Jackson Pollock
Authors: Deborah Solomon
Pollock
A BIOGRAPHY
Deborah Solomon
First Cooper Square Press edition 2001
This Cooper Square Press paperback edition of
Jackson Pollock
is an unabridged republication of the edition first published in New York in 1987.
It is reprinted by arrangement with the author.
Copyright © 1987 by Deborah Solomon
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical
means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission
from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
Designed by Eve Kirch
Published by Cooper Square Press
An Imprint of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group
150 Fifth Avenue, Suite 817
New York, New York 10011
Distributed by National Book Network
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Solomon, Deborah.
Jackson Pollock : a biography / Deborah Solomon.
p. cm.
Originally Published: New York : Simon and Schuster, 1987.
ISBN: 978-0-8454-1182-6
1. Pollock, Jackson, 1912–1956. 2. Painters—United States—Biography. 3. Abstract expressionism—United
States. I. Title.
ND237.P73 S65 2001
759.13—dc21
2001028915
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National
Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
For helping me tell this story I am indebted to the following individuals: Mary Abbott-Clyde,
Frances Avery, Will Barnet, Ethel Baziotes, Josephine Ben-Shmuel, Thomas P. Benton,
Grace Borgenicht, Carol Braider, the late Fritz Bultman, Rudy Burckhardt, Peter Busa,
Leo Castelli, Janet Chase-Hauck, Herman Cherry, Irene Crippen, Whitney Darrow, Jr.,
Fielding Dawson, Dorothy Dehner, Joseph Delaney, Paul Falkenberg, Herbert Ferber,
Helen Frankenthaler, Constance Garner, Sidney Geist, Max Granick, Clement Greenberg,
Florence and Peter Grippe, David Hare, Ben Heller, Joseph L. Henderson, Clair Heyer,
Rebecca Hicks, Harry Holtzman, Axel Horn, Elizabeth Hubbard, Merle Hubbard, Vetta
Huston, Sidney Janis, Paul Jenkins, Buffie Johnson, Mervin Jules, Reuben Kadish, Jacob
Kainen, Jerome Kamrowski, Nathaniel Kaz, Ruth Kligman, Joyce Kootz, the late Lee Krasner,
Ibram Lassaw, Berthe Laxineta, Violet de Laszlo, Harold Lehman, the late John Little,
Josephine Little, Cile Lord, Jessie Benton Lyman, Arloie McCoy, Jason McCoy, Yvonne
McKinney, George Sid Miller, Sue Mitchell, Robert Motherwell, Hans Namuth, Annalee
Newman, Ruth and Tino Nivola, Alfonso Ossorio, Frances and Wayne Overholtzer, Philip
Pavia, Eleanor Piacenza, Alma and Jay Pollock, Charles Pollock, Elizabeth Pollock,
Frank and Marie Pollock, Herbert L. Pratt, Milton Resnick, Dan Rice, Dorothea Rockburne,
May Tabak Rosenberg, Patia Rosenberg, Lou Rosenthal, Berton Roueché, Irving Sandler,
Nene Schardt, Rachel Scott, Dorothy Seiberling, Charles Seliger, Jane Smith, Eleanor
Steffen, Ronald Stein, Ruth Stein, Hedda Sterne, Wally Strautin, the late James Johnson
Sweeney, Allene Talmage, Araks Tolegian, the late Manuel Tolegian, Esteban and Harriet
Vicente, Theodore Wahl, James H. Wall, Joan Ward, Enez Whipple, Roger Wilcox, Reginald
Wilson, Maia Wojciechowska, Elisabeth Zogbaum, and the late Marta Vivas-Zogbaum.
I am grateful to Lee Krasner for granting me unrestricted access to Pollock’s papers.
Eugene Victor Thaw, the executor of the Pollock estate since Miss Krasner’s death,
has kindly given me permission to quote from those papers.
Most of Pollock’s papers are located at the Archives of American Art in Washington,
DC. I owe special thanks to the Archives staff, particularly Bill McNaught and Jemison
Hammond, for their gracious assistance and patience.
Some of Pollock’s letters remain in private hands. I am grateful to Arloie McCoy,
Rebecca Hicks, and Charles Seliger for letting me examine their letters. Frank Pollock
made available to me the letters of his mother, and Irene Crippen allowed me to consult
some additional letters from Stella Pollock.
