ve got a long way to go yet toward my development - much that needs working on doing everything with a def inite purpose. Without purpose with each move then chaos.”(403) – Age 20

Dean of Art To help readers picture the young, rebellious Jackson, biographers have suggested thinking of characters played in movies starring James Dean, or characters played by Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Steve McQueen, or Martin Sheen when they were young. Many soap operas, for example, include a character that is an angry young man archetype. The myth of the cowboy-artist Pollock probably satisfied a similar popular need in his day. Of course, those actors were generations after Pollock. Moreover, the actors were fortunately less rebellious in their real lives than in the troubled lives of the characters they played. Pollock was, in reality, truly at least as moody and non-conformist as those fictional characters. However, comparisons at the time, especially to James Dean, who also died in a fatal car crash, are inevitable. Dean’s last movie was Giant, the giant of motion pictures released in 1956, the year of Pollock’s fatal crash. Film critic Leslie Halliwell said Dean’s death set off “astonishing world-wide outbursts of emotional necrophilia.” (393) A retrospective bio-pic, The James Dean Story, was compiled in 1957, the same year as Pollock’s retrospective at MoMA. That atmosphere and those comparisons, along with the unique but widely-circulated photo of Pollock in Western gear, help to keep the myth alive to this day. Jackson’s brother, Charles, had a very similar photo in the Western work gear, but he didn’t perpetuate into adulthood a corresponding cocky attitude, as did Jackson. It might be that Pollock’s inner child was always that of a rebellious and independent cowboy. Lee Krasner In several references, the birth year of Lee Krasner is given as 1912, the same as Pollock’s. However, it is given as 1908 in Gabor and other authoritative sources (395). At the least, oral biographies sometimes mention she was older than Pollock. Krasner’s parents were Orthodox Jews from Brooklyn. She was the fifth of six children, and apparently her talent was overlooked in her youth. However, she later became a favourite student of the noted artist and mentor, Hans Hofmann, from 1937 to 1940. She lived with an artist, Igor Pantuhoff, in the early 1930s. She led her relatives to think they were married (447). He was in so many ways the opposite of Lee; in his appearance, background, and philosophy (446). Yet, they shared an apartment in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, with Harold Rosenberg and Harold’s wife, May Tabak. Rosenberg had Pollock’s evolving technique in mind when he later coined the phrase, action painting. Pantuhoff’s profile portrait of Krasner seems to be a caricature, yet it is oddly flattering. It is one of the many details carefully incorporated into the Harris movie. Pantuhoff said, “How much you get paid (for a portrait of a society lady) depends on how well you sleep with her.” (442) He was an admirer of de Kooning. Pollock’s biographers suggest Pollock and Pantuhoff “were drawn to Krasner not so much by lust as by their alcoholism, eccentricity, and a latent homosexual’s attraction to a maternal figure.” (445) After Pollock’s death, Pantuhoff inexplicably wanted to resume their love affair (23). Even brief biographies of Pollock need to profile Krasner. Critics and art historians acknowledge her importance in the history of American art. Even just socially, she always had an important male artist in her life. However, each of those men had a love/hate relationship with her. One of her biographers observes, “To these men, an incisive mind, a sharp wit, luxuriant hair, a stunning figure, and beautiful hands couldn’t militate against a face that evoked cubism in the flesh.” (137) Pollock derisively referred to Lee in public and in her presence as ‘that face’. One neighbour described her as ‘shrewishly unattractive.’ (138) A classmate of Krasner’s said, “She was not a handsome woman… My impression was that most men, like me, were rather repelled by her.” (443). Hofmann did at least two portraits of Krasner, probably between 1935 and 1940. Each seems to seek both her strength and grace while acknowledging her prominent physical features and his apparent interest in her shapely lips. The portrait, with the odd double-lined outline of the nose, is the property of the Jason McCoy Gallery, from the collection of a former Hofmann student, Lillian Kiesler. It is oil on board, 25 x 21 ¼ inches (63.5 x 54 cm). Hofmann expert, Tina Dickey, believes, “(Hofmann) may have been using two brushes at once in those double strokes.” About the theory that Hofmann was showing the process of his work, Dickey adds, “It seems unlikely that he would, or could, draw a line so closely parallel to the line of an earlier stage.” (335) (Note Jason McCoy is Sande McCoy’s son, a nephew of Pollock).

Number 32, 1950, 1950. Enamel on canvas, 269 x 457.5 cm, Kunstammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.

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“Well, method is, it seems to me, a natural growth out of a need, and f rom a need the modern artist has found new ways of expressing the world about him.”(406) – Age 38

Gothic, 1944. Oil on canvas, 215.5 x 142.1 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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Pollock’s portraits of Krasner were also unflattering, in contrast to her self-portraits in which she showed herself as young and even glamorous. Her biographer, Gabor, describes how the young girl, Lena Krassner (sic), hung a mirror from a tree in her backyard and then painted her own portrait: “Those who knew Krasner would easily recognise the pose of defiance… scepticism and intensity.” (362) Krasner was not alone in being the artist-wife of a more famous husband, and thus put her career on hold during his artistically productive years. De Kooning’s wife, Elaine, was another. Ann Rower makes a fascinating comparison between the two artist wives (97). Other outstanding women who often stood behind their famous men are studied in Andrea Gabor’s, Einstein’s Wife (28). Concerning Krasner’s politics, Gabor comments, “She believed in the new aesthetic and in a divine, Platonic ideal of the artist that she found embodied by Pollock.” (432) Even after years of life in the shadows of Pollock, Krasner would become, as biographer Gabor expresses it “the most powerful wife and widow in the artistic firmament.” (448) Another woman would be essential to the process – Peggy Guggenheim. The art education of Krasner was exceptional. Robert Hughes notes, “No American could have had a better one in the ‘30s. First, there was rigorous academic grounding under the atelier system at the Art Students League in New York. Then the large-scale practical experience on the WPA murals in the ‘30s; finally, three years (1937-1940) under the great émigré teacher, Hans Hofmann, who knew… Matisse, Kandinsky, Mondrian… and could share their ideas with students.” (449) Most critics today would probably agree with Hughes, who said in 1983, the art of Krasner was, “…nearly the equal of de Kooning and better than Rothko or Still” (53). Guggenheim once asked Krasner to exhibit in a show for women artists, but Lee declined, probably rejecting the notion women artists should be singled out so categorically. The two women never got along. Lee thought the wealthy patron wanted to have sex with her husband. It was common knowledge Guggenheim had had affairs with other artists, including Tanguy and one of her future partners, Max Ernst. In 1943, Ernst left Guggenheim for Dorothea Tanning, a young American Surrealist painter. It wasn’t unreasonable for Lee to think Guggenheim was trying to seduce her very masculine husband (10). In the film Pollock, Harris, as Jackson, and his real-life wife, actress Amy Madigan as Peggy, act out an unsuccessful sexual effort alleged to have taken place between the two. Guggenheim’s biographer makes a convincing case to show it is unlikely that Jackson and Peggy ever had sex, in spite of the rumours (349). Krasner finally received overdue recognition in a celebrated 1983 retrospective. The exhibition then toured several rounds of U.S. museums. In his long review in Time Magazine, Robert Hughes points out the fiction of the scenario which tries to explain Krasner’s comparatively small and unnoticed production of works during her life with Pollock. That myth depicts her as the vulnerable female who was overcome by the famous male. Hughes points out if Pollock had married someone “with a less acerbic and combative temper than Krasner’s, his demands, his egotism and his fondness for the bottle might have done her in” (53). Particularly because of his behaviour in his final year, unfaithfulness could have been added to the judgment list. Concerning a specific work of hers, Krasner insisted she had painted over one of Pollock’s discarded canvases. However, Gabor reports recent tests have revealed she actually painted over one of her own canvases. Of course, there might be more than one painting involved in the apparent contradiction (450). Early in her relationship with Pollock, Krasner took control of his art. She later discovered Sidney Janis, Pollock’s dealer for years, had sold several Pollock paintings to members of his family at very low prices (124). After Pollock’s death, Krasner displayed dozens of her own works on her walls, but no Pollock paintings. Karen Wilkins observes, “Krasner’s marriage to Pollock, while unquestionably of crucial importance to his own short professional life and his evolution as an artist, occupied only fifteen years of Krasner’s nearly fifty years in her career as a painter…” (121) The final sentence before the closing credits of Ed Harris’ movie states: “Lee Krasner lived for another twenty-eight years (after the death of Pollock), during which she managed the Pollock estate and produced the biggest, boldest, most brilliantly coloured works of her career, many of them painted in Jackson’s studio.” (45) She died alone in a hospital room at age seventy-six in June 1984. According to Gabor, Lee left an estate worth about $10 million (28). However, Solomon says it was $20 million (360). There is agreement on the fact she left no burial instructions, but gave specific directions to preserve the house in Springs on Long Island as a museum and study centre, now known as Pollock/Krasner House and Study Center (126). Just as there was a retrospective of Pollock’s works at MoMA after his death, there was also one of Krasner’s works six months after her death. Additionally, in 2000, the Brooklyn Museum of Art had an Exhibit of Krasner (6 October, 2000 to 7 January, 2001), which was one of several international exhibits of her work. In 2005, Christie’s auction house expects an untitled 1961 Krasner oil and enamel on canvas (162.5 x 147.9 cm) to sell for half a million dollars (342).

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Number 14, 1951, 1951. Enamel on canvas, 146.4 x 269.2 cm, Tate Gallery, London.

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Yellow Islands, 1952. Oil on canvas, 143.5 x 185.4 cm, Tate Gallery, London.

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Number 17A, 1948. Oil on canvas, 86.5 x 112 cm, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

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Guggenheim’s Early Sightings After much advice and encouragement, Guggenheim decided to see more of Pollock’s works. She went to his apartment/studio, where she was to meet him. It was an event which would be described in several biographies, plays and movies, and from different points of view in several memoirs. Most agree Guggenheim arrived at the Pollock apartment before Jackson himself arrived. Testing the lady’s patience even more was her climb up four flights of steps. In some versions, including the Harris movie, Guggenheim climbed the flights only to find he wasn’t home. She returned to street level where she found the drunken Pollock. He and Krasner had returned home from Peter Busa’s wedding. Furious, Guggenheim then climbed up the stairs again, this time with the artist and Krasner (348). Guggenheim then at first saw only Krasner’s works. She complained she did not come to see the works of ‘L.K.,’ the signature Lee used at the time. Years later, Robert Hughes of Time Magazine stated Guggenheim always seemed to be so jealous of Krasner’s place in Pollock’s life that “she refused to acknowledge her as an artist.” (53) When Guggenheim finally saw Pollock’s works in the apartment she was impressed, but she was not yet enthusiastic. Before making a decision concerning a one-man show, she said she would have to call on the expert opinion of her advisor, Marcel Duchamp. In 1925, Duchamp had participated in the first exposition in Paris of Surrealists and related artists (386). Once Duchamp saw the Pollock paintings en masse, he expressed approval as well, though in an inarticulate way and with his characteristic reserve. A conversation between him and Pollock surely would have been one of few words. However, the master’s authoritative nod was the final push Guggenheim needed to gamble on Pollock. His first one-man show was held later that year. After her partner and art advisor, Max Ernst, left her in 1943, Guggenheim relied on the advice of three people in her entourage, especially Howard Putzel, a former Los Angeles art gallery owner, the Chilean artist Matta and, less officially, James Johnson Sweeney. Putzel became her confidant and secretary in Paris. Sweeney would become chairman of the divisions of painting and sculpture at MoMA. All three of Guggenheim’s innercircle advisors directed her to young Americans. Guggenheim’s initial association with Lee Krasner, then Jackson Pollock, was through others whom she already knew and trusted. She believed in Putzel and he believed in Pollock. Likewise, she respected Duchamp and he approved of Pollock. Herbert Matter, the photographer/designer, also saw Pollock’s works at the artist’s apartment. Matter told James John Sweeney, and he in turn told Peggy Guggenheim. (In 2003 Matter’s son, Alex, reported that he found a trove of 32 paintings alledged by Pollock and given by the artist to his father.) (467) Matta joined those who recommended Pollock to Guggenheim after meeting the artist during discussions about automatism. The discussion group included artists Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Peter Busa, and Jerome Kamrowskia. Peggy Guggenheim assembled a jury to select works for a Spring Salon. The judges included Duchamp and Sweeney, and most important, Piet Mondrian. He was the highly respected master of the de Stijl movement, recently arrived in Manhattan. It seems Guggenheim’s driving obsession was sex. Some say she allowed herself to be overly involved with the men she was attracted to. The record shows she neglected not only women artists, but also other men who were excellent modern American painters, including Motherwell, Guston, Tworkov, Kline, and even Rothko. A similar infamous event, often dramatised but apparently based solely on fragmentary evidence, is when Pollock walked naked into a room filled with guests, then urinated into a fireplace during the party following the hanging of his Mural. Guggenheim’s memory of the evening was Pollock walking naked into the room, but she didn’t mention urination. However, she stressed the man was certainly difficult and sometimes he could upset people – and furniture. However, she added he could be quite the opposite when not drinking. She believed he felt trapped in the big city and his life would have been more fulfilling had he lived out West, far from the social life of a large city, which she thought may have frightened him (184).

“I am doubt ful of any talent, so what even I choose to be, will be accomplished only by long study and work.”(401) – Age 17

Guggenheim’s Autobiographies In 1945-1946, Guggenheim worked on editing and publishing the first of two books of her memoirs. Even though Krasner was not on good terms with Guggenheim, Peggy did ask Lee to read it before the final manuscript was submitted. As in John Updike’s highly imaginative account of many events in Pollock’s life, Guggenheim’s memoirs Out of This Century, often made up names concealing real people, though only slightly. The subtitle, Confessions of an Art Addict, did not appear on the front jacket of the Dial Press edition in 1946. To say the first autobiography was not well received by critics is a polite understatement. However, the work is noteworthy here because Pollock designed the book’s jacket, with front cover art by Peggy’s companion, Max Ernst. The back was by Pollock. Several Pollock biographies, including the 1967 MoMA publication, Jackson

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Number 12A, 1948. Enamel on gesso on paper, 57.2 x 77.8 cm, Collection Mr. and Mrs. Stanley R. Gumberg, Pittsburgh.

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Untitled (Composition with pouring I), 1943. Oil on canvas, 90.8 x 113.6 cm, Private Collection.

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Red and Blue, c.1943-1946. Gouache, tempera and ink on fiberboard, 48.6 x 61 cm, Collection Charles H. Carpenter.

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Night Sounds, c.1944. Oil and pastel on canvas, 109.2 x 116.8 cm, Private Collection.

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“I hate paintings… Painting is my whole life.”(407) – Age 44

Pollock (304), mention that Pollock designed the cover for her autobiography, but do not make clear the front cover art is by Ernst (130). Some others incorrectly indicate that the cover art was by Pollock as well. Later, after writing a second autobiography, Guggenheim admitted, “I seem to have written the first book as an uninhibited woman and the second as a lady who was trying to establish her place in the history of modern art.” (131) Throughout her life, Guggenheim was the doyenne of modern art, or ‘the mistress of modernism,’ the title used by her biographer, Mary V. Dearborn. Closing of Art of This Century According to biographers Naifeh & Smith, Pollock begged Guggenheim to give him a final show at Art of This Century (AOTC) in 1946, before the gallery closed (132). It would have been the best time to sell art, during the Christmas season. He wanted to sell more paintings in order to make a profit that year. However, she said the best she could do was to give him a show in early 1947, which was clearly not as advantageous to him. In Greenberg’s review of Pollock’s first exhibition, the critic said some of the artist’s large works used wallpaper patterns (37). Even years later, in 1952, the critic Harold Rosenberg would still refer to apocalyptic wallpaper, a phrase often repeated and which especially irritated the artist (133). Rosenberg’s statement about gestural painting was likewise influential and became famous, alluding rather obviously to Pollock as well as others: “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act… what was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” (134) One-Man Shows In this unofficial review of the artist’s works, the significant one-man shows during his life are considered to be the following: 1st 1943 AOTC* 2nd 1945 Chicago 3rd 1945 AOTC* 4th 1945 San Francisco 5th 1946 AOTC* 6th 1948 Betty Parsons* 7th 1949 Betty Parsons* 8th 1949 Betty Parsons* 9th 1950 Venice 10th 1950 Betty Parsons* 11th 1951 Maryland 12th 1951 Betty Parsons* 13th 1952 Paris 14th 1952 Sidney Janis* 15th 1953 Vermont 16th 1954 Sidney Janis* 17th 1955 Sidney Janis* 18th 1956-1957 MoMA Retrospective* 19th 1957 Brazil, Rome, Basel, Amsterdam, Manburg, Berlin, London, Paris *Manhattan Guggenheim’s Profits After his first one-man show, Pollock was not yet an unqualified critical success. But, late in life, Guggenheim watched the prices of Pollock paintings grow to tremendous amounts. She commented, “I never sold a Pollock for more than $1,000 in my life.” (68) Art dealer Ben Heller likewise denied the rumour he made $4 million on his works by Pollock, adding: “I’ve been in hock for works of art since I started (collecting).” (341) However, by donating Mural to the University of Iowa in 1948, Guggenheim was able to take a tax deduction of $3,100. On the other hand, she had given away countless Pollock works over the years, usually without realising any tax advantages (135). For example, she gave Pollock’s Cathedral to Bernard and Becky Reis in 1949, who in turn later gave it to the Dallas Museum of Art. Cathedral was chosen to represent Pollock’s work in his biographical profile in Greenhill’s Dictionary of Art (39). Guggenheim believed she owned the 1947 works, War, Composition, Shimmering Image, White Horizontal, and Sounds in the Grass: Eyes In the Heat (II). She didn’t mention Alchemy which is another work often shown as typical of Pollock’s work from those peak years. In Steven Little’s book Isms (2004), the painting is shown to illustrate the ‘physicality and energy’ which is typical of much of Abstract Expressionism. The author then defines Jung’s concept of alchemy, as if the painting’s title had anything to do with the painting itself.

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Untitled, c.1945 Ink and Gouache over engraving and drypoint, 40.6 x 59.7 cm, Private Collection.

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Number 6, 1948: Blue, Red, Yellow, 1948. Oil and enamel on paper, mounted on canvas, 57.2 x 77.8 cm, Private Collection.

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Number 34, 1949, 1949. Enamel on paper on masonite, 59.7 x 81.3 x 1.9 cm. Munson Proctor Art Institute, Museum of Art, Utica, New York.

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Untitled (Cut-Out Figure), 1948-1950. Enamel, aluminum and oil paint, glass and nails on cardboard and paper, mounted on fiberboard, 78.8 x 57.5 cm, Private Collection.

Untitled (Cut-Out), 1948. Enamel, aluminum and oil paint, glass and nails on cardboard and paper, mounted on fiberboard, 78.8 x 57.5 cm, Ohara Museum of Art, Kurashiki, Japan.

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Untitled (Shadows: Number 2, 1948), 1948. Oil and paper cut out on canvas, 136.5 x 111.8 cm, Private Collection.

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Also painted in 1947 was Reflection on the Big Dipper. It was one of the works from this period critics, with the exception of Greenberg, loved to use to show off their clever phrases. Parker Tyler in Art Digest said, “Pollock’s current method seems to be a sort of automatism, apparently while staring steadily up into the sky, he lets go a loaded brush on the canvas. …probably it also results in the severest pain in the neck since Michelangelo painted the Sistine Ceiling.” (371) Not many people actually liked Pollock’s earlier works, so the rare positive reaction to them is especially noteworthy. The fact that Putzel immediately used the word ‘genius’ to describe Pollock’s works is mentioned in most biographies of Pollock. Putzel’s personal epiphany is captured in plays, movies and most notably in Ed Harris’ film. They all follow, sometimes scrupulously, the comprehensive presentation in the Naifeh & Smith biography (72). The ‘genius’ moment is also pivotal in Updike’s novel (136).

“I sometimes lose a painting but I have no fear of changes, because a painting has a life of its own.”(409) – Age 38

Farmhouse Around the time of their marriage, Krasner found the farmhouse on Long Island which they rented. Krasner wanted Pollock to leave Manhattan, in order to isolate him from his drinking buddies. The house, built in 1879, was on the edge of a swamp and had no heat or inside toilet. But Krasner convinced Guggenheim that Pollock would be more productive at that location. She also convinced Guggenheim to loan them the money to obtain the mortgage on the property. Over the years Guggenheim’s relationship with Pollock, Krasner and their art would have dramatic highs and lows. It seems Guggenheim was both generous and exploitative, while Krasner was distrusted yet needed in order to do business with Pollock. The Studio Floor Once Krasner settled the initial problems with Pollock’s estate, she eagerly returned to her own career. She prepared the barn-studio to be her own studio. At that point in his oral chronology, Potter adds the rather unexpected sentence: “She had the artist Athos Zacharias scrape down and paint the floor of Jackson’s studio.” (350) Zacharias was Krasner’s assistant at the time. The statement is surprising because all who visit or even know about the studio recall the reverence given to the paint-splattered floor, considered to be just as Pollock left it. It is even said to show footprints associated with the painter(s) who created Blue Poles. Zacharias recalls, When I became L.K’s assistant, at a meeting that Alfonso Ossorio arranged, the studio floor was covered with 23 square pieces of hard one quarter inch thick material… On the surface of this material there were leavings of Jackson’s paintings that were very striking. After perhaps a few months, Lee asked me to ‘roll out’ (paint over) the floor with grey flooring paint. My heart sank because of the symbolic significance of her request. At the time I was not aware that on the underside of (each of) the panels there was silk screened (the image of) a baseball diamond. These were board-games that Jackson had obtained from one of his brothers, who was in the boardgame business. After Lee died, the boards were pulled up and leavings of Jackson’s paintings appeared again on the original floor board (457). An expert on baseball board-games, Dr. Mark Cooper, has identified the squares as not wood, but a firm kind of pressboard. They were excess inventory from the 1948 game called Autograph Baseball Game, made by the F.J. Raff Company. Zacharias remembers Pollock painted on some of these floorboards from the original barn. He remembers one such work was hung in the kitchen dining area where he and Krasner would eat. A footprint on the floorboard in the studio today is said to have been made by Pollock after he, and apparently others, walked across his famous 1952 painting Blue Poles (13). Today those who visit Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center can see supplies once used by Pollock and/or Krasner (305). They can also see very little splattering of paint on the immaculate shelves. The neat display includes “powdered pigments from the WPA paint workshop, strips of broken colored glass used by Pollock in collage pieces and by Krasner in glass Mosaics, and a skull stolen by Pollock from a prop cabinet at the Art Students League.” (13) The orderly display is similar to that of other memorialised studios of artists, including those of Benton and de Kooning. However, the spotless coffee cans and tubes of paint are in contrast to the hallowed studio floor, where visitors can see multi-coloured paints splattered by Pollock himself. The hallowed area is venerated; visitors wear slippers to protect the area if they want to walk on it. Blue Poles in PollockSquared In the climatic scene in Bill Rabinovitch’s film, PollockSquared, neighbours are seen helping to pick up Pollock’s sagging spirits by coming to his yard and helping him create Blue Poles. Rabinovitch envisions the work as being created in the yard, rather than in the studio (356). The possibility is inspired by Potter’s suggestion that Tony Smith and Barnett Newman collaborated with a discouraged Pollock. Naifeh & Smith expanded the idea. They

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Untitled, 1946. Gouache on paper, 56.5 x 82.6 cm, Thyssen – Bornemisza Collection, Lugano.

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Circumcision, 1946. Oil on canvas, 142.3 x 168 cm, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York).

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“I do step into the canvas occasionally – that is, working f rom the four sides I don’t have to get into the canvas too much.”(406) – Age 38

Untitled (Composition with Serpent Mask), 1938-1941. Oil on smooth side of masonite, 30.2 x 26.6 cm, Courtesy Joan T. Washburn Gallery, New York and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation.

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propose it was first Tony Smith, then Newman, who worked with Pollock on the piece (355). Solomon details how the three artists might have worked together over time on the painting (357). Rabinovitch goes further with the idea to include neighbours. However, Potter admits, “Lee’s view of others having worked on it (Blue Poles) is put simply: ‘Hogwash!’ She remembers Jackson painting in the poles (eight dark blue mostly vertical lines) with a two-by-four (piece of lumber) as a straightedge.” Dealer Ben Heller comments: “Collaboration? Fig leaves! That’s an old war-horse that’s been, I think, sufficiently answered enough times not to have to require any more comment.” (358) Stanley P. Friedman observes the Australian who bought the painting might have got a bargain in obtaining a masterpiece by three great American artists rather than one (354). Rabinovitch explains: “An artist’s absolute authenticity wasn’t really what I was after. Rather, I wanted to make larger, more poetic points about the general Zeitgeist, which is done throughout the film. The Blue Poles scene is the climax of the movie. I brought in more characters than likely participated in the actual event. That definitely throws things into a more fanciful perspective.” At the same time, Rabinovitch gives a nod to historic reality as he makes the actors who play Barnet Newman and Tony Smith prominent in the scene. He recalls, “Our Newman was a close look-alike as well as a powerful intellectual artist who strongly identified with Barnet. Isabella Rossellini’s handsome nephew played our Tony Smith with great verve.” Jackson’s friends who interceded that day in our version (of the Blue Poles events) included a few current neighbours (from Springs) playing the Potters. The real Jeffrey Potter was away in Europe, but otherwise might have participated. We also had look-alike actors playing Franz Kline, Helen Frankenthaler (the Art In America critic), and Philip Guston. In the movie, these characters are seen individually exchanging comments with Jackson prior to being set to work on the painting. (Rabinovich knew Guston, who visited his studio a few times). Rabinovitch said, I had tried to get Larry Rivers, whom I knew, to come over (to participate in the Blue Poles scene) which would have been great fun, but he was already very ill and in fact passed away that very week. In his honour we did a scene later that day where our Jackson runs over a Larry Rivers sculpture (on purpose) which provokes a bit of fun and a yelling fight, with a real Manhattan art dealer playing the part of Larry. Larry Rivers died on 26 August, 2002 of liver cancer. In its obituary of Rivers, Time Magazine remembers Rivers once suggested the headline for his obituary should state, ‘Genius of the Vulgar Dies at 63’ (362). He lived to be seventy-eight. Also in the scene are the sculptor Reuben Nakian’s son and a real Manhattan art critic and Greenberg lookalike. Rabinovitch adds, “Filling things out was a look-alike (Marcel) Duchamp. We returned late that night with a handful of people and by using my night vision camera did some meditation scenes of Pollock with the painting.” For the earlier feature film Pollock (2000), Ed Harris never got to use the actual Pollock studio. Instead, he recreated a look-alike studio from scratch somewhere in Brooklyn (45). However, Rabinovitch explained that for PollockSquared: We actually used the real studio several times, but not on the day of the Blue Poles shoot. When we did use the real studio we used slippers but in one scene our Pollock and Krasner play off each other barefoot as a reminiscing Pollock goes around pointing out patches of colour on the floor, identifying several by year and by painting. On the day of shooting that scene we also showed our handsome de Kooning, a real Italian art dealer playing (Leo) Castelli, as well as look-alikes playing (Clement) Greenberg, and our vivacious (Peggy) Guggenheim (373). Some other paintings created by the artist about that time of Blue Poles are hardly noticed in the shadow of the larger works. Yellow Islands, for example, is one of the black paintings (with occasional yellow highlights) easily overlooked (380). The Tate Gallery acquired it in 1961, but it is hardly ever reproduced in biographies or commentaries. Pollock-Krasner House In the backyard of the Pollock property, where the Blue Poles movie scene took place, there is a pile of boulders the artist dug up from the property and “assembled almost like a sculpture.” (140) It was on that pile of boulders the famous final photograph of him with Ruth Kligman was taken. The artist intended to build some sort of sculpture from the boulders, as well as from various pieces of farm equipment which came with the property when he and Lee bought it. Throughout oral biographies there are several references to the artist’s dream, ever since his youth, to work on various sculpture projects. New York State encourages tourists to visit Pollock-Krasner House, listing it as part of the state’s extraordinary art heritage. Governor George Pataki stated, “In the mid-twentieth century, the bold works of Jackson Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists or ‘The New York School’, brought the city to the forefront of the exciting Modern Art movement.” (19)

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Composition with Motif of Small Squares, c.1938-41. Oil on canvas, 60 x 26.3 cm, Private collection, Munich.

Composition with Black Pouring, c.1947. Oil and enamel on canvas mounted on masonite, 43.8 x 23.3 cm, Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu Collection.

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In 1928, Georges Braque showed cubist works, including, Still Life with Jug. Dali met Picasso and Surrealists in Paris.

Theosophy One of the relatively calm but brief periods of Pollock’s life happened when he was sixteen. Fredrick John de St. Vrain Schwankovsky taught Pollock the basics of abstract art, specifically as seen in the young man’s first interest – sculpture. Schwankovsky also introduced Pollock to the basics of Buddhism and the new movement known as Theosophy, a Western approach to mysticism based on Eastern philosophy. The highly-impressionable Pollock then became intensely interested in the teachings of Rudolf Steiner, who wrote a book titled Theosophy, and especially Jiddu Krishnamurti, a Hindu mystic and former Theosophy leader who had his own following, especially in California. The artist’s work would thereafter in some way always show these spiritual influences. There are three fundamental propositions of Theosophy, at least as seen by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, one of the most important figures in the early Theosophy movement (141). Some believe these three propositions of Theosophy might have prepared the young Pollock to formulate his concise and often-quoted Zen-like axioms. These principles, paired with Pollock’s concise statements, are: [] An omnipresent, boundless, and immutable principle transcends human understanding (Pollock’s “I deny the accident” could flow from this principle). [] The universality of ‘the law of periodicity’ recorded by science as found in all nature (Pollock’s “I am nature” could flow from this principle). [] The fundamental identity of all souls with the universal Over-Soul, “suggesting brotherhood is a fact in nature. And the obligatory pilgrimage of every soul through numerous cycles of incarnation.” (Pollock’s “I am ‘in’ my work” could flow from this principle). The propositions might have led to Pollock’s concept and presentation of ‘all over’ composition, or the unbounded expansive vision of his work, taking the moment and the image beyond any three-dimensional boundary of a canvas. By working close to the large surface and rarely stepping back from it to see it from a distance, he literally saw only his work without physical limits. The rhythms and consequent patterns are carried on in the mind’s eye beyond the canvas. In 1929, Salvador Dali joined Surrealists. MoMA opened with an exhibition of well-established European artists. In 1930, Grant Wood’s American Gothic had its first showing.

Coming of Rage Throughout his adult life, and even during his rare sober periods, Pollock would express his rage, not only through his art but also in his social relationships, and at inappropriate times and places. His violence would be displayed even against the people closest to him, including his father, as happened during the summer of 1929. Pollock visited him at Santa Ynez, California, where they worked together on the construction of a road. Jackson later recalled how he missed this opportunity to improve his relationship with his father while they were literally on the same road, but still not seeing eye-to-eye. The male authority figures in Jackson’s life during his formative years were heavy drinkers or alcoholics: his father, his co-workers, and Benton (122). Most, if not all, male friends of Pollock thereafter would be heavy drinkers, including Greenberg, who in interviews would sometimes refer to Pollock as a drunk. It was that kind of criticism which alienated the intellectual Greenberg from some people, artists in particular. Greenberg could be, as Time Magazine once said of author Susan Sontag, “as exasperatingly pretentious as anyone in the not overly humble world of cultural punditry.” (301) The 1920s and 1930s were also decades during which excessive drinking was glamourised in popular culture and, ironically, made more attractive by Prohibition (1920-1933). Many Hollywood films during the time made abuse of alcohol a positive and exciting thing to do, even for an adult. The outlawing of alcoholic beverages nation-wide during that time also demonstrated, especially to impressionable youth, the hypocrisy of authority figures who enforced a constitutional amendment, based on the Volstead Act, but who continued to drink in their private lives. President Warren Harding, for example, served alcohol in the White House during Prohibition. Moreover, at that time there was very little understanding of the behaviour of alcoholics, especially the adult children of alcoholics. Much more is known now about the typical behaviour of these adults, reading almost like a profile of ‘angry young men,’ such as Pollock (122).

Untitled (Figure Composition), c.1938-1941. Gouache on paper, 57.8 x 45.1 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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Number 16, 1950, 1950. Oil on hardboard, 56.7 x 56.7 cm, Gift by Nelson Rockefeller, Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro Collection.

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Number 20, 1950. Oil on masonite, 56.5 x 56.5 cm, Loan from the University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson, United States, Gift of Edward J. Gallagher, Jr.

