Jackson Pollock (29 page)

By 1947 Peggy Guggenheim was eager to close her gallery and return to Europe. She
felt disillusioned by her six years in New York. Her husband, Max Ernst, had run off
to Arizona with a young painter named Dorothea Tanning, and many of the artists to
whom she had given their first one-man shows, such as Mother-well and Baziotes, had
left Art of This Century for other galleries. Furthermore, for all her efforts to
promote Pollock, his reputation remained negligible. The Museum of Modern Art had
failed to include him in its important 1946 exhibition “Fourteen Americans,” and his
pictures had never really sold; she was stuck with so many of them, she started giving
them away so she wouldn’t have to ship them back to Europe. Among the paintings she
decided to part with was
Mural
, which she gave to the University of Iowa after several other institutions, including
Yale, had said they didn’t want it. (Years later, after Pollock had become famous,
Peggy Guggenheim tried to get the mural back by offering the college a Braque, but
to no avail.) To add to her problems, she
was under contract to continue paying Pollock three hundred dollars a month for one
more year, and she felt she couldn’t leave New York until she had found an art dealer
willing to take over the contract. But no one was interested.

Many art dealers had opened galleries along Fifty-seventh Street in the years following
the war, but only two or three were showing the work of the American avant-garde.
One of them was Sam Kootz, a tall, affable southerner who had opened his gallery at
15 East Fifty-seventh Street in 1945. Kootz had already proved his commitment to the
vanguard by showing Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, and Byron Browne, even if it meant
selling Picassos from his back room to keep the gallery solvent. But for all his enthusiasm
for American art, Kootz told Peggy Guggenheim that he wasn’t willing to take on Pollock.
To put it frankly, he said, he didn’t want to work with an alcoholic. Only a few weeks
earlier Pollock had staggered into the gallery on a Saturday afternoon and drunkenly
shouted, “I’m better than all the fucking painters on these walls!” Kootz had asked
him to leave.

Across the hall from Kootz was Betty Parsons, a trim, energetic artist and art dealer,
with wide-set blue eyes and short gray hair that framed a strong face. Parsons had
started her dealing career in the early forties from the basement of the Wakefield
Bookshop, where she gave Saul Steinberg his first show and listened sympathetically
to almost every artist who sought her attention. Steinberg once drew a portrait of
Parsons as a cocker spaniel, with a high, philosophical forehead and a slightly worried
expression; it is a measure of her open-mindedness that she thought it was a good
likeness.

Parsons considered herself lucky to have opened her gallery just before Art of This
Century closed, in time to inherit many of the artists who had shown there. She gladly
volunteered to take on Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Hans Hofmann. Pollock, however,
posed a problem. She could not allow herself to take over his contract with Art of
This Century and assume the responsibility of paying him thirty-six hundred dollars
a year when it was inconceivable that his annual shows would gross that much. Peggy
Guggenheim was willing to compromise. She said she would continue paying Pollock’s
monthly stipend until his contract ran out if Parsons would just give him a show.
Parsons felt she had no choice. As she put it, Pollock “was dumped in my lap because
nobody else would risk showing him.”

In May 1947 Peggy Guggenheim closed her gallery. She eventually settled in Venice,
where she purchased the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, converted the servants quarters
into galleries, and opened her own museum. She spent the rest of her days riding the
Grand Canal in her private gondola, sleeping in a sterling silver bed designed by
Alexander Calder, and acquiring a reputation among the Venetians as the “last duchess.”
If her departure from New York marked the end of her adventures among the avant-garde,
the same could be said of André Breton, who had returned to Paris to find that Existentialism
had replaced Surrealism as the prevailing intellectual rage. Surrealism was dead in
Europe. In New York the movement seemed to pass into instant eclipse with the closing
of Art of This Century. The exit of the Surrealists from New York after the war cleared
the stage for a new avant-garde.

