Jackson Pollock (30 page)

“Every so often,” de Kooning once said, “a painter has to destroy painting. Cezanne
did it. Picasso did it with cubism. Then Pollock did it. He busted our idea of a picture
all to hell.”

In the summer of 1947 Pollock produced the first of his so-called “drip” paintings.
*
Not the least among his innovations was the
technique by which they were created. Instead of using an easel, Pollock placed his
canvas on the floor and applied paint from sticks, trowels, and hardened brushes.
He walked around the canvas as he worked, tossing paint from all four sides. At some
point Pollock realized that he would not have to stop to dip the stick into a can
of paint if he poured the paint directly from the can. So he placed a stick in a can
of paint, tilted the can, and allowed the pigment to run down the stick and onto the
canvas. Sometimes he tilted the can just a bit to produce a slow, dribbling line.
Sometimes he tilted it at sharper angles so the paint fell faster and landed harder,
forming a puddle. He experimented with a wide range of paints—artist’s oils, industrial
enamels, plumber’s aluminum paint, and, most often, ordinary house paint, which he
chose because of its fluidity and low cost.

One of the most common misconceptions about Pollock’s working methods is that he produced
his “drip” paintings almost instantaneously. To the contrary, he tended to work in
stages. It was not unusual for him to interrupt work on a canvas and tack it to a
wall in the barn so that he could contemplate his next step. Sometimes he waited a
few days before returning to the painting, sometimes weeks. In the meanwhile he worked
on other paintings; he was always working on more than one painting at a time.

Pollock was not the first painter to employ the technique of dripping paint. Several
critics believe he got the idea from Siqueiros, who as early as 1936 was laying his
canvas on the floor
and splattering Duco from a stick to help generate images. Other critics say the idea
came from Hans Hofmann, who in 1940 enlivened the surface of a painting called
Spring
with an overlay of drips. And surely Pollock knew that Max Ernst, while visiting
Matta’s summer house in Cape Cod in 1941, had filled a tin can with paint, punctured
a hole in the bottom, and swung it over a canvas; his “oscillation” paintings were
exhibited by Betty Parsons at the Wakefield Bookshop in 1942. By no means was Pollock
the first to drip, but he was the first to use the technique as a means of making
a major creative statement.

A lot can be said about Pollock’s technique, and a lot has been said. What is by far
the most relevant point was made by Pollock himself in an unpublished interview in
1949. “I don’t have any theories about technique,” he said. “Technique is the result
of saying something, not vice versa.” As to what his paintings said, Pollock never
specified.

The seventeen “drip” paintings that Pollock produced in 1947 generally consist of
dense, tangled arrangements of tossed and flung lines. At first, in a picture such
as
Galaxy
, Pollock spattered paint to obscure an image that had begun as a human figure. But
soon the spattering took over, and images started evolving out of the flow of paint.
Cathedral
(
Fig. 23
), a large, vertical painting in which hundreds of looping black lines arch against
a whitish ground, hints at the soaring quality of later work. In
Full Fathom Five
Pollock embedded actual objects in the wet paint: a key, a comb, the caps from tubes
of paint, a handful of tacks, cigarette butts, burnt matches—mementos of the painting’s
creation as well as metaphors for its status as a real physical object whose meaning
lies entirely in the use of materials. There is an amazing sense of movement in these
paintings as countless linear rhythms and tensions counteract one another to form
an indivisible whole. The only way to look at a “drip” painting is all at once.

The key element in the “drip” paintings is line, as opposed to color or form. As many
critics have pointed out, Pollock was essentially drawing in paint, or endowing the
painted line with the immediacy and spontaneity one tends to associate with pencil
sketches. His line is novel not only because of the way it is applied but also because
it doesn’t define shapes or mark the edge of a plane—the two traditional functions
of drawing. Instead it travels freely, following its own path as it breaks away from
the tedious conventions of description and illustration. Color is of secondary importance
and rarely calls attention to itself. Pollock generally avoided strong, saturated
hues in favor of black, white, and aluminum, which evoke the monochromy of pencil
sketches and serve to dramatize the linear quality of his work.