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“As to what I would like to be. It is dif f icult to say. An artist of some kind. If nothing else I shall always study the Arts.”(401) – Age 17

In an interview with Guggenheim’s biographer, Mary V. Dearborn, the artist Charles Seliger mentioned he never once saw Pollock drunk (185). However, most oral biographies note the artist was indeed often drunk. Biographers Stevens & Swan note, “Pollock was regarded as the pioneer; the man who broke the limits of conventional European practice not only in his painting but also in his cowboy-on-a-spree drunks.” (186) Inarticulate Communicator Time Magazine expressed the typically simplistic description of Pollock as a man who “figured out a way to paint as no one before him ever had, and he was a human being, a shambles – drunken, depressed, disloyal and near to moronically inarticulate.” (108) Pollock rarely said much in public and wrote even less. However, there exists a fragment of a poem, written around 1942, and interviews (1944, 1949, 1950, 1954). The quotations from, or attributed to, Pollock splattered throughout this book show his pattern of making concise and emphatic statements. Technique Described Pollock read from prepared comments during his formal interview with William Wright for Radio Sag Harbor (303). He described something of his technique. The text is often quoted; it is concise, clear and one of the few times Pollock described details of his method. He said: “Most of the paint I use is a liquid, flowing kind of paint. The brushes I use are used more as sticks, rather than brushes – the brush doesn’t touch the surface of the canvas; it’s just above… I do have a general notion of what I’m about and what the results will be… The result is the thing – and – it doesn’t make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.” During that reading he also said: “Modern art to me is nothing more than the expression of contemporary aims of the age that we’re living in… My opinion is that new needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements. It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express this age, the aeroplane, the atom bomb, and the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture. Each age finds its own technique.” (208) The Orozco Mural In the autumn of 1930, with brothers Charles and Frank, Jackson visited Pomona College in Claremont, California, where he was very impressed by the new 20’ x 20’ fresco, Prometheus, by José Clemente Orozco. The work was placed on the wall, above the fireplace of the students’ refectory (181). Years later Gaston and Sanford went with Pollock to Hanover, New Hampshire, to see another Orozco mural, The Topic of American Civilization, which is at Dartmouth College. Prometheus, the subject of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound and Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, was the giant mythological and heroic benefactor of mankind, the god who in some versions created mankind out of clay and water. That was a story appropriate for the young Pollock, who had just spent the first half of the year learning to work with clay sculpture and to draw at Manual Arts. He was now preparing himself to take on the world, or at least Manhattan. He would be meeting Orozco himself in a few months. It was probably Charles who suggested the first pilgrimage to the mural Prometheus by Orozco. The work had dramatically illustrated what Charles had been telling Jackson about ways to draw disproportionately large muscles to show strength. This emphasis was obvious in Benton’s murals as well. Charles carried on the style in his own early works. Several of Jackson’s pencil drawings from the 1930s show his interest in the male physique as well, giving some very weak evidence to those straining to show Pollock was bisexual. Just as the Prometheus of Greek mythology taught practical arts to mankind, Charles gave useful direction to his brother. Maybe he sensed the struggle against the mainstream they would soon experience when they moved on to Manhattan. Pollock thought the Orozco’s Prometheus was the most important painting of the century. Of course he had no idea that in a few years some of his own work would be thought of by many in a similar way. He would soon display a small reproduction of the Orozco work in his Manhattan living space thereafter. Meticulously concerned about certain details, Ed Harris hung a reproduction of Prometheus on the wall of the film set representing Pollock’s first apartment in his film, although no reference to it is made in the spoken lines. New York City Later that year Jackson moved to Manhattan, where he lived in Greenwich Village with his brothers, Frank and Charles. At first he attended the sculpture class of Ahron Ben-Schmuel at Greenwich House. Then he attended the Art Students League again, where he studied under Thomas Hart Benton, as he had done four years earlier. In November, Pollock again had the opportunity to observe an Orozco work, but this time he would meet the artist himself who was working with Benton on a large mural commissioned by the New School for Social Research, which was nearby.

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Untitled (Composition with Ritual Scene), c.1938-1941. Oil on canvas mounted on masonite, 48.3 x 121.9 cm, Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden, Lincoln.

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Sketchbook, facsimile, published 1982, page 25, 15.1 x 33 cm, Thaw Collection, The Pierpoint, Morgan Library, New York.

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Sketchbook, facsimile, published 1982, page 24 verso, 15.1 x 33 cm, Thaw Collection, The Pierpoint, Morgan Library, New York.

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War, c.1944-1946 (dated “1947”). Ink and color pencil on paper, 52.4 x 66 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Lee Krasner Pollock, in memory of Jackson Pollock, 1982.

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Untitled, c.1946. Ink, pastel, and gouache on paper, 48.3 x 66 cm, Collection Denise and Andrew Saul.

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“Allover works on account it means no limits, just edges. So I work in the edge, on lots of levels, too.”(415)

Benton Revisited Jackson’s artist brother, Charles, had been studying under Benton for four years. It was then Jackson’s turn to see his old mentor again and be impressed by the master’s large and already celebrated paintings, filled with the images and spirit of the West with which Pollock was somewhat familiar. The well-known artist’s distinctive style greatly impressed Pollock. He and Benton became more than teacher and student. They became very close friends. Pollock befriended and lived with the Bentons during the summer of 1931. It was some time during those early years (1931-1935) that Pollock painted his only full-faced self-portrait, a small oil of 7 x 5 ¼ inches (18.6 x 13.3 cm), showing himself as ‘Paul’, a much younger person than he was at the time. Jungian Francis O’Connor would find this fact significant nearly seventy years later (363). Pollock later did self-portraits of himself as a more mature person, such as the half-face sketch on a page of studies after El Greco’s Healing of the Blind Man, Holy Family, and Betrothal of the Virgin (363). He also referred to the totality of Portrait and a Dream (1953) as a self-portrait. Benton, born in Missouri and a lover of the legends of the rugged Old West, probably saw the independent and unsophisticated Pollock as a cowboy born in Cody, Wyoming. To the Bentons he was the young cowboy, someone they could trust to even care for T.P., their young son. Pollock’s little painting, T.P.’s Boat in Menemsha Pond, painted with oil on tin around 1934, refers to the Benton boy’s toy sailboat. One of Benton’s more memorable portraits is his 1929 T.P. Three Years Old, inscribed on the reverse, “To T.P. Three years old from Dad Benton.” T.P. went on to be a flutist in the Florida Symphony Orchestra (289). Legends Pollock and his fans developed legends about him and spread them about. For example, Pollock told very different versions of how his right index fingertip was cut off by a childhood playmate. It seems the details would differ with each retelling. The Naifeh & Smith biography relates various versions of the story (148). However it happened, the accident involving Pollock’s missing fingertip left him sensitive about the result. Some photos show his attempt to hide that finger from the viewer. The artist, as Naifeh & Smith have noted, “escaped childhood uncircumcised,” raising the notion of sexual symbolism (149). A Freudian might also find some significance in how Pollock ‘accidentally’ made his commissioned Mural eight inches too long for an area in Guggenheim’s hallway. Surely he knew the correct dimensions. However, after his work was completed the unwanted inches had to be cut off during the installation before it would fit the patron’s entranceway. On the other hand, as Freud might have said, “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” (454) David Hare, who was there with Marcel Duchamp, recalled that when Pollock was told about the cutting of the painting he didn’t care. (387) It again seems Pollock was less interested in the product of his process than in the act of a work’s creation. 1931 was the year of the first showing of Salvador Dali’s, Persistence of Memory. It would become nearly a logo for popular Surrealism. The sixteen-year construction of Rockefeller Center in Manhattan began, in which there would be murals that would cause political controversy. The Empire State Building was completed.

Old Friends Early in 1931, Pollock and his friend and fellow student, Manuel Tolegian, hitchhiked around the United States. Inspired by the regionalism of their teacher Benton, the young men tried to observe and draw what they saw. Philip Guston, one of the artists Pollock knew along with Reuben Kadish, from his childhood days in Los Angeles, was only a year younger than Pollock. Guston would turn to abstract art in the late 1940s, as would contemporary Franz Kline. Kadish would prove to be an important link in the chain of influential people paving the way for Pollock’s eventual fame. While all three artists – Guston, Kline, and Pollock – developed unique styles, Guston’s art was seen by some as lyrical and evocative, while Kline’s would be seen as forceful and boldly dramatic. In 1951, Kline would be one of the founders of The Club, organisers of a show in which Pollock would exhibit.

Head, c.1938-1941. Oil on canvas, 40.6 x 40 cm, Berardo Collection. Sintra Museu de Arte Moderna, Sintra.

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Benton as Role Model In December 1931, Pollock’s drawing lessons were interrupted when his teacher, Benton, travelled to Indiana to paint a mural for that state. Pollock saw Benton as an artist who was not afraid to generate national controversy because of his style, methods and content. The young artist would do likewise in future years. From studying both Benton’s art as well Benton himself, Pollock could see hard work and sensitivity to history and community spirit could generate timeless art of universal appeal. Meanwhile, he was surely aware of the national controversy surrounding the Benton murals which were part of the Indiana exhibit at the Chicago’s Century of Progress Exposition in 1933. After the fair, the murals were stored in a horse barn at the state fairgrounds for four years. Then most of the

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Sun-Scape, 1946. Oil on masonite, 47.6 x 59 cm, Galerie Jan Krugier, Ditesheim and Cie, Geneva.

Untitled, c.1946. Silkscreen, 21.6 x 14 cm, Courtesy Joan T. Washburn Gallery, New York and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation.

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panels were installed at Indiana University in the new auditorium’s grand lobby in 1939. Included in the very centre of one of the panels, Parks, the Circus, the Klan, the Press, was the image of hooded, flag-waving individuals burning a cross. By including that image, Benton forced state Republicans into an uncomfortable discussion regarding the influence the notorious Klu Klux Klan (K.K.K.) once had on their party. This most controversial panel would be installed in a classroom rather than in the auditorium with the rest of the panels. Controversy has surrounded the Benton mural ever since. Not only his art, but Benton himself was controversial. He was considered radical and reactionary, yet was practically unknown. The most upsetting part for some Indiana politicians to accept was that he was not a Hoosier, a native of that mid-west state. His mural at the New School in Manhattan, done before the Indiana commission came about, had earned him wide attention. The Indiana murals confirmed his genius. Benton thereafter was coupled with Grant Wood and John Stuart Curry, brilliant artists who presented the American experience in scenes to which the average American could relate, even though his individual style and regionalist aesthetic was unusual. He was on the cover of Time Magazine the following year (21).

“The self-discipline you speak of – will come, I think, as a natural growth of a deeper, more integrated, experience. …” We will fulf ill that promise.”(408) – Age 31

Art Students League When Benton left the Art Students League, Pollock stayed in touch. At the League, Pollock studied painting and composition under John Sloan, and sculpture under Robert Laurent. These classes required drawing using live models, and soon Pollock’s lack of drawing skills was again obvious. Even so, Pollock was accepted as an assistant teacher at the Art Students League, thereby saving him money on the enrolment fee. Using the graphic arts studio, he produced lithographs, some of which would be published two years later by Theodore Wahl. Writing Home Pollock managed to jump on board freight trains occasionally to visit his parents in California. During the summers while at the Art Students League, he worked as a lumberjack at Big Pines in California to raise money for his school tuition. Now and then Pollock wrote letters to his brothers, sharing his enthusiasm with them about his experience. His letters show he sought financial support from family and close friends. In a letter to his father, he expressed some guilt about accepting ‘a token’ from his mother: “I shouldn’t allow it I guess.” (150) In his letters he revealed not only insecurity about his finances, but also wrote about the political situation of the day. He also discussed his talent. In one letter, sent when only twenty years old, he revealed he was already thinking of his legacy and how he would be a good artist. He said, “Being an artist is life itself.”, adding, “and when I say artist I don’t mean it in a narrow sense of the word – but the man who is building things – creating, molding the earth.” At that time he thought he would be such an artist “in a good seventy years, or so.” That would be at age ninety in 2002. Unfortunately, he would actually live less than half that long. In the same letter, Pollock said he thought his medium was “sculpturing” (sic). Yet, that year when he made a second trip west, he only sketched. Father’s Death In Jackson’s final letter to his father, the artist knew the fifty-seven year-old alcoholic was ill. He assured his father he intended to be an artist and he had found a mentor in Benton, almost as if assuring his father he was going to be in good hands with the paternal mentor. LeRoy Pollock died at his Los Angeles home on 6 March, 1933. However, three of his sons, Charles, Frank and Jackson, did not return home to be with the family. Jackson explained he didn’t have the money to make the trip, although he mourned alone and assured his mother in a letter he would return home soon. However, it would be some time before he would actually see her again. Instead of travelling home that summer, Pollock studied with the stone sculptor, Ahron Ben-Shmuel. Benton returned to the school, but Pollock didn’t take his classes. He and Benton continued to socialise, and the master never failed to encourage his student. However, the alcoholic Benton later stated, “Pollock was a born artist. The only thing I taught him was how to drink a fifth a day.” (325)

Direction, 1945. Oil on canvas, 80.6 x 55.7 cm, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York).

In 1932, Picasso’s sculpture, The Head of a Woman, was shown. Alexander Calder exhibited mobiles, the freely hanging sculptures, some of which would later be shown at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This

Untitled, 1952-1956.

Century (AOTC) Gallery. In 1933, modernism in art was suppressed in Germany. Expressionism was popular

Dripped ink on Howell paper, 46 x 55.6 cm,

in France. Matisse’s The Dance was shown. Kandinsky and Klee left Germany, the former for France, the

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

latter for Switzerland.

Gift of Lee Krasner-Pollock, 1982.

New York Again When Jackson settled in New York in 1934, he lived with his brother, Charles, and his sister-in-law, Elizabeth. When hearing Sanford and Arloie were moving to Deep River, Connecticut, Pollock was suddenly faced with the

Totem Lesson 2, 1945. Oil on canvas, 182.8 x 152.4 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

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“That being ‘in the painting’ – did I dream it up, or Lee? – isn’t what counts. It’s that the work is out of me. If not, you’re playing patt ycakes.”(416)

possibility of living alone without their very supportive presence. In the Ed Harris movie, Pollock, the actor imagines how a highly-agitated Pollock might have reacted to that situation. Harris portrays it creatively by throwing an odd drumming tantrum. Throughout the movie, Harris’ interpretation of what Jackson might have done is appropriate, even if only in his own well-informed imagination. The painting, Going West, created by Pollock in 1934-1935 under his mentor, Benton, had surely brought back memories of earlier days and much relocation. Francis V. O’Connor’s insightful interpretations of the work find psychological links between Pollock’s need to break from Benton and the past, and his desire to build on his roots in the present (77). In early 1934, Pollock experimented with various media, making two sketches in oil on wrapping paper for wall paintings. They were never actually executed for the tuition-free Greenwich House, where he had tried to sculpt earlier (182). Pollock never owned a new car. Rather, he seemed to especially love an old Model-T Ford. In the summer of 1934, in the Model-T, accompanied by his fellow-painter brother Charles, Jackson again travelled around the United States. This time it included a visit to their mother. It was his fourth such trip in five years to the Western states. This time Jackson expressed in letters to his brothers how shocked he was to see the visible effects that economic depression had had throughout the States. That summer he also began the first of four consecutive summer vacations at the Benton’s in Childmark on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. Rita Benton organised a local exhibition for which Pollock painted several pieces of pottery (332). Rita Benton Jackson’s mistress, Ruth Kligman, says in her autobiography Jackson lusted after Benton’s wife, Rita (147). Certainly it would have eventually complicated the relationship between Pollock and the Bentons. In the Naifeh & Smith tome, Jackson is quoted as claiming he did have sex with Rita, but after interviews, the oral biographers doubt he did. This might again be an imaginative Pollock, the creator and promulgator of myths. For Freudian biographers, the possibility of Pollock pursuing the older woman is also linked to the young artist’s relationship with his controlling mother. The maternal Krasner was also slightly older than Jackson. His mother is often blamed for many of her sons’ later problems, though recent biographies are more holistic when considering the many factors contributing to the child/man’s psychological problems.

Ritual, 1953. Oil on canvas, 229.9 x 108 cm, Collection Robert and Jane Meyerhoff, Phoenix, Maryland.

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Seeking Money While earning money as a janitor in public schools, Pollock met two more important women in his life – Caroline Pratt and Helen Marot. Caroline was the principal of the school where he worked and Helen was a teacher. Both women were interested in helping the young artist with his problems by helping him find better work and telling friends of his talents. While on unemployment benefits, Pollock stole food and gasoline, which he later admitted. He and his brother, Sanford, wandered the streets and painted scenes contrasting the rich and the poor of the city, but apparently none of those survived. From October, 1936, Jackson lived in a Greenwich Village apartment with Sanford. The two artists enrolled in a Federal Arts Project mural class, part of FDR’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) later called the Work Project Administration. The WPA provided work for the unemployed in general, but especially generated much-needed income for artists, and also brought contemporary art to public buildings. Basic wages were paid to artists who produced at least one work every two months. Pollock helped produce the monumental public murals, preparing him for the production of his own rather large works. Years later he worked off and on for the project for nearly ten years, until it closed in 1943. Pollock’s work for the city during those years moved writers to imagine him cleaning bird droppings off monuments in parks, generating rather obvious and crude comparisons to the artist’s later so-called drip paintings. The experience might have drawn Pollock to appreciate wild birds, but images of horrific birds are seen in his early sketches. A 1934-1941 oil (and sand) is titled, Bird. It seems to be in anticipation of the title – Bird in Flight – given to Pollock by O’Hara in his poem Jackson Pollock (106). His book Jackson Pollock is described in the bibliography (80a). Jackson and Lee had a mean pet crow they named Caw-caw, who was trained by Pollock to do several tricks (364). There are several 1947 photos of Pollock with Caw-caw (86). Elements of bird images can be found throughout the artist’s paintings, especially during his early, somewhat Surrealistic period. The bird is cleverly represented with a well-trained crow in the Ed Harris movie, Pollock. In a couple of brief segments a crow is hardly noticed in the shadows while perched on the back of the chair of the Krasner character. In the Rabinovitch movie PollockSquared, a crow representing Caw-caw is created by high-tech animation and is seamlessly integrated into the film. However the real

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red-tailed hawk, the Manhattan celebrity hawk – Pale Male, and his life mate Lola, which appears in the movie – was actually filmed during the final days of the Christo Gates installation in Central Park, Manhattan. In 1935, Salvador Dali’s Giraffe on Fire was shown. Alcoholics Anonymous was organised in Manhattan. In 1936, Mondrian exhibited Composition in Blue and Red. At MoMA, thirty-two works done by Picasso between 1907 and 1929 were shown.

In 1935, Pollock had what might be called his first exhibition. A watercolour titled Threshers was shown at the Brooklyn Museum in the show Eighth Exhibition of Watercolors, Pastels, and Drawings by American and

“None of the art magazines are worth anything. Nobody takes them seriously. They’re a bunch of snobs… I hate to admit it, but I prefer the approach of Time. I’d rather have one of my pictures reproduced in Collier’s or The Saturday Evening Post than in any of the art magazines. At least you’d know where you stand. They don’t pretend to like our work.”(407) – Age 44

French Artists. The work apparently no longer exists. Advent of Originality For the first half of 1935, Pollock was a stonecutter. Then in the summer he signed up as an assistant to a pupil of Benton’s. The master was producing wax models for the murals division of the Federal Arts Project. Benton would later switch to the easel painting division. Pollock’s Cotton Pickers still very much showed the influence of Benton. It was shown in the temporary galleries of the Municipal Art Committee, Manhattan, in 1937. The same year he also showed a watercolour at the WPA Federal Art Gallery. Pollock could now afford to experiment on his own to discover and develop a personal style. After 1938 that unique quality began to take shape, though not yet noticed by others. The Mexican Muralists Mexican painters, especially José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, impressed Pollock from the time he was a teenager in the early 1930s. In Los Angeles at the Chouinard Art School, Pollock was especially fascinated by the frescoes of Siqueiros. According to those who worked with them, Pollock and Siqueiros were extremely simpático. (306) Trying to Unveil the Image of Pollock Walsh believes Pollock’s intense anxiety presented to him the impossibility of producing traditional forms of art. It seems Pollock struggled with this issue. Walsh concludes, “It seems doubtful that he was ever satisfied with the results he achieved.” (351) Pollock’s frustration at not being able to draw was certainly a factor. It is seen in his famous comment, “Do you think I would have painted this crap if I knew how to draw a hand?” (424) However, his letters as a teenager to his father, and to brothers Charles and Frank, offer rare peeks into his thoughts at specific times. As expected, he described the problems he had in school, saying others thought of him as a “rotten rebel from Russia.” (401) Pollock mentioned attending a number of Communist meetings, where he first became aware of Diego Rivera’s work. That year he was impressed by the large mural work done by Rivera he found reproduced in the journal, Creative Art. Rivera would continue to be an influence on Pollock throughout the rest of their lives. Rivera lived a year longer than the younger artist. Though Pollock revealed his deep interest in art, he doubted he had any talent, and he thought he could accomplish something “…only by long study and work.” In letters to his father and brothers, he stated he was interested in painting and sculpture and, to a lesser extent, architecture (46). In 1933, he would see Diego Rivera working on a mural at the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center, Manhattan. Unfortunately, the Rivera work was destroyed because it was considered too sympathetic towards Communism. However, Rivera’s controversial art would be remembered, especially in 2002, when another politically-incorrect artwork displayed in Rockefeller Center was removed only eight days after it appeared. The work was Eric Discher’s bronze statue, Tumbling Woman, a tribute to the victims of the World Trade Center tragedy of 11 September, 2001 (74). Pollock would see distinctive approaches in the art of each of the muralists. He would notice particularly how they treated the distribution of colour and shapes over large areas. There were political aspects to the fascination

Totem Lesson 1, 1944.

also. Siqueiros, for example, was a loyal Stalinist and, in fact, took part in an assassination attempt against

Oil on canvas, 177.8 x 111.7 cm,

Trotsky. On the other hand, Rivera became disenchanted with Stalinism and joined the Trotskyites.

Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Harry W. Anderson.

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Untitled, c.1945. Black and colour ink, gouache, pastel, and wash on paper, 46.6 x 62.8 cm, Gecht Family Collection, Chicago.

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Untitled (Drawing with Spirals), c.1946. Brush, spatter, and black and colour ink, pastel, gouache and wash on paper, 57.2 x 78.8 cm, Collection Mr and Mrs Bertram L. Wolstein.

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“… the direction that painting seems to be taking here – is – away f rom the easel – into some sort, some kind of all – wall painting.”(406) Age 38

Siqueiros Walsh is impressed by the fact many of Pollock’s friends were in and around the Communist Party. He finds it politically significant that, in 1936 the artist and his brother Sanford, worked in a Manhattan studio under David Alfaro Siqueiros, helping to build a float for the Communist’s May Day parade. Pollock developed a desire to be a great artist like the outstanding Mexican muralist and activist. Siqueiros was the catalytic agent who set something off like an explosion in Pollock. Maybe political activism was part of Pollock’s youthful energy as well. However, it seems the artists were mainly interested in the techniques they were learning in the Laboratory of Modern Techniques in Art, an experimental workshop studio, begun by Siqueiros. The inspiration continued throughout the year, but the workshop ended when Siqueiros returned to Spain the following year. At the least, Pollock learned from Siqueiros about the beauty of new pigments, synthetic colours, shellac, Duco, cellulose lacquers and silicones, and other industrial synthetic materials. He also learned new ways to apply those materials, pouring them, spraying them with an air-gun, splattering, even hurling them at the picture’s surface (118). Even more significant, the technical problems of ‘controlled accidents’ and spontaneous applications of paint to various surfaces were studied. Unusual Paints The unusual paints Pollock used, except for the aluminium, have held up over the years. The Pollock work at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Museum of Art, in Utica, New York, is an example of aluminium not as brilliant as it was originally. But the work remains beautiful and may be especially interesting because it is an example of this ‘imperfection.’ White Light is one of the works which includes aluminium paint, as is the much larger Number 1, 1950: Lavender Mist. When Ossorio bought Lavender its aluminium was as originally intended, but by 1976 when he sold it for two million dollars to the National Gallery in Washington, its metal paint was unfortunately dull (376). However, such works hold up over the decades for their other qualities and – like many classic paintings of even centuries ago – they retain their importance, at least, if not their original brilliance. In fact, Walker’s essay on Lavender Mist for The National Gallery does not mention the technical imperfection (118). Earlier paintings included two 1947 aluminium paintings, Phosphorescence (1947), and Cathedral. Other Pollock paintings done with aluminium paint around 1948 and 1949 before Lavender include Untitled: Cut-Out Figure, Number 3, 1949: Tiger, and Number 8, 1949. Five of the works with aluminium done after Lavender and before Blue Poles are shown here. Then Blue Poles and White Lights are examples of later and larger works using metallic paint. Eureka! Two of the themes consistent with Pollock’s conviction, although it came from the unconscious, were that his work was not a product of accident, and it was “…not about nothing.” That key notion relates to his famous reply to Time Magazine, “No Chaos, Damn it!” Several artists stress the theme about Abstract Expressionism in theory, but some acted it out less convincingly in their work. Likewise, other artists observe the effect paint has when dripped on to a surface, but none before Pollock developed it into the brilliant visual polyphony he made happen. Walsh is not alone in thinking Pollock invented his gestural technique by accident in 1947 (333). The Ed Harris movie includes the dramatic moment at which Pollock notices the pattern made on the floor as some paint accidentally drips from his stick. However, while ordinary activity caused by gravity seems to be simply a fundamental fact of nature, the discovery of its application for another purpose gives the phenomena new significance. On occasion, those Eureka moments in history result from a combination of intelligence, insight, imagination, and intuition. Then an ordinary reality might be transferred to an entirely different discipline by an ingenious observer such as those in science: Archimedes, Sir Isaac Newton, Copernicus, or Thomas Edison. Similarly in art, genius can bring to those moments personal experience, discipline, talents and skills which combine to form a leap reaching beyond the obvious to utter brilliance. Jackson Pollock was such an agent of several aspects of art, but most dramatically of the lowly drip. He discovered how to direct it through its journey in space away from its downward pull by gravity to its most sublime redirection and fulfilment. Exactly how and why Pollock did it puzzles everyone, but it calls on the viewer to participate in the process. As Erich Fromm said, “The capacity to be puzzled is… the premise of all creation, be it in art or science.” (24) Meanwhile, not all critics choose to be creatively puzzled. Just as the Eureka moments are typically flashes of acceleration which change an individual intimately, changing critical opinion of the masses is slow and unpredictable. Stephen Jay Gould observes, “Creative thought in science, as much as in the arts, is the motor of changing opinion.” (31)

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Number 4, 1948: Gray and Red, 1948. Oil and gesso on paper, 57.4 x 78.4 cm, Estate of Frederick R. Weisman.

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Number 8, 1949, 1949. Oil, enamel and aluminium paint on canvas, 86.6 x 180.9 cm, Neuberger Museum of art, Purchase College, State University of New York.

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Number 8, 1950, 1950. Mixed media on canvas, 142.2 x 99 cm, Private Collection.

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Untitled, 1938-1939. Pencil and colour pencil on paper, 15.2 x 18.2 cm, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

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Meeting Krasner During the summer of the 1936 Siqueiros workshop, Sanford married Arloie Conaway, but they continued to share the Eighth Street apartment with Jackson. Jackson then reluctantly tried to live alone, but that year also he met his future wife, the artist Leonore Krassner. Leonore was the name given to her by her Russian-Jewish parents. Reluctantly conforming to the male-dominated field of art at the time, she changed her name to the unisex moniker, Lee, and to the more popular spelling, Krasner (with one ‘s’). Krasner got the WPA to hire Pollock again. He worked in a printing shop, cleaning the ink rollers. It is very likely at this time that he learned a great deal about the qualities and handling of commercial paints. Krasner introduced Pollock to Kandinsky, Mercedes Carles, and Herbert Matta, as well as to her teacher, Hofmann. Those contacts would eventually lead to yet other influential people and networks of artists, critics, gallery owners, sponsors and the contemporary New York art world. Kandinsky and Hofmann especially befriended Pollock. Once Lee moved into the apartment with Pollock, he began to rely on her considerable strength for nearly everything for the rest of his life. Krasner first met Pollock in 1936 when she was still living with Igor Pantuhoff. While rubbing up against her during a dance, Pollock crudely asked her ‘in a loud stage whisper’ if she liked to have sex. She walked away from him. This kind of behaviour was apparently not unusual for Pollock, even when he first met: women. Similar remarks were made by several women in interviews with oral biographers, but are not included here (294). Guggenheim’s biographer stresses Krasner denied Naifeh & Smith interviewed her, albeit they insist they did so seven times (322). Krasner reported that she refused to talk with them (293). When seeing the name Pollock at the McMillen ‘gallery,’ Krasner did not associate it with the rude man she had met six years earlier (387). The Ed Harris film recreates the 1941 scene, showing Pollock’s future wife, Lee Krasner, visiting him for the first time since the encounter of years before. In its obituary of Krasner, Time Magazine mentioned when Krasner and Pollock first met “the Brooklyn-born Krasner was the better credentialled of the two and helped move Pollock toward the avant-garde.” Lee’s reputation as an artist grew during this time so when they next met she was by far the more established painter. Time noted Krasner “continued to paint in a mutually-respectful, non-competitive partnership with him during the years of poverty and productivity on their farm in East Hampton, N.Y.” Time referred to her as a “pioneer Abstract Expressionist painter of the New York School, whose mastery of draftsmanship and color was informed by an angry toughness and an exceptionally strong sense of rhythm.” It added she “showed the influence of Matisse and Picasso as well as Jackson Pollock.” (109)

“When I am painting I am not much aware of what is taking place – it is only af ter that I see what I have done.”(405) – Age 25

In 1937, Picasso’s Guernica was created for the Paris World Exhibition. In 1937, MoMA held one of the largest shows ever by a living and still-working artist which included 362 Picasso works, including Guernica and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which the museum had also just acquired. In 1939, Freud died. John Steinbeck’s, The Grapes of Wrath won the Pulitzer. Einstein writes a letter to FDR urging a project to develop an atomic bomb before Germany gets one.

Pollock surely saw Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon at MoMA during 1937. It was a work he said was “terribly important to him,” according to Krasner (366). Also that year Jackson and Sanford rented a house in Pennsylvania for the summer. Sanford convinced Jackson he should begin psychiatric therapy for his alcoholism. Psychoanalysis Jackson returned to psychoanalytical therapy with the Jungian, Joseph L. Henderson. The following year Henderson left New York, so Pollock continued treatment with Dr. Violet Staub de Laszlo. With both, he used his drawings to aid him, including those in his dream journal. Pollock’s sketchbook is now encased for protection at the Pierpont Morgan Library in Manhattan. Copies of the pages made before the encasement were an essential part of the insightful analysis by Francis V. O’Connor in his doctoral dissertation written in 1965 at Johns Hopkins University. It is titled, The Genesis of Jackson Pollock, 1912 to 1943 (77). Insights from his studies are seen in his subsequent articles on Pollock and are also referenced in many biographies and other commentaries. O’Connor also wrote the extensive 1967 book, Jackson Pollock, for MoMA (78). His brilliant 1998 lecture on works which are key to understanding Pollock is reproduced in Helen Harrison’s anthology, Such Desperate Joy: Imagining Jackson Pollock (46) and titled, Jackson Pollock: Down to the Weave. It is possibly the most insightful of all writings about Pollock’s personality. Three of O’Connor’s four Poems for Jackson Pollock are included in Harrison’s anthology. Pollock would be in and out of therapy for the rest of his life, during which he would have periods of sobriety, productivity, and prolific creativity, followed by prolonged periods of irresponsible drunkenness, violence, creative blocks and depression.

