Jackson Pollock (40 page)

Blue Poles
was conceived after Pollock went back to the painting he had made with Tony Smith
and Barnett Newman. By daylight the image looked grotesque, and he knew it would have
to be destroyed. But the Belgian linen on which it was painted, measuring roughly
seven feet high and eighteen feet long, was too valuable to be discarded (it had cost
him about fifty dollars), and he decided he would try to salvage it. One day that
summer he repainted the entire canvas, creating a mural-sized “drip” painting that
was bluish in tone and dense in texture. After tacking the painting to a wall in his
studio for a period of consideration, Pollock decided it “didn’t work.” The painting,
though monumental in size, possessed none of the monumental calm of his earlier murals.
Its weaving rhythms of paint, instead of balancing one another, simply sat on the
canvas like so much slop. Part of the problem was color. For fear of repeating himself,
he had forced himself to work in strong hues, which made it that much more difficult
to integrate the disparate parts of the image into a single, overwhelming whole.

Over the next few weeks, in at least six work sessions, Pollock tried to save the
painting. “This won’t come through,” he told Lee many times, despairing at his inability
to recapture the coherence of his earlier work. Finally, in frustration, Pollock tried
a solution that he had not used in more than a decade. He superimposed eight vertical
“poles” on the image, spacing them at equal distances and tilting them slightly at
opposing perpendicular angles. The massive blue poles, with their rough, cragged edges,
accomplished what his “drips” alone no longer could; they charged the painting with
a formidable sense of order and restraint. For Pollock
Blue Poles
was a victory, but a narrow one. His creative powers had begun to dissipate, and
the device of the “poles” attests to his desperation as surely as the invisible under-layers
by Newman and Smith.

Pollock’s inaugural show at the Janis Gallery, with
Blue
Poles, Convergence
, and ten other paintings, opened in November to wide critical acclaim. It was reviewed
favorably in
The Nation, The New York Times, The New Yorker
, and the art magazines, with
Art News
voting it the second-best one-man show of the year (after Miró). For Pollock, however,
the show was a terrible disappointment. He telephoned the gallery often, hoping to
hear that sales had been made, but the best news Janis could offer him was that a
collector or two had stopped into the gallery and promised to consider his work. A
typically exasperating incident occurred when a collector from Baltimore who had agreed
to buy a certain “drip” painting backed out because the painting in question was four
inches too long for his living room wall. By the time the show closed only one painting
had been sold—
Number 8, 1952
—and it was not even a large painting. Pollock received a check for a thousand dollars,
his entire earnings from the gallery that year.

His humiliation was keen. He had moved to the Janis Gallery out of anger with Parsons,
yet realized now that his anger had been unjustified. It was not Parsons’ fault that
she had been unable to sell his paintings. The simple fact was that no one could sell
them. The public did not want his paintings; it did not want
him
. In his frustration Pollock telephoned Sidney Janis one night when he was drunk and
yelled into the phone: “This is Jackson Pollock and I hear you like my painting. Why
don’t you buy one?”

When Pollock’s show closed Janis removed
Blue Poles
from its wooden stretcher, rolled it up, and placed it in storage in an unlocked
stairwell. A year later Lee expressed concern that the painting might crack if left
in that position. Janis didn’t have room to store the painting unrolled, so he sent
it back to Springs. In January 1954
Blue Poles
was shipped back to the Janis Gallery and shown for a second time in a group exhibition
called “Nine American Painters Today.” This time the painting sold. It was purchased
by the collector Fred Olsen at the urging of Tony Smith, who was designing a house
for the Olsens in Connecticut. Olsen paid Janis $6000, of which Pollock received $4000.
Two years later Olsen sold the painting to collector Ben Heller for
$32,000. In September 1973 Heller sold it to the Australian National Gallery in Canberra
for $2 million, then the highest price ever paid for a work by an American artist.

One voice was missing from the chorus of praise accompanying Pollock’s first show
at the Janis Gallery. Clement Greenberg did not review the exhibit. He felt that Pollock’s
new paintings marked a falling off from his earlier work and that for the first time
Pollock had produced “not bad paintings, but paintings where the inspiration was flagging.”

As a loyal friend, Greenberg decided to keep his opinions between Pollock and himself;
there was no need to castigate him publicly. Besides, Pollock had already produced
more than enough evidence to justify his reputation as the greatest painter of his
era and had nothing to apologize for. Greenberg continued to champion him; if he couldn’t
promote the new paintings, he’d promote the old ones. In the fall of 1952 he organized
the first retrospective of Pollock’s career. It consisted of eight works, dating from
1943 to 1951, hung in a barn on the campus of Bennington College.

For Pollock the retrospective was not so much a tribute as a tribulation. Already
Greenberg was burying him, acting as if his career had ended with his 1951 “black”
paintings. And as much as Pollock recognized the shortcomings of his 1952 paintings,
he resented having to hear about them from Greenberg. Perhaps it was inevitable that
Pollock and his champion would have a falling out. It happened on November 16, when
Pollock, along with Lee, visited Bennington for the opening of his show. The reception
was a small, genteel affair, hosted by the painter and art teacher Paul Feeley and
attended by faculty members and students. At one point during the party Pollock walked
over to the bar and started pouring himself a drink when Greenberg caught sight of
him and said to himself: “The last thing I want is for Pollock to get drunk at Bennington.”
Taking no account of what the guests might think, Greenberg loudly ordered Pollock
to put down the drink. Pollock became embarrassed, blushing noticeably
as he tried to conjure up the appropriate comment. Only three words came out, but
their message was unmistakable. “You’re a fool,” Pollock told Greenberg. Almost two
years would pass before they spoke to each other again.

