Authors: Deborah Solomon
For all the excitement generated by the show, the critical response
was somewhat disappointing. Robert Coates, of
The New Yorker
, was still questioning whether Pollock’s paintings meant anything and felt that One
and
Autumn Rhythm
bordered on “meaningless embellishment.” Howard Devree, of
The New York Times
, was similarly doubtful and asked his readers rhetorically: “Does [Pollock’s] personal
comment ever come through to us?” The art journals, by comparison, reviewed the show
very favorably.
Art Digest
called it Pollock’s “richest and most exciting to date,” and
Art News
singled it out the following January as one of three best one-man shows of the year.
(Pollock was ranked second, after John Marin and ahead of Alberto Giacometti.) The
Art News
citation was an honor of the highest order, but Pollock was past the point of deriving
satisfaction from such distinctions. No amount of praise could ease his self-doubts.
He told Greenberg in the early fifties that he didn’t know where his paintings came
from—unless they were bad paintings.
Pollock and Lee spent most of the winter in New York City, where they once again stayed
in Alfonso Ossorio’s carriage house at 9 MacDougal Alley. It was to be a difficult
winter for Pollock as he struggled with the familiar problems of depression and drinking.
On January 6, 1951, three weeks after his show came down, Pollock confided to Ossorio,
who was in Paris: “I found New York terribly depressing after my show—and nearly impossible—but
am coming out of it now.” By the end of January, however, he was no better off: “I
really hit an all time low—with depression and drinking—NYC is brutal.” Unable to
control his drinking, he surrendered to a dismal routine that consisted of waking
up late in the afternoon and heading out for the bars. No matter where his nocturnal
wanderings began, they usually ended at the Cedar Street Tavern, the legendary artists’
bar.
The Cedar Street Tavern, at University Place and Eighth Street, was rather ordinary-looking.
It had drab green walls, some booths and tables in the back, and not much to distinguish
it from other bars in Greenwich Village save for a round neon sign that hung outside,
casting a green halo above the street. The Cedar was a “no-environment,” to borrow
a phrase from de Kooning, and it was precisely its nondescript character that accounted
for its popularity among artists when they first started going there in the forties.
There was no pool table, no jukebox, no television, nothing to interfere with the
serious business of talking about art. By the early fifties, however, the quiet conversations
had ended. As the artists became well known, so did their bar, and even the most casual
of passersby began pausing out front and glancing through the glass in the door to
survey the scene inside. Looking in, one could see who was there. On a good night
one might see Franz Kline or Philip Guston or maybe even de Kooning. On a great night
one might see Pollock, standing up front by the bar, holding a glass of Scotch, surrounded
by art students and various young admirers who had come to the Cedar Street Tavern
for the chance to see him.
There are many stories about Pollock and the Cedar bar, most of which make him out
to be a mean, violent drunk. One story alleges that he tore the bathroom door off
its hinges, and another story has him ripping the toilet from the wall. He supposedly
punched out de Kooning, Kline, and many others. But as Clement Greenberg once said,
“I used to ask people, ‘Who, exactly, has he hit?’ and then they couldn’t remember.
Jackson’s violence—what a joke. He had a
horror
of violence.” Pollock did like to flirt with violence, though. Drunk, he teased,
taunted, and bullied, and no one was spared his obnoxious behavior. Standing up front
by the bar, with his customary double Scotch, Pollock would deliver a well-known monologue
to the admirers clustered around him. “What are you involved with? What are you
really
involved with?” he would ask belligerently, glaring at some hapless fellow and daring
him to answer. “You’re all a bunch of horses’ asses!”
By this time, just about every art student in the country was familiar with Pollock’s
work. He had become a hero to a generation of young artists who admired his total
freedom with paint. But Pollock had no interest in winning followers, and those who
got to know him at the Cedar were generally disappointed to find that he could be
crude as any other drunk. Audrey Flack, then a twenty-year-old art student at Yale
who idolized Pollock “like a movie star,” recalls her disgust upon first meeting him.
She was
sitting at the Cedar one night when Pollock came in, sat down next to her, and “pulled
my behind and burped in my face.” Larry Rivers, the painter and saxophonist, was another
devout admirer whom Pollock managed to offend with his churlish behavior. One night
at the Cedar, Rivers left his table to go to the men’s room and was dismayed to learn
upon his return that “while I was in there, Pollock asked [my date] if she’d like
to leave with him.”
