Jackson Pollock (31 page)

For all his tinkering around the house, Pollock was not as handy as one might suppose.
While he definitely enjoyed gardening, cooking, and carpentry, he had limited patience
for whatever projects he undertook. He brought his intensity to bear on even the simplest
tasks and tended to get frustrated rather easily. Edward Hults, a local plumber in
Springs who assisted Pollock with many home-improvement projects, later recalled that
“he was reckless with tools . . . he’d throw them around, kick them even.” One day
Hults arrived at the house to find that Pollock had impulsively ripped out some beams
while trying to install plumbing for an upstairs bathroom. “Why,” Hults exclaimed,
“if there’d come any wind the house would have collapsed!”

New neighbors arrived from New York, easing the oppressive isolation of the country.
John Little, an abstract painter whom Lee knew from the Hofmann school, purchased
a barn on Three Mile Harbor Road. Wilfrid Zogbaum, a fashion photographer and sculptor,
bought a farmhouse a few hundred yards south of the Pollocks on Fireplace Road. Pollock
became good friends with both men, retiring the aggressive stance he assumed among
his colleagues at the Parsons Gallery. He had no need to prove himself “the strongst
painter of his generation” among his neighbors in Springs, who acknowledged, hands
down, that he was the master among them. To John Little and Wilfrid Zogbaum, Pollock
was a gentle, appreciative friend. He often stopped by Zogbaum’s house to bring him
homegrown eggplants. He visited John Little too and lent many hours to the renovation
of Little’s house. When his friends returned the visits, they could expect to be welcomed
graciously by Pollock and his latest pet, Caw-Caw, a mischievous black crow that provided
amusement by poking holes in tubes of oil paint and stealing clothespins from neighbors’
clotheslines. At least one particular incident endeared Pollock to Zogbaum. One day
the sociable “Zog” showed up with Wilfredo Lam, insisting that Pollock acquaint himself
with the Surrealist painter. Zogbaum left the two artists alone under a tree and returned
an hour later, eager to see how they were getting along. He found them sitting silently.
Pollock looked up and explained. “Wilfredo doesn’t speak any English,” he said, “and
I don’t speak any French.”

As Pollock languished in Springs his reputation was advancing abroad. Six of his works
went on exhibit that summer at the Venice Biennale, the largest and most prestigious
of the great European art fairs. The six Pollocks were part of a show mounted by Peggy
Guggenheim, who, as a leading art patron in Venice, had been invited to exhibit her
collection at the fair. She was given her own pavilion, alongside those of Great Britain,
France, and Holland, prompting her to comment wryly, “I felt as though I were a new
European country.” The United States also had a pavilion, but it would be some time
before Pollock was exhibited in Venice as an official representative of this country.
(Featured in the U.S. pavilion that summer were such conservative choices as Benton,
Pop Hart, and Andrew Wyeth.) Pollock’s appearance at the 1948 Biennale marked his
international debut, and it apparently went well. “I am glad you took on Pollock and
only wish he could sell,” Peggy Guggenheim wrote to Parsons in 1949. “Here in the
Biennale he was considered by far the best of all the American painters.”

Back home, however, Pollock seemed to be attracting only ridicule. Resistance to his
art had been mounting steadily ever since his Parsons show had closed. In February
1949 James Plaut, the director of the Institute of Modern Art in Boston, announced
that the museum was changing the “modern” in its name to “contemporary” to disassociate
itself from certain modern painters whose work signaled “a cult of bewilderment.”
The museum statement did not mention any artists by name, although a follow-up story
in
The New York Times
specified that the name change in Boston represented a necessary effort to distinguish
the “experimental meanderings” of such artists as Pollock and Gorky
from art that possessed meaning. That May a group of artists headed by the painter
Paul Burlin planned a well-publicized protest meeting at the Museum of Modern Art
to oppose the name change in Boston, and while Pollock was not among the thirty-six
official organizers, he and Lee both attended.

Meanwhile
Life
magazine finally caught on to the events on Fifty-seventh Street and was perturbed
to discover that the latest movement in the fine arts bore no resemblance to the cultural
renaissance that Henry Luce’s publications had envisioned for the coming American
century. Confounded by “the strange art of today,”
Life
presented its readers, in October 1948, with a “Round Table on Modern Art” in which
fifteen leading cultural figures were asked to evaluate the work of Pollock, de Kooning,
and other “young American extremists.” Pollock’s
Cathedral
was submitted to the panel of experts, eliciting a round of praise from Greenberg
and Sweeney and predictably patronizing comments from the others:

Sir Leigh Ashton, director of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London: “It seems
to me exquisite in tone and quality. It would make a most enchanting printed silk.”

