Authors: Deborah Solomon
“Mr. and Mrs. Jackson Pollack,”
The East Hampton Star
noted on May 10, “have returned to their home after spending the winter in Chicago
and New York.” It was only a matter of days before Pollock was back in his studio
and finally able to overcome the drinking and dissipation of the previous months.
He worked hard that summer, avoiding all distractions, as he prepared for his next
show at the Parsons Gallery, which was scheduled for November. It was a productive
summer for his wife as well, for Lee too was preparing for an upcoming show at the
Parsons Gallery—her first one-woman show. At Pollock’s urging,
Parsons had recently come out to Springs to look at Lee’s work and had been favorably
impressed. She scheduled Lee’s show for October.
Every day around noon Pollock headed out to the barn and Lee went upstairs to the
bedroom that served as her studio. They did not see each other again until dinner
time. “How did it go?” Lee would invariably ask him, though she could tell from the
look on his face exactly how it had gone. “Not bad,” Pollock would say, assuming it
had been a good day. “Would you like to see what I did?” He sought her support, and
she sought his, neither of them taking account of the disparity in their reputations.
In fact, sometimes it was hard to determine exactly who was ahead of whom, and their
ranks were not as clearly defined as Pollock might have liked. When Pollock and Lee
participated that summer in a group show at Guild Hall, Lee came away with a second
prize of seventy-five dollars. Her husband placed third, for a mere fifty dollars.
Almost a decade had passed since a young Lee Krasner had stood before her easel wondering
how she, like Pollock, might imbue her art with direct and spontaneous feeling. The
result of her earliest efforts had been a series of frustrating “gray slabs.” She
had destroyed them in 1945, hosing them down until the paint peeled from the canvas.
A breakthrough had soon followed, however. Between 1946 and 1949 she produced about
forty paintings known as her “Little Images.” These dense, small-scale, “allover”
abstractions consist of tight organic forms applied in thick impasto and repeated
rhythmically in parallel rows. Lee considered her “Little Images” mature, eloquent
statements, yet she still sought to loosen up her style and acquire a more improvisatory
approach to painting. In the summer of 1951, while preparing for her show at Parsons,
she sensed that another breakthrough was imminent. She summoned her husband to her
studio one day, and Pollock too noticed the change. “Lee is doing some of her best
painting,” he wrote in June, “—it has a freshness and a bigness that she didn’t get
before—I think she will have a handsome show.” It is hard to evaluate Pollock’s appraisal,
for Lee, doubting her own accomplishments, later destroyed eleven
of the fourteen paintings that she exhibited in her show. Not until after her husband’s
death did she produce the work that assured her reputation as a leading Abstract Expressionist.
“This has been a very quiet summer,” Pollock wrote in August, “no parties hardly any
beach—and a lot of work.” From May through September he secluded himself in his studio
and worked with fanatic purpose, producing twenty-eight “black paintings” (titled
Number 1
through
Number 28
) that mark a radical break from the style of his past. In most of the paintings Pollock
limited himself to monochromatic hues of black and reddish-brown, thinning his pigment
to a watery consistency and soaking it into raw, unprimed canvas. By abandoning color
he gave his art a sense of urgency, which carries over into the subject matter as
well. The human figure suddenly returns, with heads, faces, and mutilated limbs emerging
from the webs and tangles of black. The most common and crudest of the images is a
decapitated Roman head, its high, balding forehead and classical features bearing
an unsettling likeness to the artist. Sometimes the head is merely suggested; other
times it is obscenely explicit, floating lifelessly against the stark expanse of the
canvas (
Fig. 26
). Even considered abstractly, many of the paintings have a morbid, funereal feeling
about them, their stained and blotted off-white surfaces at times resembling blood-soiled
bandages.