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Pollock seemed to have a love/hate relationship not only with Lee, but also with his psychiatrists. Yet, Kligman recalled she once asked him what he would like to come back as if he believed in reincarnation. After thinking about it, he said, “A psychiatrist.” (142) The Drunk In his Pollock-inspired novel, Updike has his Krasner-like character say her husband/artist “was pathetic when he was drunk… He reverted to infancy, this drastic insecurity and megalomania, burbling… doing whatever it took to make him the centre of attention, punching somebody. He liked to upset a table with all the food on it.” (194) The most famous example is the day he completed the psychologically draining demonstration for the Hans Namuth movie. The drama caused by Pollock after the filming has been described and shown in several media. Both Charles and Sanford made special efforts to help their troubled younger brother. Sande rearranged his apartment so Jackson could have some work space. Jackson then began again to produce small works. He showed a watercolour at the inaugural exhibit of the new WPA Federal Art Gallery. In the winter of 1937, two or three years after painting his early Benton-inspired Going West, Pollock actually did travel back to Kansas City to visit the Bentons for Christmas. That was the last time he would visit his mentor. On his way back to New York from Kansas, he visited his brother, Charles, who was then a commercial illustrator in Detroit. Pollock asked the Federal Arts Project for permission to take time off to take a sketching trip with Benton, but permission was not granted. Unfortunately, he was fired the very next month because of his drinking-related absences. He then decided to get medical help for his alcoholism. From July to September 1938, he underwent treatment at the Bloomingdale Asylum in White Plains, New York for detoxification. While he was there he received some psychiatric therapy. Krasner, as well as his relatives and some of his friends saw the obvious need for him to manage his rage and correct his socially unacceptable behaviour. They also supported his visits to Jungian analysts. He showed through his sketchbooks, or dream journals, that he considered analysis as an opportunity to discover, understand, and work with both his unconscious mind and his art. The comparatively new field of psychoanalysis, especially the Jungian approaches, offered hope to counteract the disillusionment of some artists. An understanding of the collective unconscious, mythologising, and universal archetypes, and later ‘the hero’s journey’ gave the creative community rich new soil to plough. However, not all commentators understood the fuller meaning of ‘hero’ as archetype. For example, Robert Hughes of Time Magazine felt that ‘a mythic hero’ of Abstract Expressionism was an inflationary phrase when applied to Pollock (53). Appropriately, during this period of basic self-discovery, Pollock painted his two untitled works featuring naked men. The first was called Naked Man with a Knife. In the same period he also painted an untitled work called Composition with Ritual Scene, one of several pages from a sketchbook dated 1938 (365). He made several bowls and plaques of beaten copper. In November, he managed to resume his work with the painting division of the FAP, but his salary was even less than before. Guggenheim’s biographer astutely observes Pollock was viewed by many as a legend who was incredibly self-destructive. They would never know of his constant battle to achieve happiness (143). He would be overjoyed whenever he felt his therapy was working. Pollock’s dramatic demonstrations of rage are referred to and described, often in detail, by each of Pollock’s many biographers, as well as in movies, plays, novels, short stories, and poetry about him. Ed Harris captures the consummate portrayal of the enraged artist in his movie Pollock in which several of the well-documented displays of the artist’s outbursts are very effectively presented. In the Shadow of Picasso In 1939 Pollock saw Picasso’s Guernica at the Valentine Gallery. The work impressed the artist intensely, so much so that actual visual elements of the large mural appeared later in the artist’s sketchbook and in major works, specifically in Masqued Image, and Stenographic Figure, 1942. Both are now at MoMA, as is Picasso’s super-sized masterpiece. Stenographic Figure, as described by Dearborn, “shows a rather horrifying female creature reaching out a paw to a withered male figure, but the depressing image is rendered in luminous, sure colors, with mysterious symbols and numbers in the background, perhaps showing the influence of Matta’s teachings (about automatism).” (195) The size of Guernica is amazing. It is 349.3 x 778.6 cm, or 271,266.38 square cm. By comparison, Pollock’s large Mural, done six years later (after sizing it – cutting off eight inches in length – to fit Guggenheim’s hallway) is only 243 x 603.2 cm, or 146,577.6 square cm, about half the size of the Picasso. Both works can be contrasted in size and technique to Goya’s 1814 Execution of the Rioters, May 3, 1808 (268 x 347 cm, in the Prado). More obviously, two untitled sketches (1938-1939) and an untitled sheet of studies (1939-1942) are obvious studies by Pollock of details in Guernica (196). While the subject matter of the Picasso and Goya are more obviously related, similar content – outrage about man’s inhumanity to man – might also be found in Pollock’s Stenographic Figure and his Untitled 1944-45

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Mask, c.1941. Oil on canvas, 42.5 x 48.3 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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engraving (printed posthumously 1967). The more obvious comparisons are between the content in Picasso and Pollock, as in Pollock’s Male and Female in Search of a Symbol (1943) and Picasso’s Two Women in Front of a Window (1927). The title of the 1943 work was later changed to simply Search of a Symbol, probably so it would not be confused with the 1935-1938 Male and Female. Classic Influences Benton encouraged his students to study the classics. For Pollock, these influences also included El Greco and Albert Pinkham Ryder. Specifically, the influence of Peter Paul Rubens also reached Pollock through his mentor, Benton, who was very interested in the figurative art of the Baroque master’s large works. Pollock began Benton’s mural class in 1931 and soon received individual attention from the master. Pollock’s sketchbooks include drawings typical of a student who is more interested in showing his serious study of technique and form, rather than the content. The cubic forms which interested Benton in these works are also seen in Pollock’s analytical drawings. There are obvious visual links between Pollock to Picasso and other modern artists, but the link back to Renaissance artists is probably less obvious. According to Kligman, Pollock said the painter who influenced him the most was Albert Pinkham Ryder, then Clyfford Still, Barney Newman, and Mark Rothko. He added, “Motherwell is too slick… but is in the same league as the others. De Kooning is the best of the group.” But at another time he said to her, seriously, “There are only three painters: Picasso, Matisse, and Pollock.” (151) In the fanciful Rabinovitch movie, Ryder returns in period costume to participate in the collaborative creation of Blue Poles, along with other artists who influenced Pollock. Other Influences Sam Hunter notices Pollock’s personal application of Surrealist devices. He adds Pollock “has retained fragments of Picasso’s anatomical imagery and distorted memories of the Surrealistic bestiary.” Herbert Read notes these elements might equally have come from André Masson. In his introduction to the 1958 Pollock retrospective at MoMA, Sam Hunter adds Pollock does this “all within a scheme of continuous, circulating arabesques which seem to operate automatically and remind us of Miró or Masson.” (152) Arabesque is actually a popular name for Number 13A of 1948. Biographer Justin Spring notes Pollock’s “early attempts to follow Benton’s instructions on studying the rhythm of ‘lines’ of paintings show many linear, geometric figures drawn in a style that anticipates the forcefully driving line, block form, and energetic angles of Pollock’s poured paintings…” (5) However, when Sanford wrote to Charles about Jackson in 1941, he mentioned their brother “has freed himself from the influence of Benton and he is doing creative work in the most profound sense of the term. We are sure that if he can manage not to let himself go, his work will be important.” In the Harris movie the script calls for Pollock to say it was John Graham who helped Pollock get Benton’s influence out of his system (45). Removing the mask, which was a part of Benton’s influence he no longer wanted, might have been the release he needed to paint Mask (1941). Earlier he had used a mask in Birth, described by Naifeh & Smith as “a turbulent canvas of Picassoid heads transforming into Indian masks.” (367) It was a troublesome time when Graham’s African masks and Jungian archetypes apparently took on a special meaning for the artist seeking to unveil himself, if not to anyone else, at least to himself. Probably the first important book written on the history of modern art published after Pollock’s death was by the distinguished Briton, Sir Herbert Read (1893-1968). He states Pollock’s ‘action painting’ was inspired directly by André Masson and dates back to before Masson’s arrival in the United States in 1938. He thought the influence of Masson on Pollock was still very evident in Pollock’s later works, such as Sleeping Effort of 1953 (90). Herbert Read acknowledges the influence of Picasso and Miró on Pollock, but stated their influence “does not seem to be so stylistically significant.” However, individual Pollock works can show direct quotations or reference points to specific work. Direct elements of Picasso are seen not only in Pollock’s early sketches, but also in Stenographic Figure, The She-Wolf, and Easter and the Totem. For example, artist Kathy Segall sees Edvard Munch’s 1893 seminal expressionist icon, The Scream (or also called The City), in Pollock’s Number 25, 1951: Echo. Similarly, she sees in Pollock’s Gothic (1944) "an underlying drawing that is the organising principle," from Constantin Brancusi's 1926 bronze La Négresse Blonde. Others might see some influence of Amédéo Modigliani's distinctive style as in his Femme aux yeux bleus (1918). Originality Herbert Read states: “The clue to Pollock’s originality is found in the phrase ‘concrete pictorial sensations’ (…) Pollock’s aim was to try and isolate these concrete sensations, that is to say, free them from the memory images that inevitably insert themselves into any mode of expression, particularly into any attempt to project images from the unconscious.” (197)

Troubled Queen, c.1945. Oil and enamel on canvas, 188.3 x 110.5 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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STRUGGLING DURING THE EARLY YEARS: MAKING ENERGY VISIBLE In 1940, Klee died. Kandinsky’s Sky Blue was exhibited. Dali settled in the U.S. Jung’s The Interpretation of Personality was published. In 1941, Ernst came to the U.S. and settled in Arizona. The National Gallery of Art opened in Washington, D.C.

Political Issues

“i feel i will make an artist of some kind i have never proven to myself nor any body else that i have it in me.”(402) – Age 18

In 1940, Pollock wrote to his brother Charles: “I have been going thru (sic) violent changes the past couple of years. God knows what will come of it all it’s pretty negative stuff so far.” Whatever else it may also have been, it was to remain ‘negative stuff’ (308). Walsh notes Peter Fuller’s insights on these points: “Despite his considerable abilities… Pollock never developed a convincing historical vision in his own paintings. What prevented him from doing so was, at least in part, history itself: the hopes for a better world and for socialism which, albeit confusedly, he had held since adolescence, were shattered by World War II.” Fuller said he was not trying to deny the psychological roots of Pollock’s malaise; but he insisted it had an historical component (225, 331). Also in 1940, Pollock watched Orozco create a painting at the MoMA for the exhibition Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art. That year the WPA cut back its spending due to pressure from the U.S. Congress. During bureaucratic reorganisation, all the artists who had worked in the program for over eighteen months were let go. Pollock had no WPA work from May to October of 1940. There were political complications with his employment because of his sympathy for Communism and his refusal to sign a loyalty statement. Pollock was rarely involved directly in political issues, with the exception of a school demonstration during his youth and later a ‘strike’ against the Metropolitan Museum in 1951. However, David Siqueiros, a militant activist, fascinated him, but perhaps the admiration was mainly for his mural work, rather than for his political position. Pollock was a registered ‘4-F’, unfit for military service, based on a letter to the draft board from his psychiatrist, Dr. de Laszlo. Sanford was also aware of Jackson’s mental instability, as he read in a letter from Charles, which apparently included diagnostic comments from the doctor: “He is tormented with neuroses that cause him to suffer from bouts of irresponsibility and manic depression, alcohol abuse and a tendency to self-destruction.” (465). Moreover, Pollock’s potential to be productive was still very much in doubt. He was like the character in Updike’s novel who was “handicapped by his alcoholism (and) limited in his intelligence.” (113). Greenwich Village The old section of Manhattan, Greenwich Village, called simply The Village by the natives, has always been the supportive breeding ground and comfort zone of the avant-garde. When Pollock was hitting the bars there in the 1940s, it was the virtual art colony of the world outside Paris. Later an area south of Houston Street, called SoHo, became the centre of artists’ lofts and galleries. In 2005, the new Museum of Contemporary Art in Chelsea had an exhibit called Art in the East Village, 1981-1987. In it, photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders staged skits referring back to the Life Magazine photo of the Abstract Expressionists “substituting ambitious East Villagers for Pollock and the early stars.” (102) In 2005, the museum progressed toward a new seven-storey home in the Bowery and Prince Street in SoHo, which might soon return some of the contemporary art-loving traffic to that neighbourhood (343). Chelsea has inherited much of the mystique of an art colony. The listing of exhibitions in The New York Times (25 February, 2005) includes one show in SoHo, three in ‘uptown’ and one ‘on 57th Street,’ but eight for Chelsea. Even In Pollock’s day, the Chelsea Hotel, locally called simply ‘The Chelsea’ was the scene of rebellious and creative avant-garde personalities. Other hotels in Manhattan became associated with specific

Untitled, c.1948-1949

groups, such as The Ansonia Hotel at 72nd and Broadway, which was popular with opera singers and other

Ink and enamel on paper, 56.8 x 76.2 cm,

classical musicians.

New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Summertime, Number 9A, 1948, 1948. Oil and enamel on canvas, 84.5 x 549.5 cm, Tate Gallery, London.

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“Modern art to me is nothing more than the expression of contemporary aims of the age that we’re living in.”(406) – Age 38

The Chelsea in particular was the social centre of boisterous, drinking writers. Pollock’s friend Tennessee Williams was often a guest at The Chelsea, as were earlier literary notables, such as O. Henry, Mark Twain, Thomas Wolfe, Brendan Behan, and Dylan Thomas (440). The drinking artists of Pollock’s generation carried on the dubious tradition in The Village (123). In Pollock’s Springs neighbourhood there were also artist bars for hard drinkers. However, whatever the neighbourhood, Pollock could find a bar where fans and other artists could soon find him. Oral biographers gathered a variety of stories about brawls between notable artists, usually with Pollock starting fights or being in the middle of it all (441). Athos Zacharias comments, “Back then the art world (in New York) was small, about 450 people. You knew everybody and as a group we felt isolated from the rest of New York. Bill (de Kooning), Pollock, Rothko, and a few others were just beginning to make a living from their work. We had no idea that it would explode and that the smallness and intimacy of our world would end.” (231) In 1942, Braque’s cubist art was seen in paintings such as Patience. Aaron Copland’s Rodeo brought some cowboy culture to Manhattan. In 1943, Benton’s July Hay and Mondrian’s Broadway BoogieWoogie were shown. The musical Oklahoma! opened on Broadway and won the Pulitzer the next year.

Rebirth In January 1942, John Graham invited Pollock to show his work Birth at the McMillen ‘gallery’ in a show called American and French Paintings. A review of the show was probably the first mention of Pollock in the press, and where Krasner became aware of Pollock and soon later took the initiative to meet him. In the informal environment of that furniture showroom, works by Americans such as Pollock, Krasner and de Kooning were included side-by-side with Matisse, Picasso and other artists of the École de Paris. Also showing was Braque, Davis, Derain, and Kubin. Fuller observes, “Compared with the decadence of Paris, Pollock’s sincerity became a symbol of regeneration…” (331) Lee Krasner felt she knew everyone of importance in New York’s modern art scene, but when she saw the unfamiliar name Jackson Pollock and noticed he lived nearby, she decided to visit him. The scene of their meeting at his apartment is presented memorably in the Ed Harris film. The simplicity of the event is in contrast to the historical significance for the art world of the early meeting of these two dynamic artists. Later in the year, Pollock’s The Flame, was shown at the Metropolitan Museum in a patriotic show titled Artists for Victory. Around that time his early exposure began to earn him some deserved attention. Either Motherwell or Sweeney first introduced Pollock to Guggenheim (197). Putzel invited Pollock to his exhibition of collages scheduled for April 1943. Moby Dick The 1943 work Blue is also called Moby Dick, but probably has nothing to do with the Melville classic. However, artist Peter Busa told Naifeh & Smith that Pollock “must have tried to read it (the Melville novel Moby Dick) not once but ten times.” Busa thought Pollock’s obsession with his father’s death set him up to identify with Captain Ahab’s obsessive search for the meaning of ‘fate’ (368). His friend and biographer B.H. Friedman recalled to Jeffrey Potter that he suspected Pollock had never actually read the classic. At most the book was probably something assigned to Pollock in school. Yet Friedman thought Pollock would probably have told a talk show host it was his favourite book (369). The painting was apparently not in an exhibition during Pollock’s lifetime.

The Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle, c.1943. Oil on canvas, 109.5 x 104 cm, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

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Peggy Guggenheim Peggy Guggenheim’s given name was Marguerite. She was born in 1898, niece of Solomon Guggenheim and related to the Seligman family of bankers. The famous Guggenheim Art Museum in Manhattan is named for her wealthy, art-patron uncle. While Dearborn’s biography of Guggenheim is the most recent, authoritative and complete, Bruno Alfieri includes a short profile of personal recollections in an informal essay (201). It is surprising that Guggenheim had no comment in 1956 about the death of Pollock (203). But it is now known she did not want to be associated with Lee Krasner. Tension between Krasner and Guggenheim arose when it was discovered several paintings done by Pollock during 1946 to 1957, the time of her contract with the artist, had not been turned over by Krasner to Guggenheim as required by the terms of their agreement.

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Out of the Web: Number 7, 1949, 1949. Oil and enamel on fiberboard, 121.5 x 244 cm, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart.

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Guggenheim was also upset after a showing in 1950 of twenty-three Pollock paintings because the press was leaving her name out of the reviews. She blamed Pollock and especially Krasner, whom she believed actively pursued the removal of all references to her involvement. This spirit of animosity lasted thereafter so in 1956 when Krasner visited Europe, Guggenheim did not invite Krasner to stay at her home (202). In 1957, while at a gallery in Rome, Guggenheim saw War, a drawing Pollock had done in 1947 during the time of her exclusive deal with the artist (204). At the time she was too busy to start litigation, but later her lawsuit began and it took over four years before it was settled out of court. Her biographer notes, “In the settlement, Krasner gave her two small Pollock paintings then said to be worth $US500 together.” (205) Guggenheim obviously lost the battle. In March 2005, the solo play Woman Before a Glass by Lanie Robertson opened on Broadway. It starred Mercedes Ruehl as Peggy Guggenheim. The Village Voice explained Guggenheim “devoted her life to the love of art and artists – getting physical about it with more than one of the latter.” The New York Times reviewer, Charles Isherwood, referred to Guggenheim’s ‘stream-of-consciousness screeds’. The reviewer noted the playwright Lanie Robertson “uses exclamation points liberally, rather in the manner that Jackson Pollock used paint…” (53A). Howard Putzel Sculptor Reuben Kadish knew Jackson’s brother, Sande, as well as Jackson himself, from their years together in Los Angeles. Then in New York, in the summer of 1942, Reuben brought Howard Putzel to Jackson’s apartment studio to see the work Jackson had been doing since they had last met. In their youth, Kadish and Pollock pounded on boulders together, learning the basics of sculpting (388). Pollock always retained his desire to sculpt. Kadish had been a friend of Putzel’s for nearly a decade when he introduced him to Pollock. In 1944 Putzel opened his own showplace, 67 Gallery, with an impressive first exhibit called A Problem for Critics. Greenberg originally disagreed with Putzel on the definition of American avant-garde, but the critic later came to see that Putzel was accurate, as he demonstrated in his seminal show. Putzel was, as a 1980 Art in America article noted, “A proponent of Surrealism and early abstract art.” His first show included works by young Americans, including Pollock, as well as Miró, Arp and Picasso. The problem was, apparently, to figure out who was who in the show. While the show was a success, Putzel continued to have serious personal problems. He was not only an alcoholic with an unhealthy heart and a thyroid condition, but he also had epilepsy. Moreover, he was also an ‘Athenian’, the code name at the time for a homosexual (127). He befriended several great future artists early in their careers, including Mark Rothko and Yves Tanguy, before Pollock. De Kooning referred to gay men as ‘gigglers’ (398). Before Putzel moved to Paris, his gallery in San Francisco failed, as did another in Los Angeles There he would bring Pollock and other young Americans to the attention of Guggenheim. Putzel made sure she would be especially aware of Pollock as she launched her AOTC gallery in Manhattan. Its opening was a springboard for the artists who evolved Abstract Expressionism, and for Pollock in particular. It was Putzel, apparently always very pragmatic, who later encouraged Pollock to paint smaller pieces which might sell more easily. In 1947 and 1948 Pollock painted a few pairs of paintings which were the same size. In 1948, paintings in one set were 4450.16 sq cm each. Otherwise, none of the other Pollock paintings represented here in colour are the same size. Around this time Pollock worked on rolls of canvas. He would paint on long areas from these rolls and then cut portions of various lengths to make individual paintings (115). The New Yorker Magazine included a cartoon showing an artist sawing off short sections of a long plank of a single landscape creating a pile of small paintings, spoofing the fact that the assembly-line techniques could be done with realistic as well as abstract paintings. The gallery begun by Putzel had not been open long before one of his patrons, Kenneth MacPherson, withdrew his financial support (22). Surely this contributed to Putzel’s depressed state of mind at the time. In August 1945, around the time Pollock and Lee moved to Long Island, Putzel died. His body was discovered at the Gallery. Guggenheim’s biographer mentions most commentators attribute the death to his heart. However, “He may have been murdered by someone he picked up on the street; the fact that there were rumours of suicide suggests something was being covered up.” (128) Some, including Guggenheim, considered it a suicide. But the biographer also notes he might have been murdered. Friedman simply states Putzel committed suicide, without citing any source (12, 17, 128, 129).

Out of the Web: Number 7, 1949, 1949. (detail)

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Pasiphäe, c.1943. Oil on canvas, 142.5 x 243.8 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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“The way I see it, we’re parts of a hole, like a glove turned inside out. And outside of the glove, the hole, is a realit y we can’t imagine because it’s endless – this universe holding existence together. … no shit.”(418)

Krasner and Pollock especially mourned the death of their good friend, Putzel. Several biographers believe these deaths influenced Pollock’s attitude about life and death. Perhaps they also influenced his tendency to self-destruct, slowly through alcoholism, or quickly by reckless speeding. Suicides Walsh notes Pollock’s death was not the only one surrounded with concern about suicide among the artists of his day. Before Pollock died, Arshile Gorky had already hanged himself in 1948 (Works from the early years of Gorky were exhibited at the Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, a gallery in Los Angeles, in February 2005) (345). Gorky is currently shown in at least sixteen American art museums or galleries (346). Kline drank himself to death in 1962. David Smith, the sculptor, died in an automobile accident in 1965, and Rothko slashed his arms and bled to death in 1970 (346). Reviewing Influences A summary of the influences on Pollock besides his childhood, Theosophy and the Wild West, can also serve as an overview of his professional life, from its origin with Benton, through to his final works. None of his experiences – even with Benton’s – seemed to be entirely forgotten by him. After Benton’s influence, it was Siqueiros’ 1936 workshop where Pollock saw a link between the unconscious and art, which flowed from his rudimentary awareness of the basic notions of Jungian psychotherapy. In 1939, his confidence was buttressed after meeting John Graham. Then came his alliance with Krasner from late 1941 before meeting Greenberg. He was also influenced by his exposure to automatism and awareness of the drip painting of Motherwell and Matta. Throughout most of these influences there was also the association, albeit not always civilised, with the avant-garde community. Some people trace the beginnings of his high-profile career back to 1942 and his first one-man shows at Guggenheim’s AOTC, when his work began to reach critical success and then peaked at mid-century. In her autobiography Guggenheim recalled, “When I first exhibited Pollock he was very much under the influence of the Surrealists and of Picasso. But he very soon overcame this influence, to become, strangely enough, the greatest painter since Picasso.” (42) “I Am Nature.” When he saw some of Pollock’s work for the first time, Hofmann encouraged the artist to study with him in order to learn from nature. In Pollock’s famous reply, “I am nature”, the artist revealed again one of his key ideas, one which might have been rooted in the Theosophy he had learned fifteen years earlier. However, Hofmann came to that quotable moment also with a history. Tina Dickey, the editor of the Hans Hofmann Catalogue Raisonné, observes: “By 1948, Hofmann had devoted half a century to the study of nature, yet nearly from the start his friendships with the Fauve and Cubist painters of Paris had convinced him to reject the convention of representational art.” (17) In his movie, Pollock, Ed Harris had the artist say the famous “I am nature” statement not to Hofmann, but to Krasner. Harris explains in a voiceover track from the film that this theatrical license was taken for practical cinematic reasons. Meanwhile, Harris has Pollock painting Male and Female (1942) as he makes the statement. This is historically appropriate because it was apparently in the year of this work’s creation that Hofmann and Pollock had the dialogue. Although Pollock was a man of few written or spoken words, it is likely he said, “I am nature” more than once and to more than one person. He might have said it in different ways, but surely never more concisely. More importantly, the philosophy which the phrase expresses is seen acted out in how he involved himself in the organic growth of his creations. His body became one with his instruments, especially as he danced around his larger works. He danced around them both literally and also, when ‘explaining’ them, figuratively. Part of the veiling of himself came from his cryptic and rare peeks into his unique philosophy of work.

The Moon Woman, 1942. Oil on canvas, 175.2 x 109.3 cm, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.

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Shift of Influence Centres By the late 1940s there was significant immigration of several artists from Europe to the United States, and specifically the shift of the art world’s capital from Paris to New York. It created a more objective critical view of post-war American society than it might otherwise have had without the mix of influences. Walsh quotes Serge Guilbault who suggested, “They (the painters) were sick of politics and therefore thought they were sick of history as well. By using primitive imagery and myths to cut themselves off from the historical reality of their own time, they hoped to protect themselves from the manipulation and disillusionment they had suffered previously.” (301)

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The Key (Accabonac Creek Series), 1946. Oil on canvas, 149.8 x 213.3 cm, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.

Croaking Movement (Sounds in the Grass Series), c.1946. Oil on canvas, 137 x 112.1 cm, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.

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Untitled (White on Black I), c.1948. Oil on canvas, 61.2 x 43.8 cm, Private Collection.

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Walsh continues quoting Guilbault on this point: “For them… the political situation had become hopeless in its complexity and absurdity. The avant-garde retained traces of political consciousness, but devoid of direction. The political content of their art had been emptied out by the use of myth. Pollock, Rothko, Gottlieb, Barnett Newman – the avant-garde painters who talked about their art – did not reject history, because it was there in all its hideous features, snapping at their throats. They did not reject the idea of some kind of action, of some reaction to the social situation. They did not avoid the problems of the age but transformed them into something else; they transformed history into nature. As Roland Barthes has put it, ‘By moving from history to nature, myth gets rid of something. It does away with the complexity of human actions and bestows upon them the simplicity of essences.’” (302)

“Don’t control it, use it. Let it be yours.”(419)

A New Process Some resources simplistically describe the artist’s technique which was developing during this period. In the Funk & Wagnalls profile of the artist, for example, Pollock’s ‘action-painting technique’ is described as a technique “in which the artist drips aluminium paint and commercial enamels from sticks and trowels onto huge canvasses stretched on the floor.” (27) Pollock explained he used sticks, trowels, or knives instead of brushes. He stated he preferred “dripping fluid paint or a heavy impasto with sand, broken glass and other foreign matter added.” (83) Cartoonists enjoy picturing Pollock using various instruments to deliver paint to a canvas. In his introduction to Pollock for children, illustrator Mike Venezia shows the artist in the kitchen asking his wife if he can borrow the turkey baster and egg-beater (117b). In 1955, while the idea of painting without traditional brushes was still novel, a New Yorker cartoonist needed no caption to be amusing when he simply pictured a painter applying paint to a canvas with an ordinary paint roller (458). Artists recall how the floor of the Siqueiros workshop was splattered with sprayed paints, a sight which surely influenced the memory Pollock recalled years later. Those new techniques were applied to mural paintings as well as to political banners. The latter included propaganda used at Communist demonstrations. A photo of Pollock with Siqueiros and colleague George Cox, taken at the 1936 May Day Parade, is in the Archives of American Art at The Smithsonian Institution. In Russia, the parade has been an annual demonstration by Socialists for the working class since 1889. The Advent of Fame When recreating how others directed Pollock to international fame, it is important to note his journey took a providential turn when he met the aggressive and assertive Krasner. She told her teacher, Hofmann, and her friend, Matta, about Pollock. Matta suggested to James Sweeney that he see the Pollock works. Sweeney then told Peggy Guggenheim. Once the powerful Guggenheim became involved, the art world would never be the same. Iconoclasts, eager to bring down the unlikely icon which Pollock became, can easily build a case showing Pollock was staged by others: Krasner, Guggenheim, Greenberg, MoMA, as well as by himself. Had the artist’s fame been less sudden, its evolution from his humble early works to audacious murals might have been more appreciated. Once when looking at the night sky from the Springs location, Krasner compared Pollock to a comet which had a short life span but was bright and beautiful while it lasted. Kirk Varnedoe, MoMA’s distinguished curator, apparently had Lee’s comment in mind in 1998 when he titled his MoMA exhibition catalogue Comet. He once said Pollock “formed and held onto the notion that being an artist would be his life,” even though he had “an apparently near-total lack of talent.” (116) Varnedoe left MoMA in 2001 and died in 2003. Automatism Pollock met Sebastian Matta and Robert Motherwell through William Baziotes, who invited Pollock to gather artists together who were interested in psychic automatism. In order to approach the topic of spontaneous writing or drawing, one had to have some awareness of basic psychology. In terms of psychology, which was not yet popular in Pollock’s day, there had to be some understanding of the conflict between ‘right-brained’ feeling and ‘left-brained’ thinking. Gabor offers an apposite analogy: “For an artist, it was not unlike the experience of an early-twentieth-century physicist suddenly coming upon quantum mechanics and finding that she must reassess her whole view of the universe.” (199)

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The Comet, 1947. Oil on canvas, 94.3 45.5 cm, Wilhelm-Hack Museum, Ludwigshafen.

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Number 5, 1948. Oil, enamel, aluminium paint on fiberboard, 243.8 x 121.9 cm, Collection David Geffen, Los Angeles.

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“my drawing i will tell you f rankly is rotten it seems to lack f reedom and rhythm it is cold and lifeless.”(402) – Age 18

Pollock understood sobriety was a prerequisite for reaching the ‘automatic response’ required for his best work. To allow a painting to have a ‘life of its own’ required he have perfect coordination of eye and hand with an ability to let go of any preconceived envisioning of the work. It was prerequisite to being ‘in’ his work. He said: When I am ‘in’ my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It is only after a sort of ‘get acquainted’ period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony. (84) The passage is often quoted not only because it is one of the rare verbal statements the artist made about his work, but also because it expresses what seems to be at the heart of his philosophy of art. While de Kooning treated his masterpiece Excavation as “an architectural structure into which he could freely move” (273), Pollock described being truly ‘in’ his own painting as he worked. Observers of the works of either painter might experience being drawn forward and back and side to side with the de Kooning, compared to being moved in rhythmic three-dimensional curves when ‘in’ the Pollock. The casual viewer might see some optical illusion, as with an illustration showing certain designs of concentric circles which appear to move as one looks into their centre point. However, illusion is not what the artists meant when they were ‘in’ their work. Pollock appeared to be spontaneous and transcendently able to be ‘in’ his painting when he achieved that state. As de Kooning’s biographers state: “When Pollock unrolled canvas on the ground, creating a kind of metaphysical boundlessness – like the ocean – he gave up the window and the mirror of the painter at the easel. He also gave up traditional brushwork.” (250) Surrealists Pollock wanted to be independent of the Surrealists as led by the influential André Breton. But he was also not comfortable with group activities, at least not when everyone was sober. Moreover, he had already been experimenting with, and was certainly well aware of, the essential role of the unconscious in the creative process. However, Krasner and Pollock did participate in informal automatic writing experiments with Motherwell and Baziotes. New York-based artist, Inka Essenhigh, has stated the Surrealists were a literary movement first, using automatic writing, before they ventured into automatic drawing: “They wanted to let one thought lead to another without judgement or priority.” She explains automatic drawing is more difficult because “all your thoughts and actions happen on the same page and you can see them all at once.” (20) The Unconscious When Pollock terminated his psychoanalysis with de Laszlo, he made his final entries into his sketchbook. He apparently envisioned starting with a clean slate. He tried to free himself from the past so he could begin at the beginning and paint what he wanted to paint, something Pollock called the unconscious. However, there is an important distinction here. Haskell notes the artist wanted to paint, not just about the unconscious, but he wanted to paint the unconscious – the entity itself (48). “He wanted to break through to this thing, to poke a hole in the fabric, separating him from it, and that’s what he did.” (251) The idea itself was admirable, but the amazing thing is he and others felt he actually did it. De Kooning said Pollock ‘broke the ice’. Richard Lacayo of Time Magazine added, “True enough, but it broke him too.” (60) Money Matters Pollock assisted Krasner on her work for the Federal Arts Project, but they also signed a petition to President Franklin Roosevelt protesting the deterioration of the program. Even so, in October both artists participated in yet another project directed by Krasner. To pay bills, Pollock and Krasner took on several odd jobs during this time. He would often pick up practical knowledge which would show up later in his actual work. For instance, he was an assistant at a print shop, where he learned some basics of serigraphy. It seemed in nearly every job that Pollock had he would cause trouble or be dismissed because of drinking-related problems. This included an incident when he was working as an attendant at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, the predecessor to The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. He later confessed, “Between the canned music and the craziness of the director I got myself fired.” (310) Once the possibility of exhibiting looked promising, Pollock gave up his job at the Museum. The poet, Frank O’Hara (1926-1966), could identify with Pollock’s humble roots. Like the painter, he also worked as a MoMA guard, long before his artistry was acknowledged. He went on to be a founding member with John

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Number 20, 1948, 1948 Enamel on paper, 52 x 66 cm, Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute Museum of Art, Utica, New York. Edward W. Root Bequest.

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Number 23, 1948, 1948. Enamel on gesso on paper, 57.5 x 78.4 cm, Tate Gallery, London.

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Untitled (Mural), 1950. Oil, enamel and aluminum paint on canvas, mounted on wood, 183 x 244 cm, Teheran Museum of Art, Iran.

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Number 5 (detail), 1948. Oil, enamel, aluminium paint on fiberboard, 243.8 x 121.9 cm, Collection David Geffen, Los Angeles.

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Blue Poles: Number 11 (detail),1952, 1952. Enamel and aluminum paint with glass on canvas, 210 x 486.8 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

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Untitled, c.1951. Oil, ink, glue and paper on canvas, 127 x 88.9 cm, The Phillips Collection, Washington.

