Jackson Pollock (22 page)

About a week before the opening of his show Pollock received a copy of the exhibition
catalogue. The introduction by James Johnson Sweeney, the first text devoted to Pollock’s
work, offered ardent praise. “Pollock’s talent is volcanic. It has fire. It is unpredictable. . . . It
is lavish, explosive, untidy. . . . What we need is more young men who paint from
inner impulsion without an ear to what the critic or spectator may feel—painters who
will risk spoiling a canvas to say something in their own way.” At the same time Sweeney
acknowledged that there was room for improvement: “It is true that Pollock needs self-discipline.”

Pollock sent Sweeney a gracous thank-you note on November 3. “I have read your forward
to the catalogue, and I am excited. I am happy—The self-discipline you speak of—will
come, I
think, as a natural growth of a deeper, more integrated, experience. Many thanks . . .”

For all his polite comments, Pollock was upset by Sweeney’s claim that he lacked self-discipline.
Didn’t Sweeney understand how much discipline it took to paint a work like
The She-Wolf?
His work may have
looked
undisciplined, but the effect was entirely deliberate. Pollock was determined to
prove to Sweeney that he had erred in his judgment. He returned to his studio and
painted a work called
Search for a Symbol
, an elegant, decorative painting in which biomorphic shapes float against a creamy
pink background. Without waiting for the painting to dry, Pollock carried it up to
the gallery and showed it to Sweeney. “Here,” he said, “I want you to see a really
disciplined painting.”
Search for a Symbol
was added to his show at the last minute and put on display, as an amused reviewer
noted, “wet with new birth.”

Pollock’s first show at Art of This Century, November 9–29, opened to generally favorable
reviews. While some critics found his canvases overbearing, they were so impressed
by Pollock’s raw energy that they were willing to disregard the flaws. There was a
crude strength to his painting that no one could ignore. With time and experience,
it was believed, Pollock had a chance of becoming one of the best painters in the
country. Already he had a distinctive style.

Robert Coates, of
The New Yorker
, who one year earlier had admired Pollock’s entry in the “Spring Salon,” remained
enthusiastic. “At Art of This Century,” he wrote, “there is what seems to be an authentic
discovery—the paintings of Jackson Pollock . . . the effect of his one noticeable
influence, Picasso, is a healthy one, for it imposes a certain symmetry on his work
without detracting from its basic force and vigor.”

Clement Greenberg, the reviewer for
The Nation
, found “surprise and fulfillment” in Pollock’s first show. He was particularly fond
of the smaller works, which he considered among “the strongest abstract paintings
I have yet seen by an American.” The larger paintings, by comparison, struck him as
less successful, but perhaps that was inevitable given the enormity of Pollock’s ambitions.
“Being young and full of energy,” Greenberg noted, “he takes orders he can’t fill.”
Greenberg was to emerge as Pollock’s most ardent champion after his second show.

In the three weeks in November that the show remained on view Pollock and Lee stopped
by the gallery almost every day to see if any sales had been made. Lee often stayed
for a few hours, hoping she might be able to interest visitors in Pollock’s work.
Peggy Guggenheim too worked hard at trying to sell the paintings, if for no other
reason than that she was paying Pollock $150 a month and was eager to recoup the expense.
But by the time the show closed, none of the paintings had sold. Pollock was poor
as ever, and his hardest work still lay ahead—he had to finish the mural commissioned
by Peggy Guggenheim.

With his show behind him, Pollock returned to his studio, prepared to devote himself
to the mural. He had stretched the canvas in July 1943. Now it was December. The canvas
was still blank.

When Pollock emerged from his studio after his first day of work on the mural, Lee
didn’t ask him how it had gone. She could tell from the look on his face that he had
been unable to get started. The next day went no better. Nor the next week. Pollock
couldn’t get started.

He had wanted to paint a mural for many years, ever since his student days when he
had visited Benton’s studio and watched admiringly as his teacher produced giant murals
about American history and culture. And though the mural movement of the thirties
was over, Pollock’s feelings about mural painting hadn’t changed; it had never been
his intention to paint a mural that would advance some social cause. What appealed
to him about murals was their enormous size; a mural is larger than life. As one who
was obsessed with a need to prove himself, Pollock no doubt saw mural painting as
the ultimate test of his artistic prowess.