Within a few weeks Pollock’s anger with Greenberg had paled compared with his anger
at another critic. At least Greenberg understood his art, which was more than Pollock
could say for Harold Rosenberg. In December 1952 Pollock picked up a copy of
Art News
and learned that his art, according to his neighbor Harold, could best be defined
as an “encounter” between the artist and his canvas. “At a certain moment,” the article
began, “the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena
in which to act. . . . What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.”

Pollock was appalled by Rosenberg’s famous essay on “action painting.” Even though
the article did not mention any contemporary painters by name, Pollock felt sure that
the piece was about him. It had to be, for it even included a comment he had once
made to Rosenberg. The previous summer, a time when he was having difficulty getting
down to work, he had casually referred to his canvas as an “arena,” perhaps thinking
of Picasso’s
corridas
, or bullfights. The last thing he had meant to imply was that he considered the canvas
“an arena in which to act,” but there was his word, completely out of context, with
Rosenberg building a theory around it and caricaturing him as a Promethean paint-flinger
who cared more about the act of hurling paint than making good paintings.

Rosenberg later denied that Pollock’s use of the word “arena” had given him the idea
for the article, and indeed, one does not have to be a philosopher to recognize the
piece as a variation on the existentialist fashions of the fifties or to suspect that
it was inspired by the Hans Namuth movie in which Pollock literally becomes an actor.
But that did not lessen Pollock’s frustration. To the outside world he was suddenly
an “action painter,” a title that must have struck him as cruelly ironic. His creative
powers had begun to wane. Inside his studio the action was virtually over.

The next four years of Pollock’s life were dominated by a struggle against alcoholism
and depression. He did manage to produce a few good paintings but agonized constantly
over whether he was “saying anything.” So severe were his self-doubts that one day
he called his wife into his studio and, gesturing toward a finished painting, asked
her without a trace of irony, “Is this a painting?” Unable to work, he lost all sense
of purpose. He talked about suicide but did not attempt it with means any faster than
alcohol. He took to spending long hours at local bars, particularly Cavagnaro’s, on
Newtown Lane, whose owner recalls the sight of him “pulling up in his coupe at eight-thirty
or nine in the morning for his double Grand-Dad on the rocks.” His days often ended
at the East Hampton police station, where well-intentioned officers, who knew he was
someone important, let him off with a mere reprimand for his drunken recklessness.
A typical incident occurred in April 1953 when he drove his Model A into the opposing
lane of traffic on Main Street and forced a motorist off the
road. On other occasions driving a car was altogether beyond his powers. “Found Jackson
Pollock outside on sidewalk lying down,” notes one item in the police blotter.

The summer of 1953 was Pollock’s last period of sustained creative activity, and the
ten or so works he completed are a tribute to his persistence in the face of fanatic
self-doubt. In most of his late works Pollock rejected his celebrated “drip” style
for a style resembling the European moderns, as if heeding Picasso’s dictum that “To
copy others is necessary but to copy oneself is pathetic.” Pollock’s
Easter and the Totem
, an elegant painting with pretty swatches of pink and green pinned flat against vertical
planes, has often been likened to Matisse’s
Bathers by a River. Sleeping Effort
, with its vibrantly colored undulating forms, evokes both Matisse and Kandinsky.
In
Portrait and a Dream
, a long horizontal canvas rigidly divided into two sections, a big Picasso-like head
balances a wiry tangle of black-and-white lines. There is an undeniable strength to
these paintings, but what finally comes across is an emptiness beneath the surface.
The Deep
, which shows a huge floe of ice split down the middle by a crack, seems oddly contrived;
unable to recapture the meaning that had unfolded almost magically in his earlier
work, Pollock turned to heavy-handed symbolism.

When Pollock’s second show at the Janis Gallery opened in February 1954—it was Janis
who had Pollock switch back from numbering to naming his paintings so he’d be able
to keep them straight—the critics were approving. “To begin with they’re really painted,
not dripped!” gushed Emily Genauer in the
Herald Tribune
. Pollock, however, was long past the point of driving satisfaction from good notices.
He recognized his 1953 paintings for what they were: an admirable effort to continue
working at a time when he wasn’t quite sure of what he wanted to say. For so many
years he had raced forward, testing limits, pushing at extremes, discarding discoveries
as soon as he came upon them; but he could no longer sustain this momentum. For the
second consecutive year he had failed to move forward, and unable to move forward,
Pollock quickly lost faith in his abilities. In 1954 he completed only one painting.
In 1955 he completed
Search
and
Scent
.
In the last year of his life he completed nothing. Many of his friends agreed among
themselves that the reason Pollock stopped painting was that he had already done everything
he could, and whether this is true we can of course never know. But as the sculptor
David Smith wrote to Adolph Gottlieb: “I don’t agree that he had shot his bolt. He
had shot a bolt but he had been bolting for fifteen years, and he had other bolts
left. But bottles won.”