The stage, in the late 1940s, became the Betty Parsons Gallery, which was once described
by Greenberg as “a place where art goes on and is not just shown and sold.” When Pollock
joined the gallery in May 1947 he was one of a group of young Americans who were in
roughly the same position. Most had started their careers during the Depression and
had worked on the Project. After fifteen years or so they were still poor, still unknown,
and still living downtown in cold-water flats. But the history of art was about to
be rewritten. Within the next three years Pollock, Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Barnett
Newman would paint their signature images and unveil them before the public at the
Parsons Gallery. In 1947 Still showed his jagged vertical forms set against dark color
fields. In 1948 Pollock showed his “drip” paintings. In 1950 Rothko showed his floating
rectangles, and Newman showed his “zip” paintings—flat color fields seared by thin,
vertical stripes. Later the four painters would be grouped, along with several others,
under the rubric of Abstract Expressionism—the term had already been used by Robert
Coates in
The New Yorker
—but their paintings resembled one another only in the most general ways. They each
painted large, virile, single-sign images that expressed, as Rothko once said half
jokingly about his own art, “basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.”
Parsons nicknamed the group the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

From the day he joined the Parsons Gallery, Pollock was set apart from the other painters
by the recognition he had received from Clement Greenberg. They had read in
The Nation
that Pollock was “the strongest painter of his generation,” an appraisal that understandably
irked the rest of the so-called generation. Pollock’s occasional visits to the gallery
tended to heighten the resentment. He came in from Springs to attend many of the openings
but only to alienate people by insulting the shows. Parsons later said that he divided
all exhibits into one of two categories—“awful” or “terrible.” While this is surely
an exaggeration, the sculptor Herbert Ferber had said of Pollock that “he wasn’t the
sort of artist to compliment someone else’s work.” He seemed to enjoy his coveted
status as the best of the young Americans and pretended that he had no need for anyone’s
friendship or approval. One day Bradley Walker Tomlin, a genial artist from Syracuse,
New York, who was one of the pioneers of “allover” painting, asked Pollock a simple
question: how did he keep his pigments from running together? “I can’t tell you that,”
Pollock said angrily. Tomlin recognized in his comment the defensive posturing of
a painfully insecure man, and the two of them became good friends.

Not everyone was as willing as Tomlin to indulge Pollock in his adolescent behavior.
The best-known painter at the gallery after Pollock was Rothko, and the two geniuses
did not get along. Rothko was large and stocky, with a high, balding forehead and
deep-set brown eyes that peered at the world through thick glasses. His suicide in
1970 has given rise to the caricature of a doomed, solitary figure, and Rothko in
fact did have a tendency toward moodiness. He hated critics and curators and called
the Whitney Museum “a junkshop.” He once wrote that exhibiting a painting is a “risky
and unfeeling act. . . . How often it must be permanently impaired by the eyes of
the vulgar and the cruelty of
the impotent who would extend their affliction universally!” But Rothko was considerably
less high-sounding in ordinary conversation. He was an affectionate, generous friend
to many artists, which helps explain why he resented Pollock. Rothko considered the
star of the gallery a self-promoter who cared about little else than furthering his
own reputation. As he wrote to Barnett Newman in June 1947: “Pollock is a self contained
and sustained advertising concern.”

Newman did not share this opinion. Whenever anyone picked on Pollock, Newman stood
up for him. “Jackson doesn’t need anyone to help him paint his pictures,” Newman used
to say, a comment that pleased Pollock enormously. Although Pollock was not a defender
of Newman’s art, he was fond of “Barney” Newman, a warm, gregarious intellectual with
a hefty build and a thick, flowing mustache. Newman considered himself an anarchist,
but like most anarchists, he was constantly organizing groups. He ran for mayor of
New York in 1933, on the platform of improving parks and creating a Department of
Clean Air. He and Pollock both liked baseball and used to go to Ebbets Field together
to root for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Barnett Newman could always be found at the gallery on Saturday afternoons, standing
around talking to visitors. He was a brilliant conversationalist, fluent in such wide-ranging
topics as ornithology, geology, linguistics, and particularly primitive art. His rivals
accused him of being an ideologue, which once prompted Newman to remark that “aesthetics
is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds.” By late afternoon on Saturdays,
Newman had usually managed to attract a small group of artists to the gallery. No
one could compete with his conversation, but there was one painter who could silence
it. Pollock liked to annoy Newman. He’d listen attentively as Newman spoke, nodding
his head in agreement and then interrupting suddenly. “Barney, you know what I think?”
he used to say. “I think you’re a horse’s ass.” In Pollock’s vocabulary, the phrase
was a compliment.