But the enormous size of the piece of canvas in his studio posed some very specific
problems. How would he structure the mural? How would he manage to sustain tension
over so large an area? Only a few weeks earlier Clement Greenberg had written in
The Nation
that Pollock’s one flaw as a painter was his inability to handle size. The larger
the paintings in the show, Greenberg had written, had been less successful than the
smaller ones, as the artist “takes orders he can’t fill . . . spends himself in too
many directions at once . . . [his] space tautens but does not burst into a picture.”

After two weeks Pollock told Lee that her presence was interfering with his work.
He asked her to leave the apartment for a few days. She went to Huntington to visit
her parents. When she returned three days later the canvas was still blank.

Late one afternoon in January 1944 Lee’s friend John Little stopped by the apartment.
He found Lee pacing nervously. “Jackson’s supposed to deliver that mural tomorrow,”
she told him. “He hasn’t even started it.”

When John Little stopped by the next day Lee was all smiles. “You won’t believe what
happened,” she said. “Jackson finished the painting last night.”

After a month of agonizing, Pollock had painted the mural in one night.

Working with both a stick and a brush, Pollock had created a syncopated arrangement
of swooping black lines and whirling forms that charge the picture surface with “allover”
intensity (
Fig. 18
). At first glance the mural looks wholly abstract, but the swooping black lines are
actually totems, or stick figures, that have been partly obscured. There are eight
of them altogether, and they are shown in profile, their back legs raised slightly
as if in midstep. In their static gait across the canvas the tall, spindly figures
give the painting structure, like a scaffold that holds everything in place. Against
this rigid framework is a swirling overlay of turquoise and yellow strokes, each one
intertwining with the next and uniting the figures in a rhythmic ritual procession.
Mural
, with its circling strokes and giant arabesques, is a cross between painting and
drawing that hints at the crucial role of line in Pollock’s future work.

Pollock was proud of the mural. When Peggy Guggenheim sent a truck to his studio in
January 1944 to pick it up and transport it to her apartment on East Sixty-first Street,
Pollock rode
along with the truckers. He arrived at Peggy’s apartment to find that his patron was
not home—she was at the gallery—but had assigned the job of installing the mural to
her friends Marcel Duchamp and David Hare. It took the two artists only moments to
figure out that the mural was eight inches too long for the designated spot in the
hallway. Duchamp asked Pollock a touchy question: Would he mind very much if they
cut eight inches off the end of the work? Pollock said it was fine with him.

While Duchamp was installing the mural, Pollock went upstairs to the living room and
helped himself to a drink. He proceeded to get very drunk and telephoned his patron
at the gallery to ask her to come home. Peggy said she couldn’t come home; she had
work to do. When Pollock called again, Peggy slammed down the phone. He continued
to call throughout the afternoon and pleaded with her to come home. In her autobiography
Peggy Guggenheim recounts that at one point during that difficult afternoon Pollock
took off his clothes and wandered stark naked into a party being given by her roommate
Jean Connolly. As the guests looked on in dismay, he urinated in the fireplace. Like
other stories told about Pollock, this is one that many of his acquaintances are fond
of telling but none quite remember having witnessed.

With his show behind him and the mural completed, Pollock entered a severe depression.
He took to heavy drinking and surrendered to feelings of self-loathing and despair.
A typically distressing incident occurred one day when Hofmann came to visit along
with two of his students, Fred Hauck and Janet Chase, whom he hoped to introduce to
Pollock. Halfway up the four flights they heard a loud noise. An easel came tumbling
down the stairs. Hofmann picked it up and carried it back to the studio, where he
found Pollock in frightening condition. When Hofmann asked him why he had thrown the
easel down the stairs, Pollock started to cry. “I hate my easel,” he said. “I hate
art.”

