Authors: Deborah Solomon
The first Monday in November 1945 Pollock and Lee packed their belongings into a meat
truck they had borrowed from May Rosenberg’s brother, a butcher, and drove the hundred
or so miles from New York to Springs. The rural hamlet would later become part of
the most fashionable art colony in the country, but in 1945 the southern fork of Long
Island was frontier territory compared to places like Woodstock or Provincetown. Its
best-known painters were long gone. William Merritt Chase and Childe Hassam had settled
in Southampton in the late nineteenth century, when painting from nature was still
the object of art. Thomas Moran, who died in 1926, once had a studio in downtown East
Hampton, where he painted panoramic views of the Rocky Mountains. The area was discovered
by Surrealists during Word War II, when André Breton, Max Ernst, and their friends
could often be spotted at Coast Guard Beach. As for the hamlet of Springs, the first
settler from the New York art crowd was Harold Rosenberg. He liked to point out that
he purchased his house in the year “1944 B.J.—Before Jackson.”
Pollock and Lee spent their first months in Springs making
their new house habitable. They tore down walls and turned the first floor of the
house into one big room. The floor was painted white enamel, which reflected the light
and filled the room with brightness. Together they decorated, hanging paintings on
walls, plants from the ceilings, and copper pots on the pegboard in the kitchen. They
collected stones, shells, driftwood, glass shards, and curiously shaped gourds and
displayed their finds on window ledges and tabletops. The upstairs had three rooms,
one of which was sunny and spacious and faced Accabonac Creek. They chose it as their
bedroom, furnishing it simply with twin beds and a heavy oak chest. A second bedroom,
which faced north and looked out on treetops, became Pollock’s temporary studio. Within
a year he would move out into the barn.
Neither the fresh coats of paint nor the modest decorations could ease the harsh conditions
under which Pollock and Lee spent their first winter in the country. The ramshackle
farmhouse was chilly and drafty, and their only source of heat was a coal-burning
stove in the kitchen. At night the house got so cold that the water in the toilet
sometimes froze, and Pollock would have to melt it with a blowtorch in the morning.
To make matters worse, it was hard to get coal for the stove, since wartime shortages
persisted even though the war was over. “No coal as yet and wood burns like paper
at $21 a cord,” Pollock noted in a postcard to Ed Strautin, his former neighbor on
Eighth Street, soon after his arrival.
In spite of the hardships, Pollock’s earliest letters from Springs reveal a profound
fondness for his new surroundings. “I opened the door this morning and never touched
ground until I hit the side of the barn five hundred yards away,” he wrote in the
postcard to Strautin. “Such winds. It’s all very nice, tho a little tuff on a city
slicker.”
His enthusiasm did not waver as the winter months wore on. “It was good to get your
Xmas card,” he wrote to Louis Bunce, who was now teaching art in Portland, Oregon.
“How have you been—? how is the painting coming?—how about the west?—Lee and I are
trying the country life for a while—we really love it here—a good feeling to be out
of New York for a spell.”
That Thanksgiving, Pollock’s mother came from Connecticut to visit them, and her stay
was the social highlight of his first season in the country. It was a quiet, solitary
time for him, particularly because he did not own a car and had to limit his travels
to places he could visit on foot or on a bicycle. But he did have one friend who lived
nearby. Robert Motherwell owned four acres in East Hampton, where he was building
a house from a Quonset hut with the help of the noted French architect Pierre Chareau.
While working on the hut Motherwell was staying in a rented farmhouse in Springs.
He and his wife Maria, a Mexican dancer, would stop by the Pollocks’ a few times a
week to drive them into town for groceries, and occasionally the two couples had dinner
together.
Other than the Motherwells, Pollock had little contact with his neighbors during his
first few months in the country. Springs was a close-knit community of about 360 people,
and most of the families had been there for generations. They socialized regularly
at meetings of The Springs Village Improvement Society, The Springs Brotherhood Society,
and The Springs Chapel Society, the last of which sponsored weekly bingo games. Pollock,
as one might expect, elected not to join any of the community groups, but he did meet
a few of his neighbors at Dan Miller’s general store, where farmers and fishermen
congregated to drink pop and exchange gossip. The local residents, or “Bonackers”
(named for Accabonac Creek), were curious about their new arrival. They had learned
a little bit about him from Mrs. Elwyn Harris, who shared telephone number 492-002
with the Pollocks and knew that the quiet painter from New York could be surprisingly
loquacious. “He used to drink a lot,” Mrs. Harris once said, “and tie up my line talking
to his artist friends from New York.” Springs was one more place where Pollock was
never quite at home.