I am especially indebted to Stephen Campbell of the Thomas H. and Rita P. Benton Testamentary
Trusts, United Missouri Bank, Kansas City, for granting me unrestricted access to
and permission to quote from the Bentons’ personal papers.
Many people aided me in my search for pertinent documents. My thanks to Ray Ferren
of Guild Hall; Bonnie Clearwater of the Rothko Foundation; Sandy Hirsh of the Adolph
Gottlieb Foundation; Marilyn Cohen of the Betty Parsons Foundation; Lawrence Campbell
of the Art Students League; Altamae Markham of the Park County Library, in Cody, Wyoming;
Ward Jackson
of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Dorothy King of the East Hampton Free Library;
and Stephen L. Schlesinger of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Time-Life,
Inc. provided me with transcripts of unpublished interviews with Jackson Pollock,
Betty Parsons, and several others. Pat Carlton shared with me her research on Caroline
Pratt, and Constance Schwartz shared her research on Lee Krasner. Clair Heyer led
me through an overgrown church cemetery in Tingley, Iowa, in search of the gravestones
of Pollock’s ancestors.
I am grateful to the New York Public Library for use of the Frederick Lewis Allen
Memorial Room and to the Dallas Public Library for use of the Frances Sanger Mossiker
study room.
John Herman, my first editor, got me off on a strong start. Bob Bender provided superb
editorial advice later on and improved my manuscript immeasurably. Kathy Robbins,
my literary agent, has done as much as anyone to encourage me and has also provided
essential editorial guidance. Her assistant, Loretta Fidel, has been most helpful.
Many others have supported me over the past few years, but I am particularly grateful
to Kent Sepkowitz, Karen Marder, Douglas Pollack, David Firestone, Lee Stern, Jesse
Kornbluth, and James Atlas.
To my parents
and my sisters Lisa and Cherise
2. Manual Arts High School: 1928–30
3. Art Students League: 1930–33
4. Life with the Bentons: 1933–35
8. Surrealists in New York: 1942–43
11. “Grand Feeling When It Happens”: 1947–48
12. “The Greatest Living Painter”: 1949–50
13. The “Black” Paintings: 1951
My God! I’d rather go to Europe than to heaven!
—American painter William Merritt Chase (1849–1916)
when offered the chance to study abroad
Everyone is going or gone to Paris. With the old shit (that you can’t paint in America).
Have an idea they will all be back
.
—Jackson Pollock, 1946
Origins
Jackson Pollock’s mother, Stella May McClure, was born in May 1875 in a two-room log
cabin in Tingley, Iowa, an isolated farming town in the southernmost part of the state.
As the oldest child in a struggling pioneer family, Stella was saddled with responsibilities
from her earliest years. She quit school after the sixth grade to help raise her six
brothers and sisters, two of whom died in childhood. The family was poor but respectable,
and it gave them an edge of distinction to earn their livelihood by a means other
than farming. Stella’s father, John McClure, was a mason and carpenter who laid most
of the foundations in Tingley; and her mother, Cordelia, was known among the townspeople
for her weaving. Stella, like her parents, was good with her hands. Besides sewing
all the clothes for her family, by the time she was a teen she was sewing beautiful
long dresses that she sold to the wealthier women in town. She loved fine, well-crafted
things, and it made her proud to be descended on both sides from weavers. Once when
she was asked to write a family history, the only
people she included were the craftsmen, as if no one else really mattered. “Great
Grand Pa Boyd was born in Ireland was a linen weaver,” she noted. “Great Grand Mother
Speck weaver of woolens and carpets. My mother wove first piece of linen when she
was sixteen.”
Stella’s grandparents were Irish weavers of Presbyterian stock who had emigrated around
the time of the great potato famine and settled in Ohio in the 1840s. Her parents,
John and Cordelia McClure, both of whom grew up in Iowa, had traveled to Tingley by
covered wagon in the 1870s, when land was selling for ten dollars an acre and farmers
were burning fields of bluestem grass to make room for corn. Tingley was off the track
of pioneer cross-state travel, but rumors of a coming railroad drew enough settlers
to fill up the farms. When the Humeston & Shenandoah Railroad Company ran a line through
Tingley in 1882, the town prospered quickly. Within two years its population swelled
from one hundred to four hundred and its Main Street was lined with sixteen businesses,
including two lumberyards, three general stores, a hotel, a blacksmith shop, and a
livery stable. The townspeople were mostly farmers who grew crops, raised cattle,
and shipped their livestock by railroad to faraway cities that the farmers themselves
rarely visited.