Jackson Pollock (18 page)

Igor left New York without telling Lee, packing his suitcases and disappearing in
the middle of the night. When she woke up, he was gone. A few weeks later she moved
out of the room that she had shared with him and set up her own place on Ninth Street.
On the walls of her studio she scribbled a few lines from Delmore Schwartz’s translation
of Rimbaud’s
A Season in Hell:

To whom shall I hire myself out? What beast must I adore?
What holy image is attacked: What hearts shall I break?
What lie must I maintain? In what blood tread?

The lines were written in black crayon except for a few words—“What lie must I maintain?”
Those were written in blue.

In November 1941 Lee received a postcard from her friend John Graham. “Dear Lenore,”
he wrote, “I am arranging at an uptown gallery a show of French and American paintings
with excellent publicity, etc. I have Braque, Picasso . . . I want to have your last
large painting. I will drop [in] at your place Friday afternoon.”

“American and French Paintings,” the show organized by
Graham, opened in January 1942 to favorable publicity. Pollock and de Kooning received
the first reviews of their careers, though the comments were rather brief. “Pollack”
was cited in
Art News
for his “general whirling figures” and de Kooning, identified in
Art Digest
as “William Kooning,” was singled out as “strange.” Lee wasn’t mentioned at all,
nor was John Graham, and none of the paintings sold. “The Americans looked very good,”
de Kooning once said, “but nobody paid attention. It was not like today. People just
weren’t buying American painting.”

When the exhibit closed in February 1942, Pollock and Lee removed their paintings
from the gallery and took them back to Lee’s place on Ninth Street, where they were
now spending most of their time. Pollock hung up his
Birth
on a wall dominated by Lee’s Cubist still lifes. He told her he wanted her to keep
the painting for herself. It was the first of many works he was to give to her over
the years.

Pollock was looking at Lee’s paintings one day when he offered her some advice. He
told her to sign them. Lee, who had never signed her paintings, disagreed. She gave
him a lecture on Mondrian, telling him Mondrian didn’t sign his paintings because
signatures clutter up the picture surface and ruin the geometrical purity of the design.
“You have to sign your paintings,” Pollock insisted. Lee started to tease him, saying
the only reason he signed his canvases was because Benton did, and the only reason
Benton did was because the Old Masters did. As Lee was talking, Pollock suddenly stood
up. He loaded a brush with black pigment, walked over to a painting hanging on the
wall, and across the bottom, in large, harshly slanted script, wrote “L. Krassner.”
He went on to the next canvas: “L. Krassner,” and so on, until every painting in the
room bore his mark.

Lee didn’t take any chances after that. She signed her paintings. She also managed
to register her protest, signing them in abbreviated form—“L.K.”

While Pollock and Lee were spending most of their time by themselves, his circle of
acquaintances was expanding. She introduced him to everyone she knew and often invited
people up to his studio to see his work. He met her friends from the Hofmann
School, friends from the Project, and more friends still from the American Abstract
Artists. But this is not to imply that Pollock’s life became more social; to the contrary,
Lee’s became more solitary. Most of her friends found it difficult to talk to him
as he seemed preoccupied with his problems. To Fritz Bultman, a student of Hofmann’s,
Pollock was a “human being in anguish.” To May Rosenberg, the wife of the critic,
he was simply “a guy in overalls who never said a word.” Most of Lee’s friends couldn’t
figure out what she saw in him.

To others Pollock seemed combative, and he often alienated people without intending
to. Among the visitors to his studio was Alexander Calder, who was already well known
as a sculptor; ten years earlier he had made his first mobiles, or “moving Mondrians,”
as he called them. An engineer by training, Calder noticed as he glanced around Pollock’s
studio that his work possessed none of the airy grace that was a distinguishing feature
of Calder’s own work. Paint was jabbed on thickly, forms were packed tightly together.
“They’re all so dense,” Calder commented. “Oh,” Pollock said good-naturedly, “you
want to see one less dense?” He left the room and returned with the densest painting
he had. Calder was not amused.

Another distinguished visitor to Pollock’s studio was Hans Hofmann. He lived in the
building next door, and Lee was eager to hear what her former teacher thought of Pollock’s
work. One day she invited him over. He spent a few minutes studying the unstretched
paintings tacked on the walls, then offered a compliment for which Pollock would never
forgive him. “You are very talented,” Hofmann told him. “You should join my class.”

Hofmann went on to question Pollock’s methods. The teacher was surprised by the bareness
of the room. There were no antique casts, no tabletops set with bowls of fruit, no
still-life arrangements from which the artist could abstract. Hofmann, who believed
that nature was the source of inspiration of all art, wondered whether Pollock felt
the same. “Do you work from nature?” he said.

Pollock, in his most famous display of bravado, blurted angrily: “I
am
nature.”

Pollock and Lee had both been on the Project now for seven years, he as an easel painter
and she as a mural painter. But not too long after they met, in February 1942, the
Project was reorganized as a division of the War Services Program. Artists were now
required to report each morning to 110 King Street, where they were assigned to group
projects relating to the war effort. They turned out material of all sorts: armbands
for the Red Cross, pamphlets on air-raid precautions, posters announcing campaigns
for victory gardens. This was precisely the sort of work that Pollock detested, as
one who had no patience for teamwork. But fortunately he could not have had a more
sympathetic supervisor. He worked under Lee, who, as a “supervisor of exhibits,” had
managed to have Pollock put on her staff.