Pollock’s third one-man show at Art of This Century was scheduled to open in March
1946, only four months after he had moved to Springs. He prepared for it in an upstairs
bedroom. The inconvenience of having to work in cold, cramped temporary quarters with
a plumber installing pipes in an adjacent bathroom
and an occasional field mouse peeking in did not seem to hamper him. That first winter
he completed eleven new paintings as well as some gouaches, working with speed and
sureness and apparent indifference to the change in his surroundings.
Troubled Queen
(
Fig. 21
), a large vertical painting that measures about six feet high, is a violent picture
that shows two decapitated heads emerging from a thicket of slashing lines. One of
the heads is a triangle pierced by a single eye. The other head is heart-shaped, with
two square eyes, a smear of a mouth, and a troubled expression that suggests she is
the queen of the painting’s title. And she has good reason to be troubled. She appears
to be suffocating, as if choked by the fat, zagging lines and broken arcs that glut
the picture surface and squeeze out any semblance of space. Paint is jabbed on thickly,
enhancing the sense of airlessness that pervades the painting. It’s as if the artist
feels entrapped by the style in which he is working, and one senses Pollock’s eagerness
here to dispense with figurative images and achieve a means for direct and spontaneous
expression. The title of the painting—as well as such other titles as
The Little King, White Angel, High Priestess, Moon Vessel
, and
Circumcision
(named by Lee)—carries poetic or mythological weight, but the poetry lies in the
crude handling of paint rather than in the subject matter.
Pollock’s third show at Art of This Century (April 2–20) opened to disappointing reviews.
Only two critics bothered to review it, and neither was particularly admiring. Clement
Greenberg, writing in
The Nation
, confessed to feeling let down by Pollock’s latest work and thought that none of
the pictures in the show measured up to certain of his earlier works. But Greenberg
still managed to come through with praise: “What may at first sight seem crowded and
repetitious reveals on second sight an infinity of dramatic movement and variety.
One has to learn Pollock’s idiom to realize its flexibility. And it is precisely because
I am, in general, still learning from Pollock that I hesitate to attempt a more thorough
analysis of his art.”
Pollock and Lee visited New York for two weeks when his show opened at the beginning
of April. They had been gone from
New York only seven months, but the city to which they returned was a different place.
The war was over, and New York was no longer the home of the international avant-garde.
The Surrealists had gone back to Europe, and Peggy Guggenheim was planning on closing
the gallery and joining them. Paris was still the fountainhead of modern art, “and
every move made there is decisive for advanced art elsewhere,” Greenberg wrote in
1946. Once again American art students were signing up to study at the Académie Julian
or Bourdelle’s Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and older painters who had started
their careers during the Depression, when they had been too poor to afford the obligatory
stint in Montmartre, were planning extended trips abroad. Pollock, by comparison,
had no interest in going to France. “Everyone is going or gone to Paris,” he noted
to his friend Louis Bunce. “With the old shit (that you can’t paint in America). Have
an idea they will all be back.”
In the three years that had passed since Peggy Guggenheim had arranged to give Pollock
his first show, she had added the names of many other young Americans to the gallery
roster. Baziotes had his first show in October 1944 and was followed that fall by
Motherwell and the sculptor David Hare. Mark Rothko had his first show in January
1945. So too there were shows by Charles Seliger, Richard Pousette-Dart, Robert De
Niro (the actor’s father), and Janet Sobel, a grandmother from Brooklyn. There were
so many shows by American artists that some of the Europeans had left the gallery
in disgust and gone to Samuel Kootz’s place down the block. To Pollock, who kept abreast
of the goings-on at the gallery, the art of his American contemporaries was of definite
merit, which helps explain his sentiment that New York had become as vital an art
center as Paris. “Baziotes, I think, is the most interesting of the painters you mentioned,”
he noted to a friend that spring. “Gorky has taken a new turn for the better. . . . Gottlieb
and Rothko are doing some interesting stuff—also Pousette-Dart.”
