Jackson Pollock (21 page)

Pollock and Lee were nearing their building when they spotted Peggy Guggenheim coming
out. She was furious. Where had Pollock been? How dare he waste her time! When Peggy
Guggenheim accompanied Pollock and Lee back upstairs, she became even angrier. The
first thing she saw in the living room were paintings signed “L.K.” She started to
shriek. “L.K.! Who’s L.K.? I didn’t come to see L.K.’s work.” It was the beginning
of a long animosity between the two women. As Lee once said, never again could she
look at Peggy Guggenheim without thinking, What a bitch.

Peggy Guggenheim didn’t know quite what to make of Pollock, and she once described
him as a “trapped animal who never should have left Wyoming.” She wasn’t sure whether
she should give him a one-man show. For one thing, there was his personality. “Pollock
himself,” she has written, “was rather difficult; he drank too much and became so
unpleasant, one might say, devilish, on these occasions.” Furthermore, she was unsure
about his art. She confided her reservations to James Johnson Sweeney. Peggy told
Sweeney that the reason she was vacillating about Pollock was that she found his art
“a little bit wild” and she didn’t know how to classify him. That was reason enough,
Sweeney assured her, to give Pollock a show.

Peggy also took up the matter with Howard Putzel. Like Sweeney, Putzel felt it was
obvious that Pollock deserved a show. Furthermore, Putzel suggested that Pollock be
offered some sort of monthly stipend so he could quit his job at the Museum of Non-Objective
Art, where he was still the elevator man, and devote himself to painting on a full-time
basis.

That July, Pollock received the news he had been hoping for. Peggy Guggenheim was
going to give him a one-man show and had optimistically scheduled the opening date
for November 9. That would make it the second show of the gallery’s fall season; the
first was “Masterworks of Early de Chirico.”

For all her initial hesitation, Peggy Guggenheim gave Pollock her all-out support
once she had decided she wanted to show him at the gallery. A more enthusiastic patron
he could not have found anywhere. Besides offering him a one-man show, Guggenheim
also invited him to paint a mural for the hallway of her apartment. Furthermore, she
offered him a one-year contract by which he would receive a fixed income of $150 a
month and a settlement at the end of the year if he sold more than $2700 worth of
paintings. If he failed to sell that amount, Peggy was to receive pictures to make
up the difference. In effect, for $150 a month, Peggy Guggenheim was to receive his
entire output. At the time it sounded like a generous offer, and Pollock gladly accepted.

With those details settled, Lee took off for Huntington, Long Island, to spend a few
days with her ailing father. Pollock kept her abreast of his dealings with the gallery.
“Dear Lee,” reads an undated postcard. “Have signed the contract and have seen the
wall space for the mural—its all very exciting. See you Saturday. Love Jackson.”

For Pollock it was a moment of triumph. For the first time since arriving in New York
thirteen years earlier his future looked bright and his past had been vindicated.
He had proved himself to everyone—to his brother Charles, beside whom he had seemed
so lacking; to his classmates at the League, who said he couldn’t draw; to Hans Hofmann,
who had questioned his methods; to the Surrealists, who had dismissed him as an uncultivated
American; to the Baroness Hilla Rebay, who had dared to tear his drawing in half.
“Dear Baroness,” Pollock wrote on July 21, 1943, “I wish to thank you for the two
criticisms of my work that you gave, and for the very pleasant period of employment.”
This letter of resignation, coauthored by Lee, was sure to make the baroness seethe.
“The Museum, ‘Art of This Century,’ has contracted my work for a one-man show this
coming November, for which I must prepare. Trusting you found my services at the museum
satisfactory, I am sincerely, Jackson Pollock.”

In July 1943 Pollock began to prepare for his first one-man show, which was scheduled
to open in less than four months. The prospect of a show galvanized his fiercest energies,
and the next few months were a wonderfully creative time for him.

