Jackson Pollock (39 page)

By January 1952 Pollock had become exasperated with Betty Parsons. His paintings were
not selling, and as Parsons was the first to admit, “I never pushed sales very hard.
Most dealers love the money. I love the painting.” Such blithe indifference to the
financial side of her business was understandably unnerving to Pollock, who, unlike
his dealer, did not have a wealthy family to fall back on. Besides, as he had recently
learned, Parsons could be penny-pinching despite her claims to the contrary. She had
been squabbling with him over money since the previous spring, when Pollock, in an
attempt “to get out of my financial mess,” had considered applying for a mural commission.
Parsons promptly reminded him that her status as Pollock’s art dealer entitled her
to a share of his outside earnings: “If you cannot give me 15%, then give me 10%,
if not 10%, 5%,” and so on. The matter dragged on for months, with Pollock complaining
to a friend that “Betty sailed last Sat. . . . As usual there was no time to plan
or discuss things.” The Betty Parsons Gallery, once described by Greenberg
as “a place where art goes on,” had become a place where arguments went on.

Pollock was not alone in his dissatisfaction with Parsons. Rothko, Newman, and Clyfford
Still felt she had opened up the gallery to every second-rate painter who had ever
asked for a show and that concentration on a few good artists—mainly themselves—would
yield better financial results. They asked her to drop almost everyone else from the
gallery, a request that went ignored. One by one, artists began threatening to leave
the gallery. Pollock wasn’t just bluffing. At the end of January, a few weeks after
his contract expired, he informed Parsons that he had no intention of signing a new
contract with her. Furthermore, if she couldn’t sell his paintings, he would sell
them himself; he wanted all the paintings in her possession returned to him immediately.
Such impulsive demands made Parsons “very anxious,” as she wrote to Pollock on January
31. She insisted that he stay with her at least until May, which would give her a
chance to sell the paintings from his last show.

Pollock’s disputes with Parsons were his way of venting his frustration over a problem
that was not her fault: no one wanted to buy his paintings. In spite of Pollock’s
reputation, there were very few serious collectors in the fifties, and a handful at
most were willing to speculate in contemporary American art. In short, there was virtually
no market for Pollock’s work, and as Greenberg often tried to explain to him, “Since
Manet, the best art has never gone over fast.” This explanation was of no consolation
to Pollock. For years critics had been announcing with a grandiosity worthy of Barnum
that New York had replaced Paris as the center of contemporary art—yet what exactly
did this mean if he couldn’t sell his paintings? In Europe he was even less appreciated.
His first one-man show in Paris opened in March 1952, at the Studio Paul Facchetti,
a photography studio and gallery on the Rue de Lille. Of the fifteen works on exhibit
only two sold, and adding to this indignity was the fact that the owner of the gallery
did not return his paintings or pay him for the ones that had sold until Pollock sent
a friend into the gallery a year later to see to those details.

In May 1952 Pollock left the Parsons Gallery for one that seemed to offer better prospects.
The Sidney Janis Gallery was located across the hall from Parsons at 15 East Fifty-seventh
Street, but the two galleries had little in common other than their address. Janis,
a short, bespectacled, one-time shirt manufacturer from Buffalo, New York, was a prosperous
businessman who dealt mostly in blue-chip European moderns such as Mondrian, Léger,
and Kandinsky. Pollock had already exhibited in two group shows at the gallery—he
and Lee had exhibited together in a show called “Man and Wife”—and he knew that Janis,
though occasionally gimmicky, at least had a flair for generating publicity and attracting
wealthy collectors. No one could say that Janis wasn’t enterprising. A few months
earlier Lee had mentioned casually to Janis that her husband was looking for a new
dealer. “Do you think the market for Pollock has peaked?” he wondered. “It hasn’t
even been scratched,” Lee insisted. Janis scheduled a show for Pollock for November
of 1952.

It has often been said of Betty Parsons, half-jokingly, that she lost interest in
an artist as soon as he became successful; Janis, to the contrary, made his reputation
by waiting for an artist to become successful before inviting him into the fold. In
the next few years many of the artists at Parsons, including Rothko and Still, would
follow Pollock across the hall to the Janis Gallery. Parsons was indignant at the
exodus from her gallery but helpless to stop it. In the end she couldn’t even hold
onto the physical space her gallery occupied. In 1963 after accusing Janis of convincing
their landlord to have her evicted—which Janis vigorously denied—Parsons sued the
landlord. She lost, and Janis took over her space.

Pollock’s departure from the Parsons Gallery signified the end not only of the gallery’s
most adventurous days but of the larger adventure of Abstract Expressionism. The major
discoveries had all been made, and what was once the radical vanguard was beginning
to seem quite familiar. So entrenched was Pollock’s reputation that when he participated
that spring in a prestigious group show at the Museum of Modern Art called “14 Americans,”
the critics were bored. “The edge is gone,” lamented
Art News
editor Thomas Hess. “We say: ‘Yes, Jackson Pollock . . . it’s about time he got here.’
”

One spring afternoon Pollock visited the Parsons Gallery to remove his unsold paintings
from storage and carry them across the hall to his new gallery. Maybe Janis would
be able to sell them, but maybe not, and for the moment it did not really seem to
matter. Even if he never won a wide audience, he at least had one friend who appreciated
his gift. Late that afternoon he telephoned Tony Smith and asked him, “Can you come
up to the gallery and help me?” Smith, who was surprised by the request since Pollock
rarely asked for help with physical work, arrived a few minutes later. Pollock met
him by the elevator and led him into the storage area, where he picked up a painting,
Number 25, 1951
, a self-portrait in black. He returned to the hallway, pushed the elevator button,
and waited for the doors to open. He shoved the painting at his friend. “Here,” Pollock
said, “get out of here.”

