Jackson Pollock (28 page)

With the arrival of summer Harold and May Rosenberg moved out to Springs from their
apartment on East Tenth Street. They lived on Neck Path, around the corner from the
Pollocks, and the two couples saw one another often. Pollock got along reasonably
well with Rosenberg, an imposing, voluble, dark-haired poet who already had an appreciable
reputation as an art and literary critic. Though trained to be a lawyer, he had been
writing for
Partisan Review
since the late thirties and had gotten to know most of the artists in New York when
he had worked on the Project as a mural painter. Compared to Greenberg, who had a
polite, self-effacing manner, Rosenberg was as mighty in person as he was in his writing.
He stood six feet four, spoke in a booming voice, and was a dazzling conversationalist
with a knack for coining memorable phrases. (While working part time in advertising,
he came up with the idea of Smokey the Bear.) He was “one of the intellectual captains
of the modern world”—to borrow from Saul Bellow, whose protagonist Victor Wulpy is
transparently modeled after Rosenberg.

Pollock and Rosenberg admired each other immensely, but both were too stubborn to
admit it. They were fond of exchanging insults. Pollock used to say that Rosenberg’s
ideas got in his way as a critic. Rosenberg countered that Pollock painted “like a
monkey.” The critic was a frequent visitor to the Pollock household, and on a typical
visit wouldn’t even wait to sit down before taking note of one of Pollock’s paintings
and launching into a lecture. In his loud voice he might relate the painting to any
one of a number of his favorite topics, ranging from the Eighteenth Brumaire to Kierkegaard’s
“despair of the aesthetic” to the teachings of Hans Hofmann. As Rosenberg talked,
Pollock would become saturnine, and it was only a matter of minutes before he uttered
his familiar accusation that Rosenberg knew nothing about painting and was “full of
shit.”

Pollock seemed to delight in rousing Rosenberg to anger and tended to behave rambunctiously
in his presence. May Rosenberg recalls an afternoon when the two couples were driving
to the beach and Pollock threatened to urinate in the car if Rosenberg didn’t pull
over. “You will wait until I pull over,” Rosenberg
said like a stern parent, prompting Pollock to whine that he couldn’t wait. On another
occasion, in the middle of a dinner party at the Rosenbergs’ home, Pollock drunkenly
started harassing his host. “That’s a lot of shit!” he shouted repeatedly, rudely
interrupting a serious discussion. Rosenberg tried to ignore him but finally became
exasperated and told him firmly: “You have clearly had too much to drink. What you
need now is not to go on interrupting but to go upstairs and take a nap.” Like a penitent
child, Pollock smiled sweetly and headed upstairs.

Their first summer in Springs, Pollock and Lee entertained frequently. Clement Greenberg
came out for the July Fourth holiday and was followed by various relatives, the art
dealer John Bernard Myers, and Ed Strautin, their former neighbor of Eighth Street.
Friends have consistently described Pollock as a gracious, accommodating host who
seemed to enjoy having company. He was fond of taking visitors for a tour of his property
as well as to his studio to look at his work. And he also liked to cook for his guests.
While he was never an avid eater himself—smoking and drinking had the predictable
adverse effects on his appetite—Pollock took pleasure in the ritual of preparing a
meal. One of his specialties was spaghetti and meat sauce prepared according to a
recipe he had learned from Rita Benton. But even “Rita’s Spaghetti” was something
of an extravagance to the impoverished couple, and they were much more likely to serve
a clam dish made with clams they had caught in the bay behind the house. John Bernard
Myers recalled the sight of Pollock coming through the back door with a bucket of
fresh clams, looking rather pleased. Back in the kitchen, he knifed them opened with
noticeable deftness. “The movement of knife into shell never faltered,” Myers has
written. “He seemed to open each mollusk with a single jab and slice.”

