Jackson Pollock (32 page)

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The convention among contemporary art critics and academics is to disdain the commonplace
term “drip” paintings in favor of the more fashionable usage “poured” paintings. The
term was originated by William Rubin to distinguish between dripping, as an act of
casting paint droplets across a canvas, and pouring, which implies a continuously
appied line of paint. But though the term “poured” has about it the air of technical
orthodoxy (“I can tell you that they are not
drip
paintings at all,” insists
The New York Times
critic John Russell. “Poured, poured, not dripped.”), it also smacks somewhat of
the pedantic. Pollock’s dripping is a term and an image that has entered the century’s
vocabulary, and to eradicate it simply because of the movement of the artist’s hand
during the act of creation seems unnecessarily fussy. “Pouring” ultimately is no more
accurate a description of a man flinging, spattering, and tossing paint than “dripping”
and conveys none of the appropriate active imagery. “Dripping,” in fact, was Pollock’s
term of choice to describe his art, and it has become so universal that even the French
refer to his 1947–50 works as “Le Drippings.” Considering the attention that has already
been paid to Pollock’s technique, one would hope that any additional coinages would
refer to the paintings themselves rather than to the method by which they were created.

In February 1949 Pollock was visited in Springs by Arnold Newman, a thirty-year-old
freelance photographer on assignment for
Life
. The magazine had provided Newman with no specific instructions as to how to photograph
Pollock, indicating only that it needed some pictures in both black-and-white and
color for a feature story to be published that summer.

Pollock was happy to spend a day with Newman posing for pictures. Tailed by his dog
Gyp, he took the photographer (and the photographer’s assistant) behind the house
toward the bay and then around the corner to Dan Miller’s general store. He also took
them inside his studio and posed for pictures in the barn. When Newman asked him a
few questions about his technique, Pollock offered to demonstrate. He placed a fresh
sheet of canvas on the floor of the barn, kneeled on top of it, and with slow studied
movements dripped paint from a stick. He proceeded to pick up a can of sand, and crouching
on his heels, added pinches of earth to his painting. Pollock, who had never painted
for a photographer
before and almost never allowed anyone to watch him work, was willing to paint for
the five million readers of
Life
. In a denim jacket, blue jeans, and paint-spattered work boots, he crouched on the
floor and ran earth through his fingers, giving a performance as the rough, rugged
all-American genius of his ambitions.

In the course of the day Pollock took note of a peculiar irony: Newman, a freelance
photographer, was better off than he was. He had arrived in Springs in a chauffeur-driven
car; he had his own assistant. Both Newman and the assistant were being paid for the
story, whereas Pollock, of course, was not. Pollock was the “famous artist,” but everyone
except him seemed to be profiting from his fame. Pollock was standing outside the
barn when he turned to Newman suddenly. “I’m a little bit short of cash,” he said.
“Can you lend me a $150?” He disappeared for a moment and returned with a painting,
leaning it against the barn without saying anything. Newman declined the sale, explaining
politely that he was getting married the following month and had to save his money.

Besides agreeing to be photographed, Pollock had also consented to be interviewed
by the magazine. Later that winter he visited the offices of
Life
, along with Lee, and met with editor Dorothy Seiberling. What did his art mean? the
interviewer asked. Who were his favorite artists? Was it true that cigarette ashes
and dead bumble bees could be found in some of his paintings? “He talked,” Seiberling
later recalled, “but you felt it was agony for him. He twisted his hands. Lee had
to amplify whatever he said.” Even with Lee’s help, his answers failed to satisfy
the editors and were never published. To read them is to understand why. While his
answers were consistently interesting, Pollock refused to explain his art or himself.
Asked why he didn’t paint realistically, Pollock told the interviewer: “If you want
to see a face, look at one.” When asked how he felt about hostile critics, Pollock
replied: “If they’d leave most of their stuff at home and just look at the painting,
they’d have no trouble enjoying it. It’s just like looking at a bed of flowers. You
don’t tear your hair out over what it means.”

Life’s
feature story on Pollock appeared on August 8, 1949, along with pieces on the return
of Austrian war prisoners, George Bernard Shaw’s ninety-third birthday celebration,
and the rage for dime-store clothing. “J
ACKSON
P
OLLOCK
—Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” Thus read the headline in
Life
. The article explained:

Recently a formidably high-brow New York art critic [Clement Greenberg] hailed the
brooding, puzzled-looking man shown above as a major artist of our time and a fine
candidate to become “the greatest American painter of the 20th century.” Others believe
that Jackson Pollock produces nothing more than interesting, if inexplicable, decorations.
Still others condemn his pictures as degenerate and find them unpalatable as yesterday’s
macaroni. Even so, Pollock, at the age of 37, has burst forth as the shining new phenomenon
of American art. . . .