In a mood of supreme confidence Pollock decided he would also tackle the mural commissioned
by Peggy Guggenheim for the hallway of her apartment. “I want to have the painting
finished for the show,” he noted proudly to his brother Charles. Pollock wasn’t sure
yet what the subject of his mural would be. He knew only that the mural would be very
large, about twenty feet long and nine feet high, and that it would be painted on
canvas instead of on a wall. That way, as Duchamp had advised Peggy Guggenheim, it
wouldn’t have to be abandoned in case she moved.

Pollock soon realized that his studio was not large enough to accommodate a twenty-foot-long
painting. So he decided he would knock down the wall separating his and Lee’s studios,
which would increase his work space by about a third. Lee was not sympathetic. “And
where am I supposed to work?” she wanted to know. They were having an argument about
it when the sculptor Reuben Kadish stopped by to visit. Kadish, a friend of Pollock’s
since high school, suggested to Lee that she consider setting up a studio in a vacant
room adjoining his own studio, on West Twelfth Street. Lee accepted the offer.

With that matter settled, Pollock took a sledgehammer and knocked down the wall separating
the two studios. Lee assisted, and the two of them spent a long night packing the
debris into metal buckets and hauling it downstairs. By July 29 Pollock was ready
to start the mural. “I have it stretched now,” he wrote to Charles. “It looks pretty
big, but exciting as all hell.”

For all his eagerness, Pollock decided he wasn’t ready to start the mural after all.
He needed more time to think about it. When his show opened, the twenty-foot-long
canvas would still be blank.

The next few months were one of the most productive and prolific periods in Pollock’s
life. He completed about ten new paintings, among them such well-known works as
The She-Wolf, The Guardians of the Secret
, and
The Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle
. While there is no duplication from one painting to the next, one feature they do
have in common is their intense invocation of American Indian culture. In
Moon-Woman
a bright red head decorated with mock war paint is wearing an elaborate feather headdress.
Other works are abundant with such Indian staples as arrows, totemic stick figures,
and a whole repertory of geometric markings, such as slash marks, X’s, and zigzags.
It seems entirely fitting that Pollock chose to borrow from American Indian art at
this point in his career when he was struggling for a style that was free of European
influence and eager to establish his independence of his predecessors abroad. Pollock
once said in an interview: “An American is an American and his painting [is] naturally
qualified by that fact, whether he wills it or not.”

One of the more significant paintings from this period is
The She-Wolf (
Fig. 16
)
, a large, horizontal canvas in which Pollock
took Picasso’s bull by the horns. The image consists of a massive, heavily outlined
beast set against a frenetic background of splashed and splattered pigments. While
the title of the painting evokes the she-wolf of popular mythology—the foster mother
of Romulus and Remus—Pollock’s she-wolf is not a reference to a specific myth. In
fact, she is not even a she-wolf. For despite the painting’s title, the so-called
she-wolf actually seems to consist of two animals backed into each other. On the left
is a bull, an obvious reference to Picasso, a celebrator of the bullfight. On the
right side of the painting is another image altogether—a buffalo as pictured on a
United States nickel. The two animals are linked together by a fat red arrow that
travels horizontally from the heart of the bull to the head of the buffalo, and this
“heartline arrow motif,” as it’s known in Navaho art, is one among many allusions
to Indian art in the painting.
The She-Wolf
is the offspring of a European bull and an American buffalo; it’s Pollock’s defiant
answer to the legendary beast images of Picasso.

Pollock never offered interpretations of his paintings, and in the case of
The She-Wolf
he actively opposed interpretation.
“She-Wolf
came into existence because I had to paint it. Any attempt on my part to say something
about it, to attempt explanation of the inexplicable, could only destroy it.” The
statement was made to Sidney Janis, the art dealer, who in 1943 was putting together
a book called
Abstract and Surrealist Art in America
. He planned to reproduce
The She-Wolf
and had asked Pollock to submit a short statement about it.