For Pollock the “drip” paintings were a vindication. As one who had been obsessed
from childhood with his inadequacies at drawing, he finally had become the draftsman
of his ambitions. It is worth recalling that at the age of eighteen, in his first
written appraisal of his work, Pollock had confided to his oldest brother: “my drawing
i will tell you frankly is rotten it seems to lack freedom and rythem.” The comment
is rather remarkable in that no painter is better known for the freedom and rhythm
of his draftsmanship than Pollock. The technique of dripping paint allowed him to
create a flowing, continuous, gigantic line, a kind of superhuman calligraphy that
brought his sense of drawing into harmony with the scale of his ambitions.

Soon after he had finished preparing for his show, Pollock was visited by Ralph Manheim,
a translator of German literature, and his wife, who lived nearby in Springs. As was
his customary practice, Pollock invited his visitors into his studio. When Manheim
learned that the paintings had yet to be titled, he volunteered a few suggestions,
and within a few hours he and his wife Mary had titled the majority of the works.
Many of the titles relate to the idea of metamorphosis, such as
Alchemy, Prism, Sea Change
, and
Full Fathom Five
(the last two from Shakespeare). Titles such as
Phosphorescence, Shooting Star, Magic Lantern
, and
Comet
seem to have been inspired by the ubiquity of aluminum paint, the color Pollock used
most often after black and white.

The first written appraisal of Pollock’s “drip” paintings apparently came from his
mother. She visited Springs for Thanksgiving
and was impressed by the paintings in the barn. “Jack was busy getting his paintings
stretched for his show which is the 5th of Jan,” she noted to one of her children,
“he has done a lot of swell painting this year.”

In January 1948 Pollock and Lee came to New York for the opening of his show at the
Parsons Gallery. The debut of his “drip” paintings turned out to be an abysmal disappointment,
arousing little interest from either critics or collectors. The seventeen paintings
on exhibit were priced as low as $150, but only one sold (the purchaser was a friend
of Peggy Guggenheim’s). Friends stopped by the gallery to offer their congratulations
but couldn’t afford to buy anything. One day Herbert Ferber, who also exhibited at
Parsons, asked Pollock whether he would be willing to trade a “drip” painting for
a Ferber sculpture. “Sure,” Pollock told him, “pick any one you want.” Ferber picked
Vortex
, one of the smaller paintings in the show. (“I didn’t want to seem greedy,” he explained.)
Under the terms of his contract Pollock was allowed to keep one painting for himself.
He chose
Lucifer
, the largest painting in the show, but later had to give it away to settle an outstanding
doctor’s bill. After the show closed, Pollock’s first “drip” paintings were shipped
to Peggy Guggenheim. In the next few years she gave away all but two to museums in
such places as Omaha and Seattle.

The critical reaction was surprisingly tame. Newspaper reviewers simply ignored the
show. While commentary appeared in four magazines, none of them ran reproductions,
so the public had no idea of what the paintings looked like. The only admiring critic
was Clement Greenberg, but once again his review was probably unintelligible to most
readers. He seemed more interested in his death-of-the-easel-picture theory than in
the art it described and never mentioned Pollock’s new technique. “Since Mondrian,”
Greenberg wrote in
The Nation
, “no one had driven the easel picture so far from itself; but this is not altogether
Pollock’s doing. In this day and age the art of painting increasingly rejects the
easel and yearns for the wall.”