Five million copies, five million reactions. In White Plains, New York, a doctor who
had treated Pollock at Bloomingdale Asylum a decade earlier sent his congratulations,
while requesting that Pollock drop him a line about his mental health and the “adjustment
you have made since you left the hospital.” In Rockwood, Tennessee, his old girlfriend
Becky Tarwater considered sending a note but decided against it because “maybe it
would seem exploitative.” In Deep River, Connecticut, the local newspaper interviewed
Pollock’s mother, who confessed she did not “completely understand” her son’s art.
In Cody, Wyoming, the town was in an uproar. Although the article in
Life
presented Pollock as a paint-slinging cowboy from Cody, no one in that town remembered
his having lived there. An investigation was launched by
The Cody Enterprise
, which reported that the “Pollock controversy is similar to that of movie cowboy
Roy Rogers who claims Cody as his home. . . . Cody does not disclaim such noted sons,
but is only careful to check on their authenticity.” Meanwhile, back home in Springs,
the farmers and fishermen could not believe their eyes. What was Jackson Pollock,
of all people, doing in America’s favorite magazine? “A good many of them made peace
with themselves,” according to Dan Miller, “by figuring that
Life
magazine was crazier than Pollock.”

Pollock was proud of the article in
Life
. It may have poked fun at him, but it also ordained his position as the leading painter
of his generation. (For years afterward he kept a stack of copies of the August 8,
1949,
Life
on a kitchen shelf and made sure that everyone saw it.) At the same time, Pollock
felt uneasy about having posed for the article. He had always prided himself on his
independence, so what was he doing in
Life
magazine, implicitly appealing to middle-class America for its support? Pollock first
saw the article when his friends James Brooks and Bradley Walker Tomlin arrived in
Springs from New York carrying a few copies. Tomlin opened the magazine and tried
to show Pollock the pictures of himself. Pollock refused to look. Perhaps he recalled
the day, not so long before, when Tomlin had asked him a question about his technique.
“I can’t tell you that,” he had growled. For
Life
, however, he had revealed all, exploiting his art for the sake of his public image.
“He couldn’t read the article while we were there,” Brooks later recalled. “He was
too embarrassed.”

Soon after the article was published Pollock was sitting at his kitchen table one
day with his friend Tony Smith. Out the window they could see Pollock’s Model A parked
in the driveway. Pollock asked Smith if he had read the article in
Life
. Then he asked Smith if he thought he should be driving a better car. “The Model
A’s a good car,” Smith said. “What the hell kind of car do you want?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Pollock said. “Maybe a Cadillac.”

He was only half joking. He soon bought from a used-car dealer in Southampton a Cadillac
convertible—a 1941 model with a bashed front fender but a Cadillac nonetheless. It
cost him four hundred dollars. “In many ways,” Smith once said, “Jackson was a straight
American boy. He wanted what most people want.” He just wanted it much more.

To drive by the farmhouse on Fireplace Road was to know that someone important lived
there. The short dirt driveway, which had remained empty for so many seasons, was
now crowded with cars on almost any weekend afternoon as neighbors in the Hamptons
appeared out of nowhere to meet the
painter they had seen in
Life
. Friendships were formed, invitations extended, favors offered without second thought.
Rosanne Larkin, a potter, invited Pollock to try his hand at the potter’s wheel in
her studio in East Hampton. Berton Roueché, a genial Missourian who wrote about medicine
for
The New Yorker
, offered to write a piece about Pollock for the magazine; it appeared the following
year. Valentine and Happy Macy, East Hampton socialites who had made their money in
radio stations and newspapers, casually sent over a truckload of spare antique furniture,
including a red velvet Victorian couch and a massive oak table. Those who met him
recognized his genuineness and helped him however they could. None of his neighbors
did more than Alfonso Ossorio.

Born in Manila to a family of sugar growers, Ossorio had grown up in England, studied
at Harvard, and established a modest reputation as a painter in 1941, when Betty Parsons
gave him a one-man show at the Wakefield Bookshop. Although he continued to exhibit
with Parsons for the next two decades, it was primarily as a patron that Ossorio would
be appreciated. He had first met the Pollocks in January 1949 when he bought a “drip”
painting for fifteen hundred dollars, more than twice as much as anyone had ever before
paid for a Pollock. Lee, who was expert at cultivating collectors, promptly suggested
to Ossorio that he and his lifelong companion, the dancer Ted Dragon, consider summering
in East Hampton. She took the couple house hunting and eventually found them a perfect
country nest—the seventy-acre Albert Herter estate, complete with a rambling Italianate
mansion overlooking Geórgica Pond. Ossorio nicknamed the place The Creeks, and it
became a private showcase for the dozen or so Pollocks he purchased from the artist
in the next few years.

Ossorio first visited the studio in Springs on a matter of business. One summer afternoon
he showed up with the painting he had purchased the previous January and claimed that
it needed some repair work. Pollock glanced quickly at
Number 5, 1948
, a large, red “drip” painting, and realized that Ossorio was right. While working
on the canvas Pollock at one point had yanked a stick from a can of hardened paint
and inadvertently picked up a
scab that had formed on the surface. Ever democratic in his use of materials, Pollock
had tossed the scab onto the painting. Months later the still-wet scab had slid across
the canvas, bending the image out of shape.

Pollock politely offered to repair the painting and suggested to Ossorio that he leave
the work with him for a week or so. In reality, though, Pollock had no intention of
being reduced to a mere restorer. When Lee came into the studio a few days later to
see how the repair was progressing, she screamed. Ossorio’s painting no longer existed.
Instead of repairing the work Pollock had repainted it, creating an entirely new image.
“You don’t know Ossorio,” Lee scolded. “Maybe he won’t like it.” Ossorio, however,
didn’t mind a bit. He said he had learned a worthwhile lesson: “Don’t let an artist
repair his own picture unless you want it to be improved.”