Pollock’s main project that summer was preparing the barn for use as a studio. For
starters, he had the barn moved from behind the house to the northern side of the
property, so that it wouldn’t obstruct the view of the bay. Cleaning out the barn
took all summer. The previous owner of the property, a land surveyor, had left the
barn cluttered with heaps of broken machinery
and scrap metal, and Pollock seemed to enjoy sorting through it. He discarded the
machinery but kept the scrap metal, piling it up neatly in the backyard with plans
of using it someday for sculpture. The small brown barn (it measured about eighteen
by twenty-four feet) had neither heat, insulation, nor electricity, and Pollock decided
he would leave it that way for the time being, even if it meant he could paint only
when it was light out. His renovations to the barn were modest. He built cabinets
and shelves for his materials, boarded up a window, and cut a new window that was
above eye level so that he wouldn’t be distracted by the view. On the walls of the
barn he hung his own paintings.

At the end of the summer Pollock moved into the barn to prepare for his fourth show
at Art of This Century. The result was fifteen new paintings that belong to two series—
Accabonac Creek
, which was begun in the upstairs bedroom, and
Sounds in the Grass
. In spite of the titles the paintings contain no overt references to the landscape.
The strongest of his 1946 works mark a critical juncture between the “veiling the
image” style of his past and the “drip” paintings he began the following year.
Shimmering Substance
(
Fig. 22
), which is widely regarded as a key transitional work, is a small, bright painting
composed of hundreds of curling yellow and white brushstrokes, the cursive gestures
packed tightly together to form a mesh of sensation. Paint is applied in thick, buttery
textures, as if squeezed directly from the tube. While it is possible to make out
some dark images hovering beneath the surface, Pollock doesn’t allow them to become
identifiable. He has “veiled the image” so thoroughly that the veil has become the
image. In other words,
Sounds in the Grass: Shimmering Substance
is totally abstract.

This in itself, of course, was not a breakthrough. An artist such as Mondrian, whom
Pollock admired enormously, had long ago rejected representation in favor of pure
abstraction, searching for ideals based on the simplification of shapes and colors.
For Pollock, however, abstraction was not a philosophical choice but a last resort,
the only hope left for forging a vehicle that could fully accommodate his emotions.
It took him sixteen years to arrive at a style that was totally abstract, and that
he felt ambivalent about
abandoning the human figure seems certain. (Even Picasso never completely gave up
the figure, for fear that his work would degenerate into meaningless pattern.) But
by 1946 Pollock had no choice. He felt hampered by the human figure, for it prevented
him from recording sensation as quickly or intensely as he experienced it. And so
he did away with recognizable imagery in favor of direct expression. It would later
be said that Pollock stripped painting to its fundamentals, exploiting the two-dimensional
limitations of his medium for maximum effect. But Pollock thought no more about defining
his medium than he did about formulating theories or founding a movement. He turned
to abstraction not to define the limits of art but to escape them.

After finishing
Shimmering Substance
Pollock invited Lee into the barn to look at the painting. “That’s for Clem,” he
told her. He knew that Clement Greenberg would admire the work, which, like the mural
he had painted for Peggy Guggenheim, was an “allover” painting. Unlike a conventional
painting, with its illusion of deep space, an “allover” painting consists of undifferentiated
forms dispersed evenly across the picture surface. There are no breaks in the composition,
and the only way to take in the painting is all at once. Rather than being an imitation
of something else, an “allover” painting is an object in its own right. It is utterly
self-contained and doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is. This distinction
between painting as a window on reality and painting as its own reality was one of
the crucial issues to the founders of modern art, and it is for that reason that Pollock
felt Greenberg would admire his latest work. He was right.

Greenberg was the only critic to review Pollock’s 1947 show, but such was his ardor
that it almost compensated for the lack of interest among other critics. “Jackson
Pollock’s fourth one-man show in so many years at Art of This Century,” he wrote in
The Nation
in February 1947, “is his best since his first one and signals what may be a major
step in his development.” The rest of the review was probably incomprehensible to
the readers of
The Nation
, who had not yet developed an ear for Greenberg’s formalism any more than they had
developed an eye for Pollock’s art. Readers must have wondered what Greenberg meant
by his coneluding
remarks: “Pollock points a way beyond the easel, beyond the mobile, framed picture,
to the mural, perhaps—or perhaps not. I cannot tell.”