But his strongest praise was reserved for primitive art. “The Pacific Islands show
at the Museum of Modern Art [“Arts of the South Seas”] tops everything that has come
this way in the past
four years.” One wonders what show he was thinking of four years earlier—perhaps the
American Indian show that he had seen with John Graham in 1941.
During their trip to New York, Pollock and Lee stayed at their former apartment at
46 East Eighth Street, their pied-à-terre for the next five years. The front part
of the apartment had been taken over by James Brooks, a reserved, soft-spoken painter
from St. Louis who had worked on the Project during the thirties and had recently
returned to New York after three years in the army. Pollock liked the quiet midwesterner
but ended up angering him practically every night by coming home drunk and causing
a stir. Jay Pollock, who had taken over the other half of the apartment, would calm
things down. Jay had played football in high school, and Jackson knew better than
to antagonize his older brother. “Jack would get pie-eyed and start arguing,” Jay
once said, “but I told him right off I wouldn’t stand for that kind of thing. Jack
sometimes looked like he was real aggressive, but he was chicken.” But Jay was willing
to indulge his kid brother in other ways. One day Jackson asked Jay whether he could
have a collection of Navaho blankets and rugs that his brother had purchased in a
crafts shop in Los Angeles, offering to give him a painting in exchange. Jay agreed
to the trade, even though he knew he would never take the painting because he was
not an admirer of Jackson’s work.
Back in Springs, Pollock felt anxious. His last show had closed on April 20, 1946,
and his next show was scheduled to open on January 14, 1947, leaving him less time
than usual to prepare. He couldn’t blame the poor scheduling on Peggy Guggenheim.
He had specifically requested that she try to give him one more show before she closed
her gallery, even if it meant having to return to his studio and produce a new body
of paintings before he was quite ready. Faced with the pressures of the studio, Pollock’s
house in the country and the work it demanded of him suddenly became a burden. “The
work is endless—and a little depressing at times,” Pollock complained the first week
in June. “Moving out here I found difficult—change of light and space—and so damned
much to be done around the place. But I feel I’ll be down to work soon.”
But he did not get down to work, at least not immediately, allowing himself to be
diverted by the pleasures of the country. He settled into a relaxed routine that consisted
of sleeping as late as eleven, lingering groggily over a breakfast of coffee and Camel
cigarettes, and setting off at about noon to fritter away the day. Almost every afternoon
he rode his bicycle to the nearby Bossey farm, on Accabonac Road, to pick up groceries,
such as butter and milk. On one of his visits to the farm he impulsively bought a
baby billy goat, which he put in his backyard and allowed to nibble at the grass.
On another visit he picked up a puppy, a white mongrel with wide patches of black
around the eyes. He named it Gyp, after the dog of his childhood, and took it along
on his daily outings in Springs.
That first summer in Springs everything filled Pollock with wonder, no matter how
banal. “I pulled a ligament in my elbow,” he wrote to Ed Strautin, “—so have learned
to wipe my ass with my left hand—an entirely new sensation.”
One by one, Pollock befriended his neighbors, whose initial suspicions about the painter
from New York evaporated once they got to know him. One of his neighbors was an elderly
woman named Mrs. Pigeon. By the time Pollock set off on his daily outings she had
usually managed to finish a wash and hang it up on a clothesline. To Mrs. Pigeon’s
delight, Pollock would stop by on his bicycle and act astonished that she had accomplished
so much in the morning.
Pollock occasionally visited the George Sid Miller dairy farm, which was a few hundred
yards north of his property. He didn’t have much to say to the dour old farmer but
got along well with his farmhand Charlie. The two men could spend hours in the horse
stable smoking cigarettes and admiring the animals. One day Charlie stopped into Dan
Miller’s general store and told its proprietor: “That old Pollock, lazy son-of-a-bitch,
ain’t he, Dan?” The grocer asked Charlie what he meant. “Why,” Charlie said, “I never
see him do a day’s work, did you?” A few days later Dan Miller told Pollock that Charlie
had called him a lazy son-of-a-bitch. Pollock was amused. “Instead of being offended,”
Miller once said, “he loved Charlie all the more. That’s the kind of guy he was—he
was a tremendous man.”