Besides Newman, the only other artist at the gallery whom Pollock became very close
to was Tony Smith, a large, bearded,
erudite architect and sculptor who was in charge of hanging all the shows. The two
men had first met several years earlier at a party in the Village, and Smith’s first
impression had been of a “sullen, intense, miserable” person who made him think, I’ve
got to get out of here. I can’t stand that guy. But he felt very different on his
second meeting with Pollock, and they quickly developed a friendship of quiet understanding
and affection. Smith often drove out to Springs for the weekend. He and Pollock could
spend hours at the kitchen table talking about nothing. “He was always telling me
the local news,” Smith has recalled, “what everyone was doing, people I had never
heard of. He would give me a thumbnail sketch to fill me in. He seldom talked about
art, but when he did it was often in relation to his own community. . . . He’d mention
some old lady, or a retired broker, who had taken up painting. I would say, ‘What
of it? What the hell difference does it make to you?’ ”

Betty Parsons could never quite relax in Pollock’s presence. On his visits to the
gallery he tried to make conversation with her, but she sensed his discomfort, and
it made her nervous. Pollock often asked Parsons about her travels. He wanted to know
what Europe was like. He asked her about the Orient too, and his questions struck
her as odd. “There was a desperation about him,” Parsons once said. “When he wasn’t
drinking, he was shy, he could hardly speak. And when he was drinking, he wanted to
fight. . . . I would run away.”

A few months after Pollock joined the gallery, Betty Parsons visited him in Springs
one day to help plan his upcoming show. Barnett Newman and his wife Annalee, who worked
for the New York City Board of Education, drove her out. In the evening Pollock and
Lee and their guests sat down on the living room floor and sketched together, experimenting
with fine-nibbed Japanese pens that Newman had brought as a gift. Parsons watched
closely as Pollock drew. At first his drawings were graceful. But soon he was pushing
too hard on his pen and the point broke. He broke three pens in a row. He became angry,
cursing the pens that would not do what he wanted them to.

“He had tremendous drive and passion,” Parsons once said,
“and it was too much for him. Whatever he did wasn’t enough. Some people are born
with too big an engine inside them. If he hadn’t painted, he would have gone mad.”

In August 1947, three months after he joined the gallery, Pollock returned to the
barn to prepare for his first show at the Parsons Gallery. His frustrations vanished
the moment he began to work. “I’m just now getting into painting again and the stuff
is really beginning to flow,” he wrote to his friend Louis Bunce at the end of August.
“Grand feeling when it happens.”

He worked steadily through the end of the summer and the fall. As the weather grew
chillier he could hear the wind coming through the cracks in the barn and feel the
cold air streaming in. By October he was heating the barn with a pot-bellied kerosene
stove and bundling up in layers of clothing; his customary outfit was a thermal shirt,
a sweat shirt, and a hip-length dungaree coat. Lee worried constantly that the kerosene
stove would cause a fire. The small wooden barn even smelled flammable, pungent with
the greasy scent of oil and turpentine. Tubes and cans of paint lay open on the wide-planked
wooden floor. Dozens of paintings leaned against the walls. Lee suggested to Pollock
that he store his finished works in racks, but Pollock insisted on keeping his work
within view. As he painted he could look up and see his earlier work: past informing
present. His 1947 paintings grew out of his past art but broke with it too; in some
ways they broke with the entire history of art.