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Ashbery and Kenneth Koch of the 1950s New York School of poets. O’Hara died from injuries received when hit by a beach vehicle on Fire Island on Long Island, New York. In the spring of 1943, Pollock and Motherwell worked together on a joint exhibition of collages. The show, held at AOTC, was organised by Guggenheim and Putzel and was called Collages. While the work Pollock contributed is presently lost, the artist, Robert Motherwell, confirmed he had seen the artist working on it during that time. He watched Pollock spit on the work and burn its edges (209). The bland reviews of the show did not even mention the works by Pollock. However, this show began Guggenheim’s discovery of the artist. Her biographer notes she often referred to Pollock as her and Sweeney’s spiritual offspring. (210) She also supported other young promising artists, including Motherwell, Baziotes, and Rothko. However, she would later call Pollock her single greatest discovery (211). Baziotes and Motherwell would later defect from Guggenheim to join her rival, Sam Kootz. After hearing recommendations about Pollock and seeing a few of his works, Guggenheim considered the possibility of offering him his first one-man show in the summer of 1943.

“Painters should paint, not teach, goddam it!”(420)

First One-Man Show In November 1943, Pollock had his first one-man show. He was the first American artist to exhibit at AOTC. The works shown included fifteen oils and several works on paper, all executed in the previous three years. The show revealed his genius early in his career through his gestural masterpieces, which burst with industrial colours not seen before in art galleries, but still with figurative or Cubist elements. The titles alluded to mythical subjects, soon to be typical of titles used by the New York avant-garde. One painting, untitled in the spring show, is now called Stenographic Figure. There were also other paintings with the phrase ‘moon woman’ in their titles. The Moon Woman from the same year was in six exhibitions over the next decade. Moon Woman Cuts the Circle was first shown with The She-Wolf at MoMA in 1944. The influence of Miró’s Seated Woman and Picasso’s Studio (1928) was seen especially in Pollock’s Male and Female. Because of Guggenheim’s connections, Guardians of the Secret would be included in Pollock’s one-man show in the San Francisco Museum of Art two years later. She-Wolf was shown and bought within a year by MoMA. It was the only painting to sell directly from the show and the first of the artist’s work to be shown in a public collection. A decade later it would travel to Paris for two exhibitions, 1953 and 1955. Today it is in the Pollock room at the new MoMA, which opened in 2004. Regarding the four 1943 shows in which Pollock was shown at AOTC, Peggy Guggenheim told the press, “I consider (Pollock) to be one of the strongest and most interesting American painters.” (252) In the catalogue for the show, Sweeney wrote, “Pollock’s talent is volcanic.” (105) The fact Pollock was not yet a familiar name is perhaps symbolised by the artist’s name being misspelled as Pollack (sic) in the catalogue’s foreword. The critic’s other adjectives included unpredictable, lavish, explosive, untidy. But he also said the work was undisciplined, a description which upset Pollock. The artist would also later react strongly to a Time Magazine item stating his work displayed chaos. He would fire off a famous note to Time saying, “No chaos. Damn it!” The magazine published the memorable reply. Pattern Within the Pattern Pollock’s conviction that there was no chaos and no accidents in his work has been confirmed. It is being shown now, fifty years later, by the research of physicist Richard P. Taylor at the Materials Science Institute, Department of Physics at the University of Oregon. Taylor presents his breakthrough research concerning fractal expressionism in Pollock’s work. He is finding patterns seen in small areas, such as the tip of one of Pollock’s drips, are amazingly repeated in an even smaller section of the small section, and so forth, similar patterns found in snowflakes, or tree limbs, and throughout nature. It is seen then that Pollock is ‘in’ his work; his work leads to and flows from nature; therefore, he ‘is’ nature. The discovery points to the wisdom behind Pollock’s theosophical comment, “I am nature.” (107) Beginning to Change the World Time Magazine included the opening of Pollock’s first one-man show as one of the eighty events which changed the world. Although the first reaction of most critics at the show was still one of puzzlement, some of the critics and mass media finally ‘got it.’ Then, as Time’s Richard Lacayo put it: “The Abstract Expressionists, who had been fermenting for years, exploded American art onto the world stage for the first time.” (47)

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The Wooden Horse: Number 10A, 1948, 1948. Oil, enamel and wood hobbyhorse head on brown cotton canvas, mounted on fiberboard, 90.1 x 190.5 cm, Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

Barnett Newman, Untitled, 1948. Oil on paper mounted on canvas, 46 x 50.8 cm, Private collection.

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“Possibly it’s just a matter of time when there maybe will be a demand for the real stuf f af ter all. That isn’t my worry - mine is to produce it.”(404) – Age 21

Robert Motherwell, Figure with Rectangular Window, 1948. Oil on masonite mounted on a wood strainer, 243.2 x 121.9 cm, Collection Dedalus Foundation, New York.

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Lacayo referred to Pollock as, “America’s first painter pop star, the drunken angel of an emerging hipster culture in search of new routes to those old American goals, the instinctive and the transcendent.” (63) Greenberg, then the art reviewer for Nation, stated he hoped, “(Pollock) in his search for style, would not lapse into one of the influences on him, such as Miró, Picasso, and Siqueiros.” He also notes, “Pollock has… come out on the other side at the age of thirty-one, painting mostly with his own brush.” He is, “…the strongest painter of his generation and perhaps the greatest one to appear since Miró.” (33) Greenberg states, “All original art looks ugly at first.” He pointed out Pollock was obviously not afraid to let his art look ugly. The same could be said about the artist’s personal life. However, when evaluating Pollock’s future, Greenberg was the most prescient of all critics, especially when he described what he envisioned to be Pollock’s future influence. James Johnson Sweeney wrote, “Pollock offers unusual promise in his exuberance, independence, and native sensibility.” (253) At first some critics felt the Guggenheim gallery, designed by Fredrick Kiesler, was an experiment, a research laboratory for new artistic ideas, as well as a showplace for the art which Guggenheim had collected since 1938. She received advice from some of the most successful artists: Alfred J. Barr, Jr., André Breton (1896-1966), Duchamp, and Max Ernst (1891-1976) (90 and 105). John Updike’s novel, Hope, modelled on Lee Krasner, recalls, “Most people had no idea anything wonderful was happening. They did not know there was a moment. They were still thinking Picasso and Miró and the Surrealists…” (215) Pollock biographers often mention both Pollock and Guggenheim were disappointed that only one work, a drawing, was sold during the 1943 show. However, it is often not mentioned that Guggenheim later sold several works which premiered at the show (216). The buyer of the one drawing was Kenneth MacPherson, even though he did not like the major work associated with the show, Mural. The work was commissioned for the lobby of Guggenheim’s duplex apartment she shared at the time with MacPherson in Manhattan. In a letter to Emily Coleman, Guggenheim commented it was unfortunate that MacPherson didn’t like Mural, because he had to see it every time he went in and out of their residence (217). A Pollock piece of five years earlier, The Flame, was included in the Artists for Victory exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is now at MoMA. Mural A major high point of Pollock’s career began as the risk-taking Guggenheim offered him a one-year contract in 1943 at $150 a month. In a 1976 interview with Dennis Barrie, artist Gerome Kamrowski said: “He (Pollock) was the first American painter in my time that I know of to receive a contract as a painter.” (225) The contract Pollock had with Guggenheim was an outstanding opportunity for Pollock because it gave the artist the financial security to devote all his time to painting. At the time she also commissioned him to create a work which would probably be his magnum opus. It was Duchamp who suggested the work be done on canvas, instead of directly on the wall surface. It was titled Mural. Note, a smaller untitled Pollock work of 1950 is also sometimes titled Mural. After the AOTC one-man show closed in November 1943, Pollock contemplated his work. Robert Goodnough noticed, “Pollock often sits for hours in deep contemplation of a work in progress… A Pollock painting is not born easily but comes into being after weeks, often months of work and thought. At times he paints with feverish activity, or again with slow deliberation.” (237) That pattern undoubtedly contributed to the legend of his last-minute rush to complete the work on time. A famous photograph shows Pollock standing before the large and empty canvas – his shadow dramatically falling across it. The photo is often used in biographies and commentaries on his art. It captures the spirit of the days he allegedly spent seated before the canvas, contemplating the blank space, before he finally began to paint. The notion of a brooding artist contemplating his work apparently appealed to the popular media. A New Yorker Magazine cartoonist enjoyed showing a wife who has quickly splashed paint on to a blank canvas. She then tells her brooding painter-husband he can no longer complain about a blank canvas staring him in the face (460). All the estimates of how long Pollock actually took to paint Mural indicate he did it in a burst of energy, probably over comparatively few hours. An impressive scene in the Ed Harris movie, Pollock, (2002) recreates the painting of Mural. The story is supported by fellow artists who recall seeing Pollock energetically attacking his other works after a long period of apparent reflection. But then after such mental preparation, “Pollock is out aquesting and he goes hell-bent at each canvas,” said Maude Riley (222). Biographers have noted Krasner confirmed Pollock was, like her, totally committed to a work once begun, at least when he was sober.

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Night Mist, c.1944-1945. Oil on canvas, 99.1 x 183.2 cm, National Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida.

Enchanted Forest, 1947. Oil on canvas, 221.3 x 114.6 cm, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.

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Untitled (Bald Woman with Skeleton), 1938-1941. Oil on smooth side of masonite attached to stretcher, 50.8 x 61 cm, Courtesy Joan T. Washburn Gallery, New York.

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Contemporary witnesses interviewed by biographers disagree on the length of time Pollock spent contemplating, then actually painting the work. According to Naifeh and Smith, Pollock completed the massive work in a furious fifteen hour stint. (218) Guggenheim wrote Pollock did it in a rather unbelievable three hours. Either way, Pollock clearly dated the work 1943. Moreover, Guggenheim biographer, Dearborn, describes the discovery of a postcard from Pollock to his brother, Frank, stating the mural had been finished the summer before the November opening (226). The result this time was a portable mural, nearly twenty feet long (2.47 x 6.05m), an exceptionally large work even now. Apparently a few inches had to be cut off its length when it was actually brought to the entrance hallway of the East 61st Street residence of Guggenheim in Manhattan. It was major exposure for him, since it was a place visited by the media and many of the most influential people in contemporary art. To make room to create the large work Mural, Pollock knocked out the wall between Krasner’s studio and his own. Like the stories of Pollock being a cowboy, the Mural stories are mostly exaggeration. The artist and Krasner cooperated somewhat with the story-telling, and even had Pollock pose dramatically next to the large blank canvas, his shadow falling on the spotless space that was yet to come alive with action and colour as few art works ever had before. The irony is the facts of the artist’s life and his art were already dramatic without such mythology. When the agreement to do the mural was first made, Pollock decided to celebrate with his friends Putzel, Rothko, and Seliger. According to an interview with Seliger by Guggenheim biographer Mary V. Dearborn, the three went to dinner and then to a Times Square movie theatre to see a double bill of the 1931 box office hits, Frankenstein and Dracula (225). Frankenstein starred Boris Karloff, while Dracula featured Bela Lugosi. Both men were appearing for the first time in title roles with which they would always be identified. One might wonder how the three celebrating drinkers, Pollock, Seliger and Rothko, reacted to the famous line of Lugosi’s character: “I never drink… wine.” The unusual celebration was appropriate because future super celebrities Karloff and Lugosi were each giving birth to their own monstrous legends and myths. Moreover, Pollock’s Mural was a masterpiece which turned into a legendary monster. Brian O’Doherty, in Jackson Pollock’s Myth, analyses the legends and mystique surrounding Pollock (227). Commentator Ellen G. Landau proposes the experience of creating Mural moved Pollock away from the totemic and analytical resources, or psychological introspection, to a more confident non-objectivity (221). From then on there would be less focus on the Jungian resolution of problems, or what Joseph Campbell would five years later call ‘the hero’s journey’ (9). After its premiere in Guggenheim’s hallway, Mural was then the only Pollock shown at MoMA’s Large Scale Modern Paintings in 1947. Mural is now at the University of Iowa. Guggenheim gave it to the school, but later regretted doing so because they didn’t seem to understand its value and apparently didn’t help the students to appreciate it. The work was installed in the students’ dining room. She later offered to give the school a Braque in exchange for it, but the school declined (220).

“… with experience – it seems to be possible to control the f low of the paint, to a great extent, and I don’t use – I don’t use the accident – ‘cause I deny the accident.”(406) – Age 38

Pollock’s Sensitivity Pollock’s mistress, Ruth Kligman, said she felt Pollock was like either a huge animal or a child. She said she felt as if “He could cry or become violent at any moment.” She remembers how he reacted during a performance of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. He had seen it twice before and had cried both times, he admitted to Kligman. (228) The psychiatrist, Francis O’Connor, suggests Pollock’s emotional reaction to the famous Beckett play had some deep roots in his childhood experiences. In his brilliant lecture Jackson Pollock: Down to the Weave, he analyses sketches from Pollock’s dream journal to back up his theory (363). Krasner’s Productivity Krasner painted very little during the time when Pollock’s productivity was peaking. As Ginzburg put it, “She was muffled into muteness by the loud thunder of his creativity, bitter and frustrated by his needs and neuroses; but after he died, she came into her own and painted prodigiously.” (229) In 1944, Williams’ The Glass Menagerie opened. Picasso’s The Tomato Plant was shown. Kandinsky, Mondrian, Lucien Pissarro and Edvard Munch died. In 1945, Frank Lloyd Wright showed designs for the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan. In New Mexico, the first atomic bomb was detonated. Later, US atomic bombs used on Japan.

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Two, 1943-1945. Oil on canvas, 193 x 110 cm, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York).

Untitled (Don Quixote), 1944. Oil on canvas, 73.2 x 45.6 cm, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York).

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“It’s here, it’s not in Paris. It used to be with Benton, but now it’s with me.”(421)

The Atomic Age Maybe more than any other era in American history, current events in the late 1940s influenced art. Mariann Smith summed it up: “The end of World War II, the explosion of the atomic bomb, and the realization that mankind had developed the ability to destroy itself were all factors in creating a mood of introspection and reflection.” This was the atmosphere in which “Abstract Expressionists rejected representational art as incapable of expressing the emotional atmosphere of the time. By turning to new forms of expressionism Pollock, Rothko, and their colleagues brought American painting to international prominence and for the first time an American city, New York, replaced Paris and the other European centers as the leader of the avant-garde art world.” (392) In his taped interview for the Sag Harbor radio station in the summer of 1950, which was never aired, Pollock showed his awareness of the times. “It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express this age, the aeroplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture. Each age finds its own technique.” (455) Global Art Village Early in 1944, Pollock wrote to his brother, Frank, that he was enthusiastic about his work and the exhibits, and the way in which his work was being reproduced in the media. He was interviewed by Art & Architecture, during which he contrasted the fast-paced life of New York to that of the western cities of his youth. He acknowledged the open spaces of the Western states had influenced him deeply. However, he stated whatever apparent references to Native American art showed up in his work were not intentional. He challenged the notion of trying to resolve the problem of modern art (or what others might call American art) by rejecting artists from other nations. He mentioned specifically two of the artists he most admired were the Europeans Picasso and Miró, while the only American that interested him was Ryder. However, the poet O’Hara would later call Pollock America’s Ingres, compared to de Kooning as its Delcroix (67). In 1944, Sidney Janis included a work by Leanore Krassner (sic) in his book, Abstract and Surrealist Art in America, produced for MoMA. Even before Mural began that year, Janis, who would become a Pollock dealer, included Pollock’s Male and Female in Search of a Symbol and The She-Wolf. She-Wolf In May 1944, Pollock showed Male and Female at the Pinacoteca Gallery. Also in May, Sweeney recommended Pollock’s uniquely composed, The She-Wolf to Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the director of the painting and sculpture department at MoMA. It was acquired for $650 and was the first Pollock purchased by a museum. Janis states, “I think it is the most provocative painting by an American I’ve seen.” (54) The She-Wolf was featured a few months later in Sidney Janis’ influential book Abstract and Surrealistic Art in America (1944). Janis later revised his book, adding a chapter on Surrealism. It was in that chapter Pollock made his statement about The She-Wolf, saying the work came into existence “because I had to paint it.” Adding, “Any attempt on my part to say something about it, to attempt explanation of the inexplicable, could only destroy it.” (54) In 1972, The Funk & Wagnalls New Encyclopedia referred to The She-Wolf as, “The most characteristic of his works of this period.” (230)

Untitled (Kneeling Figure), 1934-1938. Oil on canvas, 68.5 x 53.6 cm, Courtesy Joan T. Washburn Gallery, New York and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Inc.

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Guardians of the Secret Pollock was invited by Sidney Janis to show in the exhibition titled, Abstract and Surrealist Art in the United States, at the Cincinnati Art Museum. He again showed Guardians of the Secret. The painting was in his first one-man show earlier in 1943. However, as if it had obvious transitional qualities, the second time it was unexpectedly included in the Surrealists’ section. It would also be in his next one-man show in Chicago the following year. In Guardians of the Secret, the viewer might sense the strong vertical figures on either side of the centre, guarding the entrance to the mysterious area of secrets. A beast is seen along the lower horizontal of the painting as a ghostly spirit hovers above it all. Overall the work is in some way reminiscent of the JudeoChristian stories of the ‘Holy of Holies’, or the sanctum sanctorum in the Vulgate version. (Exodus 26:31-34). It is unlikely Pollock had Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) in mind when contemplating his painting of the most holy place, but like the great essayist, Pollock might also have dipped into his unconscious memories of his religious mother and her profound influence on him. “Such things,” Carlyle’s character recalls, “reach inwards to the very core of your being; mysteriously does a Holy of Holies build itself into visibility in the mysterious deeps.” (315)

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The Tea Cup (Accabonac Creek Series), 1946. Oil on canvas, 101.6 x 71.1 cm, Frieder Burda Collection.

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Orange Head, c. 1938-1941. Oil on canvas, 47.6 x 40 cm, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Inc., New York.

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The Mad Moon-Woman, 1941. Oil on canvas, 100.3 x 74.9 cm, Private Collection.

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The work is one of the more obvious examples of the dramatic influence Theosophy had on him. The work recalls the theosophical legend of the ‘guardians of the threshold’ he first heard as a seventeen-yearold during presentations by Krishnamurti. Biographer Emmerling notes, “By complicating and purposely veiling the imagery in many paintings of this period he attempted to invoke a magical, metaphysical reality.” The mysterious atmosphere of the work is reminiscent of Hofmann’s comment in his Search for the Real: “Art is magic. So say the Surrealists. But how is it magic? In its metaphysical development? Or does some final transformation culminate in a magic reality? In truth, the latter is impossible without the former. If creation is not magic, the outcome cannot be magic.” (233) In her memoir, Ruth Kligman recalls dancing with Pollock for the first time. She says he danced “rather delicately for so huge a man.” (234) Elsewhere, she described the way his hands and arms moved “like electricity.” Elsewhere she confessed, “I wanted his power; I wanted his magic, and the quality that can’t be learned or cultivated…” (235, 236) The elusive magic of Pollock’s skill and persona that Kligman described so well is reminiscent of the many Pollock imitators who try to produce ‘a Pollock,’ but their quality never come close to his genuine works.

“The source of my unconscious.”(405)

painting

is

the

– Age 25

Less Popular Works Pollock did several works around 1944 which weren’t in major exhibitions, but some are occasionally seen reproduced in publications. The more popular, There Were Seven in Eight, from about this time (c.1945) was included in the third one-man show at AOTC. It was a large canvas (109.2 x 259.1 cm) begun shortly after the success of Mural, but apparently wasn’t completed for several months, perhaps because it was becoming obvious to him that smaller works sold better. But the large work was eventually finished and obtained by MoMA. Holiday Between the purchase of The She-Wolf by MoMA and his solo exhibit at Guggenheim’s, Pollock and Krasner took a summer holiday in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Putzel visited them at their rented studio. There he was planning a new gallery because he had left AOTC. Between One-Man Shows Between Pollock’s first one-man show in 1943 and his second in 1945 at AOTC, Guggenheim convinced MoMA to purchase his The She-Wolf. She also visited the Springs property rented by Pollock and Krasner to see if Pollock would be able to work well there. She decided to bankroll most of the financing, but her terms were demanding. In the deal she obtained three paintings, including the 1943-1944 work Pasiphaë. Apparently Pollock stopped working for awhile on the large Pasiphaë to create several smaller works at the request of Putzel, who needed them because they would be easier to sell. But it also might have been Pollock’s inner struggle with Picasso that aborted the work for awhile. It is the work which most clearly shows allusions to Guernica (De Kooning’s Attic makes a similar Picasso allusion). However, Chicago critic Eleanor Jewett, capturing the restless and raucous atmosphere which the Pollock brought to the exhibit, adds that in this work Pollock’s “ruins are more complete” than in Picasso’s Magnum Opus (77). Second One-Man Show Pollock had another one-man show in 1945 at The Arts Club of Chicago. The latter included seventeen of his works in addition to those that were shown at the first one-man show at AOTC. These included the 1943 work Guardians of the Secret, Wounded Animal, Pacify, and Search for a Symbol. Some of these works are at the San Francisco Museum of Art. Cincinnati Again Between the two one-man shows in 1945, there was a showing of Gothic (1944) at the Cincinnati Art Museum’s Critics’ Choice of Contemporary American Painting, 49th Annual. The vertical work might be seen as an expressionist’s reply to Grant Wood’s phenomenally famous American Gothic of a dozen years earlier, but that was most likely not the artist’s intention. Seven years later the Pollock work would represent the artist’s work for 1944 at the Sidney Janis 15 Years of Jackson Pollock show. Third Solo, Second at AOTC Pollock’s second one-man show at AOTC was held mid-March to mid-April. On the first day Guggenheim invited visitors to her townhouse to see Mural for the first time. Meanwhile, the gallery itself exhibited thirteen of Pollock’s paintings, gouaches, and drawings.

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Untitled, c.1946. Gouache and pastel on wove paper, 58 x 80 cm, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.

Bird Effort (Accabonac Creek Series), 1946. Oil on canvas, 61 x 51 cm, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York).

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“Paintings don’t need all this fooling around. The hell with museums! Put the paintings in a room and look at ‘em – isn’t that enough? You remember that ol d buil ding where the Museum of Modern Art started? What was wrong with that?”(407) – Age 44

Broadening the Horizon Pollock loved the vast spaces of the West, and he shared this passion with Native Americans and early pioneer artists of the West. Currently, the Earth Art pioneer, Michael Heizer, is building a sculpture in a remote area of Nevada. Commenting on the influences on such Earth Art, Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic of The New York Times, notes, “The Abstract Expressionists had linked American art with scale. Jackson Pollock’s paintings were said to refer to the Western landscape.” (58) In order to have an unobstructed view of the horizon from the second floor window of his house, Pollock had to move a barn which was obstructing his visual path. First he laid a cement foundation by himself. Then, like barn-building Pennsylvania Amish farmers, the neighbours in Springs helped him move the barn uphill to a new location. In return, Pollock helped neighbours with many jobs, including rebuilding a porch, harvesting potatoes, moving rocks, or other work that needed to be done. Of all the biographies of Pollock, the oral history by Potter probably best describes this aspect of Pollock’s relationship with his neighbours (85). Pollock helped repair the roof of Harold Rosenberg’s house, presently the residence of Robin Holland, the Village Voice photographer. One of the reasons Pollock liked the new property was because he could enjoy the view north to Accabonac Creek, which could be seen from the top floor of the house. The stretch of flat land between the house and the creek reminded him of the open spaces of the Western States where he had grown up. The view from the house, once the barn had been moved, was in sharp contrast to the closeness of the Manhattan apartments he and Krasner had shared. The results of his new, wider vision are apparent when his newer works are compared to the smaller and more claustrophobic ones he created while living in the small Manhattan apartments he shared first with his brothers and then with Krasner. In his movie, PollockSquared, Bill Rabinovitch shows this view clearly. Likewise, in the Ed Harris movie, Pollock, the artist’s love of this property is captured when his title character is shown lying on the ground enjoying the open spaces. It was an exciting time in Manhattan as Frank Lloyd Wright’s design of the new Guggenheim Museum developed. It boldly stated its innovative shape in contrast to the box-like structures along the same highfashion avenue. Many of the business buildings and stores were not much more creative than the repetitive designs seen in the rows of single-family units in the suburbs during the post-war house-building boom. In a New Yorker Magazine cartoon in 1958, a couple of people drive by the unusual building as the woman asks, “Are they allowed to do that on Fifth Avenue?” (328) A similar attitude still existed about Pollock’s art, as mainstream people typically asked, “Is that allowed?” Marriage Although her own family treated Krasner like an outsider, she grieved deeply when her father died in 1944. It seemed her desire to marry Pollock and move out of Manhattan intensified after her father’s death. She apparently thought if Pollock married her, she might be more able to end his drinking and fighting. Krasner wasn’t interested in a church wedding. It was Pollock who wanted a religious ceremony, which surely pleased his mother. After trying other local churches, Krasner and Pollock found Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan which allowed inter-faith marriage. She was raised Jewish. His parents were Presbyterian. The couple was married on 25 October, 1945. At the last minute, Guggenheim backed out as a witness. However, Natale Tabak, the wife of Harold Rosenberg, was a witness. The ceremony was presided over by Rev. Charles J. Haulenbeck, Assistant Minister of the Church (139) The couple moved into their Long Island home in November. At the end of the month, the couple hosted Thanksgiving dinner with their families.

Number 22, 1950. Enamel on Masonite, 56.3 x 56.3 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art.

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Productivity Pollock did not paint while the couple fixed up the house. Then they used the top floor bedroom as a studio where Pollock did the back cover for Guggenheim’s memoir, Out of This Century. He also painted The Key and prepared for his next show. In it there were sixteen paintings in a well-received show. Pollock also converted the barn behind their house into what would be his studio, where his most notable work would soon be done. Krasner recalled he would sleep late and “sit over that damn cup of coffee for two hours.” He would begin his workday later, then work till dark. The quantity and quality of the work he did there was, as Krasner said, incredible. At first the studio had no lights and no heat, yet it was his most productive period. Krasner certainly played a maternal role in Pollock’s life, but unlike his mother, she could be very critical of his work, as well as of his self-destructive lifestyle. However, she put her own widely appreciated work on hold for years while she endlessly encouraged Pollock to work.

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There Were Seven in Eight, c.1945. Oil on canvas, 109.2 x 259.1 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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Portrait of H.M., 1945. Oil on canvas, 91.4 x 109.2 cm, University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City, Gift of Mrs Peggy Guggenheim, 1947.

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Creative Block In the autumn, Pollock experimented with making etchings at Stanley William Hayter’s studio, Atelier 17. Yet, during these times when he was exploring and expanding, it seems Krasner was least productive. In her book on Krasner, Barbara Rose proposes a reason why Krasner might have had a creative block while living with Pollock, especially during the early years (223). Rose believes it was a consequence of Krasner trying to reconcile the contrast between Pollock’s highly-intuitive approach of dipping into the subconscious for his ‘automatic’ work, and to her more regimented and cubist training by Hofmann (94).

“Churches are okay if you got to belong to something to feel safe, but artists don’t need that … they’re part of the universal energ y in their creating. Look – existence is. We’re sort of all like everything else, we’re on our own, goddammit!”(422)

In 1946, the musical Annie Get Your Gun opened, again romanticising the Wild West on Broadway. In 1947, Picasso brought expressionism to pottery and sculpture. Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire opened and won the Pulitzer the next year.

In December 1945, and into the next year, Pollock exhibited Two for the first time at the AOTC. He then showed it at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting. It would be a popular feature in four subsequent exhibitions. The Gestural Veiling Pollock and Krasner disliked the term ‘drip’, a reference to the technique by which the direction of paint is sent through the air towards the surface under the control of the gesture or motion of the artist. The resulting works made Pollock phenomenally recognisable in pop culture. His larger works were especially notable, but were often used merely as background for fashion photography, parodies in cartoons, or as artefacts to be imitated or satirised. Philip Rylands holds that Pollock’s gestural paintings were the hallmark of his style and the key to his historical importance (231). Therefore, Greenberg was certainly prophetic when stating, even before the gestural technique dominated the artist’s work, that the 1945 AOTC exhibit of these works “signals what may be a major step in his development.” (232) Pollock began his gestural paintings in 1947. The painter, Robert Goodnough, described the technique in a May 1951, article in Art News. “The Paint – usually enamel, which he finds more pliable – is applied by dipping a brush or stick into the can and then, by rapid movements of the wrist, arm and body, quickly allowing it to fall in weaving rhythms over the surface. The brush seldom touches the canvas.” His description agrees with the Namuth ‘home movie’, meant to show Pollock at work, and includes the artist’s own rare commentary. It was apparently Namuth who thought of shooting a movie from under a sheet of glass on which Pollock would paint Number 29, 1950. According to Relyea, “What Pepe Karmel uncovers, alas, is that Pollock’s first baptismal splashes of paint actually depict frolicking stick figures, from which the painter’s classic abstractions evolve – a verdict dependent to no small degree on some wilful interpretation of its own.” (238) This might remind viewers familiar with the Pollock oeuvre of Pollock’s Mural of eight years earlier in which veiled stick figures are more easily unveiled. Reylea notices experts seem to agree: “Pollock painted too close to the canvas to see what he was doing, too closely to become a spectator of his own art.” (239) It brings to mind a documentary film showing both Matisse and Picasso standing back frequently from their work surface to observe it from a viewer’s location. But many believe Pollock rarely ‘stood back’ from his work. He always seemed to be much more concerned with the process of creating rather than the final product. After all, does any artist ever see or hear his or her work as others experience it? Reylea finds the philosophical analysis by Rosealind Krauss “turns its back on eyesight to enmesh itself instead in the real… While fashioned as a ‘desublimation’ of the canonical Modernist reading of Pollock, what she (Krauss) ends up describing is precisely an experience of the sublime.” (240) Reylea stated around 1900 that photography was found to be a very helpful tool for recording the movements of workers as they performed routine tasks. In that pioneering area, Fredrick Winslow Taylor led the campaign which was subsequently developed in the methodical work of his disciple, Frank Gilbreth (242). Stealing the Soul Pollock’s works were an effort to make visible the invisible. Marshall McLuhan might have said it veils the image by imaging the veil. Reylea wrote Pollock’s distinctive skill was “the deliberate fathering… of all of the great mass of traditional knowledge, which in the past has been in the hands of the workman, and in the physical skill and knack of the workman,” which is his “most valuable possession.” (242)

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Full Fathom Five, 1947. Oil on canvas with nails, tacks, buttons, key, coins, cigarettes, matches, etc. 129.2 x 76.5 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Full Fathom Five (detail), 1947.

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Sea Change, 1947. Collage of oil and small pebbles on canvas, 141.9 x 112.1 cm, The Seattle Art Museum. Gift of Mis Peggy Guggenheim.

Watery Paths, 1947. Oil on canvas, 114 x 86 cm, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome.

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“I think it {an abstract painting} would be enjoyed just as music is enjoyed – af ter a while you may like it or you may not.”(406) – Age 38

This insight throws a revealing new light on Pollock’s dramatic emotional explosion and his return to drinking immediately after the shooting of the famous 1950 movie. In it the photographer, Namuth, directed the artist to pose as if he were doing his gestural work. By revealing the rubrics of his skill and in effect taking his most valuable possession, his knowledge, from him, the film effectively reduces the artist’s self-worth and his raison d’être. In the catalogue for his Pollock retrospective, Kirk Varnedoe writes about this important point: “Moving away from the head and out into the body need not lead us only to scatology but also to the varieties of knowledge that, in the body of an athlete or dance, are superbly organised and shaped without recourse to conscious cerebration. Movements of innate fight and disciples training are constantly available to us, to remind us of the fluid refinement possible within the life of the body… Pollock releases not just excreta but this form of knowledge.” (116) Commentators seem to avoid this philosophical discussion, probably because of its unpleasantness. They typically omit mentioning how Pollock had, at least a few times, added some of his own body fluids, as well as his hand and shoe prints to the canvases ‘in’ which he worked. He would not be upset if someone damaged one of his works. It seems he was more protective of his method than the resulting product. Final AOTC Before Guggenheim closed her AOTC gallery in May 1945 and returned to Europe, Pollock participated in the gallery’s final show, his fourth one-man show. The sixteen works included his Accabonac Creek series, which he painted while in his studio on the top floor of the farmhouse from where he could see the creek. Also included was his Sounds in the Grass series, painted in the barn studio. Shimmering Substance, in the Sounds in the Grass series, is one of the popular works presently in the new MoMA room of Pollock works. Other popular works from the 1946 series are Eyes in the Heat and the most popular exhibition work from the series, Croaking Movement. Betty Parsons Guggenheim convinced Betty Parsons to take on the showing of Pollock’s works until the expiration of his agreement with AOTC in 1948. Pollock had his first solo exhibition at Parsons Gallery soon afterward. Parsons guaranteed him another one-man show during the next winter. The closing of AOTC had a disastrous effect on the finances of Pollock and Krasner. Pollock works had been shown at Parsons without many sales. However, he would have five one-man shows at Parsons. She would later state that supporting Pollock had been the best thing she had ever done (68). Pollock and Guggenheim never met again after 1947, although Krasner was yet to have many confrontations with Guggenheim in the years ahead, especially after Pollock’s death. After the Art of the Century one-man show in 1947, the artist had four exhibitions that year at which he showed a single work each: Mural at MoMA, Abstraction in England, The Key in Chicago, and finally, Galaxy at the Whitney. It provided him with the opportunity to be omnipresent as he was nearing the peak of his most productive years. The Key found a home at the Chicago Art Institute. It was Pollock’s only entry in the museum’s 59th Annual Exhibition of American Painting and Sculpture in 1947. In 1948, in Manhattan, de Kooning held his first one-man show, featuring Black Friday. The Life Magazine roundtable discussion on modern art involved Aldous Huxley, Clement Greenberg, Meyer Schapiro, James Johnson Sweeney and Francis Henry Taylor.

