Jackson Pollock (34 page)

17. Harold Rosenberg, the art critic, coined the phrase “action painting.” (Photo
by Fred W. McDarrah)

18. After fifteen years in Greenwich Village, Pollock moved to the country. He and
Lee bought a five-acre farm in Springs, East Hampton, for $5,000. (Courtesy Ronald
Stein)

19. Pollock became a household name after he was featured in
Life
. (Copyright Arnold Newman)

20. Pollock was often asked to demonstrate his novel “drip” technique. Here he poses
for photographer Rudolph Burckhardt . . .

21. . . . with Lee at his side.

22. This picture of the so-called “Irascibles,” which appeared in
Life
magazine in January 1951, is the only group portrait of the Abstract Expressionists.
Top row, left to right: Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, Hedda Sterne;
middle row: Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still,
Robert Motherwell, Bradley Walker Tomlin; seated: Theodore Stamos, Jimmy Ernst, Barnett
Newman, James Brooks, Mark Rothko. (Photo by Nina Leen,
Life
magazine, Copyright Time, Inc.)

23. The Pollock brothers and their mother gathered in Springs in the summer of 1950
for their first reunion in more than a decade. Charles Pollock (seated left) was then
an art professor in Michigan. Sande (standing right) owned a printing shop in Connecticut.
Frank Pollock (standing left) was a rose grower in California, and brother Jay (seated
right) was a printer. (Courtesy Archives of American Art)

24. Pollock carves a holiday roast as his mother and wife look on. (Courtesy Archives
of American Art)

25. Pollock virtually stopped painting in the last years of his life. He is shown
here in his studio with his dogs Gyp and Ahab. (Courtesy Archives of American Art)

Though Pollock socialized often that winter, he remained significantly absent from
activities at the new headquarters of the avant-garde—The Club. The celebrated hangout
had been founded by de Kooning, Resnick, and their cronies after deciding that they
needed a meeting place more conducive to conversation than the inhospitable Waldorf
Cafeteria. (The cafeteria’s management had started harassing artists, limiting tables
to four, and forbidding smoking.) In the fall of 1949 they rented a loft on the fifth
floor of 39 East Eighth Street, equipped it with folding chairs and a coffeepot, and
thus founded the Eighth Street Club. At first a casual haunt, The Club was soon sponsoring
panel discussions (“Has the Situation Changed?”) and Friday-night lectures ranging
from Lionel Abel, “The Modernity of the Modern World,” to Dr. Frederick Perls, “Creativeness
in Art and Neurosis.” Membership eventually swelled to a 150, though Pollock, the
perpetual nonjoiner, did not join The Club. He did make one appearance in the winter
of 1950 but left before the lecture was over. As Harold Rosenberg once said, “Jackson
didn’t like doing things with coffee.”

One day in May 1950, soon after returning to Springs, Pollock received a phone call
from Barnett Newman. Lee answered the phone and told Newman that Pollock was in the
barn and could not be disturbed. Newman said it was urgent. He was calling from the
apartment of Adolph Gottlieb, on State Street in Brooklyn, where he was meeting with
Rothko, Reinhardt, and others to finish drafting a letter of protest to the president
of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The letter, signed by eighteen painters and ten
sculptors, announced a boycott of “American Painting Today—1950,” a big exhibition-competition
that the Metropolitan was planning for December. The artists felt it was futile to
enter their work in the competition since the Met had chosen a
jury “notoriously hostile to advanced art.” The only thing missing from the short
letter of protest, Newman told Lee, was Pollock’s signature.

As Lee walked to the barn to get Pollock she grew angrier by the second. Why hadn’t
Newman asked her to sign the letter? Wasn’t
she
an artist, and an activist as well? She thought about the many protests she had attended
in the thirties, the picket lines she had marched on. It only made her angrier to
think that while she had been excluded from the protest, her husband, who hardly knew
a picket line from a police line, had suddenly become indispensable to art-world politics.
She listened silently as Pollock talked to Newman, explaining politely that he could
not come to New York to sign the letter but, yes, he was willing to send a telegram
to Gottlieb’s studio saying he supported the protesters. The telegram went out that
day. “I
ENDORSED
[sic]
THE LETTER OPPOSING THE
M
ETROPOLITAN
M
USEUM OF
A
RT 1950 JURIED SHOW STOP
J
ACKSON
P
OLLOCK
.”