Aldous Huxley, novelist: “It raises a question of why it stops when it does. The artist
could go on forever. I don’t know. It seems to me like a panel for wallpaper which
is repeated indefinitely about the wall.”

A. Hyatt Mayor, curator of prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: “I suspect any
picture I think I could have made myself.”

Theodore Green, professor of philosophy at Yale: “A pleasant design for a necktie.”

While much has been made of Pollock’s “victimization” by the mass media and the “torment”
he suffered from a public that did not understand him, Pollock in fact tolerated his
detractors with remarkable composure. He knew better than to hope for a sympathetic
reception from such purveyors of mass culture as
Time
and
Life
. He had written to a friend about a year earlier, “Have had fairly good response
from the public (interested in my kind of painting),” clearly accepting the fact that
avant-garde art
lies outside the parameters of popular taste. By the time the
Life
“Round Table” appeared, in autumn, Pollock had already returned to the barn and begun
to prepare for his second show at the Parsons Gallery. Inside his studio the only
critic who mattered was himself.

The thirty-two paintings that Pollock completed in 1948—twice as many as in the previous
year—continued his earlier innovations in “dripped” paint while breaking new ground.
A year after pioneering his new technique Pollock felt comfortable enough with it
to venture a few risks. For one thing, the works became larger:
Summertime
stretches eighteen feet long, and
Number 5, 1948
is eight feet tall. His style, in general, became looser and more open, the poured
lines no longer burying the canvas from edge to edge; he allowed the canvas to show
through. By 1948 Pollock had become master enough not only to make his own rules but
to break them as well. Defying his own abstract style, he reintroduced figurative
imagery into the art. In the
Wooden Horse
he glued onto the canvas the head of a wooden hobbyhorse (which he had found beneath
John Little’s kitchen floor while helping with renovations one day). In
White Cockatoo
(
Fig. 24
) he again toyed with conventional form; fleshy masses of red, white, and blue pigment
rest in the interstices of loopy black lines like birds in bare tree branches. In
Number 1, 1948
, described by Greenberg as “a huge baroque scrawl in aluminum, black, white, madder
and blue,” Pollock put himself into the painting. He pressed his paint-smeared hands
against the canvas, creating a series of hand prints reminiscent of early cave markings.
(Though the prints made with his left hand remain unaltered, the prints made with
his right hand were touched up to conceal the fact that his fingertip was missing.)
By 1948 Pollock’s loops of flung paint had become a force to reckon with as they brazenly
ensnared wooden horses, white cockatoos, hand prints, and any other forms that got
in their way. Conventional forms are suggested but only to be subordinated to line,
and the paintings remain abstract. Pollock was testing the limits of his mastery with
a sureness that borders on bravura.

In 1948 Pollock decided to dispense with titles; there was no
point in encouraging viewers to look for anecdotal meaning in his work when the only
meaning lay in the use of paint. Instead he started numbering his paintings—Number
1, Number 2, Number 3, and so on, though not necessarily in the order in which they
were conceived. While descriptive titles such as
White Cockatoo
and
Wooden Horse
have been picked up over the years to help keep the paintings straight, none of these
titles were Pollock’s. As far as he was concerned, titles only complicated things.
Commenting sometime later on why he did away with them, Pollock told an interviewer:
“I decided to stop adding to the confusion.”

By December, when Pollock had finished preparing for his second show at Parsons, he
felt sufficiently fortified to confront his worst problem: he decided he was going
to stop drinking. That Christmas he and Lee traveled to Deep River, Connecticut, to
spend a week with his family, and his mother soon reported exuberantly, “There was
no drinking. We were all so happy . . . hope he will stay with it he says he wants
to quit and went to the Dr. on his own.” The doctor to whom she was referring was
Dr. Edwin Heller, a general practitioner who had founded a medical clinic in East
Hampton the previous year. Pollock first visited Heller for a minor ailment but soon
started returning on a weekly basis, determined “to leave it alone everything wine
to beer for they were poison to him,” as his mother wrote. Lee was amazed by Pollock’s
recovery and often asked him how Dr. Heller had managed to cure him of his alcoholism
when three psychotherapists and one homeopathic physician had failed, as had she.
Pollock told her simply, “He is an honest man. I can trust him.”