Around 1948, Pollock’s stars began to align for the meteoric rise of his brief career. Appropriately, about this time he painted Comet.

Shimmering Substance (Sounds in the Grass Series), 1946. Oil on canvas, 76.3 x 61.6 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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Life Magazine In 1948, Life Magazine organised a discussion at MoMA. Fifteen critics and connoisseurs were asked to “clarify the strange art of today.” (265) The resulting article included a reproduction of Pollock’s Cathedral (78). The work was seen literally on both coasts that year, first at his one-man show at Parsons and later in San Francisco. Presently the Life Magazine format is a thin, but always visually interesting Sunday newspaper photo supplement. But at the time of the MoMA discussion, Life was focused on current events like its newspaper cousins. However, it was considered by some readers to be somewhat like the media George Bernard Shaw referred to when he said most newspapers couldn’t distinguish between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation.

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Mural, 1943-1944, Oil on canvas, 243.2 x 603.2 cm, The University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City.

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Untitled engraving, 1944-1945 (printed in 1967). Engraving and dry point, 37.3 x 45.8 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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At the Parson’s exhibition, the work Phosphorescence was also included. It was one of the works named by neighbours, Ralph and Mary Manheim. Pollock would stand back while the couple named the works. According to Krasner, Pollock would approve or not approve each suggested title. Apparently the couple chose the names also for Enchanted Forest, Lucifer, Watery Paths, Magic Lantern, Sea Change, and Full Fathom Five. The name for Cathedral was given, directly or indirectly, by Greenberg, who referred to the spirit

“Do you think I would have painted this crap if I knew how to draw a hand?”(424)

of Pollock’s work at the time as that of a great Gothic Cathedral (370). The 8 August, 1948 Life article which followed the MoMA discussion shows once again Marshall McLuhan was correct when he emphasised his idée fixe: the medium is the message. Millions of readers saw the powerful Arnold Newman image of a young, macho, maybe arrogant artist spread across two pages in colour. The artist was seen standing next to his long, colourful canvas. Richard Taylor observes that in those pre-television days, a colour spread in Life was a moment of national significance (314). In another Life photo, by Martha Holmes, the artist is shown at work. However, the Newman photo became the more famous one, showing Pollock in a cocky pose, standing before his extra-wide work, Summertime: Number 9, 1948. The photo overpowered the condescending tone of the article. De Kooning’s biographers comment, “Suddenly, a tongue-tied and difficult artist was an American star. In the next decade, countless young artists would dream of this defiant, cocky pose.” (266) The article would greatly influence Pollock’s reputation in a positive way. However, the unsigned article, later found to be by Dorothy Saiberling, seemed mostly sarcastic with its famous headline which asked: “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” The famous Life article would reverberate throughout the American art world, sending ripples of influence outward for decades to come. It began to build an exciting and optimistic anticipation which would lead to the next Pollock show later in the year. By emphasising the word ‘greatest’, the question could be somewhat accepting of the art and artist, by simply asking the reader to judge quality. However, by emphasising ‘he’ in the query, the tone became aggressive. The article itself was less ambiguous. It questioned the quality of modern art in general, as was typical at the time. The cultural atmosphere, where Pollock so often felt he had to prove he was not ‘a phony’, was one in which some artists might not have been authentic. The article, intended to be critical of Abstract Expressionism, ironically advanced Pollock’s fame and brought many critics to seriously answer in a positive way what was originally a tongue-in-cheek question. Fame arrived at Pollock’s door like Pandora’s box: It excited hope and anticipation, but soon it unleashed all sorts of devastating problems, such as an invasion of his retreat from the big city (63). However, many contemporary commentators agree that at the time Pollock was the greatest living painter in the United States, and remains one of the most significant. Similarly, Pollock – well aware of irony – noted in the August 1950 New Yorker interview, “There was a reviewer awhile back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was. It was a fine compliment. Only he didn’t know it.” Easel versus Mural In 1948, Greenberg mentioned the ongoing rivalry of easel versus mural and how it referred to the artists who were starting to use larger-scale easel art. Soon after the Greenberg article, another appeared titled, The Crisis of the Easel Picture, in which he referred to all-over compositions. He included works by Pollock in his examples. Pollock’s January 1948 one-man show at Parsons included seventeen works, each with a descriptive title. Numbered paintings would begin with his next one-man show at Parsons. The show was a critical disaster. The only critic who liked the new gestural paintings was Greenberg. De Kooning’s biographers note, “Now that most of Pollock’s supporters had returned to Europe, some Americans weren’t certain that the painter… was worth the trouble.” (243) Ironically, Lucifer, a work that would become one of the most valuable of all Pollock works, was in that failed show. Lucifer Lucifer was listed in 2003 as one of the ten most wanted works of art of the year, according to ARTNews magazine in its list of ‘elusive masterworks collectors would die for’. The work was expected to fetch up to $US100 million, according to the magazine. The large work is often selected as typical of Pollock’s early gestural period. It is the one chosen to accompany the profile of the artist in Funk & Wagnalls New Encyclopedia (27). Likewise, the National Gallery selected Lucifer to use with its profile of Pollock (91).

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Cathedral, 1947. Enamel and aluminium paint on canvas, 181.6 x 89 cm, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas.

Phosphorescence, 1947. Oil, enamel and aluminium paint on canvas, 11.8 x 71.1 cm, Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts.

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Lucifer, 1947. Oil, enamel and aluminium paint on canvas, 104.1 x 267.9 cm, Collection Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson.

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“Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.”(407) – Age 44

Very Active Year In 1948, Guggenheim showed six works from her Pollock collection at the XXIV Venice Biennial. It was, in effect, the first showing of Pollock in Europe. It travelled to Florence and Milan in 1949. This was the third of five years in a row Pollock’s Two would be in a major exhibition. Meanwhile, back home, Pollock joined other artists in protest against hostile critics, particularly those who supported a statement made by The Boston Institute of Contemporary Art which challenged the professional integrity of abstract artists. Pollock also renewed his agreement with Betty Parsons, this time committing himself until June 1949. Meanwhile, he applied for a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. Even though his work received good reviews, such as from the influential critic, Clement Greenberg, his request was rejected. The feeling he was a fraud haunted Pollock. In the Ed Harris movie, the character keeps repeating, “I am not a phony,” especially on the infamous evening on which the Namuth film was completed. Critics often contributed to his doubts. Even his friend, Greenberg, was not always supportive. In 1949, MoMA had a Kokoschka Exhibition. In 1950, de Kooning began his lampooning Woman series. Williams’ The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone opened.

In letters to his brothers, Pollock expressed satisfaction with the reviews his work was receiving. He even made a few public statements, such as in the journal, Possibilities. One of its publishers, along with Robert Motherwell, was Harold Rosenberg. His wife, Natale Tabak, had been a witness to Pollock’s wedding two years before. Rosenberg would also be involved with the group of artists called the ‘Intrasubjectives’ later that year. ‘In’ the Painting In the journal, Possibilities, Pollock described details of the technique he used at the time. Instead of using an easel, he tacked unstretched canvas to the floor: “I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be ‘in’ the painting.” He stated the method was similar to that used by the Indian sand painters of the West. Being ‘in’ the process, as Pollock often said he was during his work, was not unique to him, or even to painting. The phenomenon is familiar to other creative personalities, including the prolific novelist, Joyce Carol Oates. Articulating much of what Pollock probably meant, Oates recently said, “Tomorrow morning when I’m at my desk, I’ll be writing. That’s very real. That’s process. When the book comes out in five years, it’s then product. The process is what you live in; the product comes at the end. Sometimes it does well, sometimes less well. But the process gives you happiness. You have to be happy in the process. You can’t be waiting for some future redemption when you’ll be called the greatest writer in the world.” (249) Signature Updike’s Krasner-like character recalled her husband “slapped his hand loaded with black paint along the top of a mural-sized painting”, probably alluding to Number 1A, 1948. She added it was “as if to say ‘I made this.’ It became a cliché, painting with your body, but Zack was the first. All alone in that barn with his sticks and hardware paints, he was inventing performance art.” (255) Some Pollock paintings show handprints, like that on Number 1A, 1948. A segment showing the handprints from that major work, owned by MoMA, is on the cover of the museum’s anthology on Pollock (250). In his novel, Updike has the artist’s widow recall a bumblebee, a sneaker print, or a cigarette butt would get worked into a painting. These would “remind us of what we’re looking at, a big piece of canvas, with edges.” (255) But Pollock wasn’t the first to involve the environment in the creative process. Vincent van Gogh, the first super popular expressionist, allowed seeds and plant material to get into and remain in his paintings. In Full Fathom Five there are nails, tacks, buttons, a key, coins, and matches, as well as bits of cigarettes. The work was in Pollock’s sixth and ninth one-man shows. The most obvious example of Pollock incorporating objects from his environment in his work was when he painted The Wooden Horse, on which an actual wooden hobbyhorse head is attached. This work could remind us of what the artist Christo said about his 2005 Gates installation in Central Park, Manhattan: “The whole thing was like pop in the best sense – almost frivolous, but not quite.” (285)

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Number 28, 1951, 1951. Oil on canvas, 76.5 x 137.5 cm, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. David Pincus.

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Number 3, 1949: Tiger, 1949. Oil, enamel, aluminium paint, string and cigarette fragment on canvas, mounted on fibreboard, 157.5 x 94.6 cm, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington.

Eyes in the Heat (Sounds in the Grass Series), 1946. Oil on canvas, 137.2 x 109.2 cm, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.

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Guardians of the Secret, 1943. Oil on canvas, 122.9 x 191.5 cm, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco.

Guardians of the Secret, 1943. (detail)

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The Water Bull, c.1946. Oil on canvas, 76.5 x 213 cm, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

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Bits of cigarettes can also be seen in Number 3, 1959: Tiger. It is amazing tobacco isn’t seen in even more of his works. Several, if not most, photos show the artist with a cigarette in his hand or lips. However, Mary Abbott, a friend of de Kooning, recalled once offering Pollock a cigarette. She said he replied, “I only smoke canvas.” (257) Most biographies of Pollock include at least one photo of him smoking a cigarette, such as on the covers of biographies of Friedman, Naifeh & Smith, and Solomon. Photos of the artist with a cigarette also appear in books by Emmerling, Harrison and Potter. The most famous photo with a cigarette is undoubtedly the one that appeared in Life Magazine in 1949 (69). In the 1930s and 1940s, Hollywood movie and pop culture cooperated with mass advertising in tyring to make cigarettes glamorous, as if smoking was a sign of maturity, success, confidence, sexual attraction, and even health. While he was a nonconformist in most ways, Pollock virtually endorsed that image. In the Mood When examining how automatic painting evolved from automatic writing, it is appropriate to note novelists can appreciate Pollock’s need to let the painting have a life of its own. Giving advice to writers, Ray Bradbury told Writer’s Digest, “I believe a story is valid only when it’s immediate and passionate, when it dances out of your subconscious. If you interfere in any way, you destroy it… Let your characters have their way. Let your secret life be lived.” (258) The experience of letting the art direct the artist probably also relates to musical performers who speak of being in a mental or emotional zone during which they can improvise. Depending on the era, they might speak of being ‘in the mood’ (Glenn Miller) or something similar with each pop music style. Out of the Web The Pollock works created right before and after the 1949 Life article show the artist’s frustration and a need to change direction. Out of the web of this period came experimental works such as Out of the Web. In reproductions, the work is often shown in black and white print only, losing the important yellow details (381). It is also frequently misnamed (382). Similarly, the pastel subtleties in The Deep are typically lost even in colour reproductions. In Web, the artist used the underside of a masonite panel. After several layers of black, white, grey, red, and yellow paint dried, Pollock cut simple shapes into the surface, removed small areas of paint, and revealed the tile beneath. He was unveiling the foundation, making it the image, similar to the way he was always trying to dip into and reveal the unconscious. The trial and error period peaked at the one-man show in which Out of the Web first appeared. Architect Peter Blake unveiled the model he envisioned being the perfect museum for Pollock’s paintings. The event was billed as “a theatrical exercise using Jackson Pollock’s paintings and sculpture.” The artist made little wire-andplaster sculptures to illustrate how and where artefacts would be displayed in the museum’s space (375). Music Updike’s character Zack liked to listen to jazz while working. He liked Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, and Bix Beiderbecke. “Once the couple (based on Pollock and Krasner) got electricity out to the barn, he turned it up loud as if to keep her (his wife) away.” (259) However, in her biography, Ruth Kligman recalls Pollock didn’t like jazz, but played Dixieland (260). However, Potter remembers Pollock saying, “You can stick your symphonies and shit. Jazz is now, and that’s for me. But so is a cello, all on its own.” (336) The late Larry Rivers told Potter about a typical evening at the local nightclub called Jungle Pete’s when a drunken Pollock would ask the musicians to play what Larry called ‘cornies’, or old-fashioned pop songs, such as I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby. That was the title song of the 1940 movie first featuring the tune, and was one of at least five movies which included the tune in the 1940s. Pollock would say, “That’s a good tune.” Rivers commented, “In the ‘Jungle Pete’s’ scene this wasn’t a heavy painter with an accomplishment behind him. Pollock was a figure of derision… actually, he wasn’t that bad.” (337) According to Kligman, in 1956 Pollock did not know who Elvis Presley was, even though ‘the King’ had ten hit single records in the previous two years (82). She mentioned during their time together in his final year he also said he didn’t like the ‘Negro music’ she bought for him, referring to jazz by musicians like Charlie Parker. “I like Dixieland music, that’s what I grew up on,” she recalls him saying. She adds, “He rarely played records, occasionally some classical music, but it disturbed him.” Kligman comments, “His inner dialogue was the only sound he needed.” (261) However, Isamu Nogughi has said Pollock confessed, “He couldn’t do this weird poured work unless he had been drinking and listening to jazz.” However, Nogughi quickly added, those are “perhaps not his exact words.” (338) Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center has Pollock’s hi fi system, hundreds of jazz records and the artist’s personal library. (256)

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“That bastard, he (Picasso) misses nothing!” (410)

It seems oral biographies are often only as reliable as the people interviewing and those being interviewed. Each person involved might see very little of the subject’s entire life. Consider, for example, what Leland Bell told Potter: “I’m a jazz drummer and when I talked to him (Pollock) about jazz – nothing. He had no interest whatsoever in jazz, and I don’t think he had a feeling for any music. He didn’t know and he didn’t care.” (339) Similarly, art dealer Ben Heller told Potter, “He (Pollock) didn’t know nearly as much about music as other things, but he could hear well. He was interested in the warm jazz and the minimal knowledge I gave him. We played different music on different days and listened to Schönberg, Debussy, Stravinsky (and) Bartok in the more modern era, or we’d go back into the pre-classical world and so forth.” Heller proposed the pattern of Pollock’s interest was not so much in music but in people who were “breaking the mold. Trying to break out or had something to say in their work.” (340) Each of the serious composers named by Heller certainly was an iconoclast in their own way. Obviously, those were people with whom Pollock could identify. Composer John Cage, then thirty-nine, had already been tagged an experimental composer. He was asked by Lee Krasner to compose a musical score for the Namuth faux documentary. She hated the film, but thought a good musical score might save it from total disaster. However, the composer excused himself, saying he was working on his Imaginary Landscape Number 4, an eccentric work for twelve randomly-tuned radios, twenty-four players and a conductor. Cage did, however, introduce Krasner to the twenty-five year old composer, Morton Feldman, whose first works would be revealed later that year. Cage later confessed: “I couldn’t abide Pollock’s work because I couldn’t stand the man.” (347) Feldman, obviously a fan of Abstract Expressionists, years later composed a piano trio titled De Kooning (1965), as well as compositions titled Rothko Chapel (1971), and For Frank O’Hara (1973). Alcoholism Pollock renewed his treatment for alcoholism with Dr. Edwin H. Heller (not related to art dealer Ben Heller) and had some success for about two years, until the doctor died in an automobile accident in the fall of 1950. After Pollock and Krasner visited his mother for Christmas in 1948, Mrs. Pollock wrote to Charles. She mentioned Jackson had been going to Dr. Heller. She said Jackson had been sober for three weeks, and added, “He says he wants to quit.” (390) Seventh One-Man Show, Second at Parsons The highlight of 1949 for Pollock was his second one-man show at Parsons Gallery, where he exhibited twenty-six paintings, all numbered works, and thirteen with descriptive subtitles. All were probably painted the year before. According to the wife of an art dealer who was there, the exhibition was “full of huge, beautiful Pollocks, very overwhelming.” (263) Architect Marcel Breuer liked what he saw and commissioned Pollock to do a mural for Bertram Geller’s house on Long Island that Breuer had designed. Pollock began work on it in March 1950. At Guild Hall, East Hampton, a show titled Seventeen Artists featured a single Pollock, but its title is apparently not now known. Pollock, the Sculptor In June 1949, Pollock renewed his contract with Betty Parsons, which would be binding until January 1952. He then continued sculpting for the rest of the year at the studio of his neighbour, Roseanne Lawrence Larkin. At the exhibition Sculptures by Painters at MoMA, two of Pollock’s three-dimensional works were shown. Jane Sabersky organised the show. It originated at the Peridot Gallery and travelled to various cities in the United States during 1951.

Untitled, c.1939-1942 Pen and coloured crayon on linen textored paper, 25 x 20 cm, Munich, Private Collection.

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Tony Smith Thanks to a contact with Betty Parsons, Pollock renewed a close friendship with architect Tony Smith which had begun nearly twenty years earlier at the Art Students League. The two were nearly the same age. Apparently Tony was sexually attracted to Pollock, as it seems several men and women were throughout Pollock’s life.

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Blue (Moby Dick), c.1943. Gouache and ink on fiberboard, 48 x 60.5 cm, Ohara Museum of Art, Kurashiki, Japan.

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Smith and Pollock discussed theology, philosophy, and art, and they often got drunk together. Friends report Pollock admitted he usually had no idea what Smith was talking about, such as during his commentaries about the Irish novelist, James Joyce. The complex Finnegan’s Wake (1939) was one of Smith’s favourite topics. Surely their frequent discussions included the introspective monologues of Joyce and his use of symbolic motif. Especially apposite would be their talks about the ‘stream of consciousness’ used in both autodrawing and by Joyce. That device was used especially in Joyce’s 1922 masterpiece Ulysses, available legally in the US only after 1933. Alfonso Ossorio In 1949, Pollock met Alfonso Ossorio, who would prove to be a major friend and benefactor. Smith and Ossorio spearheaded the idea to have Pollock paint murals for a Catholic church on Long Island, but the project was aborted. After Pollock’s second show at Parsons in 1949, Ossorio bought a work by Pollock. Ossorio, whose father made his money in Cuban sugar, was generous with his wealth and a faithful patron of Pollock. More importantly, though, he and his partner, Ted Dragon, became friends with Krasner and Pollock. During the early winter months of 1950, Pollock and Krasner stayed at Ossorio’s MacDougal Alley house in Manhattan while he and Dragon were in Paris. Pollock wrote several letters to Ossorio during 1951 while an exhibition of Pollock’s works was being planned for Paris. Ossorio and Dragon visited Krasner and Pollock two or three times a week. Believing Lee and Jackson were still poor; the men often brought food and gifts. Although the couple was no longer in financial difficulty, they did nothing to discourage their generosity (318). After Pollock’s death, Krasner would live for a while at Ossorio’s sixty-acre estate in East Hampton called The Creeks. The ‘Intrasubjectives’ In the Fall of 1949, New York City gallery owner, Samuel M. Kootz, brought together works by a remarkable roster of artists for an exhibit titled The ‘Intrasubjectives’. Pollock showed his Number 9, 1948. Also represented in the collection were Baziotes, Gorky, Gottlieb, Graves, Hofmann, de Kooning, Motherwell, Reinhardt, Rothko, Tobey, and Tomlin. The group included artists who would become outstanding figures in the history of abstract art. Pollock and his contemporaries, in what would later be called the Abstract Expressionist movement, or more rarely simply AbEx, were to be the “anointed gladiators of the American avant-garde.” (64) Many of them, certainly including Pollock, were at first fed to the lions of popular opinion. Only later did a few perceptive critics lionise them, followed later by much of the art world. Abstract Expressionism In their text written for the 1949 catalogue for the Kootz Gallery exhibition by Kootz and Rosenberg, they make a strong case in defence of the emergence of an Abstract Expressionist movement in America. This event, in fact, is considered by some to be the birth of the movement, but not the first use of the term. In his 1972 biography of Pollock, B.H. Friedman points out Alfred H. Barr, Jr. of MoMA had used the term, Abstract Expressionism in 1929 when referring to the early work of Kandinsky. In 1946 the term appeared in a New Yorker article in which Robert M. Coates applied the term to the work of Hans Hofmann (263). Six of Pollock’s works were included in Guggenheim’s collection shown at the XXIV Venice Biennale. The exhibit travelled to Florence, then to Rome. The work selected from the second big ‘numbers’ show at Parsons became the only Pollock in the Whitney Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting that year. It was titled Number 14, 1949. For the 1950 XXV Venice Biennale, the three Pollock works exhibited were selected from the sixty numbered works from the two big exhibitions earlier in the year: Number 1, 1948 from the first Parsons show of 1949, and the MoMA show of 1951. There was also Number 12, 1949 and Number 23, 1949 from the second Parsons show.

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SELF-DISCOVERY

In 1950 President Truman ordered the development of the hydrogen bomb. The Korean War began.

Venice In 1950, Alfred Barr risked his reputation when he selected several outrageous Abstract Expressionists to

“Does it work?”(412)

represent the U.S. pavilion. The predominately European audience viewed one work each of Pollock, Marin, Gorky and de Kooning. De Kooning’s entry was his masterpiece Excavation, about which Mondrian said, “A little forced. Too much will.” (320) Mondrian was not alone in being critical of pretentious art, but he himself was also an occasional target of such criticism. The idea that such seemingly simple geometric designs would communicate any meaning was preposterous. In a New Yorker cartoon by Whitney Darran, Jr., an artist admires his Mondrian-like work and proclaims to mankind that it is, “A message of good will.” (330) In contrast to the first showing in 1950 of Pollock works in Venice, which was a comparatively small show of three numbered works, the second show there that same year was a large one-man show of twenty works. Pollock didn’t suggest what, if any, lessons should be learned, or what behaviour should be changed as a result of seeing his art. However, some fans found messages or at least admired his greatness. Of Pollock’s three paintings shown at the U.S. pavilion, Number 1, 1948 especially caused excitement. Catherine Viviano, an art dealer, recalled, “They (young Italian painters) loved his work. They recognised immediately what a great artist he was.” (321) Also shown was Pollock’s Number 12, 1949 and Number 23, 1949. At the exhibition, the flow of visitors was continuous all day and evening long. A visitors’ book was placed in the middle of the exhibition area; however, in it were “primarily insults and banalities.” (399) The visitors had been “punched in the stomach by the effectiveness and – artistic – violence of Jackson Pollock’s uppercuts.” Pollock might never have seen the famous visitors’ book, or the critical anthology of his exhibit, but he was aware of the typical criticism (262). Venice became Guggenheim’s preferred residence. The play, The Woman in the Mirror, a one-woman show on Broadway in 2005, is about Guggenheim’s life at her Venice location between 1963 and 1968. The Time article that provoked Pollock’s famous ‘No chaos’ reply appeared shortly after the 1950 Venice exhibit. This year also, Galaxy was included in the Whitney Annual show. The following year at the Venice Biennale, Pollock showed, Number 15, 1949. Number 1A, 1948 In 1950, MoMA purchased Number 1A, 1948. It would become and remain a favourite work of visitors to MoMA into the next century. This painting was featured at the old MoMA and is now displayed in the renovated museum. It is shown on the predominant wall of the Pollock room. The work has been featured in MoMA promotional materials, along with some of the other new museum’s very famous works. While all of the selections from MoMA’s collection of Pollock works are sublime, critics disagree on how to rank the quality of the works. However, many visitors will surely agree with Greenberg, who compares the magnificent Number 1A 1948 to the works of great medieval painters. Relyea states of this work: “The entire, self-conflicted history of modern art resides in it.” (284) Lavender Mist Lavender Mist was created during a two-year period in which Pollock was at his most creative, a time when he, “…substituted tranquillisers for alcohol to relieve the tension he had felt since childhood.” The work “is a complex skein of paint fused into a delicate and unified surface… There is beauty in every square foot.” (118) Greenberg bestowed its name on it after seeing the work from a distance. However, some critics still did not understand. One said Pollock’s Cathedral would make “a most

Abstract Painting, 1943.

enchanting printed silk,” while another said it could be a “pleasant design for a necktie.” (44) These and

Oil and collage on paper, 40 x 53.3 cm,

other critics at the time obviously intended to downgrade the ‘all-over’ art as merely decorative.

Private Collection, Courtesy Robert Miller Gallery, New York.

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Number 1, 1948. Oil and enamel on canvas, 172.7 x 264.2 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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Guilbault observes, “Pollock became one commodity among others. Pollock paintings took their place alongside Bendix automatic washers, Ritz crackers, and Pall Mall cigarettes…” (43) While Andy Warhol intended some of his work to reflect such assembly line products, Pollock’s art was unwittingly pulled into the mainstream. The borders between pop culture and gallery art had again broken down as it had earlier with Dada and some Cubists and Surrealists. Dali is an obvious example. All-Over In Pollock’s art, the elements serve the all-over image. De Kooning’s biographers say, “(Pollock’s art) left the past behind and rose above the quarrel between Cubism and Surrealism; it was a transcendent art.” (269) Pollock was in effect demonstrating how he, if not all artists, could consider a vast new space without borders. In 1944, a magazine provocatively and simplistically proclaimed, “Pollock’s painting gained strength from being anti-harmony… Harmony would never be a virtue in his work.” (291) Other artists at the time, including de Kooning, attempted the all-over style. However, critic Walter Darby Bannard and others feel even in de Kooning’s 1950 masterpiece Excavation, it didn’t pass Pollock’s famous criteria. It didn’t ‘work’ (271). Television interviewer Charlie Rose asked Kirk Varnedoe, then curator of MoMA, about how Pollock “wound up with a type of painting that was abstract in a way that had never been abstract before.” Rose asked, “Why did he do it?” Varnedoe replied, “There isn’t any central event in his life that would trigger it. It was that move to the floor, the move to liquid paint, the rejection of traditional figuration and composition that made Pollock such a radical.” (95) The all-over style was part of Pollock’s rejection of tradition, and it contributed to a certain uniqueness to his work. While many ambitious or naïve painters wanted to imitate his all-over style, they rarely, if ever, came close. In Greenwich Village, during the 1990s, shops had spinning machines into which the customers could place boards and paints of their choice so the machine could produce ‘a Pollock’. Clement Greenberg A key figure throughout Pollock’s life was the critic, Clement Greenberg. He attended Syracuse University, but had no formal training in art. Yet, his writing established him as an important critic of American art. His 1939 essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch, which appeared in the Partisan Review, introduced him to the inner circle of New York intellectuals. Kligman felt he looked like an intellectual (256). Guggenheim’s biographer referred to him as “nothing less than a king maker in the art world; his nod could make or break an artist’s career.” (244) Greenberg was America’s most prescient art critic. The early signs of his insight can be seen in his many letters, from 1928 to 1943, to his friend, Harold Lazarus, a classmate at Syracuse University and future English professor at Temple University (245). His controversial opinions would be seen as most prophetic when he championed Pollock, de Kooning, and Hofmann during the ascendant years of Abstract Expressionism. At first the relationship between Greenberg, Pollock, and Krasner ran mostly warm, but later had hot and cold periods. Pollock apparently felt their relationship became strained after Greenberg started going to the same analyst as he did (246). Moreover, during Pollock’s final year, Greenberg was especially critical about the artist’s extramarital relationship (247). In fact, Greenberg had an opinion on everything, and everyone seemed to have an opinion about him. David Walsh calls him a tedious snob (307). The actor Jeffrey Tambor captured this aspect of Greenburg perfectly in the Ed Harris movie. At the outset, Greenberg referred to Pollock as the most powerful painter in America. Greenberg added at the time Pollock was a “gothic, morbid, and extreme disciple of Picasso’s Cubism and Miró’s Post-Cubism, tinctured also with Kandinsky and Surrealist inspiration.” He predicted Pollock would become a major painter (248). However, in Updike’s novel, the artist’s widow comments, “Clem used Zack to make his own name, and when Zack faltered, Clem was the first one off the boat.” (283) Even after Pollock’s death, Greenberg would focus on the artist’s dark side, saying frankly what others said only euphemistically about Pollock’s final responsibility and accountability. In his DVD commentary about his movie, Harris mentions at the opening of the 1956-1957 retrospective, an outraged person called MoMA to question the show’s appropriateness (45).

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Number 1A (handprint detail), 1948.

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Lavender Mist, Number 1, 1950, 1950. Oil, enamel and aluminium paint on canvas, 221 x 299.7 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington.

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Later Time Magazine would refer to Pollock as the heavyweight of Abstract Expressionism, (108) but it was Greenberg’s published comments about Pollock’s art which lifted the heavyweight to that position, albeit the critic at times reduced the weight considerably during the artist’s weak periods. John Graham In 1928, John Graham, a very physical and charismatic art critic and dealer born in Poland, showed his Picasso-inspired art in Paris. He then had his first one-man show in Manhattan. That show, and shows of de Kooning at the time, prepared the art world for the forthcoming emphasis on Surrealistic themes by Pollock. Graham also published his impressive work, Systems and Dialectics, in which he drew attention to a few artists who would later become famous, such as de Kooning. However, he mainly made an impressive case to confirm Picasso as by far the greatest of modern artists. The author added Pollock’s name to his list of ‘promising young American artists’ in the second edition. In 1937, after reading Graham’s article, Primitive Art and Picasso, Pollock met the author. Graham, who would come to think of himself as a clairvoyant, would sometimes greet his visitors in the nude and show off amazing gymnastic movements during interviews. He also had much in common with Pollock, including an interest in Theosophy (307). However, Graham was put off by Pollock’s personal style, and, according to artist Ron Gorchov, at least once called him a bumpkin (190). Yet he acknowledged the artistic genius of the self-proclaimed cowboy. It was he, in fact, who gave Pollock his first significant break by including the young artist in a show for the McMillen ‘gallery’ in 1942. Even de Kooning believed it was Graham who discovered Pollock. De Kooning proclaimed, “It was hard for the other artists to see what Pollock was doing (because) their work was so different from his… But Graham could see it.” (114) Graham was probably also among the first to see Krasner’s artistic talent. He asked her to show her most recent large painting in an uptown ‘gallery’. Actually, McMillen Inc. was merely a decorators’ showroom which occasionally used modern art as a background for their furniture (191). Even so, the show would feature French and American painters, including Braque, Picasso and Derain, as well as some who were unknown at the time, including de Kooning and Pollock. Krasner’s invitation from Graham came on a penny postcard that, as her biographer notes, “would turn out to be one of those seemingly small but ultimately life-changing events.” (456) The simple little note was instrumental in linking Krasner to Pollock, then Pollock to the art world. Graham’s discovery of Pollock, Krasner, and de Kooning was a humble milestone toward the first uniquely American art movement that would become known as Abstract Expressionism, even though few at the time used or liked the term. Graham’s taste and discernment concerning art was impeccable. His biographer said he had,”the visual equivalent of perfect pitch.” (192) Fortunately for Krasner, and later Pollock, Graham was a very effective networker and knew many important artists, including Arshile Gorky and Stuart Davis. The de Kooning biographers observe, “Graham helped introduce Pollock to African art and to the work of Picasso, and he straightened out Pollock’s faith in the unconscious. Pollock began to study the art of the Surrealists.” (193) Pollock also attended Matta’s informal workshops, which discussed Surrealism. By 1943 Pollock had already been experimenting with integrating Surrealistic images into his work. Harold Rosenberg Early in his career, Rosenberg directed much of his critical writing toward Pollock, whose life and work were obviously easy targets. Like Greenberg in this regard, he sometimes became disenchanted with Pollock and his method. The artist’s anti-social behaviour was certainly a factor, but so was his appearance of ‘selling out’ or catering to middle-class commercialism. The critic Rosenberg, with two decades of Advertising Council background behind him, knew how to write convincing copy, including clever slogans. He at first praised and then pointedly slammed Pollock in his brief but important and influential 1952 essay, The American Action Painters. It was he who coined the infamous description of Pollock’s all-over work as apocalyptic wallpaper. (270) While Pollock was not yet finished as an artist, he was becoming more estranged from Krasner and friends in general. However, not everyone agreed with Rosenberg. Greenberg, encouraged by Krasner, especially thought the article was nonsense, but he too found little to praise in Pollock’s more recent works. In fact he did not come to Pollock’s defence after critical rejections were made. In his seminal 1955 essay, American-Type Painting, Greenberg would back-peddle on his former praise of Pollock as the pre-eminent American artist (35).