The three other critics who reviewed the show didn’t know quite what to make of it.
They all agreed that the paintings possessed vitality but wondered whether they meant
anything. Robert Coates, of
The New Yorker
, one of Pollock’s earliest admirers, felt that while some of the paintings “have
a good deal of poetic suggestion about them,” there are times when “communications
break down entirely.” An unsigned reviewer in
Art News
was also ambivalent, admiring Pollock’s use of aluminum paint and the “beautiful
astronomical effects” it produced while concluding that his work suffered from “monotonous
intensity.” Alonso Lansford, the reviewer for
Art Digest
, described the work as “colorful and exciting,” though he kept his comments short
as if waiting to hear what others thought before committing himself: “It will be interesting
to see the reactions to his present exhibition.”

Thus began 1948, the year in which Arshile Gorky died, Willem de Kooning had his first
one-man show, and Clement Greenberg bemoaned, in article after article, the social
“alienation” and “isolation” suffered by young American painters. For Pollock the
year brought the severest hardship he had known since the Depression. Three weeks
after his show closed, his contract with Peggy Guggenheim expired and his monthly
payments ended. Under the terms of his new contract with Betty Parsons, he was entitled
to receive any money from the sale of his work minus a one-third gallery commission.
All this was academic, however; his income from the gallery that year was zero. “I
am very worried about Pollock,” Parsons wrote to Peggy Guggenheim in Paris on February
26. “I hope he will be able to go on painting; his finances seem very precarious.”
Six weeks later Parsons wrote again: “I am still very worried about the terrible financial
condition of the Pollocks.”

For Pollock the poverty was humiliating. As one who was determined to support himself
on his painting, he felt deeply frustrated by the lack of sales. Lee offered to get
a job—she had a degree in teaching—but Pollock wouldn’t allow it and “made a real
issue of it,” according to Lee. He was too proud to have his wife support him, even
if it meant living in dire poverty. That
winter was one of their hardest ever. They still had only a couple of stoves and a
fireplace to heat the farmhouse, and they were forced to borrow money in order to
get by. Parsons lent them a few hundred dollars. Dan Miller allowed them to take groceries
from his general store on credit. After running up a sixty-dollar bill at the store
Pollock tried to settle his debt by offering Miller a painting. The grocer accepted
and hung a small “drip” painting (
Untitled
) in his store. Customers laughed at the work, and many of them commented that they
wouldn’t hang it in an outhouse. Someone started a rumor that Pollock painted with
a broom. A decade later Miller sold his painting to a Paris art dealer for seventeen
thousand dollars and bought a small airplane with the money.

Not everyone was as willing as Dan Miller to barter his goods or services for the
paintings of a destitute artist. One day Pollock telephoned William P. Collins, who
owned a local fuel company, and invited him to visit his studio. Collins accepted
the invitation but only to decide that he wasn’t willing to trade his heating fuel
for artwork. Charlie Smith, a pilot at the East Hampton airport, recalls an afternoon
when Pollock pulled up at the airport in his Model A Ford and drunkenly stumbled into
the terminal. He asked Smith to come outside. The pilot accompanied him to his car
and was surprised to find five paintings leaning against it. “Yeah?” Smith said, after
glancing at the paintings. Pollock told the pilot he could keep all five if he flew
him to New Haven, a twenty-five-minute ride. He explained that his mother and brother
lived in Connecticut and, “I have to see them.” Smith couldn’t believe he was serious.
“Airplanes cost money to run, y’know,” he told Pollock. “They burn gas.”

With the arrival of summer Pollock’s fortunes improved slightly. James Johnson Sweeney
managed to convince the Eben Demarest Trust Fund, a Boston arts foundation, to award
Pollock a fifteen-hundred-dollar grant, to be paid in quarterly installments. Pollock,
who took real pleasure in improving his property, kept busy with various outdoor projects.
He puttered in Lee’s vegetable garden, planted rows of mimosa trees, painted the house,
and gave serious thought to building a white post-and-rail
fence along the edge of the property. One day he and his friend Tony Smith were gazing
out the living room window when Pollock started talking about the fence. A fence,
he said, would make his property look more like a farm. Smith couldn’t help but laugh.
“What do you think you have here?” he teased. “A Maryland horse farm?”