With those few words Greenberg introduced his famous death-of-the-easel-picture theory.
He believed that Pollock was not just a great painter but a historical force that
could free modern art from its subservience to Cubist tradition. Greenberg, who had
started his writing career during the radical thirties, applied Marxist ideas about
historical inevitability to painting. He defined the evolution of art since Manet
in terms of the gradual elimination of illusion and felt that Pollock’s primary accomplishment
consisted of going beyond Picasso and Braque; he eliminated more illusion than they
had. The Cubists had flattened out space while continuing to differentiate between
shapes. Pollock’s “all-over” paintings, with their even dispersion of accent and emphasis,
broke down all hierarchical distinctions. “The dissolution of the pictorial into sheer
texture,” Greenberg wrote in
Partisan Review
in 1948, “into apparently sheer sensation, into an accumulation of repetitions, seems
to speak for and answer something profound in contemporary sensibility. Literature
provides parallels in Joyce and in Gertrude Stein.”

Though Greenberg is now known as one of the chief theoreticians of postwar art criticism,
his writings were mocked and scorned in the forties. His colleagues at
Partisan Review
made fun of him. Philip Rahv, the magazine’s coeditor, felt that Greenberg was overly
dogmatic and that the reason he was pushing Pollock so hard was that he expected to
ride in on his success. Delmore Schwartz, who had studied philosophy in college, was
suspicious of Greenberg’s ideas. Greenberg often cited Kant’s theory of beauty in
support of his formalism, prompting Schwartz to start a nasty rumor that Greenberg
had read only the first thirty pages of Kant’s work. When the magazine’s publisher
suggested at a staff meeting one day that
Partisan Review
award an annual prize for literary achievement, James Johnson Sweeney, a member of
the advisory board, provoked a burst of laughter by proposing, “Give the winner an
easel painting!”

It was not only at
Partisan Review
that Greenberg was subjected to insult. When the mass-circulation magazines began
to
take note of the new art on Fifty-seventh Street, it was Greenberg, not Pollock, who
was the focus of the publicity. In December 1947
Time
reported that Greenberg had recently singled out Pollock as “the most powerful painter
in America” in an article for the British magazine
Horizon
. Bewildered by Greenberg’s appraisal,
Time
ran a picture of Pollock’s painting
The Key
(reproduced upside down) beneath the sarcastic headline “The Best?”

Pollock of course was grateful for Greenberg’s support, and he didn’t begrudge him
his theories. To Pollock theories were like titles, reassuring the public that his
paintings meant something while freeing him from the tedious task of having to specify
what that meaning was. When Pollock applied for a Guggenheim fellowship in October
1947, he was asked to propose a project. His statement reveals Greenberg’s influence,
if not his direct participation. “I believe the easel picture to be a dying form,”
Pollock wrote, “and the tendency of modern feeling is towards the wall picture or
mural. I believe the time is not yet ripe for a
full
transition from easel to mural. The pictures I contemplate painting would constitute
a halfway state, and an attempt to point out the direction of the future, without
arriving there completely.”

Thomas Benton, whom Pollock had asked to write a letter of recommendation, was understandably
perplexed by the project Pollock proposed but had no doubts about his originality.
“Very much an artist,” Benton wrote of his former student. “In my opinion one of the
few original painters to come up in the last 10 years. Gifted colorist. Whether or
not he lives up to what he intends, money would not be wasted. Highly recommended.”
Greenberg and Sweeney also wrote recommendations.

In applying for the fellowship Pollock was asked to answer several questions. Have
you any constitutional disorder or physical disability? “None,” Pollock wrote. Give
a list of the scholarships or fellowships you have previously held. “None,” he wrote.
State what foreign languages you have studied. “None.” Of what learned, scientific,
or artistic societies are you a member? “None.” In what field of learning, or of art,
does your project lie?

“Creative painting,” Pollock wrote.

He was not awarded the fellowship.