“Life and work are one and neither is real for me without the other.”(414)

One. Number 31, 1950. Oil and enamel on canvas, 269.5 x 530.8 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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“There’s no problem painting at all; the problem is what to do when you’re not painting.”(411)

Despair and Technical Maturation Walsh observes the despair of the American abstract painters in the 1940s and what he describes as a considerable degree of technical maturation arrived simultaneously on the scene of American art. “They (the avant-garde) appear as a rather heroic group, standing up for certain spiritual truths in the midst of conformist, McCarthyite, Cold War America.” (298) After nearly a decade of national unity behind the national defence effort, unrest surfaced within the avant-garde. After spending the early winter months of 1950 at the home of their friend, Alfonso Ossorio, Pollock and Krasner returned to their Long Island home where Jackson began work on the mural commissioned for the Gellers’ house. ‘The Irascibles’ In 1950, Pollock joined a group of artists led by Barnett Newman. They organised a protest against the exhibition policies of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Some commentaries mistakenly state this protest was against MoMA).The artists were upset by the choice of jurors made by the Met director, Francis Henry Taylor. They sent, and gave to the press, an open letter of protest to Roland L. Redmond, president of the Met. The letter mentioned the director’s contempt for modern painting and the disproportionate amount of their ‘advanced art’ that was included in the exhibition. They expressed their refusal to participate in an upcoming national exhibition. Thereafter, the media sometimes referred to the group as ‘The Irascibles,’ or less often as ‘The Irascible 18’. The Irascibles’ Photo A Life Magazine photograph by Nina Leen, showing fifteen of the eighteen avant-garde artists, each with a very determined and committed expression, was taken on 15 January, 1951. Pollock and James Brooks rushed into Manhattan to make the photo shoot on time. Nobody smiled in the deadly serious and highly theatrical photo. It has appeared in nearly every book about Abstract Expressionists. The group included de Kooning, Gottlieb, Hofmann, Reinhardt and Rothko. Pollock is appropriately located in the centre of the group. Nearly all in the group were well known in the art world by then. Shows in Italy 1950 was a year of tremendous exposure for Pollock. First, he had three paintings in the Venice Biennale. Then a large solo exhibit of twenty-three Pollock works was held at the Museo Correr of Venice, his first in Italy. Two works were from the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam. The rest were from the Guggenheim Collection. Peggy Guggenheim collaborated in organising the show with a group of Italian modern art fans. Later, Pollock also showed Number 3, 1950 in the annual show at the Whitney in Manhattan. The same selection of works was shown again in Paris two years later. New Yorkers versus Parisians Back in the United States, Leo Castelli organised competitions between young American artists and wellestablished French artists. It was held at the Sidney Janis Gallery. Pollock’s Number 8, 1950 competed with the work of the well-established André Lanskoy (1902-1976), the Russian-born French painter. Pollock was purposely paired with Lanskoy to “demonstrate that the New Yorkers could stand side-by-side with the Parisians and even, perhaps, best them.” (274)

One. Number 31, 1950. (detail)

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No Chaos It was a year of uncharacteristic exchanges between the artist and the media. In August Pollock and Krasner had an interview that appeared in the New Yorker Magazine. It revealed something of the artist’s philosophy. Even more revealing was his reaction in November to a Time Magazine article. Time quoted from Bruno Alfieri’s essay, Short Discourse on the Pictures of Jackson Pollock. The magazine called their article, Chaos, Damn It! However, Pollock responded by sending a telegram to the magazine, which published it in December. Pollock told them: “No chaos, damn it!” He added he was presently “damned busy painting as you can see by my show coming up (at Betty Parsons Gallery in November).” He was obviously referring to something said in the Alfieri essay that he had agreed with when he added: “(I) think you left out the most exciting part of Mr. Alfieri’s piece.”

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Autumn Rhythm, Number 30, 1950, 1950. Oil on canvas, 266.7 x 525.8 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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Number 11, 1951. Enamel on canvas, 146 x 352 cm, Daros collection, Switzerland.

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While Pollock tried to distinguish between the appearance of his work and chaos, some real confusion apparently surrounded Number 31, 1949. The single work on a MoMA tour of twenty-five US locations in 1950, was replaced during the tour by an earlier work, Number 12, 1948 (Yellow, Grey, Black). Hans Namuth In the summer of 1950, photographer Hans Namuth took many photos of Pollock posed as if he were at work in the barn studio and outside. The session resulted in about 200 stills of the artist supposedly painting Number 31, 1950: One and Number 30, 1950: Autumn Rhythm. Over a span of several weeks, Namuth also filmed Pollock acting as if he were working, as well as actually working on Number 29, 1950. It was a work done on glass so the photographer could shoot from beneath looking up at the artist as he worked. Art News published five of the Namuth photographs showing Pollock appearing to also work on Autumn Rhythm. An article by Robert Goodnough in the same May issue describes for the first time in print the artist’s innovative technique. The article’s title was simply, Pollock Paints a Picture. (237) Autumn Rhythm is the major Pollock work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. The New York Times Magazine featured a memorable photograph by Richard Halvar showing a viewer lying on his side several feet away. He is leaning backwards as he looks at Autumn, as if to say ‘this looks magnificent from any angle’ (379). However, the same photo in a magazine in the 1940s might have had the caption, “What the hell is this?”

“I never give away anything unless I love it.”(407) – Age 44

Relapse Immediately after the completion of Namuth’s pseudo-documentary, Pollock unexpectedly, suddenly and dramatically returned to drinking alcohol after two very productive years of sobriety. His explosive return to drinking would be dramatised in novels, plays, and films, especially in the Ed Harris film, Pollock. The presentation of the event would be told to biographers by Krasner, as well as by Namuth, and the guests who happened to be there that fateful day. Commentators point to the possibility Pollock began drinking again partly because he felt he had compromised himself when he had been acting instead of actually painting. The idea of selling out, which many artists felt Dali had done, might also have pushed the artist over the edge from self-doubt to depression. It could be the dishonesty of acting for the camera, as if he was actually ‘in’ the painting, had driven Pollock back to drink. In the Updike novel, the Krasner-like character comments about her Pollock-like husband, Zack: “Those pictures of Zack in Life and then the little movie that that terrible, bossy German man, Hans something – those were what killed him, really. He hated himself for becoming a celebrity, the new Dali.” The name of the German the character is referring to is, of course, Hans Namuth (275). Pollock continued to drink excessively for his six remaining years. Dr. Edwin Heller, who had previously helped the artist sober up, had been killed in a car accident earlier that year. Parsons Revisited In 1950 Pollock had his fourth one-man show at Parsons, this time exhibiting thirty-five new works. The reviews were mostly favourable. In fact, the January 1951 issue of Art News considered Pollock’s show at Parsons the top show of the year. Almost all the Pollock paintings sold at the Parsons show. The success was due in great part to the famous 1949 Life Magazine article. In 1951 Dali painted Christ of St. John of the Cross. Williams’ The Rose Tattoo opened. The film A Streetcar Named Desire starred Marlon Brando. In 1952, Samuel Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot opened. The film High Noon starred Gary Cooper.

During 1951 there were at least fifteen exhibitions of Pollock’s works, and some of those exhibitions also toured to other locations. The first show was in Amsterdam and included Guggenheim’s collection of Surrealistic and Abstract art, of which nineteen were Pollock works. The big Pollock one-man show that year was at Betty Parsons with twenty-one oils shown, all with numbered titles. (1951). Earlier in the year, two works were shown in West Berlin (1951), and two at the Sidney Janis Gallery (1951) would travel to Paris. Single Pollock paintings were shown that year in Tokyo (1951), Paris (1951), and Sãn Paulo (1951), as well as at two shows at the Whitney. An exceptional Pollock sculpture was shown at the Peridot. It was truly the artist’s busiest year, and the following year was nearly as active.

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Portrait and a Dream, 1953. Oil on canvas, 148.6 x 342.2 cm, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas.

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Blue Poles: Number 11, 1952. Enamel and aluminum paint with glass on canvas, 210 x 486.8 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

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“The whole out f it {school} think I am a rotten rebel f rom Russia.”(401) – Age 17

Pollock in Vogue Vogue magazine used Pollock paintings as ‘wallpaper’ behind fashion models in photographs taken by Cecil Beaton. The photos were taken during Pollock’s exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery. The magazine feature was titled, The New Soft Look, referring more to the flamboyant dresses than to the paintings. Elsewhere, fabric for dresses, ties, sheets, and the like, was made to imitate the overall impression of ‘the Pollock look.’ At the time, many imitators thought of ‘a Pollock’ as merely being the result of a random and chaotic splattering of paint. Unveiling the Image In spite of the popularity of his gestural paintings, Pollock returned to representational art. In a June letter to Ossorio the artist wrote, “I’ve had a period of drawing on canvas in black – with some of my early image coming through – (I) think the non-objectivists will find them disturbing.” Jerry Sultz, senior art critic of The Village Voice, is one of the few to comment on the risks Pollock took at this stage in his skyrocketing career: “Few artists had less ‘natural talent’ than Pollock. His early work is turgid and ponderous. His colour (was) muddy, his composition (was) tortuous. Finally, after years of effort, he willed himself to NEWNESS. This is an extraordinary act of courage, desire, and will. Then, at the height of his fame – having toiled all those years to arrive at a viable style – Pollock began to turn away from this style in search of something new. He willingly went back to hell. How many artists would do that, would change course after only 48 months of a particular style? Pollock did and it killed him.” (292) By referring to ‘muddy’ colour, Sultz brings to mind the same criticism often repeated by Greenberg after Pollock’s first one-man show. Some observers realise Pollock was, as the de Kooning biographers concisely observed fifty years later, “an artist deeply interested in mystical experience who did not think like an interior decorator or play the poodle for the rich.” (104) Rather, Pollock at the time was not only trying admirably not to succumb entirely to his alcoholism but also was trying not to repeat himself artistically. He was experimenting with different media and new content. He was experimenting especially with figures, with less veiling of the image. Even in his final months when producing little art and while he was becoming physically bloated and lethargic, he was allowing himself to be seen unveiled as the unhealthy, dissipated and confused person he had become. The Club Also mid-year, Pollock showed Number 1, 1950 in the 9th Street Show, organised by a group of artists known as The Club. It included Franz Kline, a contemporary of Pollock’s and colleague in the Abstract Expressionist movement, but whose art was very distinct from Pollock’s style. Also in The Club were Leo Castelli, John Ferren, and Conrad Marca-Relli. The Club began the same month as the Life article on Pollock was published. De Kooning and Kline were like beloved brothers, Gorky was like an older admired brother and Pollock was like the rival within the family (276). Communication skills The Life article certainly helped make Pollock the most famous member of The Club, yet he was conspicuously absent from its gatherings. It was well known and obvious that he was uncomfortable in social situations, especially when he was not drinking. Oral biographies indicate Pollock was often virtually mute in social situations. About Pollock’s verbal skills, Ted Dragon remembered at their occasional evening socials at Ossorio’s, Pollock would “sit there like a mummy the whole time.” (319) However, he was respected among artists. George McNeil, a Club member, told the de Kooning biographers he thought the way Pollock opened up everything for artists was almost a kind of mystical thing. (277) But, he undoubtedly did that through his work, rather than his words. The description by Kligman of the ‘magic’ of Pollock drawing in the sand also comes to mind. Pollock: Number One Pollock participated in MoMA’s Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America. He showed Number 1A, 1948. Also at MoMA, the Namuth film of Pollock performing for the camera premiered in 1951. A soundtrack with Pollock as narrator was added. Its reputation helped the artist’s international popularity to peak. However, his addiction and relationship with Krasner intensified in his personal life.

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Number 29, 1950. Enamel, oil, aluminum paint, wire lathe mesh, string, colored glass and pebbles, 121.9 x 182.9 cm, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

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Number 3, 1950. Oil, enamel, and aluminum paint on fiberboard, 121.9 x 243.8 cm, Private Collection.

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Number 7, 1950, 1950. Oil, enamel and aluminium paint on canvas, 58.5 x 277.8 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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The Composite The Pollock exhibition featuring the Namuth movie included a catalogue with an essay by Karmel. It also contained a photo collage with the caption, Anatomy of a Splat. Karmel created the photo composite by using specialised video equipment. He virtually straightened out the canvas that had been seen only obliquely in the original Namuth movie. He then juxtaposed sections of the canvas, which somewhat recreated the work that was painted by Pollock during the filming. A ‘red canvas’ is also seen in the film. That work has

“Something in me knows where I’m going, and – well, painting is a state of being.”(407) – Age 44

apparently not survived. Less Veiled: More Shows Black was the dominant colour in his works, applied to white unprimed canvas and with occasional images implied. The personal life of the artist was becoming less and less veiled to the public. Meanwhile in his art, the sombre veils were being drawn back to reveal at least hints of figurative objects. Pollock’s instinct not only liberated the process from gravity, but also protected the image, and himself, from nakedness by applying layers of veils, albeit thin. Some smaller works on paper appeared to look like Chinese ideograms, giving them a feeling of authentic Zen qualities. But later Pollock moved beyond being implicit to where he was poetically explicit in ideographs. He next seemed to seek abstractness itself, as if without definition. In 1951 Michael Tapié included Number 8, 1950 in the show Véhemences Confrontées at the Galerie Nina Dausset in Paris. A one-man show organised by Tapié and Ossorio at Studio Facchetti, Paris, opened in May. It was titled Jackson Pollock 1948-1951. Ossorio wrote to Pollock and assured him the show would be a success. 1952 was an intense year for the exhibition of Pollock works. In January Pollock’s contract with Parsons ended. He hesitated to renew. He was unhappy with the low sales of his work by the gallery, but he was talked into staying on for five more months. Then he switched to the Sidney Janis Gallery. His first show there was in November. It included two major works: Number 11, 1952: Blue Poles, and Number 10, 1952: Convergence. Convergence Number 10, 1952, also known as Convergence, was shown in four exhibitions, almost annually. It is a large work but was probably overshadowed by the even larger and popular Blue Poles, created about the same time. Tracking Blue Poles While Pollock was alive, his Blue Poles (enamel and aluminium paint with glass on canvas) sold for $6,100. Later, collector Ken Heller and his wife bought it for $30,100. They would sell it in 1963 for $3 million. It is now in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Guggenheim wrote she saw Blue Poles while attending a party at the Heller’s (206). However, during an interview with Guggenheim, Heller told biographer Dearborn that Guggenheim never attended a party at his home (207). Also during 1952, Pollock had his first one man-show in Paris, at the Studio Paul Faccheti. That same year, the watercolour Number 7, 1957 was shown at the Whitney and eight paintings were shown at the 15 Americans exhibit at MoMA. Autumn Rhythm and Image of Man were featured in that show. Also in 1952 single works in Tokyo and in Pittsburgh represented Pollock. Number 21, 1951 was shown in Tokyo at The First International Art Exhibition at the Metropolitan Art Gallery. Number 27, 1951 was shown by the Carnegie Institute at The 1952 Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting. Late in 1952 Pollock discontinued his psychotherapy with Dr. Violet de Laszlo. In September, concerned about Pollock’s alcoholism, Krasner convinced Pollock to follow the advice of a homeopathic practitioner, Grant Mark. He posed as a physician, but did have M.D.’s on his staff. Pollock followed the man’s prognosis for about two years. The descriptions of the eccentric advice and products given to Pollock indicate the prognosis was mostly ridiculous and probably harmful. As Naifeh & Smith point out, Pollock rationalised the unorthodox diet that made it possible for him to drink even more without ill effects (313). In his 30 March 1952 letter to Ossorio, Pollock spoke of the catalogue for his recent show, and he also

The Deep, 1953.

mentions the eccentric diet. “I feel like I have been skinned alive – with my experience with Dr. Mark which got

Oil and enamel on canvas, 220.4 x 150.2 cm,

more involved each weak (sic) until a crisis last week – I’m still a little dazed by the whole experience.” (314)

Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

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Number 15, 1948: Red, Gray, White, Yellow, 1948. Enamel on paper, 56.5 x 77.5 cm, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond.

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Unformed Figure, 1953. Oil and enamel on canvas, 132 x 195.5 cm, Museum Ludwig, Cologne.

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Number 27, 1950, 1950. Oil on canvas, 124.5 x 269.2 cm, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

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Galaxy, 1947. Oil, aluminium paint, and small gravel on canvas, 110.4 x 86.3 cm, Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska. Gift of Miss Peggy Guggenheim.

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As the treatment began, Krasner was preparing for her first one-woman show at the Betty Parsons Gallery, from mid-October to mid-November. It overlapped with Pollock’s fifth one-man show, held during the last two months of the year and also at the Betty Parsons Gallery. Watercolours, drawings, and twentyone oils from 1951 were shown. The titles of the works, most of which were painted in black, were numbered: 11, 17, 18, 19, and 25, which is known as Echo. Finally that year, critic Clement Greenberg produced A Retrospective Show of the Paintings of Jackson Pollock at Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont. The earliest of the eight paintings in the show was Pasiphaë of 1943, while Echo: Number 25, 1951 was the most recent. In 1953, a Picasso exhibition was held in Rome. Williams’ Camino Real opened. In 1954, Picasso’s Sylvette and Chagall’s Surrealistic The Red Roofs were exhibited in Paris. Williams won the Pulitzer for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Kazan’s film, On the Waterfront, starred Marlon Brando. Henri Matisse died.

More International Exposure Art News published its annual list of exhibitions, ranking the Pollock at Janis Gallery as the first for American artists, and second only to the exhibition of Joan Miró for all exhibitions of the previous year. While Pollock created over a dozen major works for a one-man show the following year, 1953 was a year with only six comparatively small exhibitions, and no one-man shows. His participation all year amounted to only ten works total: one painting each in four of the exhibits, two works in Baltimore, and four paintings in Paris. However, the latter were included in a travelling exhibit. After the first showing in the Musée National d’Art Moderne of Paris, it then travelled on to Zurich, Düsseldorf, Stockholm, Helsinki and Oslo. It was titled 12 Peintres et Sculpteurs Américains Contemporains. MoMA and Andrew Carnduff Ritchie coordinated it. The 1954 Show Although Pollock’s works were now being accepted internationally, he ceased almost entirely to create anything new in 1954. However, his second one-man show at the Janis Gallery included ten works, all from 1953. It included the large Portrait with a Dream (later to be titled, Portrait and a Dream), and The Deep. Greenberg gave the show a negative review. He said, “Pollock has lost his verve.” Years before, Greenberg had spearheaded the superlatives, referring to the artist as, “The best painter of a whole generation.” Commentator Justin Spring more recently noted Jackson Pollock “is probably the most famous American artist of the twentieth century.” (111) Pollock would accept the adjective ‘American’ to describe him. Hpwever, he would not refer to his work as ‘American art’. Portrait and a Dream Portrait dominated the one-man shows by both its dimensions, being one of the largest of all Pollock works, and its content. Historian Read notes the work, “…illustrates obviously the continuous dichotomy between the desire to give direct expression to a feeling and the desire to create a pure harmony, and this is a conflict inherent in the whole development of modern art. On the one side a coherent image, a more or less precise configuration with its spatial envelope; on the other side only the tracks left by the painter’s gestures, the internal dynamics of the painted area.” (278) Pollock’s most controversial self-portrait is undoubtedly the right-hand side of Portrait and a Dream. Commentators suggest several interpretations of Portrait. Justin Spring states in this work Pollock “featured a close-up self-portrait on the left-hand side of the canvas, and an abstracted erotic encounter on the right.” He adds, “Scholars have suggested that in this work, Pollock is attempting to describe his increasingly troubled relationship with his wife.” (374) However, Pollock told Elizabeth Beth Hubbard that the entire work was a self-portrait of “me when I am not sober.” (444) An often-used head shot of Pollock shows him posing uncharacteristically as a close-up before Portrait, juxtaposing his face at the base of the very large right half of the work. He seems to proclaim, “Yes, this is a self-portrait.” Unfortunately, reproductions of the work are often spread over the gutter of a book so it appears to be two paintings, hung side by side. Moreover, its size in proportion to Mural and his other works is rarely appreciated in reproductions. The title of the final exhibition for Pollock that year was at the Guggenheim, and ironically it was titled, Younger American Painters: A Selection. At only forty-three, Pollock was understandably considered ‘middleaged’, but he was about to begin his last full year of life.

Echo: Number 25, 1951. Enamel on canvas, 233.4 x 218.4 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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THE GENIUS OF HIS GESTURE: INVOLVING ART AND OTHERS IN HIS SELF-DESTRUCTION In 1955, Picasso exhibited in Paris, Hamburg, and Munich. Dali’s The Lord’s Supper was exhibited. A week before he dies, Einstein signs manifesto urging nuclear disarmament. In 1956, the Italian ocean liner Andrea Doria sank off Nantucket. De Kooning’s show was held at the Sidney Janis Gallery.

In 1955, Pollock’s one-man show, given at Sidney Janis, did not include any recent works. It was, in effect, a small retrospective. It was titled 15 Years of Jackson Pollock. It showed Search, which is possibly the last major canvas he painted. There were sixteen oils in the show. As Pollock’s unproductive period continued in 1955, he knew his mother was not in good health. After suffering heart attacks the year before, she went to live with Sanford, but after Jackson’s funeral she returned to Iowa. Nearly two years later she died. According to Charles, at her funeral he and her other three sons learned, “She made a decision, a conscious decision that she wasn’t going to live any more. After Jack died, she just stopped wanting to live.” (361)

“I am continually having new experience and am going through a wavering evolution which leave my mind in an unsettled state.”(402) – Age 18

Breaking Away As time went on, Pollock became more anti-social and he and Krasner were invited to fewer social events. However, he would continue to go to The Red House (Bridgehampton, Long Island), where he knew he could always find other drinking artists (86). However, he was unable to go there while recuperating from a fractured ankle. Much is made in some biographical accounts about how the injury happened while he was drinking and roughhousing with de Kooning, but it seems to have been merely an accident, not something intended by Pollock’s famous friend (153). After breaking his ankle in 1955, Pollock was creatively unproductive once he completed painting Search. He continued to be unproductive into 1956. For his film, Pollock, Harris gained thirty unhealthy pounds for the final scenes, which showed Pollock just as photos show the artist was indeed bloated during in his final months. A New Yorker Magazine cartoon in 1959 by David Langdon shows a line of abstract paintings hanging on a gallery wall. After a sequence of large works, the row suddenly continues with much smaller works. Looking at the first smaller painting a viewer states it was “along about here that the painter slipped a disc.” (451) Krasner typically worked three hours in the morning while Pollock slept. In September she had a solo show of collages at the Stable Gallery. But her success in the art world was in stark contrast to her home life with Pollock. Piet Mondrian Only a few paintings have been identified as created by Pollock between 1935 and 1943. However, among those few there are very significant works, most notably Stenographic Figure. During 1943 the widely respected minimalist, Piet Mondrian, asked his friend, Peggy Guggenheim, to include that work of Pollock in her influential AOTC gallery. Consequently, it would be in her Spring Salon for Young Artists. Mondrian later said, “I think this the most interesting work I’ve seen so far in America.” He is also quoted as telling Guggenheim, “I have the feeling that this may be the most exciting painting that I have seen in a long, long time, here or in Europe.” The Krasner-like character in Updike’s novel recalls how Zack got the famous nod from Mondrian: Though there may have been some politics behind it, it turns out that there was another artist in the show who had helped Mondrian escape from Paris, and that’s why Mondrian came to the show at all, he wasn’t well, he died the next year – but was really impressed less by Zack’s work than the dogged way he kept at it, against all these odds. (212) Mondrian was on the distinguished jury who selected works for the salon, along with Marcel Duchamp, Peggy Guggenheim, Howard Putzel, James Thrall Soby, and James Johnson Sweeney. It was Putzel who submitted and supported Pollock’s nomination. In 1948 it would be Sweeney who would support Pollock’s successful application for a fellowship from the Eben Dernarest Trust Fund.

Beach Figures, 1944. Oil on canvas, 68.5 x 50.8 cm, Courtesy Joan T. Washburn Gallery, New York and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Inc.

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Search, 1955. Oil and enamel on canvas, 146 x 228.6 cm, Collection Samuel and Ronnie Heyman.

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Convergence: Number 10, 1952, 1952. Oil and enamel on canvas, 237.4 x 393.7 cm, Albright-Knox Art Gallery Buffalo, New York.

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“I hate art.”(423)

Adolph Gottlieb, Equinox, 1944. Oil on canvas, 61.2 x 48.2 cm, Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, Inc. American Contemporary Art Gallery, Munich.

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At the time, Guggenheim apparently didn’t like all of Pollock’s works. She felt the same about certain works she saw later in the year and each of the next three years. However, she was encouraged by Duchamp, Matta, Sweeney and Putzel to hold a one-man show of Pollock at her gallery, and did so first in 1943, then in 1945 and 1946. Putzel wrote to Pollock, predicting his art would be the new sensation of this season. He then added the accurate prediction, that, unlike past sensations, “you’ll last.” Putzel would champion Pollock’s works for the rest of his own short life. While it is true Putzel was a champion of Pollock’s, it may have been buttressed by a physical attraction to the artist as well. However, the Krasner-like character in Updike’s novel stresses, “Biographers have made much too much of certain minor incidents… There was nothing homosexual about liking to sit around getting sloshed with other men, it was simply how men were. He (Pollock) was awkward with women, but not unresponsive to them.” (213) The non sequitur here might be a man responsive to women could not also be bisexual. To illustrate the camaraderie among artists at the time, Charles Seliger said he was once on an elevator with Pollock when a third party said, “Careful, Charles – don’t stand too close to Jackson – he may influence you.” Pollock answered, “No, he may influence me.” (214) Mondrian’s enthusiasm when he first saw Pollock’s works at the Guggenheim gallery is well documented. At the time Guggenheim was considering the idea of dropping Pollock, even though Putzel and Matta advised otherwise. However, Mondrian’s comments convinced Guggenheim to include Pollock’s works. As a result, the artist’s amazing career began to take a giant leap forward. Pollock resumed psychoanalysis in Manhattan with Dr. Ralph Klein, whom he considered to be nearly perfect, and the only person who understood what he was going through. The trips into the city were usually with his beautiful, young neighbour, Patsy Southgate, but it was at the Cedar Bar where he found fans with whom to drink (326). It is there he met Ruth Kligman. Ruth Kligman Before meeting Pollock for the first time, Ruth Kligman was in love with his art. Her primary reason for moving to New York was not to meet famous artists, but to study and pursue her art career. Ruth Kligman felt herself drawn to what biographer Gabor calls the “bohemian orbit of émigré artists”, as had Krasner years before (157). They were part of the adventurous group sowing seeds of modernism in the American art scene. Apparently Pollock was unaware of her awe of him as an artist. Kligman mentioned that after she was with Pollock several days, he surprised her by asking if she knew he was a painter. Ruth visited Jackson often at Springs, and even had a rendezvous with him in the studio while Lee was home. He enjoyed showing her off as they walked along the beach in bathing suits. She actually moved in with Jackson as soon as Lee went to Paris for several weeks. Soon everyone in the small art community, including Krasner, knew of the affair between Pollock and this young woman. Kligman admitted to the Pollock biographers she had been looking for a father/genius figure. She once described Pollock as looking like Hemingway “with that large face and beard.” (159) Moreover, she found the only way she could overcome her fear of men was to manipulate them, which she could do with her voluptuousness and sexiness. Kligman told the de Kooning biographers Pollock was possessive of her, and told other men to stay away from her, including the first time de Kooning saw the couple together. After Pollock’s death, de Kooning also became one of her lovers. It was an affair everyone knew about (160). The novelist Haskell imagines a scene in which Ruth Kligman first meets Pollock: “He wasn’t comfortable talking about himself so instead he talked about Pollock, the artist, the greatest one, according to the magazines.” (162) However, Kligman clarifies she never heard Pollock speak of himself in the third person (463). There seems to be no evidence he ever did. As mentioned here earlier, the notable exception, Kligman pointed out during phone interviews, was the time he spoke to her about there being only three painters: “Picasso, Matisse, and Pollock.” (151) Kligman says Pollock’s psychiatrist believed their relationship was “the best thing that has happened.” (155) She says Pollock planned to get a divorce and settlement so he could marry her (156). John Jones Gruen shot a photo of Ruth with de Kooning. It shows, in profile, she bore a strong resemblance to Elizabeth Taylor at that time (158). Photos of her at the time seem to anticipate the thirteen famous works by Andy Warhol of Ms. Taylor, acrylic and silkscreen ink portraits, each titled Liz (1963). During the months Kligman and Pollock were together, Elizabeth Taylor was filming a version of Edna Ferber’s Giant (1957). The following year Taylor was in the adaptation of Ross Lockridge’s Raintree County (1958), in which she co-starred with Montgomery Clift. While Ruth Kligman’s appearance was often compared to Ms.

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Number I, 1952. Oil on canvas, 66 x 269.2 cm, Private Collection.

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Stenographic Figure, c.1942. Oil on linen, 101.6 x 142.2 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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Taylor’s at the time, Pollock’s style was compared to the independent cowboy characters, such as Matthew Garth, the character Clift played in the movie that made his career, Red River (1947). Ironically, during the shooting of Raintree, Clift was in a near fatal car accident, only a few weeks after Pollock’s fatal crash. Photographs of Ruth Kligman by famed photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) were taken in 1972. On her website, three of his photographs are shown. Also shown are two dozen or so paintings by Kligman, representative of the past five decades (461). In their comprehensive biography of de Kooning, Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan say of Kligman, “Not surprisingly, Kligman took a different view of herself than that held by most others – and would spend much of her life fighting the condescending treatment accorded her in accounts of the period.” (462) Asked about the statement in 2005, Ruth said, “That’s true.” In the announcement of Kligman’s exhibition Demons/The Light, a show of new works at the Zone: Chelsea Center for the Arts, from January to March of 2005, R.C. Baker of The Village Voice writes: “Kligman’s spiritual icons of the 1980’s and her more recent explorations of enveloping light have alternated with those demons that first loomed up in the 1960’s… The end of the millennium saw a resurgence of figurative expressionism across the art world; Kligman’s came from a place of re-examined tragedy… The American century of art has had its share of glories and demons, and throughout, Ruth Kligman has been its abiding witness.”