Pollock’s “black” paintings are difficult works. Critics remain divided over whether
they measure up to his earlier achievements, and some have argued that his return
to traditional drawing (that is, using line to define form) marks the onset of Pollock’s
decline. Yet whether or not one considers the “black” paintings successful, it is
hard not to be sympathetic to them when one takes account of the emotional necessity
that impelled them into existence. Where once there were soaring ribbons, there is
now a hangman’s rope, severing heads from bodies and serving as a metaphor for Pollock’s
violent break with his past. His “black” paintings can be seen as a rebellion against
his “drip” paintings. The violence of the subject matter, with its frequent references
to sacrifice and mutilation, harks back to earlier times: to 1938, when Pollock
turned against Benton, and to 1944, when he turned against Picasso. What distinguishes
the “black” paintings from those earlier cycles of figurative work is that Pollock
no longer “veiled his imagery.” Instead he left the human figure exposed, as if unconsciously
propelled toward a revelation and confession of guilt. Many critics consider the “black”
paintings an anticlimatic finale to the heroic drama of his “drip” paintings, but
in some ways they constitute the most heroic episode of his career. There is something
at once pathetic and impressive in Pollock’s need to violate a style as soon as it
came within his grasp, even when the style happened to be the one he had struggled
all his life to define.
In terms of technique, the “black” paintings are not significantly different from
earlier paintings. Pollock continued to work on the floor, dripping industrial paint
from sticks, dried brushes, and occasionally basting syringes. But instead of tacking
a single sheet of canvas to the floor, he unrolled as much as twenty feet of canvas
at a time and painted the works side by side. The method allowed him to sustain his
impulses from one painting to the next, and it was not until afterward, in long sessions
of cutting and editing, that he thought about each image as a separate aesthetic entity.
“Should I cut it here?” he asked Lee. “Should this be the bottom?” The last step was
signing his canvases. Pollock hated the finality of signing his works and usually
waited until they were about to be picked up by truck and taken to the gallery before
dipping a brush in black and signing his name to them in a fiercely slanted script.
In October, having finished preparing for their respective shows, Pollock and Lee
left Springs for a two-month stay in New York. They were both eager to hear what the
critics thought of their latest work. Many people had wondered where Pollock’s “drip”
paintings would lead, if anywhere, and not even his admirers could have anticipated
his return to the human figure. Pollock imagined their surprise at his “black” paintings,
suspecting that “the non-objectivists will find them disturbing—[as will] the kids
who think it simple to splash a Pollock out.” His immediate concern, however, was
Lee’s show, which was scheduled to open six weeks before his own. It had never been
Pollock’s intention
to overshadow his wife; to the contrary, he wanted her to stand on her own and win
the acclaim he felt she deserved. He helped her hang her show, and when it opened,
on October 15, he was careful not to monopolize attention at the reception held in
her honor. The printmaker Jacob Kainen, who arrived at the Parsons Gallery a few minutes
before the reception began, recalls watching Pollock head for the exit as soon as
a crowd assembled. “This is
Lee’s
show,” he politely told a guest, slipping out the door.
Lee’s show turned out to be a dismal disappointment, arousing little interest from
either critics or collectors. None of the fourteen paintings sold. The reviews were
patronizing, with the critic of
The New York Times
detecting in her work “feminine acuteness.” When the show closed, Lee was forty-three
years old, had never sold a painting, and was a $126 dollars in debt to Betty Parsons.
Pollock’s show at the Parsons Gallery, which opened on November 26, was even more
disappointing. Of the sixteen “black” paintings on exhibit, only two sold, bringing
him less than twelve hundred dollars. He went to the gallery almost every day hoping
to hear from Parsons that additional sales had been made. On one visit there he noticed
that someone had defaced
Number 7, 1951
, scribbling obscenities on the canvas. On another visit he ran into de Kooning’s
dealer, Charles Egan. “Good show, Jackson,” Egan said, “but could you do it in color?”
Pollock felt bitter and betrayed. He had gone beyond the style of his past, but the
collectors only wanted more of the same. Already the “drip” paintings were considered
vintage Pollock, the rest a lesser investment, a fact Pollock was reminded of every
time he walked into the gallery and noticed that the small red dot signifying a sale
had been placed beside only two paintings, and not even large paintings.