If Pollock’s statements offer little insight into his work, his titles are outright
misleading. He never titled a painting until he was done with it, and it was not unusual
for him to have Lee or his friends title his paintings for him. One day he was sitting
in his studio with a newly completed work when James Johnson Sweeney stopped by to
visit. Sweeney was still standing in the doorway when the painting caught his eye.
Four totemic figures flank a central oval. Inside the oval a stick figure battles
a beast. As Sweeney studied the painting Pollock told him, “That’s Moby Dick.”

“Pasiphaë,” Sweeney shouted out across the studio, ignoring Pollock’s comment. “That’s
Pasiphaë.”

“Who the hell is Pasiphaë?” Pollock asked. Sweeney told Pollock about Pasiphaë, wife
of King Minos, mother of the Minotaur by her intercourse with a bull.

“What’s wrong with Moby Dick?” Pollock asked.

“It’s a cliché,” Sweeney said.

Pollock gave in and named the painting
Pasiphaë
.

It is worth noting that before he met Lee, Pollock left most of his paintings untitled.
The few paintings he did title were given literal names, such as
Cotton Pickers, Red Barn, Menemsha Pond, Seascape
, and so on. In 1943 Pollock began giving his paintings highly evocative titles, such
as
Pasiphaë, She-Wolf, Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle
. But his titles confuse things more than they clarify them, for his
She-Wolf
doesn’t depict the foster mother of ancient Rome any more than his
Pasiphaë
depicts the Minoan queen. Some critics refer to Pollock’s work of the early forties
as his “mythological paintings,” and while the label is certainly as valid as any
other, Pollock’s subject matter had no specific connection to ancient Greco-Roman
myths.

While Pollock was working on major paintings such as
The She-Wolf
and
The Guardians of the Secret
, he was also turning out small compositions. He often worked on more than one project
at a time. In the course of a single day he might interrupt work on a large painting—to
allow the pigment to dry or to give himself time to think about it, and undertake
a pencil-and-ink drawing or a gouache or a small painting. Among the smaller compositions
belonging to this period are four untitled abstractions in which Pollock experimented
with the technique of dripping paint. In a work that has been catalogued as
Composition with Pouring II (
Fig. 17
)
a wiry tangle of black-and-white lines, apparently dripped from a brush, is set against
a background of swirling forms. The small composition possesses none of the soaring
lyricism that distinguishes certain of Pollock’s famous “drip” paintings but it does
establish his interest in the technique that became his primary one four years later.

While Pollock was preparing for his show, Peggy Guggenheim was tending to the business
side of his career. She wrote a press release and sent it out to newspapers and magazines.
(“Jackson Pollock is 31 years old . . .”) She also had a four-page
exhibition catalogue printed, which included an appreciation by James Johnson Sweeney.
Lee was commandeered to fold and address the catalogues and spent several days at
the gallery assisting with various projects, including the hanging of the show. Pollock
himself was indifferent to the installation and chose not to get involved. It took
all of Lee’s patience to work alongside Peggy, an heiress of singular stinginess.
One day Peggy noticed that Lee had made a mistake in addressing some envelopes that
were already stamped. She bawled her out for wasting a few cents worth of postage.

One person whom both Pollock and Lee liked was Howard Putzel, the assistant at the
gallery. He often stopped by 46 East Eighth Street to complain to Lee about the latest
abuse he had suffered at the hands of his employer. “I don’t know how I can face another
day,” Putzel would moan as Lee nodded sympathetically. Lee was more than willing to
indulge him in his complaints as Putzel was one of the earliest admirers of Pollock’s
work and was very devoted to the artist. One day when James Thrall Soby, a curator
at the Museum of Modern Art, stopped in at the gallery and spoke highly of a few Pollocks
he spotted in the storage room, Putzel sent off a kind note: “Soby dropped in this
afternoon and is mad about your work. . . . [He] predicts you’ll be THE new sensation
of the season, and moreover, that, unlike past season’s sensations, you’ll last.”