Judging from the many items about Mr. and Mrs. Jackson Pollock that appeared in
The East Hampton Star
throughout the spring and summer, the local townspeople may well have concluded that
the town’s most celebrated couple had an enviable existence. Together they exhibited
at Guild Hall, won prizes, hosted at least one reception, and donated their paintings
to deserving civic causes, such as The Springs Village Improvement Society, which
held a raffle in August. The winners of the raffle, according to the newspaper, came
away with “a bicycle, an automobile tire, a Polaroid camera, an electric iron, an
electric whipper, and to Lionel Jackson of East Hampton, a Pollock painting.”

In reality it was a strained, anxious period for both painters. One of their many
problems was that Lee no longer had a place to exhibit her work. Parsons had recently
told her that if Pollock insisted on leaving the gallery, she too would have to leave.
“I still respect you as an artist,” Parsons had told her, “but it is impossible for
me to look at you and not think of Jackson and it is an association that I cannot
have in here.” The news was a “very severe shock” to Lee, who could not help wondering
whether her status as Pollock’s wife explained not only why she was dropped from the
gallery but why she had been invited to exhibit in the
first place. Her confidence was completely undermined, and a year would pass before
she was able to paint again.

For Pollock, getting down to work was even more of an ordeal. On one hand, he was
eager to start painting again, for his move to the Janis Gallery had galvanized his
competitive instincts. But for the first time in almost a decade no direction seemed
clear to him. In the early months of 1952 he attempted a few “black” paintings, reworking
his style of the past year as if hoping it might provide some clues to what he should
do next. But the “black” paintings did not lead to any new developments. The more
time he spent in his studio, the more anxious he became.

His friends tried to help him but to no avail. A particularly pathetic incident occurred
one night after Pollock telephoned Tony Smith and said that he was feeling very depressed.
Smith arrived in Springs a few hours later and found Pollock alone in the barn. He
was holding a long carving knife and drinking bourbon. The kerosene stove was lit,
with flames shooting from the end of the pipe toward the roof. “For crissakes, Jackson,”
Smith told him, “put it out.” Pollock put out the fire but only to relight it a few
minutes later. On the floor of the barn lay an unfinished painting. “What have you
got here?” Smith asked, noticing that the work was unlike any others. It consisted
entirely of circles, applied with a very light touch, and it made Smith think of something
that George Grosz had once said: “A painter who works in circles is near madness.”

As Smith looked around the studio, he realized that Pollock had done virtually no
work in the past few weeks. The problem, he thought, was that Pollock was still trying
to work in black. “You will never get back to any objectivity,” Smith told him, “unless
you go for color.” Partly because Smith wanted Pollock to start working in color again
but mostly because he was as drunk as Pollock, he proposed that the two of them make
a painting together. He unrolled an enormous sheet of canvas on the floor of the barn
and squiggled some orange paint from a tube. Pollock suddenly perked up. “So, that’s
how you do it,” he mumbled drunkenly. “Here’s how I do it.” By the end of the night
the two
friends had sloshed a thick layer of paint on the canvas, which, in Smith’s words,
“looked like vomit.” When Smith told Pollock he was going inside the house because
he was cold, Pollock said, “I’ll stay here and pray.” He promptly passed out.

About a month later Tony Smith returned to Springs one Sunday afternoon along with
Barnett Newman and his wife. The guests were sitting in the living room when Newman
suggested that Pollock take them out to his studio and show them the painting he had
made with Smith, thinking it would be fun to see it. But Newman regretted the request
as soon as he entered the barn. Emptied paint tubes littered the floor, and bottles
of bourbon lay on their sides. The smell of stale smoke hung in the air. It was obvious
that Pollock had not returned to his studio since Smith had last visited, and an awkward,
embarrassed hush fell over the barn. Newman felt sorry for Pollock and thought to
himself that if he could just get Pollock to handle some paint again maybe he’d overcome
his block. Newman asked him a question about his technique: how did he manage to squeeze
pigment from a tube so that it stretched tautly across the canvas? Pollock offered
to demonstrate, picking up a tube of orange and with one hard squeeze forcing its
entire contents onto the painting he had started with Smith. Newman too tried the
technique, and together the two friends heaped more pigment onto the hopeless painting.

At the end of the summer, with his show at Janis less than three months off, Pollock
returned to his studio and attempted to summon up the will to work that had eluded
him for almost a year. For lack of a better alternative, he went back to color, sometimes
squeezing it sparingly into the crevices of “black” paintings, sometimes splashing
it loosely across large areas. In the mural-sized
Convergence
he poured rivulets of red, yellow, blue, and white directly on top of a “black” painting
and thereby succeeded in burying his style of the past year. But what looked like
an escape was in fact another trap. Instead of breaking new ground Pollock had returned
to his “drip” style of the late forties. He had begun to repeat himself, a process
that was so contrary to his creative instincts that he was virtually incapable of
it. In 1952
his output declined. He produced sixteen paintings that year, fewer than half as many
as in the year before and fewer than a third as many in 1950.
Blue Poles
, widely considered one of his greatest paintings, helps explain the difficulties
he was facing.