But not everyone came away with such a negative impression of Pollock. Helen Frankenthaler,
then a promising young painter fresh out of Bennington College, had the chance to
meet Pollock on many occasions through her friendship with Clement Greenberg. She
recognized him at once as a painfully diffident man who tended to lose his bearings
outside the context of his work. “One couldn’t entertain a dialogue with him about
life or art,” she has said. “One experienced the man quiet or the man wild. I guess
he was his true self when painting. That’s where he lived.”
Pollock’s favorite drinking companion was Franz Kline, a short, stocky, good-natured
painter who had grown up in the coal-mining country of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
He had a trim mustache and thick black hair, which he combed straight back to reveal
a heart-shaped face and small, sad eyes that slanted downward. Kline had painted figuratively
until the late forties, when one day he enlarged a drawing of a rocking chair with
a Bell-Opticon magnifier and conceived the idea of his famous black-and-white abstractions.
“Dali once told me,” Kline has said, “my work was related to John of the Cross, whom
he called the ‘poet of the night.’ Not having read him I wouldn’t know.” Kline’s speaking
manner was rambling and ardent, larded with frequent references to the Brooklyn Dodgers,
railroads, automobiles, Wagnerian opera, and every aspect of art history, though he
never went on at length about his own work. He and Pollock both believed that real
artists didn’t talk about their art, and anyone who did was suspect. One morning after
an evening when Kline had participated in a panel discussion at the Museum of Modern
Art, he was awakened around dawn by a hammering on
the door. He opened it. Pollock, still out from the previous night’s carousing, barged
in. He faced Kline angrily. “I heard you were talking yesterday,” he said.
Lee seldom accompanied her husband to the Cedar. “I loathed the place,” she once said.
“The women were treated like cattle.” She hated the tough talk, the horsing around,
the sight of her husband drunkenly slapping strangers on the back as if he were one
of the guys. Whom was he kidding? She blamed the Cedar for his drinking, reasoning
that if he did not go to the bar he would not drink, and it frustrated her to be unable
to keep him away. Pollock, in turn, seized every chance to heighten her frustration.
One of his favorite strategies was to pretend that he was drunker than he actually
was. A typical incident occurred one night when Kline and his sidekick, a young painter
named Dan Rice, dragged Pollock home to 9 MacDougal Alley to find Lee standing outside
her bedroom at the top of the stairs. “Don’t bother bringing him up,” Lee shouted.
“I don’t want a drunk in my bed.” Pollock collapsed in the entryway, face first, and
lay there as if unconscious. Lee continued to scream, failing to notice as her husband
lifted his head, turned it toward Kline, and flashed his friend a wink.
Sober, he could barely remember what had happened the night before. But he remembered
enough to know that he had been drunk, and the thought left him utterly dejected.
Only one year earlier he had believed he was finally “above water,” yet realized now
that “things don’t work that easily I guess.” He asked his wife to try to understand.
“It’s a storm,” he assured her. “It will pass.” He tried to show her how sorry he
was, buying her roses, baking her bread, and even telephoning Betty Parsons one day
to suggest that she give Lee a show. Parsons was opposed. “I don’t show husbands and
wives,” she told him, but Pollock insisted that she at least give Lee the courtesy
of a visit. Lee always forgave Pollock for his nasty, drunken behavior. She knew his
drinking depressed him even more than it depressed her. “Life’s not worth it,” he
often told her despairingly. “The whole thing isn’t worth it.” One day that winter
he returned home with a will. “If my wife, L
EE
P
OLLOCK
, survives me then I give, devise and bequeath to her my entire estate.”
Pollock thought he might feel better if he left New York. An arts group by the name
of Momentum had invited him to Chicago to help jury an exhibit, and though “jurying
was something I swore I’d never do,” he figured “the experience might do me good.”
On February 7 he flew to Chicago, his first time on an airplane. “Flew out and back
alone—and liked it, flying.” Maybe it reminded him of other experiences: riding freight
trains, driving his Ford, traveling at fast speeds, and capturing for one brief moment
an exhilarating sense of change, risk, and release. The airplane ride turned out to
be the only good part of the trip. In Chicago, Pollock visited Werner’s bookstore,
on Michigan Avenue, two blocks south of the Art Institute, and joined two other jurors
in an effort to select 60 works, from more than 800 entries, for a show called “Exhibition
Momentum 1951.” The Momentum group had asked Pollock to participate in order to ensure
that advanced artists received fair and adequate representation but regretted its
choice as soon as the jurying began. Each time juror Max Weber, the distinguished
American Cubist, recommended a work for the show, Pollock would respond the same way—“That’s
awful.” He meant what he said. He judged the art of his contemporaries by the same
harsh standards he applied to his own art, and by that criterion almost everything
failed. “The jurying,” he later wrote, “was dissappointing and depressing—saw nothing
original being done.” The New York
Herald Tribune
was surely referring to Pollock when it reported the following month, “If one juror
had his way, the show would have numbered less than ten items all told.”
