Jackson Pollock (35 page)

It turned out to be the most publicized event ever staged by the Abstract Expressionists.
The story was carried on page one of
The New York Times
, on May 22: “18 Painters Boycott Metropolitan; Charge ‘Hostility to Advanced Art.’
” The next day the
Herald Tribune
ran a damning editorial, headlined “The Irascible Eighteen,” the name by which the
artists would soon be identified in a famous group photograph in
Life
. The magazine’s art editor, Dorothy Seiberling, initially suggested to Newman that
the photograph be shot on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum, with the artists carrying
their paintings under their arms. While willing to pose for
Life
, the artists rejected the Metropolitan as a locale. Newman thought they should be
photographed “like bankers,” not outcasts, and Gottlieb insisted on “neutral territory.”
Life
accommodated them, scheduling the photography session at an anonymous studio on West
Forty-fourth Street. This time Pollock had no trouble getting to New York. He rode
the train from East Hampton, on November 26, along with James Brooks, to meet his
fellow protesters on the neutral territory they had requested, which turned out to
be a high-ceilinged photography studio with a drab linoleum floor, windows that faced
an alley, and a background
curtain that no one bothered to close. Photographer Nina Leen told the group to arrange
itself on the chairs and stools scattered about the room. “How do you want us to sit,”
Newman jested, “according to our voices?” Leen said she did not care. The burly Newman
plunked himself down on a stool in the front row. Pollock sat down behind him, on
a higher stool, placing himself in the center of the group.

The black-and-white portrait that appeared in
Life
in January 1951—“Irascible Group of Advanced Artists Led Fight Against Show,” the
caption stated—showed fifteen painters who resembled bankers only if one assumes that
their bank was about to collapse. Rothko, clutching himself self-protectively, eyes
the photographer with a suspicious sideward glance. De Kooning, glaring intently from
the back row, looks like a blond Kafka. The gaunt, ashen-faced Clyfford Still could
be cast as the Grim Reaper. “If some of us look angry,” Motherwell once said in reference
to the tedious, hour-long session, “the anger was probably at the photographer.” Pollock,
however, seems to be enjoying his second appearance in
Life
. Gamely he turns his head over his shoulder and raises a cigarette. He is as handsome
as Gary Cooper. He is leaning toward the camera, betraying no signs of discomfort
with either Nina Leen’s lens or the central position he occupies in both the photograph
and the eyes of the public despite his marginal role in organizing the protest.

“There was only Jackson Pollock. He was the center of the universe.” Thus Marie Pollock,
his sister-in-law, referring to an unhappy family reunion held in Springs that summer.
The get-together, the family’s first in seventeen years, had been organized by Stella
after learning that her son Frank, a rose grower, would be coming to New York from
California to attend a convention for nurserymen. She convinced her other sons to
join her in Springs for a day-long reunion. Charles, who was now an art professor,
came from East Lansing, Michigan; Jay, a printer, from Springfield, Ohio; and Sande,
with whom Stella was still living, from Deep River, Connecticut. The four brothers
arrived with their wives and children, eager to see their famous kid brother. Over
the years they had followed his career closely, with Stella, a
voluminous correspondent, keeping them posted on every development—his exhibitions
(“he had a wonderful show”), his sobriety (“still on the wagon”), and of course the
article in
Life
(“just swell . . . be sure to get it”).

On the day his family arrived in Springs, Pollock had something else on his mind besides
the reunion. He had not long before been selected, along with de Kooning, Gorky, and
four others, to represent the United States at the 1950 Venice Biennale; three of
his “drip” paintings remained on view at the fair throughout the summer. While Pollock
had decided against accompanying his work to Venice, he was eager to hear what the
Italian critics thought about his work. On the day of the reunion he received in the
mail one especially compelling review, “Piccolo discorso sui quandri di Jackson Pollock,”
by critic Bruno Alfieri. Although Pollock could no more understand the text of the
piece than he could its title, he read it again and again, for in the jumble of foreign
words was one word he did understand—“Picasso.” The critic had compared him to Picasso,
and Pollock refused to put down the article until he knew whether the comparison with
his rival was favorable.

As his guests spent the day entertaining themselves in his living room, Pollock remained
seated at the kitchen table poring over the article. Whenever his relatives wandered
into the kitchen to freshen up their drinks or see what he was doing, Pollock asked
them the same question: “Do you know any Italian?” No one did. Pollock asked them
to look at the article anyway, pointing to one line in particular: “E al confronto
di Pollock, Picasso, il povero Pablo Picasso . . . diventa un quieto e conformista
pittore del passato.” His relatives read the line. They grew angry. “Is Picasso more
important than your family?” asked sister-in-law Alma, prompting outraged stares from
both Pollock and Lee. Pollock did leave the kitchen long enough to pose for some group
photographs, but judging from his expression, he resented having to participate. When
Frank Pollock mentioned casually that he was thinking of staying an extra day, Lee
dropped a hint. “You know, Jackson,” she said very loudly, “Betty’s coming tomorrow.”
It was the last time Stella Pollock planned a reunion.

As Pollock must have suspected, the comparison with “povero
Picasso” was favorable. Critic Bruno Alfieri had written that Picasso, compared to
Pollock, was “a quiet conformist, a painter of the past.” The rest of the article,
however, was grossly unflattering. The unflattering parts Pollock had no difficulty
understanding for
Time
magazine reprinted them in English in November 1950. The news item, entitled “Chaos,
Damn It!” reported that Italian critics had tended to “shrug off” Pollock’s appearance
in Europe and that the only critic who “took the bull by the horns” was Bruno Alfieri.
He was quoted as describing Pollock’s art like this: “Chaos. Absolute lack of harmony.
Complete lack of structural organization. Total absence of technique, however rudimentary.
Once again, chaos.” Although
Time
left out the line about Picasso, it did manage to squeeze in the absurd bit of news
that “Pollock followed his canvases to Italy.”