“And we don’t know what emotions people in the f uture will read into our paintings either.”(407) – Age 44

Edith Metzger In her memoir, Kligman describes Edith Metzger as the receptionist at a beauty parlour and the mistress of the married owner (86). Ruth and Edith became friends. Unfortunately, Ruth invited her along to visit Pollock at Springs the weekend of the fatal car crash in August 1956. In her 1974 memoir, Kligman mentions she had many things in common with Edith, besides also being a young mistress of an older married man. Kligman felt she and Edith were “fallen angels, born to lose.” (165) Matta Matta, a Chilean, was rarely called by his full name, Roberto Matta Echaurren. (A couple of resources confuse the name Matta with that of Mercedes Matter). Matta arrived in New York City from Paris in 1939. He and others brought the influence of Miró and the French Surrealists to America. Several young Americans, especially the Armenian-born Gorky, were quickly influenced by the welcomed invasion. Gorky and Matta became friends around 1940, while de Kooning, eight years older than Pollock and more conservative, assimilated some of the influence but much less so and more slowly. Matta would resist Putzel’s invitations to participate in shows, even the 1943 Spring Salon for Young Artists. It included participation by the celebrated Mondrian and Duchamp. Meanwhile, the show witnessed the emergence of Pollock, who participated with remarkable energy, finding the psychological aspects of Surrealism’s influence a natural companion for his understanding of the Jungian emphasis on archetypes and the collective unconscious. The show revealed he and other young artists were finding an exciting hybrid as a result of the meeting of Surrealism and Abstraction. Zowie Relative to that, de Kooning’s large multi-coloured painting, Ruth’s Zowie (1957), is named after Kligman’s spontaneous exclamation upon first seeing the work. This work is often cited as an example of the distinctive brush stroke developed by de Kooning in the mid-1950s (166). Anticipation Pollock produced very few works during the final eighteen months of his life. However, he was aware MoMA was planning a retrospective of his works. Andrew Ritchie wrote to Pollock in May and mentioned MoMA was organising Work in Progress. It would be a series of exhibitions, each showing a different artist at the peak of his career. Pollock was selected as the first to be so honoured. Of course, nobody realised this show would, in fact, be changed very soon to a post-mortem tribute. An unsigned article in Time, six months before Pollock’s death, described the artist’s Scent as a “heady specimen of what one worshipper calls his personalised skywriting.” More the product of brushwork than of Pollock’s famed technique, it nevertheless aims to remind the observer of nothing except previous Pollock paintings, and quite succeeds in that modest design. All it says, in effect is, “Jack the Dripper, 44, still stands on his work.” (111) Two months before Pollock died, Time Magazine quoted Josef Albers, chairman of the design department at Yale: “I believe that thinking is necessary in art as everywhere else and that a clear head is never in the way of genuine feelings… What we need is less expression and more visualization,” he says. “I try to teach my students

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to visualize.” Time commented that Albers “clearly deplores self-expression of the big, drippy, half-conscious sort made chic by Jackson Pollock & Co.” But, real time has shown Abstract Expressionism and its artists are not

“this so called happy part of one’s life youth to me is a bit of damnable hell if i could come to some conclusion about myself and life perhaps there i could see something to work for”(402) – Age 18

always mindless or half-conscious (112). The Final Photo In her memoir, Kligman includes the famous photograph of herself and Jackson, which was taken with Ruth’s camera by her friend, Edith Metzger. It is reproduced in several biographies of Pollock. Kligman recalls it was taken on the day of the fatal car crash (167). Ruth had forgotten about the photos until nine years later when she came across the negatives in a book. According to Ruth, the photo was taken at 2:00 PM on the day of the car crash that killed Jackson and Edith (168). In the photo, Pollock is wearing a striped polo shirt, probably one of the blue and white kinds of French fisherman’s polo shirts of which Kligman said he had several (169). The shirt is similar to the kind often worn by Picasso, albeit Pollock certainly tried not to imitate the master in other ways. Photos by John Reed show Pollock wearing the same style shirt at other times in 1956 (86). The J. Peterman Company catalogue currently includes the Picasso Vallauris Shirt, which it says is styled after the shirt borrowed from local fishermen by Picasso and seen in his Night Fishing at Antibes (323). The Crash The evening of the crash, Jackson, Ruth and Edith had briefly visited a local party. Then while driving Ruth and Edith back home, the intoxicated Pollock stopped at a fork in the road, apparently to rest for a moment. He said he had not been feeling well. Ruth said a policeman pulled up next to the car and recognised Jackson. Instead of taking any preventative action, the policeman got back in his car and left, apparently not caring that Pollock was very drunk (170). The scene is usually not mentioned in the commentaries and, for example, is not included in the Ed Harris movie. Pollock proceeded to speed along the dangerous road back to Springs, in spite of the screams of protest from the women. Then Pollock swerved the car off the road and into trees. The crash killed Jackson and Edith, but Ruth survived, albeit she was seriously injured. The crash was on Fireplace Road, not far from his property in East Hampton, at 10:15 on the evening of 11 August, 1956. The New York Times stated the car hit four trees. It didn’t mention Edith’s death (171). Unclear descriptions of the victims continue down to the present. An on-line biography of Pollock is even more poorly worded, stating, “He died in a drunken automobile accident with his mistress and her friend.” (311) The novelist Haskell describes very effectively what he imagines was Pollock’s drunken awareness during his final seconds as he accelerated to the crash. Maybe no other writer has better expressed a more plausible scenario for the emotions which might have driven Pollock through that tragic evening (48). Haskell prefaces the dramatic description: “Jackson Pollock was bound to fail, but at least he would fail heroically. He’d made his name by fighting the way things were, and when he got famous he kept fighting the way things were, but since he was the way things were, he fought himself.” The novelist then analyses two opposing impulses that dominated Pollock’s life: “The desire to reach out into the world and touch something, and the desire to keep that thing away.” (172) Death Notice It was Greenberg who called Krasner’s host, Paul Jenkins, in Paris with the news of Pollock’s death. Greenberg told Jenkins Pollock had killed himself and a young woman. Years later in an interview with Barbara Rose, Greenberg said when he was on the phone, he heard Krasner become hysterical in the background. Only later would she learn the details of the deaths. Krasner returned from Europe in time to organise and direct the funeral. Greenberg had agreed to give a eulogy at Pollock’s funeral, but then backed out on short notice. He said he could not forgive Pollock for the vehicular homicide (173). Commentators may have wondered if Pollock would have been arrested had he lived. Guggenheim did not attend the funeral, but a very sombre de Kooning did. Pollock, like Gorky, was like a brother to Willem. Now both were gone (174). Witnesses respectfully described his deep grief. The two men who enjoyed their rivalry and physical bouts were actually close friends. Injured Ruth was too ill to attend the funeral. In her memoir she recalls she asked her twin sister, Iris, to dress like her and attend Pollock’s funeral in her place (176). Neither actually attended.

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Composition with Figures and Banners, c.1934-1938. Oil on canvas, 27 x 29.8 cm, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

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White Cockatoo: Number 24A, 1948, 1948. Enamel and oil on canvas, 88.9 x 289.5 cm, Private Collection.

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Landscape with Tree to Right, 1936. Oil on canvas, 59.6 x 74.9 cm, Private collection.

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Grave Site Krasner asked a boulder be used to mark the grave, instead of the more usual tombstone. A smaller boulder would later be used to mark her own grave. The rock which marks Krasner’s grave is a stone that a nephew of hers had once seen her admiring. The closing sentences in Deborah Solomon’s biography of Pollock refer to it as: “An ordinary rock, it rises but a foot off the ground and is barely noticeable beside the huge stone of Pollock’s grave. Even in death Lee continues to

“One of these d ays I’ll get back to sculpture.”(413)

enhance Pollock’s stature.” (464) The novelist Ginzburg imagines his art critic character goes to the Pollock/Krasner gravesite where he meets Willem de Kooning, Pollock’s greatest painting friend and rival. The de Kooning character comments, “They buried Lee at his feet… She’ll be pissed off for all eternity.” (179) Remembering When hearing of Pollock’s tragic death, fans of the poet Father Gerard Manley Hopkins (1845-1889) might have recalled lines from Heraclitan Fire (1888), a poem Christians might consider to be especially meaningful: “In a flash, at a trumpet crash I am all at once what Christ is since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond” (52) Like Pollock, Hopkins also died at age forty-four. Although his lifestyle was certainly in contrast to the painter’s, they both struggled with creativity, reality, self-discovery, sanity, mind-altering drugs, and doubts. If Pollock’s struggle with verbal skills had not been so well known, many might have thought it was he who wrote the poet’s lines, as they remind us of the precariousness of being overly judgmental of the behaviour and work of such strange, but beautifully creative men: “The mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man fathomed. Hold them cheap May who ne’er hung there.” “No Worst, there is none.” Poems (1918) (52) The much less poetic obituary of Pollock in Time Magazine described him as, “The bearded shock trooper of modern painting, who spread his canvases on the floor, dripped paint, sand and broken glass on them, smeared and scratched them, named them with numbers.” It added, “Pollock became one of the art world’s hottest sellers by 1949.” (175) Myths De Kooning’s biographers observe, “Pollock’s death immediately assumed a kind of mythical power. He was the first to succeed, he was also the first of the major figures (of Abstract Expressionism), with the exception of Gorky, to die.” The latter had died in 1948. In his novel, Ginzburg imagines an art reviewer visits the Green River Cemetery, where many other famous artists are buried: Jimmy Ernst, Ad Rheinhardt, Elaine de Kooning, Stuart Davis, “…just a few who’d followed Pollock, the wide-eyed piper to the sleepy little field of graves.” (30) The poet O’Hara, de Kooning’s good friend, wrote movingly at the very place of Pollock’s grave. He would later be buried there as well, after being killed by a beach buggy accident. Like O’Hara, many of Pollock’s other friends had difficulty letting go of their love/hate relationship with their hero. In 1961 de Kooning bought a house and land across from the cemetery. He paid for it with a painting (177). Kligman bought land across from Pollock’s house. In her memoir she wonders if she was “still waiting for him to come back.” She also mentions Pollock appears to her as an apparition and at times she feels possessed by his spirit. (178) Retrospective Only two paintings were in new exhibits before the retrospective held at MoMA after Pollock’s death. The painting shown in Newark, New Jersey, was several years old (Number 8, 1950); the other was shown in Venice, Number 10, 1952: Convergence. The MoMA exhibit that had originally planned to show Pollock’s works-in-progress was quickly transformed into a memorial. It included representative works from 1939 to 1956, including thirty-five oils, nine watercolours

Alchemy, 1947.

and several drawings. Then a posthumous tribute of twenty-five of Pollock’s paintings was organised by Andrew

Oil on canvas, 114.3 x 221 cm,

Carnduff Ritchie for an exhibition at MoMA, from 19 December, 1956 to 3 February, 1957.

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice

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“There’s no feel like it, when a painting comes right. Screwing {sexual intercourse} isn’t in it, not in that league. Screwing always could be better, some way. But a painting – right, that’s all.”(417)

Action Painting Revisited During the final decade of the twentieth century there was a renewed interest in action painting relative to Performance Art. In 1999 an exhibition at Los Angeles’ MoCA was titled, Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object: 1959-1979. An outstanding feature of the exhibit was a diptych of Hans Namuth’s film of Pollock at work. The video was played on a monitor next to Pollock’s Number 1. It was a very appropriate choice because it had been painted in 1949, the same year that began the period highlighted by the exhibition. In his review of the show, Frazer Ward notes, “The Namuth/Pollock diptych, which will inevitably receive a lot of critical attention, suggests that Pollock’s famous dance (but, more to the point, Namuth’s representation of it) provided a foundation, however unstable, for a gestural tradition of performance.” (110) Gestural techniques had been done before, but as Ward continued to report: “Pollock’s originality was to use them as final statements, to make his painting in their ultimate form a combination of drip, splatter, and thrown pigment stirred with a stick or dry brush. Paradoxically, he imposed on the essential spontaneity of his technique a surprising discipline.” (118) In a 1961 New Yorker Magazine cartoon by Peter Arno, businessmen stand before a painting of drip art. One of the men praises the artist’s ‘splatter’, but adds his ‘dribbles’ lack conviction (329). The National Gallery curator emeritus, John Walker proclaimed: “Individual parts of Pollock’s best work are delectable in themselves. They have the same impress of personal style, the same calligraphic distinction one finds in a piece of drapery by Botticelli or tresses of hair by Leonardo.” (118) A detail of Blue Poles illustrates a typical area of Pollock’s all-over works in which distinctive visual elements call for follow-up study of fractal details, as well as a call for appreciation of the art for its own sake (107). Agnes Martin Artists who carried on the movement into the second half of the twentieth century include Agnes Martin, born in 1912, the same year as Pollock. She lived more than twice Pollock’s life span and died in 2004. She studied art education at Columbia University in the 1940s. “While there she became aware of Abstract Expressionism, the modern style that she felt most in tune with, partly because its artists were of her generation… It is possible to view her as the last of the generation of Abstract Expressionists.” Therefore, the first and the last great artists of the movement were born in the same year. Both Martin and Pollock were descendants of Scottish pioneers. Both were, for a time, in the stable of art dealer Betty Parsons. Both painted large canvases and had ‘black and white’ periods, and both had a history of psychological crises. However, Martin was unlike Pollock in many ways. She wrote inspirational literature, and established herself as a moral thinker as well as an artist. She and Pollock would surely have agreed on her statement: “The value of art is in the observer. When you find out what you like, you’re really finding out about yourself.” (14) Pollock’s Legacy Shortly after Pollock’s death, art historian Howard Read noted, “One should not force a unity of aim on Pollock, which his painting does not uphold.” However, Read admits that over the twenty years of Pollock’s development the artist experimented widely, and he never wholly deserted an expressionistic aim (437). The slightly more specific result was to advance the evolution of what would be called Abstract Expressionism. That wasn’t necessarily completed with the deaths of Pollock and his contemporaries. For example, when Pop artist Tom Wesselmann died in 2004 at age seventy-three, nearly fifty years after the death of Pollock, he was working on a series of paintings in an Abstract Expressionist style (99). In 2005 at the Whitney Museum in Manhattan, the show, Cy Twombly: 50 Years of Works on Paper, was an opportunity to see again the influence of Pollock on artists, even fifty years after his death. Reviewing the show, The New York Times noted “to shake the polish out of his draftsmanship, (Twombly) practiced a version of Surrealist automatic writing, executing drawings in the dark… and Jackson Pollock he never forgot.” (317) Indelible Impressions A de Kooning show was held at the Sidney Janis Gallery the year Pollock died. It accelerated the artist’s career, as he then became increasingly acknowledged as ‘the leader of the pack’ (103). The torch had definitely been passed on to Pollock’s rival and friend. Along with de Kooning, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler, Jackson Pollock influenced other painters of large abstract works, including Cleve Grey (1918-2004) (76). However, Pollock remains arguably the most important American painter of the twentieth century. His oeuvre will always be at the pivotal point of midtwentieth century culture, as well as a major influence on subsequent visual arts. However, in his art and throughout his legacy, the man himself remains veiled.

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Ocean Grayness, 1953. Oil on canvas, 146.7 x 229 cm, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.

Mark Rothko, Sacrifice, 1946. Watercolour, gouache and ink on paper, 100.2 x 65.8 cm, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York).

Willem de Kooning, East Hampton series, 1968. Oil on paper mounted on canvas, 94 x 75.9 cm, Collection of Theodore and Ruth Baum.

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Untitled, 1944 (?) Mixed media on cardboard, 36.2 x 48.9 cm, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Christian Fayt.

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de Kooning

“Being an artist is life itself-living it I mean. And when I say artist I don’t mean it in the narrow sense of the word, but the man who is building things, creating, molding the earth, whether it be in the plains of the West or in the iron ore of Pennsylvania.”(403) – Age 20

Pollock and de Kooning were volatile drinking partners. As they drank, Pollock would become more violent and de Kooning more pugnacious. De Kooning’s biographers mention he was known to throw a punch on occasion at people who provoked him. This sometimes included his friend Pollock (268). “After Jackson Pollock’s death… de Kooning became the first art world superstar… he was the model of the major modern artist.” (16) He was certainly a contrast in many ways to his friend, rival and predecessor. As de Kooning’s biographers astutely note, “Pollock would sometimes acknowledge that de Kooning was the better painter, in a way that suggested that he, Pollock, was the greater artist. ‘You know more,’ Pollock told de Kooning, ‘but I feel more.’” (114) De Kooning, “the still living immigrant, was suddenly the too-European, too-romantic, too-stylist artist against whom subsequent pop, conceptual, and minimal artists defined themselves.” Meanwhile, de Kooning’s biographers mention, “The safely dead Pollock became the sainted American master.” (16) Even if canonised by his fans, Pollock was not saintly, as this and any other honest biography of him will show. Frank O’Hara David L. Sweet’s introduction to his brilliant and important essay, Parodic Nostalgia for Aesthetic Machismo, addresses the poetry of Frank O’Hara from an academic point of view. The scholar describes the evolution of the European influences, and what was becoming the first art from the New World, which has its own proper physiognomy. “In works by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and others, the painted canvas became the plastic correlative of unconscious processes, the spontaneous, non-verbal expression of raw, psychic energy.” For O’Hara, the actions of these pioneers, specifically Pollock, regarding the new art from America seemed “exemplary, even heroic.” (106) In his 1959 work, Jackson Pollock, O’Hara writes Pollock was one of the few artists who gave himself entirely over to his art. This in turn freed the artist from “the external encumbrances which surround art as an occasion of extreme cultural concern.” (396) Addressing somewhat the same phenomena in more simple terms, biographers have described how outlandishly Pollock behaved in public. Stripping and urinating in public has been mentioned here already, and is also mentioned in nearly every other biography of him. One event involved the artist pissing in a central location of a bar and defiantly challenging anyone to stop him. (There are seventeen entries in the Naifeh & Smith biography on the urinary habits of the beerdrinking Pollock). The Market for Pollock David Galenson, economist at the University of Chicago, divides creativity into the categories of inductive and deductive. The former includes Pollock and others who experimented endlessly with no firm end result in mind. In contrast, deductive conceptualists, according to Galenson, rely on a revolutionary idea which comes to mind fully formed. An example given of the latter is Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Galenson observes, “With conceptual artists you can usually express their real contribution in a sentence.” Pollock is obviously not a conceptual artist in that sense, albeit many casual observers have tried to tag him with the nickname Jack the Dripper, or call his action painting simply spatter art.” Galenson also observes, as explained by journalist Eduardo Porter, “Artists born before 1920 tended to do their most important work after the age of 40, while those born after 1920 peaked before hitting 50.” (86) While the Galenson formula seems true for many inductive artists, including de Kooning, Pollock seems then to be a notable exception, since his most significant and productive period was around 1950 when the artist was only thirty-eight. However, since the pattern appears to favour the theory, it would have been interesting to see what great works would have been likely from Pollock had he lived beyond his forty-four years. 1978 Retrospective In 1978 the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan had the first retrospective of Abstract Expressionism. Along with works by Pollock, there were also works by de Kooning, Gorky, Motherwell, Newman, Rothko, and David Smith.

Photograph: The Irascibles, 1950.

During his lifetime, Pollock became the new benchmark when the art world began referring to modern

Published in Life, January 15, 1951. Pollock is seated

art in terms of before, contemporary with, or after Pollock. The broader ongoing influence is that of Abstract

in the 2nd row, centre. Photo by Nina Leen, Life Magazine.

Expressionism.

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Pollock Painting, photograph: Rudolph Burckhardt

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Pollock Painting (actually pretending to paint) Number 32, 1950. Photograph: Rudolph Burckhardt.

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On the other hand, John Updike has observed, “The stern and heroic canvases of Abstract Expressionism morphed into the cheerful junk art of Pop.” (325) However, AbEx lives on, as seen in the thirty-three-cent U.S. postage stamp commemorating the movement. The stamp uses a Hans Namuth photo of Pollock, squatting as he appears to be painting one of his on-the-floor creations.

“This is so good you would not know it was done by a woman.”(425)

In The New Millennium In October 2004, a new art museum opened in Baden-Baden, Germany. It includes 580 works, mostly by postwar German Expressionists, but there are also other expressionist paintings acquired by Frieder Burda, wealthy scion of a German publishing family. The works include two by Pollock (8). MoMA 2004 The titles of the paintings in the Pollock room at the new MoMA which opened in 2004 are: Easter and the Totem Echo Full Fathom Five Gothic Number 1A, 1948 One: Number 31, 1950 The She-Wolf Sounds in the Grass: Shimmering Substance White Light In the MoMA collection there are examples of different kinds of titles given to Pollock works. During the late 1940s, titles of his works were given numbers, often randomly, which caused a great deal of confusion for everyone involved. In the early 1950s Pollock and Krasner (or their neighbours, in some cases) began giving titles to paintings, sometimes according to their dominant colour or colours. Then those who named the works began to combine colour with an object name. Some of the working titles have stuck and have been applied to the works ever since, such as White Cockatoo, Ocean Greyness, and White Light. Reincarnating Pollock In the second stanza of his poem Jackson Pollock, O’Hara visits the artist’s grave with a neighbour’s child. The child says, “He isn’t under there, he’s out in the woods beyond.” Then the poet addresses the spirit of Pollock directly, “…and like that child at your grave make me be distant and imaginative make my lines thin as ice, then swell like pythons”. For O’Hara, Pollock lives. The artist is reincarnated: “…let us walk in that nearby forest, staring into the growling trees in which an era of pompous frivolity or two is dangling its knobby knees and reaching for an audience over the pillar of our deaths a cloud heaves pushed, steaming and blasted love-propelled and tangled glitteringly has earned himself the title Bird in Flight.” (80) In the closing scene of Bill Rabinovitch’s movie PollockSquared, the real Central Park celebrity hawks, Pale Male and Lola, circle overhead. They are birds in flight who seem to want to join in the reincarnating of Pollock’s spirit. The scene involves an energetic parade through some of the 7,500 famous gigantic gates with Christo and Jeanne-Claude, their creators. The art, and the action ‘in’ the art, is a magical celebration. During the display of The Gates, the neighbouring Metropolitan Museum of Art experienced twice its normal attendance. While the veils are pulled back to reveal more art to the viewers, the frenzy of saffron banners are veiling the image of the

Pollock Painting, photograph: Rudolph Burckhardt

Jackson Pollock in his studio in The Springs, East Hampton, Long Island, 1949.

artist being recalled. Pollock would have loved it all, saying, “It works.” As for the birds in flight appearing in the scene on cue,

Final Photograph of Jackson Pollock and Ruth Kligman.

we can deny the accident. The birds in flight are calling all to say once again, with Jackson Pollock, “I am

Taken by Edith Metzger, August 11th 1956.

nature.”

Property of Ruth Kligman.

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APPENDIX Sources: Anthology Karmel’s anthology traces the interpretations of Pollock’s works over the years. It presents the few statements made by the artist which could be said to form his unwritten philosophy, not of art, but of his art. Karmel’s anthology is an indispensable reference for anyone seeking to understand the evolution and importance of Pollock’s art. Without a doubt the early reviewers of Pollock’s works could not make sense of his symbolism. But, as Karmel points out, they did raise four topics frequently: the status of easel painting, decoration, chaos and action. He notes critics related Pollock’s early works to the controversy between easel painting and mural work (286). Karmel’s anthology includes the full text of several reviews. An anonymous reviewer in 1946 noted Pollock had been pulling away from the traditional easel painting. They saw the artist was developing a mural style, even though his subject matter was more abstract than those of the great mural painters who influenced the young artist so directly (287).

Commentary and Chronology One of the first biographies on Pollock was by the poet, Frank O’Hara, (61) in the Great American Artists Series for George Braziller (1959). It was followed by Bryan Robertson’s work for Harry N. Abrams (1960). The well-documented MoMA exhibition catalogue by Francis V. O’Connor appeared in 1967 (58). It followed the unpublished doctoral dissertations of O’Connor at Johns Hopkins University in 1965. Sixteen years after Pollock’s death, Ruth Kligman wrote Love Affair (1967). It is her memoir of her time with Pollock during his final year. In 1999, twenty-one years after the first edition of her memoir was published, Ruth Kligman updated her work with a new introduction. One of the library catalogue categories on the copyright page include the entry, ‘Mistresses-United States-Biography’. But the work is more of an open love letter to Pollock than a biography. She mentions, “Writing it has been my attempt at keeping him alive, bringing his energy back into the world.” (218). Subsequent books refer especially to her recollection of discussions she had with Pollock. These more traditional biographies include the scholarly B.H. Friedman biography. There is also the highly popular work by Jeffrey Potter. Deborah Solomon, the frequent interviewer of celebrities for The New York Times Magazine, expertly generates the most literary and insightful interviews . The most comprehensive work is undoubtedly by Steven Naifeh & Gregory Smith, titled Jackson Pollock: An American Saga. All serious biographies of Pollock since that exhaustive work must acknowledge it as the most extensive study of the artist’s life. Material about Pollock appears in other autobiographies and biographies, including Peggy Guggenheim’s autobiographies, Out of This Century: Confession of an Art Addict (1960). In Mary V. Dearborn’s Mistress of Modernism (2004), the author clarifies some myths with new documentation. Likewise, new insights on Pollock appear in the extensive biography, De Kooning: An American Master by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan (2004).

Websites MoMA has a website, www.moma.org, containing links to both often used and rare resources on Pollock. From ‘research resources’ go to ‘database’ then ‘search the catalogue’. Then search ‘Pollock’ and see then specifically ‘Jackson Pollock’ where there are presently over fifty resources listed. The Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center has a very helpful website with listing of resources, see: http://naples.cc.synysb.edu/CAS/pkhouse.nsf/pages/hous

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BIBLIOGRAPHY The personal papers of Jackson Pollock are at the Archives of American Art, a division of the Smithsonian Institution. Electronically reproduced documents are consolidated in the New York City location of the Smithsonian. Pollock’s letters are the property of private parties, unless otherwise noted. Except for Richard Taylor’s work, very few current academic works are cited here. Scholar.google.com shows over 500 serious studies of Jackson Pollock or his work.

The following bibliographic citations, slightly annotated, are listed alphabetically by author’s name and are numbered, followed by footnotes with more specific citations. Each resource is assigned a number, but not all of the citation numbers are used as footnotes in the text. Some citation numbers are used more than once in the text.

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SELECTED RESOURCES (1) Henry Adams. Thomas Hart Benton (Hammer Galleries, 2004). For the exhibit Thomas Hart Benton: Paintings and Works on Paper. Catalogue generously provided by Eric Walstedt of Hammer Galleries, New York City. Cf. Henry Adams. Thomas Hart Benton: An American Original. (Knoph, 1989). (2) The Academic American Encyclopedia. “Theosophy.” (Areta, 1980). Volume 19. Page 159-160. (3) Ameringer Yohe Fine Art. Hans Hofmann: Search for the Real. Catalogue generously provided by James Yohe of Ameringer Yohe Fine Arts, New York City. (The exhibit was held January 6 - February 12, 2005.) (4) Art in America 2004 Guide to Museums Galleries Artists. (5) Leigh Asthenia. “A Life Round Table on Modern Art, Life,” Life (October 1948). (6) W. H. Auden. Quoted by Brad Gooch. Page 261. (7) Thomas Hart Benton. An Artist in America. Fourth revised edition. (University of Missouri Press, 1983). (8) Richard Bernstein. “A personal vision, with a fortune to March creates a new German museum.” The New York Times. (January 20, 2005. Page E3) (9) Joseph Campbell. The Hero With a Thousand Faces. 1948. (World Publishing, 1970). (10) Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle de Cortivron. Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership. (Scribners, 1968). Pages 98-99. Cited in Gabor. Page 298. Note 53. (11) Jean-Luc Chalumeau. Jackson Pollock. (Éditions Cercle d’Art, Paris, 1997). Includes 40 excellent color reproductions. (12) Chicago Daily Tribune. March 6, 1943. Quoted in O’Connor. Page 36

(17) Tina Dickey. “The Magic of Reality.” In Ameringer. Page 3. (18) Leanhard Emmerling. Jackson Pollock. (Taschen, 2003). Sixty-six small color reproductions. Twelve book bibliography. (19) Empire State Development. Brochure. (No date.) (20) Inka Essenhigh. “The Rabbit from the Hat.” In Ameringer. Pages 7-8. (21) Kathleen A. Foster, Nanette Esseck Brewer, Margaret Contompasis. Thomas Hart Benton and the Indiana Murals. (Indiana University Art Museum and Indiana University Press, 2000). (22) Hermine Benhaim Freed. Paper on Howard Putzel. (Archives of American Art). Quoted by Andrea Gabor. (23) Sanford Friedman. A Haunted Woman. (Dutton, 1968). (24) Erich Fromm. “The Creative Attitude.” Creativity and Its Cultivation. (1959) (25) Walter B. Fulghum, Jr. A Dictionary of Biblical Allusions in English Literature (Holt Reinhart and Winston, 1965). (26) Peter Fuller. “Jackson Pollock,” Beyond the Crisis in Art. (Writers and Readers Publishing, 1982). (27) Funk and Wagnalls New Encyclopedia. 1972. “Jackson Pollock,” Volume 19. Page 250. (28) Andrea Gabor. “Lee Krasner,” Einstein’s Wife. (Penguin, 1995). Pages 33-99. (29) Eric Gilder and June G. Port. The Dictionary of Composers and Their Music. (Ballantine, 1978). (30) Michael Ginzburg. Top of the World, Ma! (Canongate, 1994).

(13) Bob Colacello. Studios by the Sea: Artists of Long Island’s East End. (Abrams, 2002). Photos referred to here by Jonathan Becker.

(31) Stephen Jay Gold. Perspectives in Biological Medicine. (1985).

(14) Holland Cotter. “Agnes Martin, Abstract Painter, Is Dead at 92.” The New York Times. (December 17, 2004).

(32) Grad Gooch. City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara. (Alfred A. Knopf, 1993). Page 261.

(15) —. “A Sensualist’s Odd Ascetic Aesthetic.” The New York Times. (February 4, 2005). Page E35.

(33) Clement Greenberg. The Harold Letters (1928-1943): The Making of an American Intellectual. (Counterpoint, 2003) No direct material to Pollock, but background on Greenberg helps to understand his later criticism.

(16) Mary V. Dearborn. Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim. (Houghton Mifflin,

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2004). There is much more about Pollock than one would expect in this excellent biography.

(34) —. “Art,” The Nation (April 7, 1945). (35) —.“American-Type Painting,” The Collected Essays and Criticism: Affirmations and Refusals. John O’Brien (editor), (University of Chicago, 1993). (36) —.“Art,” The Nation (January 1948). (37) —.“Art,” The Nation. (February 1947). Page 137. (38) Eleanor Green. John Graham: Artist and Avantar. (The Phillips Collection, 1987). Page 19. (39) Eleanor S. Greehhill. “Jackson Pollock,” Dictionary of Art. (Dell, 1974). (40) Teresa Griffiths (Director). Jackson Pollock: Life and Death on Long Island. (BBC, 2002). VHS and DVD of half-hour documentary. Often shown on television. (41) Red Grooms. “When de Kooning was King,” The New York Times Book Review. (December 12, 2004). Pages 1011. (42) Peggy Guggenheim. Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict (1956; reprinted by New York Universe, 1979). (43) Serge Guilbault. How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. (University of Chicago Press, 1983). Subtitle: Abstract Expressionism and the Cold War. (44) Lee Hall. Elaine and Bill: Portrait of a Marriage. The Lives of Willem and Elaine de Kooning. (Cooper Square Press, 1993). (45) Ed Harris (director/actor/artist). Pollock. (2002) Screenplay by Barbara Turner and Susan Emshwiller, based on the book by Naifeh & Smith. q.v. The DVD edition has an optional voiceover commentary by Harris that is helpful after the first viewing. There are many “inside” asides that the viewer will see in subsequent viewings. Included on the DVD are interviews and hours of supplementary material. (46) Helen Harrison. Such Desperate Joy: Imagining Jackson Pollock. (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000). An anthology packed with some materials not found elsewhere. Indispsible for Pollock fans. (47) Helen A. Harrison and Constance Ayers Denne. Hamptons Bohemia: Two Centuries of Artists and Writers on the Beach. (Chronicle Books, 2002), (48) John Haskell. I Am Not Jackson Pollock. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004). A collection of short stories, the first of which is also the title of the book.

(49) Jim Hewitt, Alcoholism: A Matter of Choice: A Twenty-First Century View of Addiction. (Schenkman Books, 1999). (50) Robert Hobbs. Lee Krasner. (Independent Curators International / Harry H. Abrams, 2000), Exhibit: Brooklyn Museum of Art (October 6, 2000 — January 7, 2000), (51) Hans Hofmann. Search for the Real. (eds. Sara T. Weeks and Bartlett H. Hayes, Jr). (Addison Gallery of American Art, 1948), Page 46. Excerpted in Ameringer. Page 5. (52) Gerard Manley Hopkins. “Heracletean Fire” (1888). Poems. (Published in 1918). (53) Robert Hughes. “Bursting out of the Shadows.” Time Magazine. (November 14, 1983). (53a) Charels Isherwood, “A Collector of Art and Artists Tells All and Then Some.” The New York Times. March 11, 2005. Page E2. (54) Sidney Janis. Abstract and Surrealist Art in America. (MoMA, 1944), (55) Ken Johnson. “A panorama starring a cast of stereotypes.” The New York Times, (April 16, 2004). Review of two exhibits of Benton works. (56) Richard Kalina. “Art’s Summer Place.” (Review of the Harrison and Rower books. q. v. ) Art in America. (July 2002). (57) Pepe Karmel. Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, and Reviews. (MoMA and Harry N. Abrams, 1999). An anthology of over 50 significant selections arranged chronologically and carefully documented. Published in conjunction with the 1999 exhibition, Jackson Pollock, organized by Kirk Varnedoe. (58) Michael Kimmelamn. “Art’s Last, Lonely Cowboy.” The New York Times Magazine. (February 6, 2005). Page 33ff. (Profile of Michael Heizer). (59) Jan Bart Klaster. “De Kooning gaat door ik schilder mihn binnenste.” Her Parool. (May 11, 1983). Quoted in Stevens. Pages 209 and 652, note 209. (60) Ruth Kligman. Love Affair: A Memoir of Jackson Pollock. With a new introduction by the author. (Cooper Square Press, 1999). An indispensible resource for understanding the final days of Pollock. This is a first-person account about the artist. (61) Rosealind Krass. The Optical Unconscious. (MIT Press, 1991).

(62) —. “Reading Jackson Pollock, Abstractly,” The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. (MIT Press, 1989). Page 226. (63) Richard Lacayo. “The Big Dripper’s Opening,” Time Magazine. (January 5, 1958). (64) —. “All the Wounded Gods.” Time Magazine, (November 18, 2002). A review of John Updike’s novel, Seek My Face. (65) Melvin Lader. “Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century: The Surrealist Milieu and the American Avant-Garde,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Delaware (1981). Chapter IV. (66) Ellen G. Landau. Jackson Pollock. (Thames & Hudson, 1989). (67) Joe LeSueur. Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003). (68) Alan Levy. “Peggy Guggenheim: Venice’s Last Duchess,” Art News. (April 1975). Page 57. (69) Life Magazine. “A Life Roundtable on Modern Art,” Life. (October 11, 1948). (70) Robert Mankoff (ed.). The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker. (Black Dog and Leventhal, 2004). (71) Monica Maroni and Giorgio Bigatti (editors). Jackson Pollock in Venice. (Skira, 2002). Translated from Italian. The book is an edition of the publication accompanying the March 23 — June 30, 2002 exhibit. Combined with it is another book for a related exhibition. The book has different titles on its spine, first page, and title page. Excellent color reproductions. (72) Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith. Jackson Pollock: An American Saga. (Clarkson N. Potter, 1989; HarperCollins, 1991). This is the monumental and definitive biography of Pollock. Hundreds of people were interviewed by the authors (cf. pages 798 ff). Apparently Lee Krasner was not interviewed. (Cf. Dearborn (12). Page 344, note 220). Several of the candid photos appear in few, if any other books. There are eight color pages. (73) Nation. “Ar.” (February 1, 1947). Page 137. Quoted in Rylands. Page 30. (74) New York Magazine. Regarding the “Tumbling Woman” of Eric Discher. (May 24, 2004). Page 17. (75) The New York Times. (February 9, 1964). Art section. Page 24. (76) —. Obituary of Cleve Gray. (December 10, 2004). (77) Francis V. O’Connor. Jackson Pollock. (MoMA, 1967). Scholarly presentation of excerpt from review to exhibits. A concise reference for data about exhibits.