Lee wondered how long the recovery could last. Pollock’s mother wondered too, and
she was afraid that the pressures surrounding his next show, in January 1949, would
lead him to start drinking again. “When he has his show will be a test and a hard
one for Jack. If he can go through with that without drinking will be something I
hope he can.”

Pollock fulfilled his mother’s hopes. By the time his show closed, in February, he
was still on the wagon. In April 1949 his mother visited Springs and was thrilled
to find that he still hadn’t
had a drink. Writing to Charles, she mentioned the visit to “Jack and Lee was so nice
to be there and see them so happy and no drinking he can serve liquor to others He
feels so much better says so.” Not even his doctor’s death the following year, in
March 1950, sent Pollock back to alcohol. He stayed on the wagon for two years, from
the fall of 1948 to the fall of 1950. It has been reported elsewhere that Pollock
was able to overcome his drinking through the help of tranquilizers he received from
Dr. Heller, but there is no evidence to substantiate this claim and ample reason to
doubt it. As Stella Pollock wrote: “The Dr. doesn’t give him anything just talks to
him.” And as the doctor’s widow has said: “My husband didn’t believe in substituting
one drug for another. He treated Pollock with sympathy.” While the cause of Pollock’s
abstinence can no more be known than the cause of his drinking, surely it wasn’t coincidental
that he gave up alcohol at a time when his work was going better than ever and he
no longer needed to doubt his talent, or doubt that his talent would be realized.

Pollock’s second show at the Parsons (January 24-February 12, 1949) opened to impressive
publicity. Clement Greenberg as usual went all out. Writing in
The Nation
, Greenberg confessed that
Number 1, 1948
(the painting with hand prints) “quieted any doubts this reviewer may have felt—and
he does not in all honesty remember having felt many—as to the justness of the superlatives
with which he has praised Pollock’s art in the past.” He went on to say he knew of
no other painting by an American that could begin to compare with
Number 1
and that the work was as well contained “as anything by a Quattrocento master.”

None of the other reviewers, as usual, shared Greenberg’s enthusiasm. But the substance
of their comments was perhaps less important than where the comments appeared. While
only one year earlier the newspapers had totally ignored Pollock, they now took note
of the “young American extremist” whose
Cathedral
had appeared in
Life
magazine. For the first time, Pollock was widely reviewed—and mocked. Emily Genauer
of the
New York World-Telegram
, one of the easier-to-upset critics, felt that most of the paintings “resemble nothing
so much as a mop of tangled
hair I have an irresistible urge to comb out.” Sam Hunter of
The New York Times
, later an eloquent defender of Pollock’s art, was ambivalent. The show, he wrote,
“reflects an advanced stage of the disintegration of modern painting. But it is disintegration
with a possibly liberating and cathartic effect and informed by a highly individual
rhythm.” Hunter’s comments left various people wondering whether it was not only painting
but criticism that had disintegrated. A week after the Hunter piece appeared,
Time
magazine reprinted it beside a sizable reproduction of
Number 11, 1948
, captioned “Cathartic disintegration.” The magazine item identified Pollock as “the
darling of a highbrow cult,” failing to mention that the cult consisted of himself,
his wife, Greenberg, and maybe two or three others.

One of the many ironies of Pollock’s career is that the mocking publicity he received
from
Time, Life
, and the major newspapers accomplished what Greenberg’s praise never had: it helped
sell paintings. By the time his second show at the Parsons Gallery closed, nine paintings
had sold, compared to one the previous year. The purchasers included a Philippines
sugar heir, a president of a publishing company, a trustee of the Philadelphia Museum
of Art, and a lawyer. Best of all, the Museum of Modern Art purchased its second Pollock,
Number 4, 1948
, for $250. The museum had acted cautiously, choosing one of the smaller works in
the show. (A year later it traded the painting for the larger and bolder
Number 1, 1948
, with hand prints.) Still, Pollock was deeply pleased by the museum purchase, and
as Lee once said, “The museum never knew what they did by buying that painting.” She
was referring to the phone call that Pollock placed to a local plumber. After four
chilly winters in Springs, Pollock gave himself a present. He installed heating and
hot water in the house.