Pollock’s drinking made Lee angry. She punished him by ignoring him, forcing him into
solitude. When her friend Betsy Zogbaum came to pick her up for a dinner party one
night, Lee didn’t bother to introduce Pollock. “Who’s that?” Zogbaum
asked. “He’s nobody,” Lee snapped. When Harold and May Rosenberg visited from Washington,
where the critic was working for the Office of War Information, they too wondered
about the silent man in the apartment. “I thought he was the handyman,” May Rosenberg
recalled. “I thought he had come to frame her paintings or stretch her canvas.”

Pollock could no longer turn to his psychotherapists for help. He had stopped seeing
Violet de Laszlo, the doctor who had gotten him out of the war, the previous summer
at Lee’s insistence. If he hadn’t stopped drinking after five years of counseling,
Lee figured, he never would. She told him the expense wasn’t worth it. Dr. de Laszlo
once commented: “Lee was very possessive and so she was threatened by anyone else
on whom he was dependent.”

Lee took Pollock to see her own doctor, a homeopathic physician named Elizabeth Hubbard.
She practiced on East Seventy-third Street, on the ground floor of a brownstone. Pollock
immediately liked the doctor, a vivacious, gray-haired woman who believed she could
restore him to well-being with herbal remedies. Regardless of the efficacy of such
treatments, Dr. Hubbard was one person whom Pollock could trust. Like his other doctors,
she accepted him as he was, and he felt comfortable in her presence. He often stopped
by her office to talk to her; if Dr. Hubbard was busy with another patient, she would
send him upstairs to her apartment until she was free to see him. Her daughter remembers
coming home from school on several occasions to find Pollock in the living room, and
the sight was upsetting. “He’d just sit there with his head in his hands,” she said.

In the meantime Pollock’s artistic reputation was growing steadily. He did very little
to promote himself, but that wasn’t necessary; other people did it for him. One of
his champions was his friend Robert Motherwell, who was also exhibiting at Art of
This Century. He reviewed Pollock’s show in the February 1944 issue of
Partisan Review
. “Certain individuals represent a younger generation’s artistic chances,” Motherwell
wrote, going on to say, rather grimly, that most of those individuals were destined
to fail. “There is disease and premature death; hunger and alcoholism
and frustration; the historical moment may turn wrong . . . the hazards are so great
that no more than five out of a whole young generation are able to develop to the
end.” He felt that Pollock represented one of those five. He didn’t say who the other
four were.

That same month a magazine called
Arts and Architecture
ran an interview with Pollock, and the piece was accompanied by pictures of
The Guardians of the Secret
and
Search for a Symbol
—though the pictures and titles of the paintings were reversed. The editor of the
magazine was a friend of Peggy Guggenheim’s, and his original idea was to have Pollock
write a short essay about his work. Pollock “obviously wanted to accept,” Motherwell
has recalled, “but was shy about his lack of literary ability.” So Motherwell proposed
that the magazine do an interview, with Motherwell asking the questions anonymously
and Pollock supplying answers. In his enthusiasm Motherwell ended up answering several
of his own questions.

Another devoted friend and supporter was James Johnson Sweeney. As a member of the
acquisitions committee at the Museum of Modern Art, he had been trying for some time
to convince the museum to purchase Pollock’s
She-Wolf
. Alfred Barr was definitely interested, but felt that the price, $650, was too high.
The museum asked Peggy whether she was willing to let the painting go at $450. She
refused, and the deal appeared to be off. But the museum reconsidered in April 1944,
when Sweeney wrote an article on contemporary art for
Harper’s Bazaar
and illustrated it with a large color reproduction of
The She-Wolf
. On May 2 Pollock received a telegram: “V
ERY HAPPY TO ANNOUNCE THE MUSEUM BOUGHT
S
HE
W
OLF FOR $600 TODAY
. L
OVE
P
EGGY
G
UGGEN-HEIM
.”

It was Pollock’s first sale to a museum and may well have been his actual first sale
since the days, a decade earlier, when the Bentons had purchased an occasional work
from him so he’d have some money. Pollock of course was pleased, but it was hard for
him to get excited about the sale given his dismal financial situation. “I am getting
$150 a month from the gallery, which just about doesn’t meet the bills,” he wrote
to Charles that May. “I will have to sell a lot of work thru the year to get it above
$150.
The Museum of Modern Art bought the painting reproduced in Harpers this week which
I hope will stimulate further sales.”