Lee was in charge of a specific project—designing window displays to promote the war-training
courses being offered at city colleges. She oversaw a team of about ten artists, who
worked closely together. But Pollock remained notably uninvolved. Peter Busa, one
of his coworkers, later recalled that Lee was “highly protective” of Pollock and never
gave him any assignments. She allowed him to work on whatever he wanted, and he appears
to have spent his time contentedly making drawings and gouaches. His work was put
to resourceful ends; Lee later pasted it, along with pictures of soldiers and tanks,
into large collages that may well have been the most inventive window displays the
government ever commissioned.

Jackson was now spending very little time in his apartment. Sande decided there was
no point paying rent on an empty bedroom; he might as well offer it to his mother,
who had wanted to come east for almost a year. By May 5, 1942, Stella had arrived
in New York, from where she reported to Charles: “Tuesday night almost ten o’clock
Jack & I washed the dishes read a while and listened to the radio, he has just left
for his girls home.” Her letter went on to indicate that as a result of a new WPA
rule prohibiting more than one person per household from collecting a paycheck, either
Jackson or Sande would have to quit his job. With characteristic selflessness, Sande
had already volunteered. He was planning on accepting a job in Connecticut with a
company that
manufactured airplane parts. “He and his wife,” Stella wrote, “will have to move which
will be a job. Jack wants to keep this place.”

That September, Sande and his wife and their newborn daughter moved to Deep River,
Connecticut. It had already been decided that Stella would live with them; she couldn’t
remain in the city with Jackson, since he could barely care for himself, let alone
his aging mother.

When Sande left New York, Lee moved into the apartment and took over his studio. She
and Pollock were now working in adjacent rooms. Such close proximity necessitated
that they maintain strict regard for each other’s privacy, and it was instantly agreed
that neither would enter the other’s studio without permission. At the end of a workday,
Lee would usually ask Pollock, “How did it go?” If it had gone well, he would invite
her into his studio to show her the results. But even when he invited her in, he was
touchy about her presence. Once Lee was in his studio when she picked up a paintbrush
that had some wet pigment on it and accidentally sideswiped a black canvas. Pollock
became upset. He walked into her studio and sat down and sulked. Lee apologized profusely,
but Pollock continued to sulk for an hour.

After Lee moved in with Pollock, her art underwent a radical change. Overwhelmed by
the power of Pollock’s art, she felt disenchanted with the geometric Cubist style
in which she had been working for the past five years. She no longer wanted to paint
from nature, according to the methods of Hofmann; she wanted to paint from her imagination.
One morning Lee entered her studio, loaded a brush with pigment, and for the first
time in her life attempted to make a picture without looking at a model or a still-life
arrangement. She made some marks on a blank canvas and waited for an image to evolve.
Nothing happened. She put down some more strokes. The colors started running together
and turned muddy and gray. For the next three years, in her struggle to find a style
of her own, Lee produced little else but these muddy paintings. She called them her
“gray slabs” and later destroyed them.

Pollock, by comparison, was experiencing his most rewarding
period of painting so far. Part of the reason was surely the support offered by Lee.
No one had ever believed in him to the extent that she did, and because he considered
her very talented, her faith in him meant that much more. In 1942 Pollock applied
himself to his work with a renewed sense of purpose. He produced only three paintings,
but it is generally agreed that they mark his arrival at artistic maturity.

By 1942 most of the leading figures in European art had arrived in New York as refugees
from the war. André Breton, the “pope” of Surrealism, was living in a fifth-floor
walk-up on Eleventh Street. Roberto Matta was on Ninth Street. Fernand Léger could
often be spotted herding large groups of friends to restaurants in Chinatown. Mondrian,
a jazz buff, visited the dance halls of Harlem. Max Ernst was living in a fancy townhouse
on East Fifty-first Street with heiress Peggy Guggenheim, who had helped him escape
from occupied France and then demanded that he marry her. Duchamp was already here,
having divided his time between Paris and New York since 1915. Although Picasso, Miró,
and Matisse chose to stay behind in Europe, virtually all the major Surrealists spent
the war years in New York, and their presence had a significant impact on the local
art scene.

Pollock was drawn into the Surrealist movement through Robert Motherwell, a twenty-seven-year-old
painter from Aberdeen, Washington, who had studied philosophy at Harvard. A
slender, blond youth with an eager, deferential manner and a reverence for French
culture, Motherwell was one of the few Americans to be accepted by the Surrealists.
Already he had traveled to Mexico with Matta, studied in the studio of Kurt Seligmann,
and been nicknamed affectionately by Breton
“le petit philosophe.”
Motherwell first met Pollock in the fall of 1942 when he was trying to start a group
devoted to the exploration of Surrealist ideas. At the suggestion of the painter William
Baziotes, who knew Pollock from the Project, Motherwell paid a visit to 46 East Eighth
Street. His first impression was of a “deeply depressed man” who possessed a definite
intensity. “He was so involved with his uncontrollable neuroses and demons,” Motherwell
later said, “that I occasionally see him like Marlon Brando in scenes from
A Streetcar Named Desire
—only Brando was much more controlled than Pollock.” Motherwell was eager to introduce
his newfound friend to the Surrealists of his acquaintance.