(78) —. “Jackson Pollock: The Black Paintings: 1950-51. (Boston: The Institute of Contemporary Art, 1980). (79) Brian O’Doherty. “Jackson Pollock’s Myth” American Masters. (Dutton, 1982). Pages 96-137. (80) Frank O’Hara. Art Chronicles: 19541966. (George Braziller, 1975). Page 41.

(92) Maude Riley. Art Digest. (November 15, 1943). (93) Bryan Robertson. Jackson Pollock. (Harry N. Abrams, 1960). (94) Barbara Rose. Lee Krasner: A Retrospective. (MoMA, 1983). Referred also to in Gabor. Page 35ff.

(80a) Frank O’Hara. Jackson Pollock. (George Braziller, 1959). A 20-page essay, with 80 reproductions and 4-page chronology.

(95) Charlie Rose television interview with Kirk Varnedoe. See also the DVD edition of the Harris movie, Pollock, or the DVD Painters Painting.

(81) Painters Painting. DVD disk. Several profiles and documents presenting Pollock in the context of Abstract Expressionism. (The birthdate for Pollock is incorrect on the disk.)

(96) Harold Rosenberg. “The American Action Painters.” The Tradition of the New. (Horizon Press, 1959). Page 23. From ArtNews. (December 1952).

(82) James Robert Parish. The Elvis Presley Scrapbook. (Ballentine, 1975). “Elvis Presley Discography.” Pages 167 ff.

(97) Ann Rower. Lee and Elane. (Serpent’s Tail, 2002).

(83) Jackson Pollock. “My painting,” Possibilities. (New York, 1947.) (Winter, 1957-1958. Number 1). Page 79. Quoted in MoMA’s catalogue for the Pollock retrospective, 1958. (84) —. “Jackson Pollock replies to a questionnaire.” Arts and Architecture. Volume LXI (February 1944). (85) Eduardo Porter, “Economists have advice for potential buyers as the art market heats up” The New York Times (December 1, 2004). (86) Jeffrey Potter. To A Violent Grave: An Oral Biography of Jackson Pollock. (G. P. Putnam’s, 1985. Second edition: Pushcart, 1987). This is the first and most intimate oral biography of Pollock, to be read along with Solomon’s for some clarifications. It is an engrossing narrative, packed with witness accounts. The book is dedicated to Krasner, who was in fact not in favor of the book (see page 248). Like Solomon’s, the work was completed after Krasner died. The birthyear of Krasner, incorrect on Potter’s geneology chart. (87) Stanley Price. “The Mrs. Guggenheim Collection” The New York Times Magazine. (January 17, 1965). Quoted in Dearborn. Page 350, note 256. (88) Edward Ranzal. “Art Patron Sues Pollock’s Widow.” The New York Times. (June 9, 1961). (89) Carter Ratcliff. The Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Postwar American Art. (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996). See especially first 13 chapters. Scholarly. (90) Herbert Read. A Concise History of Modern Painting. (Praeger, 1959; revised and enlarged in 1968). (91) Lane Relyea. “The Photogenic Splat: Jackson Pollock Retouched.” Frieze. Issue 45. (March-April 1999). Pages 52-57. An innovative presentaton of Pollock’s technique as “action painting.”

(98) Philip Rylands. “Peggy Guggenheim and Art of This Century.” Before Peggy Guggenheim. (Marsilio). Pages 233-248. Adapted in Maroni & Bigatti. Pages 21-28. (99) Roberta Smith. “Tom Wesselmann, 73, Pop Artist Known for Sleek Nudes.” The New York Times. (December 26, 2004). (100) Deborah Solomon. Jackson Pollock: A Biography. (Simon & Schuster, 1987. Cooper Square Press, 2001). This is a very pleasant and polished biography of Pollock. (101) Justin Spring. The Essential Jackson Pollock. (Henry N. Abrams, 1998). This little book is an excellent introduction to Pollock. It has over 40 color reproductions and concise comments, along with a basic chronology of the artist’s life, with a minimum of controversy. (102) Mark Stevens. “Everything Went: The new museum’s survey of the East Village art scene…” New York Magazine. (January 3, 2005). Page 76. (About the 2005 exhibit East Village USA, New Museum of Contemporary Art). (103) —. “Quilts of Personality.” New York Magazine. (December 23-30, 2002). Page 114. (104) Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan. De Kooning: An American Master. (Knopf, 2004). A model of research and biography, with much information on Pollock not found elsewhere. (105) James Johnson Sweeney. Art of This Century catalogue introduction. (1943) (106) David L. Sweet. “Parodic Nostalgia for Aesthetic Machismo: Frank O’Hara and Jackson Pollock.” Journal of Modern Literature. Volume 23, Numbers 3-4 (Summer 2100). Pages 375-391. (Indiana University Press, 2001). (107) Correspondance during February and March, 2005 between the author and

Richard P.Taylor. References include. “The Visual Complexity of Pollock’s Dripped Fractals.” Also, R. P. Taylor, et al. “Authenticating Pollock Paintings Using Fractal Geometry.” Physics Department, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403. See also Scientific American, December, 2002. Page 116. An extensive bibliography on the topic is at: http://materialscience.uoregon.edu/taylor /art/info.html#Recent_Publications (108) Time Magazine. “Milestones.” (August 21, 1956). (109) —. “Milestones.” (July 2, 1984). (110) —. “Reviews.” (December 25, 2001). (111) —. “The Wild Ones.” (February 20, 1956) (112) —. “Think!” (June 18, 1956). (113) John Updike. Seek My Face. (Ballentine, 2002). A highy-imaginative novel, engaging dialogue, and entertaining myths and rumors. (114) James T. Valliere. “De Kooning on Pollock,” Partisan Review (Autumn, 1967). Pages 603-605. Cited in Stevens. Page 357. (115) Charles Van Doren. Webster’s American Biographies. (MerriamWebster, 1984) (116) Kirk Varnedoe. Comet: Jackson Pollock’s Life and Work. Exhibition catalogue. (MoMA and Abrahms, 1998). (117) Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel. Jackson Pollock: New Approaches. (Harry N. Abrams, 1999). (117b) Mike Venezia. Jackson Pollock. In the series “Getting to know the world’s greatest artists.” (Children’s Press, 1994). (118) John Walker. “Jackson Pollock”, National Gallery of Art, Washington. (Abradale Press. Harry N. Abrams, 1984). Pages 614-615. (119) David Walsh. “The Limitations of Ed Harris’ Pollock.” WSWS: Art Review. World Socialist Website. (wsws.org). (March 31, 2001). (120) James Webb. The Establishment. (1976).

Occult

(121) Karen Wilkins. “Lee Krasner.” The New Criterion. Vol. 19, Number 4. (December 2000). Review of Hobbs, q.v. (122) Janet Geringer Woititz. The Adult Children of Alcoholics. (Health Communications, 1983). See especially page 118. (123) David Yeadon. New York’s Nooks and Crannies. (Scribner’s, 1986).

251

NOTES 124

252

Gabor cites interviews. Page 302, the

172

Haskell. Page 20

218

Naifeh. Page 466 ff

269

Stevens. Page 297

second note 85

173

Gabor. Page 79

219

Naifeh. Page 295

270

Rosenberg. Pages 22-23, 48-50

125

Gabor. Page 71

174

Stevens. Page 394

220

Varnedoe. Pages 20-22

271

Stevens. Page 519

126

Gabor. Page 98; Solomon, Pages 279

175

Time (108). Page 21

221

Landau. Varnedoe. Page 147. Cf.

272

Stevens. Page 307

and 255 and note 255.

176

Kligman. Page 211

Varnedoe. Page 30

273

Stevens. Page 311

127

Dearborn. Pages 230-231

177

Stevens. Page 425

222

Sweeney. Page 45

274

Stevens. Page 317

128

Dearborn. Page 346, note 230

178

Kligman. Page 218

223

Gabor. Page 55

275

Updike. Page 19

129

Friedman. Pages 146, 237 ff

179

Ginzburg. Page 26

224

Adams. Study for “Poker Night.” Pages

276

Stevens. Page 289

130

O’Connor. Page 39

180

For a description of the injunction

38-39. Painting reproduced in Adam’s

277

Stevens. Page 291

131

Guggenheim. Page 271

(US SD New York 00-6472) filed on

biography of Benton. Page 333

278

Read. Page 268

132

Naifeh. Page 528

behalf of Ruth Kligman vs. Pollock Film,

225

Dearborn. Page 221

279

Art Chronicles. Page13

133

Karmel. Page 49

Inc.,

226

134

Karmel. Page 22

www.entlawdigest.com. That site of the

135

Dearborn. Page 292

Entertainment

136

Adams. Page 54

137

Gabor. Page 43

138

Gabor. Page 36

139

Dearborn. Page 226-227, note 227 on

280

Art Chronicles. Page 26

page 346

281

Art Chronicles. Page 39

227

O’Doherty. Page 43

282

Relyea. Page 57

subscription service.

228

Kligman. Pages 32, 69

283

Updike. Page 16

181

Solomon. Figure 7

229

Ginzburg. Page 99

284

Relyea. Page 57

182

Friedman. Page 34

230

Funk. Cf. Vol. 19. Page 249

285 . Contessore, Nicholas. “Some sadder

Letter from Kate Tull, Administrative

183

Updike. Page 90

231

Rylans. Page 26

than others as “Gates” come down.”

Assistant

184

Peggy Guggenheim. Letter to Francis V.

232

Greenberg. (36). Page 71

The New York Times. March 1, 2005.

Corporation, December 3, 2003

O’Connor, July 25, 1965. Quoted in

233

Hofmann. Page 46

140

Colacello. Pages 156-161

Dearborn. Page 228-229, note on page

234

Kligman. Page 80

286

Karmel. Page 10

141

The three principles as stated here, but

346

235

Kligman. Page 81

287

Karmel. Page 55

of

Collegiate

Church

Ed

Harris,

et

Law

al,

Digest

see is

a

Page B3.

without application to Pollock, are

185

Dearborn. Page 240

236

Kligman. Page 129

288

Dearborn. Page 345. Note 229

likewise framed in the unsigned article,

186

Stevens. Page 365

237

ArtNews. May 1951

289

Adams. Page 12

“Theosophy”

Academic

187

Kligman. Page 92

238

Relyea. Page 54

290

American Encyclopedia. See also note

188

Kligman. Page 99

239

Relyea. Page 55

geographic areas — the state, the city, the borough — this book refers to the

in

The

120.

189

Stevens. Page 392

240

Krass. Page 244; Reylea. Pages 56-58

142

Kligman. Page 108

190

Naifeh. Page 347

241

Corresondance with the author. March

143

Dearborn. Page 220

191

Gabor. Page 38

144

Harrison. Page 350

192

Green. Page 64

145

Potter. Page 23

193

146

Naifeh. Page 155

147

Kligman. Page 215

148

To avoid confusion about New York

borough as Manhattan.

3, 2005.

291

242

Relyea. Page 56

292

Stevens. Page 205`

243

Stevens. Page 253

194

Updike. Page 53

244

Dearborn. Page 238

293

Dearborn. Page 344-345. Note 220

195

Dearborn. Page 220

245

Greenberg. (34) Page 56

294

See especially 65 and 76

Naifeh. Pages 65-66

196

Emmerling. Page 25

246

Kligman. Page 124

295

Walsh. Paragraph 32, 34

149

Naifeh. Page 513

197

Read. Pages 262-263

247

Kligman. Pages 122-123

296

Walsh. Paragraph 13

150

Gabor. Page 50. And February 1932

198

Johnson. Page 21

248

Horizon Magazine

297

Walsh. Paragraph 8

letter. Cf. Harrison. Page 13.

199

Gabor. Pages 55-56

249

Interview with Publishers Weekly,

298

Walsh. Paragraph 26

151

Kligman. Pages 125-127

200

Johnson. Page 6

quoted in the Authors Guild Bulletin,

299

152

Read. Page 349, note 26

201

Johnson. Pages 9-18

Winter, 2005. Page 29

http://naples.cc.synysb.edu/CAS /pkhouse.nsf/pages/house

153

Naifeh. Pages 732-736.

202

Dearborn. Page 283

250

Stevens. Page 248

300

Naifeh. Page 29

154

Naifeh. Page 776-777

203

Dearborn. Page 285

251

Haskell. Page 5

301

Guilbault. Page 77

155

Kligman. Page 138

204

Dearborn. Page 292

252

Guggenheim to ArtDigest, 1943

302

Guilbault. Page 113

156

Kligman. Page 139

205

Dearborn. Page 292.

253

Sweeney. Page 44

303

Naifeh. Page 661

157

Gabor. Page 37

Also: Ranzal.

254

Varnedoe. Page 39

304

O’Connor. (77) Page 39

158

Stevens. Page 407 and 416

206

Guggenheim. Pages 302-303

255

Updike. Page 93

305

159

Kligman. Page 32

207

Dearborn. Pages 291, 355,

256

Kligman. Page 122.

160

Stevens. Page 404

note 291

257

Stevens. Page 322

306

Naifeh. Page 285

161

LeSueur. Page 148. Also, Stevens. Page

208

O’Connor. (77) Page 79 ff.

258

Writer’s Digest cited in the Authors

307

Naifeh. Page 343

403

209

Dearborn. Page 343, note 207

Guild Bulletin. Winter, 2005. Page 32.

308

O’Connor (77). Page 25

162

Haskell. Page 7

210

Dearborn. Page 222.

259

Updike. Page 247

307

Walsh. Paragraph 24-25

163

Updike: Page 114

Note 292 on Page 355.

260

Kligman. Page 110

308

164

Kligman. Pages 193-194

Also: Guggenheim. (31) Page 264

261

Kligman. Page 110

165

Kligman. Compare pages 66 and 180

211

Dearborn. Page 207

262

166

Stevens. Page 418. p.303

212

Updike. Page 57

167

Kligman. Page 192. Final photo is on

213

Updike. Page 84

263

Stevens. Page 272

page 6.

214

Dearborn. Page 240

264

Dearborn. Page 219

310

Naifeh. Page 451

168

Kligman. Page 11

215

Updike. Page 16

265

Stevens. Page 263

311

www.angelfire.com/art2/pollock

169

Kligman. Page 107

216

Dearborn. Page 345, note 222

266

Stevens. Page 283

313

Naifeh. Pages 674-675

170

Kligman. Page 200

217

November

267

Gabor. Page 59

314

Friedman. Page 192

171

Friedman. Page 240

268

Stevens. Page 365

315

Fulghum. Page 111

12,

Giandomenico

Romanelli,

Dearborn. Page 227

Quoted

in

Author’s correspondence with Jerry Sultz, January 25, 2005

Address: 830 Fireplace Road, East Hampton, Long Island

R. C. Baker. Anouncement to Demons / Light. A showing of new works by Ruth Kligman. January 20- March 25, 2005.

“Jackson

Zone: Chelsea Center for the Arts.

Pollock at the Museo Correo” (198)

1943.

Harper’s Bazaar. April 1944, Page 126.

www.zonechelsea.org

316

317

Taylor. “Chaos and Fractals Research.”

360

Solomon. Page 255

personal papers in the Archives of

430

Stevens. Pages 208 and 652, note 208

Taylor. Page 2 of 3. The paper is at the

361

Naifeh. Page 795

American

the

431

Klaster. Pages 209, 652 note 209

web site —

362

Gabor. Page 35

Smithsonian Institution, Washington

432

Gabor. Page 56

http://materialscience.uoregon.edu

363

Francis O’Connor, “Jackson Pollock:

D.C. They are often in secondary sources

433

Adams. Page 7

Cotter. “A Sensualist’s Odd Ascetic

Down to the Weave.” In Harrison. Pages

including

Joy:

434

Adams. Page 9

Aesthetic” (11a)

193-194

Imagining Jackson Pollock, edited by

435

Adams. Pages 76-77

See reproductions such as in O’Connor

Helen A. Harrison. (Thunders Mouth

436

Read. Page 270

(58). Page 83

Press, 2000), or Jeffrey Potter, To A

437

Read. Page 268

438

Harrison. Page 9.

439

Excerpts in Harrison. Pages 350ff. In the

Art,

a

Such

division

of

Desperate

318

Naifeh. Page 584.

319

Naifeh. Page 584

320

Naifeh. Page 605

364

Naifeh. Page 737

Violent Grave: An Oral Biography of

321

Naifeh. Page 605

365

Six sketchbook pages described in

Jackson Pollock (Pushcart, 1964). For

322

Naifeh. Page 797. The authors name

O’Connor (58). Page 134. Important

nearly

more than 800 people they interviewed

commentary on these in an O’Connor

attributed by Potter to Pollock, see

play,

over seven years, producing 18,000

lecture. (Harrison, Page 194.

Harrison. Page 86

Painting,” six characters were played by

to his brothers Charles and Frank,

five actors. The character of “Beatrice”

363

100

additional

quotations

Letter: January 31, 1930. “Number

One:

A

Pollock

pages of transcripts.

366

Naifeh. Page 351

323

www.jpeterman.com

367

Naifeh. Pages 396-397

324

Cf.

368

Naifeh. Page 252

402

to his brother Charles, January 13, 1930

Magazine. March 2005, Page. 49.

369

Potter. Page 224

403

to his father LeRoy, February, 1932

art galleries in Chelsea was avaialble. It

325

Mankoff. Page 240

370

Naifeh. Page 553

404

to his father LeRoy, February 3, 1933

visits eight galleries of modern art. See

326

Photo of Southgate in Potter, on the

371

Naifeh. Page 555.

405

draft of a statement to Possibilities

sixth page of inserted photographs. See

372

Time Magazine. August 26, 2002.

“Hollywood’s

Hottest.”

AARP

also Naifeh. Page 767.

401

October 22, 1929

327

Naifeh. Page 796

328

Cartoonist: Alan Dunn. Mankoff.

Rabinovitch and the author. February

Page 271.

2005

373

Communications

between

Mankoff. Page 293

374

Spring. Page 103

330

Solomon. Caption to photo 7

375

O’Connor. (77) Page 48

331

Fuller. Page 110, 170

376

Spring. Pages 88-90

332

Naifeh. Page 264

377

Cf. Mark Cooper. Baseball Games:

333

Walsh. Paragraph 6

Home Versions of the National

334

Salomon. Page 19

Pastime. 1860s to 1960s. (Schiffer,

335

Correspondence with Dickey by the

1995.). Phone conversation with the

author. February 2005

author, March 11, 2005.

Potter in Harrison. Page 87.

337

Potter. Page 186

338

Potter. Page 219

339

Potter. Page 186

340

Potter. Page 186

341

Potter. Page 285 (biographical note on

379 380

343

344

interview for a Sag Harbor radio station 442

Naifeh. Page 380

443

Gabor. Page 42

407

to Selden Rodman, 1956

444

O’Connor. (78) Page 20

408

to James Johnson Sweeney, November 3,

445

Gabor. Page 42

1945, reproduced in Harrison. Page 105

446

Naifeh. Pages 378, 393

recalled by Hans Namuth, November 17,

447

Naifeh. Page 381

1979. Quoted in Harrison. Page 267

448

Gabor. Page 37

recalled by Lee Krasner in interview with

449

409 410

Emily Wasserman, July 8, 1968. Quoted 411

450

Gabor, Page 71

recalled by Lee Krasner in Art in

451

Number 656 (10/10/1959) in Mankoff

New York Times Magazine. October

America, May-June 1967, quoted in

3, 2004. Page 23

Harrison. Page 65

452

Guilbault. Page 187

op. cit. According to Lee Krasner, “He

453

Stephen Little. Isms. (Universe, 2004)

“Yellow Islands” is unnamed in Spring.

412

Cf. O’Connor (77). Page 116

word ‘work’ in that sense (referring to a

382

Compare O’Connor (58. Page 116) and

work’s total integrity).”

Chalumeau (8a. Page 52).

413

telegram to Time Magazine

The New York Times. Christie’s ad.

383

Solomon. Page 18

414

as recalled by Jeffrey Potter (1949-1956).

February 11, 2005. Page E35.

384

Harrison (46). Page 8

The New York Times. “Building a New

385

Harrison (46). Page 342

415

op. cit. Page 93

Home for the New Museum.” February

386

Stevens. Page 55

416

ibid.

11, 2005. Page E35.

387

Naifeth. Page 469

417

ibid.

The New York Times. “With Charity in

388

Naifeh. Page 239

418

recalled by Potter in Potter. Page 192

Mind.” Page E35. Photo of work

389

New York Times. February 18, 2005.

419

op. cit. Page 101 458

op. cit. Page 109 op. cit. Page 115

346

Walsh. Paragraph 26

391

Van Doren. Page 833

422

op. cit. Page 154

347

Naifeh. Page 663

392

Mariann Smith for The Buffalo Fine Arts

423

Often cited, such as by Solomon. Page

348

Dearborn. Page 220.

Academy,

349

Dearborn. Pages 227-228

www.albrightknox.org

350

Potter. Page 276.

351

Walsh. Paragraph 31

The

Filmgoer’s

Page 215.

Works of Cage and Feldman listed in 396

459

with

Rex Irvin. The New Yorker Magazine. James Mulligan. The New Yorker Magazine. October 22, 1955.

Maia

461

www.ruthkligman.com

462

Stevens. Page 403

1984)

463

wife,

Phone

conversations

between

Ms.

Solomon notes this was said to Krasner

Kligman and the author took place in

Sweet)

who, “was furious at him, even though

March, 2005. E-mail correspondance

Kligman. Page 10. The painting as seen

she knew that Degas had said the same

between the author and R. Taylor took

Art Chronicles, Page 13l (cited in

425

353

Art in America 2004 Guide. Page 315

354

Potter. Page 163

355

Naifeh. Page 696

on the cover of her book be viewed also

thing to Mary Cassatt a half century

356

Author correspondence with Rabinovitch.

on-line in amazon.com

earlier.” Page 113

464

Solomon. Page 255.

Solomon. Page 178. Letter to his friend,

465

Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. 4

Louis Bunce.

466

Naifeh. Page 537

467

397

author.

Anatol Kooarski. The New Yorker

Wojciechowska, to Solomon, August 8,

Rodman’s

the

January 20, 1945. 460

Solomon. Page 240. (A letter from Seldon

Companion. (Hill & Wang, 1974)

Correspondance

Magazine. June 4, 1955.

244. 424

457

Februay, March, 2005.

421

by

http://naples.cc.synysb.edu/CAS /pkhouse.nsf/pages/house

420

Quoted

Reproduced in toto in several books Page 79ff.

456

Naifeh. Page 577

2004.

Attributed to Freud in the 16th edition of

about Pollock, including O’Connor (77).

Page E37

Gilder

455

Included in Harrison. Page 92.

390

Haliwell.

Page 117. 454

Page 570.

www.jackrutbergfinearts.com

Leslie

(70)

Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. (1992).

345

352

Hughes uses another name for Hofmann by mistake.

in Harrison. Page 70

381

393

See especially Solomon, Naifeh, and Potter

Pages 79-81

may have been the first artist to use the

included.

New York Gallery Tours 441

Page 77

Pollock collector Heller) 342

Cf. Yeadon. In 2005 a two-hour tour of

in the Fall of 1950; Cf. O’Connor (77)

Bill

329

336

magazine, c. 1947 406

Obituaries

in the play is based on Ruth Kligman. 440

place during the same month.

February 9-12, 2005

398

Stevens. Page 484

357

Solomon. Pages 234-236

399

Maroni. Page 6

358

Potter. Page 164

400

Quotations of Jackson Pollock splattered

427

Gabor. Page 49

359

The New York Times Television section.

throughout this book are typically

428

Stevens. Page 301

Pollock?".New York Times. May 29,

February 13, 2005. Page 10.

excerpted

429

Updike. Page 55

2005, Section 2, page 1.

verbatim

426

from

Pollock’s

Kennedy, Randy. "Is this a real Jackson

253

INDEX A

Gothic, 1944. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .47

Abstract Painting, 1943. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .182

Guardians of the Secret, 1943. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .174-175

Alchemy, 1947. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .232-233 Autumn Rhythm, Number 30, 1950, 1950. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .194-195

H/J/K Head, c.1938-1941. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .81

B

The Key (Accabonac Creek Series), 1946. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .118

Beach Figures, 1944. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .216 L Bird Effort (Accabonac Creek Series), 1946. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .149 Landscape with Tree to Right, 1936. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .230 Bird, 1938-1941. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .33 Birth, 1938-1941. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13

Lavender Mist, Number 1, 1950, 1950. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .188 Lucifer, 1947. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .168-169

Blue (Moby Dick), c.1943. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .180 Blue Poles: Number 11, 1952. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .129, 200-201

M The Mad Moon-Woman, 1941. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .146

C

Male and Female, 1942. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19

Cathedral, 1947. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .166

Mask, c.1941. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .101

Circumcision, 1946. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .65

The Moon Woman, 1942. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .117

The Comet, 1947. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .122

The Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle, c.1943. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .109

Composition with Black Pouring, c.1947. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .69

Mural, 1943-1944, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .162-163

Composition with Figures and Banners, c.1934-1938. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .227 Composition with Motif of Small Squares, c.1938-1941. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .68

N Night Mist, c.1944-1945. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .136

Composition with Pouring II, 1943. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .18 Night Sounds, c.1944. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .55 Convergence: Number 10, 1952, 1952. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .219 Croaking Movement (Sounds in the Grass Series), c.1946. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .119

Number 1, 1949, 1949. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .24 Number 1, 1952. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .222-223 Number 1A, 1948. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .184-185, 187

D

Number 3, 1950. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .204-205

The Deep, 1953. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .208

Number 3, 1949: Tiger, 1949. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .172

Direction, 1945. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .84

Number 4, 1948: Gray and Red, 1948. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .95 Number 5, 1948. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .123, 128

E

Number 6, 1948: Blue, Red, Yellow, 1948. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .58

Easter and the Totem, 1953. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .21

Number 7, 1950, 1950. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .206-207

East Hampton series, Willem de Kooning, 1968. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .237

Number 8, 1949, 1949. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .96

Echo: Number 25, 1951. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .214

Number 8, 1950, 1950. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .97

Enchanted Forest, 1947. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .137 Equinox, Adolph Gottlieb, 1944. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .221 Eyes in the Heat (Sounds in the Grass Series), 1946. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .173

Number 11, 1951. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .196 Number 11A, 1948, 1948. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .38 Number 12A, 1948. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .52 Number 13A, 1948, 1948 (also called Arabesque), 1948. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .34-35 Number 14, 1948, 1948. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .39

F The Flame, 1934-1938. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .22 Full Fathom Five, 1947. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .156, 157

Number 14, 1951, 1951. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .48 Number 15, 1948: Red, Gray, White, Yellow, 1948. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .210 Number 16, 1950, 1950. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .72 Number 17A, 1948. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .50

254

G

Number 20, 1948, 1948 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .125

Galaxy, 1947. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .213

Number 20, 1950, 1950. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .73

Going West, 1934-1935. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .31

Number 22, 1950. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .151

Number 23, 1948, 1948. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .126

T

Number 26A, 1948: Black and White, 1948. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .41

T.P.’s Boat in Menemsha Pond, c.1934. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .30

Number 27, 1950, 1950. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .212 Number 28, 1950, 1950. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .42

The Tea Cup (Accabonac Creek Series), 1946. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .144 There Were Seven in Eight, c.1945. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .152-153 Totem Lesson 1, 1944. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .90

Number 28, 1951, 1951. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .171

Totem Lesson 2, 1945. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .87

Number 29, 1950. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .203

Troubled Queen, c.1945. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .102

Number 32, 1950, 1950. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .44-45

Two, 1943-1945. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .140

Number 34, 1949, 1949. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .59 U/W/Y Unformed Figure, 1953. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .211

O

Untitled, c.1939-1942 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .179 Ocean Grayness, 1953. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .235

Untitled (Bald Woman with Skeleton), 1938-1941. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .138

One. Number 31, 1950. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .190-191, 193

Untitled (Composition with pouring I), 1943. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .53

Orange Head, c.1938-1941. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .145

Untitled (Composition with Ritual Scene), c.1938-1941. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .75

Out of the Web: Number 7, 1949, 1949. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .110-111, 112

Untitled (Composition with Serpent Mask), 1938-1941. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .67 Untitled (Cut-Out Figure), 1948-1950. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .60 Untitled (Cut-Out), 1948. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .61

P

Untitled (Don Quixote), 1944. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .141 Pasiphäe, c.1943. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .114-115

Untitled (Drawing with Spirals), c.1946. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .93

Phosphorescence, 1947. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .167

Untitled (Figure Composition), c.1938-1941. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .70

Photograph: Pollock Painting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .242-244

Untitled (Kneeling Figure), 1934-1938. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .143

Photograph: Final Photograph of Jackson Pollock and Ruth Kligman, 1956. . . . . . . . . . .246

Untitled (Mural), 1950. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .127

Photograph:The floor of Jackson Pollock’s studio, The Spring, East Hampton, 1998. . . . . .11

Untitled (Naked Man with a Knife), c.1938-1940. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .29 Untitled (Naked Man), c.1938-1941. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .36

Photograph: Jackson Pollock in his studio in The Springs, East Hampton,

Untitled (Scent), c.1953-1955. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14 Long Island, 1949. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .245 Photograph: The Irascibles, 1950. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .241 Photograph: Pollock Painting (actually pretending to paint) Number 32, 1950.

Untitled (Self-portrait), 1931-1935. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8 Untitled (Shadows: Number 2, 1948), 1948. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .62

. . . . . . .243

Untitled (White on Black I), c.1948. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .120

Portrait and a Dream, 1953. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .198-199

Untitled (Woman), 1935-1938. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .28

Portrait of H.M., 1945. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .154

Untitled engraving, 1944-1945 (printed in 1967). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .164 Untitled, 1938-1939. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .98 Untitled, 1944 (?) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .238-239

R Untitled, 1944. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .27 Red and Blue, c.1943-1946. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .54

Untitled, c.1945 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .57

Reflection on the Big Dipper, 1947. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .16

Untitled, c.1945. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .92

Ritual, 1953. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .89

Untitled, 1946. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .64

Robert Motherwell, Figure with Rectangular Window, 1948. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .135

Untitled, c.1946. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .79 Untitled, c.1946. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .83 Untitled, c.1946. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .148

S Untitled, c.1948-1949 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .104 Sacrifice, Mark Rothko, 1946. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .236

Untitled, c.1951. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .130

Sea Change, 1947. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .158

Untitled, c.1952-1956. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .86

Search, 1955. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .218

Untitled, Barnett Newman,1948 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .133

The She-Wolf, 1943. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12

War, c.1944-1946 (dated “1947”). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .78

Shimmering Substance (Sounds in the Grass Series), 1946. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .161

The Water Bull, c.1946. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .176 Watery Paths, 1947. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .159

Sketchbook, facsimile, published 1982 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .76, 77 White Cockatoo: Number 24A, 1948, 1948. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .228-229 Stenographic Figure, c.1942. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .224

White Light, 1954. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .25

Summertime, Number 9A, 1948, 1948. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .106-107

The Wooden Horse: Number 10A, 1948, 1948. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .132

Sun-Scape, 1946. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .82

Yellow Islands, 1952. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .49

255

“A

t the beginning, the canvas is white, void; then the cautious start, then the running of the paint from the pot onto the white of the surface…” Hans Namuth. Born in 1912, in a small town in Wyoming, Jackson Pollock embodied the American dream as the country found itself confronted with the realities of a modern era which was beginning to replace the fading nineteenth century. Like a storybook plot, Pollock left home in search of fame and fortune in New York City. Thanks to the Federal Art Project, he quickly won acclaim, and after the Second World War became the biggest art celebrity in America. For de Kooning, Pollock was the “icebreaker”. For Max Ernst and André Masson, Pollock was a fellow member of the European surrealist movement. For Motherwell, Pollock was a legitimate candidate for the status of the Master of the American School. During the many upheavals in his life in New York in the 1950s and 1960s, Pollock lost his bearing – success had simply come too fast and too easily. It was during this period that he turned to alcohol and destroyed his marriage to Lee Krasner. Eventually, he achieved truly legendary status, ending his life like that other great star of the period, James Dean, killing himself after a night of drinking, behind the wheel of his Oldsmobile.