One day Pollock visited Clement Greenberg, who was no longer writing about art for
The Nation
and had not reviewed a Pollock show in three years. “My paintings aren’t selling,”
Pollock told him. Greenberg tried to help, summoning up the old panegyric for an article
in
Partisan Review
and a second in
Harper’s
Bazaar
. (“If Pollock were a Frenchman . . . people would already be calling him
‘maître’
and speculating in his pictures.”) Still, the “black” paintings did not sell. Pollock
thought that perhaps the collectors would be more receptive if his art were less expensive.
What about prints? He authorized six of the “black” paintings to be photographically
reproduced and printed as serigraphs in editions of twenty-five. The printing was
done by his brother Sande at his shop in Essex, Connecticut. Pollock visited one day
to see how the work was progressing and told his brother, “All I want is five hundred
dollars.”
By the time his show closed, on December 15, Pollock was drinking heavily again. Lee
had once believed that she could nurse and nurture him into abstinence but was beginning
to acknowledge that his pattern of behavior could not be broken: the surge of creative
activity, the surrender to alcohol. The cure, if it existed, was not within her, and
she sought outside help. Earlier that year she had taken Pollock to see Ruth Fox,
a therapist on Lexington Avenue who specialized in alcoholism. The therapist put Pollock
on a drug called Antabuse, which, when combined with alcohol, induces wretched nausea.
Pollock took the drug but also kept drinking.
By the end of 1951 Lee was willing to consider any treatment, no matter how far-fetched.
She listened hopefully as Dr. Elizabeth Hubbard, the homeopathic physician whom Pollock
had been seeing sporadically for more than a decade, told her about a chemist by the
name of Grant Mark, on East Sixty-fifth Street. He had recently invented a formula
for “total well-being” called Grant Mark’s Emulsion, which was made out of various
organic substances including guano—bird droppings. Pollock was willing to try it.
For the next three months Lee poured her husband a cold glass of emulsion at breakfast
and dinner, making sure that he consumed the prescribed amount of one quart per day.
Once a week Pollock drove to the chemist’s office to pick up another seven quarts.
The bills ran into the hundreds of dollars. On one of his trips to the doctor Pollock
stopped off for a drink before returning to Springs and arrived home drunk. Lee met
him at the front door. “Where’s the emulsion?” she asked. Pollock realized
he had left the seven bottles in New York but couldn’t remember exactly where. He
and Lee tried to figure out where they might be, for the substance was too expensive
to forget about. But they never found the missing bottles. Of his experience with
Grant Mark, Pollock wrote to Ossorio the following March, “I feel I have been skinned
alive.”
Pollock and Lee had returned to Springs a few days after his show came down; Lee reasoned
that if she got him out of the city, perhaps he would not drink. But being in Springs
turned out to be no better than being in New York. Night after night, holed up in
the farmhouse, Lee watched her husband get drunk. When he ran out of beer, he got
into his battered Cadillac and drove to Dan Miller’s to buy another six-pack, and
for Lee, watching him get into the car was even worse than watching him drink. She
was afraid that he would have an accident. She started buying the beer herself, stacking
it by the case in the kitchen.
Pollock was having terrible nightmares. One night he dreamed that he was standing
on a high structure and his brothers were trying to push him off. Another night he
dreamed that he was looking at a vacuum cleaner when suddenly it became one of Peggy
Guggenheim’s Lhasa terriers. The dog attacked him and made a hole in his stomach.
A third dream involved a car crash. “Two cars,” he wrote, “—the one I am driving rams
into the first car which my wife has left and run away from. Between the two wrecked
cars is a dead boy.”
Three days after Christmas, at ten o’clock at night, the East Hampton police station
was notified by telephone of an automobile accident in Springs. A patrolman was sent
to the scene. “Weather clear,” the police report begins. “Jackson Pollock . . . driving
a 1941 Cadillac Conv . . . went off North side of road, hitting three mailboxes (in
triangle of intersection) of Louse Point Road . . . hitting telephone pole #30 with
right front wheel, continuing on for 55 feet in a SW direction, hitting a tree head
on.”
The East Hampton Star
ran the story on page one. “Jackson Pollock, Artist, Wrecks Car, Escapes Injury.”