Jackson Pollock (23 page)

Motherwell once commented that Pollock was the first artist he knew “who mostly talked
not about art but about money.” Indeed, he was far from indifferent to money, and
part of the reason was that he had so little of it. He didn’t even have a telephone
yet. As one who was determined to live off his painting—as opposed to teaching or
holding any other job—Pollock worried constantly whether he could actually support
himself. What would he do if Peggy Guggenheim decided not to renew his one-year contract?
Would he have to get a job? What was he qualified to do? In the spring of 1944 Peggy
Guggenheim renewed his contract for another year at the same figure of $150 a month.
Pollock was relieved. His brother Sande noted that to Charles: “since it lets him
paint he doesn’t complain.”

One day that spring Pollock was visited by Benton, who was in New York on business.
The two painters had not met for several years but had followed each other’s careers
in the pages of the art magazines. Benton had read the reviews of Pollock’s first
show and was pleased to see that his onetime protégé was getting some recognition.
But it turned out to be an awkward reunion. When Pollock took Benton into his studio,
he knew that his former teacher could not possibly approve of the work he was doing.
Benton always had hated abstract painting, and there could be no doubt that he would
find Pollock’s work distasteful. Benton tried to be polite. As Pollock later noted:
“Said he liked my stuff but you know how much meaning that has.”

From New York, Benton returned to Kansas City, where he soon started work on a new
project—a mural for Harzfeld’s, a department store downtown. Pollock, by comparison,
was about to unveil before the New York art crowd a mural of nearly identical proportions.
Benton’s artistic reputation had faded; Pollock’s was on the rise. It was their last
meeting.

With the arrival of summer Lee suggested that they take a vacation, perhaps rent a
house in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She had been there before while studying with
Hofmann, who
moved his art school from New York to Cape Cod every summer. It was precisely the
presence of Hofmann and his young disciples that made Pollock reluctant to visit Provincetown;
he had no intention of spending his summer in “Hofmann’s art colony,” as he derisively
referred to the town. On the other hand, he liked that part of the country and had
wonderful memories of his summers in Chilmark. He once told an interviewer, “I have
a definite feeling for the West—the vast horizontality of the land, for instance—here
only the Atlantic gives you that.” Provincetown, he decided, was fine after all.

They traveled to Cape Cod by train. Hofmann met them at the station in Hyannis and
insisted on giving them a tour of the area before heading for Provincetown. But it
didn’t turn out as planned. In his enthusiasm to show them some dunes, Hofmann drove
directly onto sand, and his car got stuck. When he stepped on the gas the tires sank
deeper and deeper. Hofmann started cursing in German, but Pollock, for once, was unagitated.
He calmly got out of the car and lifted it out of the sand. For the rest of the summer,
whenever Pollock’s name came up in conversation Hofmann had only praise: “Pollock?
He’s strong. He lifts cars.”

It was a lazy, restless summer for Pollock and Lee. They lived in a rented house on
Back Street, which was behind Commercial Street and a short walk from the beach. While
both of them were hoping to get some painting done—they had shipped up rolls of canvas
from New York—they got no further than talking about it. They hiked the dunes, swam
in the ocean, collected shells along the shore. Pollock became friendly with the landlady
and helped her almost every day with her gardening. “We get in for a dip at least
once a day—“Pollock noted contentedly to his brother Sande and his mother in Connecticut.
“I’ve taken a crew cut and look a little like a peeled turnip—or beet. Haven’t gotten
into work yet. . . . What are the chances of your coming up? Let us know and we’ll
work out some arrangements.”

The summer was not without friction. Lee resented that Pollock had invited his family
to visit. When his mother and brother Sande and sister-in-law Arloie showed up in
late August for a
two-week visit she had them stay at a motel rather than put them up at the house.
And she didn’t get along with Pollock’s friends either. One day Pollock introduced
her to Bernard Schardt, a former classmate of his from the League who was also summering
in Provincetown. Schardt and his wife immediately sensed that “Lee didn’t think we
were good enough for her,” and the two couples never got together again. Such was
Lee’s devotion to Pollock’s career that she had no time or patience for people who
couldn’t help him get ahead. But like most artists’ wives, she was a gracious, charming
hostess to collectors, art dealers, and anyone else who could advance his career.
That summer she invited Howard Putzel to spend two weeks in Provincetown. He had just
left his job at Art of This Century and was planning on opening his own gallery that
fall. Putzel stayed in the house.

Besides inviting his family for a visit Pollock also extended an invitation to Ed
and Wally Strautin, an older couple who had once been his neighbors on Eighth Street.
Ed was a house painter and Wally was his wife. “So let us hear from you—telling, you
will be up,” Pollock urged the couple at the end of August. “It is really grand now
not quite as warm as it was—but still damned swell swimming.” The couple never visited,
but the invitation stands as a reflection of Pollock’s hospitality.

Back in New York, Pollock was feeling sufficiently composed to consider taking on
a new project. He listened with interest when his friend Reuben Kadish suggested that
the two of them try making prints under the guidance of Stanley William Hayter. A
British-born artist, Hayter had an appreciable reputation as a master printmaker,
painter, and the founder of a workshop called Atelier 17, which was then located on
Eighth Street. He was highly esteemed among the Surrealists for his so-called automatic
engravings, in which sweeping rhythms of line give off an illusion of spontaneous
creation. Hayter’s workshop was patronized by many of the Surrealists, which made
it the sort of clubby place that Pollock tried to avoid. But Kadish felt sure that
Pollock could benefit from Hayter’s instruction. “I inveigled Jackson into trying
it,” Kadish recalled, “because I thought his work had a kinship to Hayter’s prints.”
His opinion was shared by an
Art News
critic
who had noted, two years earlier, that Pollock resembled Hayter “in his general whirling
figures.”