Pollock was outraged by the item in
Time
. How could they not mention the part about Picasso? Didn’t they know what was newsworthy?
Angrily he fired off a telegram to the magazine. “S
IR
,” he wrote. “N
O CHAOS DAMN IT
. D
AMNED BUSY PAINTING AS YOU CAN SEE BY MY SHOW COMING UP NOV. 28
. I’
VE NEVER BEEN TO
E
UROPE
. T
HINK YOU LEFT OUT THE MOST EXCITING PART OF
M
R
. A
LFIERI
’
S PIECE
.” The magazine attempted a reconciliation but only succeeded in driving Pollock to
new levels of exasperation. It published his telegram on December 11, along with an
editor’s note explaining that the most exciting part of Mr. Alfieri’s piece, “at least
for Artist Pollock,” was probably the statement that he “sits at the extreme apex”
of the avant-garde.

One bright June day Pollock was visited in his studio by Rudy Burckhardt, a photographer,
and Robert Goodnough, a painter and critic. They arrived on assignment from
Art News
magazine, which was planning a feature story called “Pollock Paints a Picture.” The
idea of the article was to follow a painting through its various stages of creation
from first to final stroke. Pollock had already agreed to cooperate with the magazine,
promising, by telephone, to start a new painting and attempt to finish it in the presence
of the writer-photographer team.

When the visitors from
Art News
arrived at his studio, however,
they quickly learned that Pollock had no intention of honoring his promise. He could
not be bothered, for his attention was focused on something else. “I can’t decide
whether this painting is finished,” he said, gesturing toward a black, spidery painting
lying on the floor of the barn. Never before had he limited his palette solely to
black nor created such a bold image. It consisted of sweeping black arabesques, flung
dramatically against the stark white expanse of the canvas. Starting a painting in
black was not unusual for Pollock, but in the past he had always gone on to embellish
the image with color in a process that was somewhat akin to developing a charcoal
sketch into a finished painting. This time there was only black, and he wasn’t sure
whether he should leave the painting in such elemental form. His decision was further
complicated by the huge proportions of the canvas. At roughly nine feet high and fifteen
feet long,
Number 32, 1950
, as the work was later titled, was his first mural-sized painting since his mural
for Peggy Guggenheim six years earlier, and Pollock had to be sure that the bare-boned
black image was capable of commanding or structuring all that space. He had been agonizing
over the question for some time and was not about to resolve it in the presence of
Art News
. Still, he did want to be in the magazine. He proposed a solution. “I’ll pretend
I’m painting,” he told Rudy Burckhardt, proceeding to pick up a stubby brush and a
can of paint and to kneel on top of the black mural. As Burckhardt photographed him,
Pollock moved a dry brush across the canvas and pretended for posterity that
Number 32, 1950
, the result of much hard work, had been created with a few carefree tosses of paint.

Pollock later decided that the mural was, in fact, finished. He considered it one
of his best works, an appraisal that many share. In some ways it represents the climax
of his career. Twenty summers earlier Pollock had visited a school outside Los Angeles
and had seen his first mural, Orozco’s
Prometheus
. He had soon after arrived in New York and watched admiringly as Benton and the Mexicans
covered wall after wall with Depression-era murals. He had dreamed about painting
his own mural, yet so inadequate were his skills that he had been unable to secure
a mural commission
on the WPA or elsewhere. By 1950, however, Pollock had not only mastered the tradition
of mural painting but subverted its very purpose. Unlike the murals of the thirties,
Number 32, 1950
does not popularize a philosophy or call for revolution. It
is
a revolution, shattering our notions about what is monumental in art. It can be argued
that Pollock’s accomplishment was to wed the public world of the mural with the private
world of his psyche in a way that was utterly new; but while that explains his newness,
it doesn’t explain his accomplishment.

Pollock’s accomplishment was to reinvent the simplest element of art—line, “the essence
of all,” as he had written with remarkable prescience two decades earlier.
Number 32, 1950
(
Fig. 25
) shows him at the height of his powers, capable of creating not just a mural but
a great work of art with the aid of nothing more elaborate than a naked black line.
No form, no color, just line. He can do whatever he wants with it, tapering it into
filigreelike delicacy or thickening it until it is heavy as mud. He can make it tauten,
slacken, halt, plunge, soar, race, and fly, and reinvent it inch by inch to accommodate
the subtlest nuances of feeling. Because he was unable to express himself through
the readymade techniques of art, Pollock devised his own techniques, and in the process
he became a great draftsman whose facility with line can withstand comparison with
predecessors as formidable as, say, Ingres or Botticelli.

On July 1, 1950 Pollock attended an art opening at Guild Hall, a long, low, whitewashed
brick building at the southern end of Main Street in East Hampton. On exhibit was
a show called “Ten East Hampton Abstractionists.” The list of participants was impressive,
particularly for a small-town community center. Besides Pollock, the show also included
Lee Krasner, James Brooks, John Little, Wilfrid Zogbaum, Buffie Johnson, and several
others who had settled in the area in the five years since Pollock had moved to Springs.
Pollock was standing alone at the opening when a young photographer from
Harper’s Bazaar
introduced himself. His name was Hans Namuth and he was renting a house for the summer
in nearby Water Mill. In his thick German accent Namuth told Pollock that he greatly
admired his work and would
like to photograph him sometime, though not necessarily for
Harper’s Bazaar
. For a moment Pollock looked reluctant. “Well,” he said, “why not?”