Back in New York, at 9 MacDougal Alley, Pollock found himself as disconsolate as ever.
He missed his house in Springs and wanted to go home but had already committed himself
to various projects in New York. He spent considerable time that winter writing and
recording a narration for the color documentary that Hans Namuth had filmed the previous
year. Pollock, in his own words, was “not too happy” about having to talk in the movie
but had agreed to do it anyway after coproducer Paul Falkenberg assured him that his
statement need not be elaborate. Together Pollock and his producer wrote a six-minute
statement that was based for the most part on earlier statements. “My home
is in Springs, East Hampton, Long Island” it begins. “I was born in Cody, Wyoming
thirty-nine years ago.” Soon after he recorded the narration, Pollock visited the
producer’s studio one day to watch the finished movie. Not one minute after it had
begun he became exasperated. Falkenberg, without consulting him, had added Balinese
gamelan music to the sound track. “Paul,” Pollock told him angrily, “this is exotic
music.” The producer tried to explain, saying that the free-flowing rhythm of the
music reminded him of Pollock’s art. “Paul,” Pollock said, amazed that the producer
could fail to understand, “I’m an American painter.” That was the end of the Balinese
gamelan music. The eleven-minute documentary was first shown that summer at the Museum
of Modern Art—with music by composer Morton Feldman. Of Brooklyn.
For Pollock the long, troubled winter was not entirely without consolations. He at
least managed to complete a few dozen ink drawings; “feel good about them,” he noted.
It had been a number of years since Pollock produced a significant number of drawings;
he had more or less stopped making drawings in the years he was making “drip” paintings.
But his 1951 drawings, like his earlier “psychoanalytic drawings” for Dr. Henderson,
were probably intended more as personal notations than public statements; he ended
up recycling most of them into other works. Some he pasted into collages. Dozens more
he soaked in Rivit glue and pasted to a pyramid-shaped wire armature to create a sculpture
(
Untitled
), which was exhibited that spring at the Peridot Gallery, on Twelfth Street, in a
show called “Sculpture by Painters.” Critics admired the sculpture—“Jackson Pollock
stops the show with a writhing, ridge-backed creature,” gushed
Art News
—but Pollock took no pride in the work. He thought it was trivial. On the day the
show closed he drove to the gallery to pick up his sculpture. Realizing it was too
large to fit in the trunk of his car, he tossed it into the street and stomped on
it until it was flat. He took it home and later threw it away.
More and more Pollock was being singled out in the press as the leader of American
painting. His work was exhibited throughout the year in a succession of group shows
at the major
New York museums, with even his detractors acknowledging that he had become, as Henry
McBride, the conservative critic, put it, “the chef-d’école, such as it is; and that
is always something.” Pollock’s contemporaries, however, did not consider him any
kind of “chef-d’école,” and the distinction was one that Pollock himself would have
quickly disavowed (not least because it was French). He was uninterested in winning
followers, and even his art, in some ways, seemed to spurn disciples. For as is true
of any artist whose style is intensely personal, it is difficult to borrow from Pollock
without lapsing into crude imitation. Why would any serious artist want to drip paint
when Pollock held the patent on the technique? De Kooning’s style, by comparison,
was more traditional and easier to appropriate, and many young artists, like Grace
Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Alfred Leslie, already owed a debt to his thrusting brushwork
and elbow-action style. The extent of de Kooning’s influence became evident in May
1951 when a group of Club members organized the “Ninth Street Show,” the most celebrated
art event of the year. It consisted of sixty-one works by as many artists, hung in
a defunct antique shop in a building that was about to be torn down. Hundreds of people
attended the opening-day celebration—a banner was raised above Ninth Street—generating
the feeling that something substantial had been accomplished in American art. For
Pollock, however, the “Ninth Street Show” was merely another reminder of his solitariness.
He authorized Betty Parsons to send one of his paintings down to Ninth Street, and
by the time the show opened, he had returned to Springs.