In the course of the next six months or so Pollock visited Atelier 17 on many occasions.
Most of the time he went in at night, after the other artists had departed. He sometimes
stopped by in the afternoon, but only if the workshop wasn’t crowded. The sculptor
Peter Grippe (who took over Atelier 17 when Hayter returned to Paris), was once working
on a print when he glanced up at the window and saw Pollock standing outside. He was
peering in, looking to see who was there. Then he walked away.

At Hayter’s workshop Pollock learned how to make engravings. He worked mainly with
a burin, a short angled steel tool used to cut lines into metal plates. It was slow,
tedious work. If Pollock applied too much pressure to the burin, the point broke.
If he didn’t apply enough pressure, the plate swung around into another position.
The eleven engravings he completed at the workshop reveal his difficulty with the
technique. His lines are generally awkward and labored, as if he drew them with his
left hand. “He wasn’t happy with the prints,” recalled Reuben Kadish, who helped Pollock
pull a few trial proofs. Hayter, who also helped Pollock print proofs, suggested that
he consider printing editions, but Pollock wasn’t interested. He took the plates home
and dumped them in a corner of his studio. They would be printed posthumously when
Lee discovered them two decades later.

Pollock’s earlier experiences with printmaking had been equally unfulfilling. During
his years on the Project, he had occasionally visited the printing workshop of Theodore
Wahl, on Minetta Lane. “Jackson wasn’t very serious,” Wahl recalled. “He’d come up
and say, ‘I want to do a lithograph.’ I’d flip him a stone, and he’d make a lithograph.
He’d come back six weeks later, and it was the same thing. The problem with Jackson
and printmaking is that you have to stick to the medium in printmaking—it’s very technical—and
Jackson couldn’t stick to the medium.” One day Wahl left Pollock alone in the workshop
for a few hours. By the time he returned Pollock had abandoned his lithograph in frustration
and helped himself to some tubes of oil
paints from the storage closet. He was sitting at a small wooden table peacefully
absorbed in a painting he was working on. As Wahl drew closer he was dismayed to realize
that Pollock was using the tabletop as his painting surface. Wahl was furious and
threw him out of the workshop.

Pollock was not a master craftsman. His efforts at printmaking turned out to be no
more rewarding than his earlier efforts at sculpture and collage. The more technical
a medium, the more difficulty he seemed to have. His hands were not graceful; his
fingers were large and thick. His right hand was missing part of the index finger
lost in his boyhood accident with an ax. It was almost as if his hands got in the
way of his art, preventing him from recording sensation as quickly as he experienced
it. Genius is often defined as a range of ability, but Pollock’s genius lay in his
narrow, obsessive need to escape the technical demands of art. The medium he chose
was painting, but even as a painter, he needed to escape the rules of his craft. Appropriately,
he soon would invent a painting method that freed his hands from contact with the
canvas.

In the fall of 1944 Pollock began to prepare for his second show at Art of This Century,
scheduled for the following March. The twenty or so paintings belonging to this period
are generally considered less successful as a group than his 1943 paintings, but it
is easy to be sympathetic to them when one takes account of what Pollock was aiming
for. At this juncture he turned his attention to questions raised by his mural—mainly,
how could he achieve the “allover” intensity of the mural while freeing his art from
the constraints of the human figure? Over the next two years Pollock continued to
paint the human figure while subjecting it to decompositions of frightening intensity.
The result finally was that the towering totems in his mural were broken down into
anatomical fragments, such as disembodied eyes that glare from the interstices of
abstract images. Pollock was struggling toward abstraction, or pure painterly expression.
By breaking down the symbolic figures that had inhabited his art since he first saw
Guernica
five years earlier, Pollock also can be said to have been struggling, on a psychological
level, to dispense with Picasso’s influence.
His 1944–46 paintings are the most violent of his career.

Among the paintings dating to this period are five untitled works that have horses
as their subject, and they appear to have been inspired by the equine imagery in Picasso’s
“bullfight paintings.” A painting that has been catalogued as
Horse
(
Fig. 19
) shows a mournful-looking horse lying on the ground, trying to raise itself on its
forelegs. Clearly the beast has been injured. At Pollock’s hands, Picasso’s creation
has been twisted and truncated and made to suffer both anatomical and spatial dislocations.
Even the use of color is violent, with purples, reds, and golds colliding senselessly.
Picasso often said that one must destroy in order to create. Of course he didn’t mean
that one must destroy Picasso, but that was the project that Pollock seems to have
set for himself in
Horse
and many other works.

One of the better-known paintings from this period is
There Were Seven in Eight
(
Fig. 20
), a large horizontal canvas that measures about twelve feet long. The image consists
of a wiry tangle of lines set against a background of densely packed forms. The lines,
which do not delineate anything, slash the picture’s surface with unruly force, and
one senses Pollock’s eagerness to be able to express himself here solely through line.
As in his
Mural
, Pollock apparently started this work by painting eight totems, and parts of them
are still visible; eyes, heads, and various anatomical fragments hover in the background.
Seven in Eight
, which is hard not to find labored and overwrought, was difficult for Pollock to
complete. He kept going back to it, over a period of several months, to rework the
surface. When Lee came into his studio one day and suggested that the painting looked
finished, Pollock disagreed. He said he was trying to “veil the image,” to cover up
any remnants of the figures in the background. He would continue to work in a “veiling
the image” style for the next two years, until he had phased out figuration altogether
and found a way to express himself through line alone.