The Fate Of A Gesture

Jackson Pollock And Postwar American Art

Carter Ratcliff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000301380
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

I am indebted first to Thomas B. Hess and James Fitzsimmons, the editors of Artnews and Art International, who encouraged me to publish the essays and reviews that led, years later, to this book. I am equally grateful for the encouragement I have received from Elizabeth C. Baker, the editor of Art in America.

Part 1
The American Infinite

2. Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, 1950. Photograph by Rudy Burckhardt

1

One day early in June 1950, a photographer named Rudy Burckhardt rode in a car from Manhattan to Springs, a village at the eastern end of Long Island. There Jackson Pollock lived with his wife, Lee Krasner. The driver was Robert Goodnough, a young painter who wrote about his older colleagues for Artnews. At Springs, he would interview Pollock for an essay on his paint-slinging method; Burckhardt would take photographs of the painter in action. With the assignment came a ready-made title; "Pollock Paints a Picture." This was a variant on "Ben Shahn Paints a Picture," "Lipchitz Makes a Sculpture," and half a dozen others. The inventor of the formula was Thomas B. Hess, managing editor at Artnews.

"Tom wanted to show the progress of a painting," says Burckhardt. "So you'd go to the artist's studio and take a picture of a canvas at various stages. Hans Hofmann was delighted to paint in front of me and Elaine de Kooning." In "Hofmann Paints a Picture," she described a virtuoso performance by a seventy-year-old artist with a shock of thick white conductor's hair. Hofmann worked at "astonishing speed, never sitting down, constantly in motion between his palette and his easel, applying his paint with broad, lunging gestures." A teacher since 1915, he welcomed an audience and may have felt lonely without one. Onlookers made Pollock uneasy.

"He told me he couldn't paint in front of the camera," Burckhardt remembers. "But he was willing to pretend, so I took pictures of him making the gestures he would make when he actually painted." These are the large motions of a confident right arm. Burckhardt's photos register Pollock's muscularity and his knack for concentrating his attention. Crouching, stretching, thrusting, he never lets physical strength become mere force.

Burckhardt could record no gleam of pigment slithering from Pollock's brush, yet its absence isn't obvious. The artist's postures signal no falsity; though he's not painting, he is not acting. He is behaving and appears to be at one with his behavior, like someone running not for form but to get somewhere quickly. Burckhardt also showed the artist squatting to stir a can of paint. The dome of his head is bald and his face is deeply creased. Its features have settled heavily, so you can't tell if he is frowning in thought or keeping his expression blank. Only thirty-eight years old, he looks as if a hard road has led him deep into middle age. Still, the arrangement of his limbs is lithe and nonchalant. He has preserved the physical vanity of youth.

Goodnough recalls that "Pollock's barn didn't make a very big studio. He had paintings tacked to the walls, and lying all over the floor. I went out to Springs a couple of times. Once there were three or four people around, and one of us stepped on a painting by mistake. Somebody said, 'Be careful.' Pollock said, 'What do you mean, be careful? So what if he steps on it?' It didn't bother him in the least." Pollock painted on heavy canvas duck. His works are not physically delicate, nor did he demand delicate behavior in their vicinity.

Some of his colors were traditional oils packaged in tubes. Others were commercial enamels sold by the gallon. Empty paint cans crowded the floor; some held his tools—sticks and hardened brushes. Mixed with this clutter were cardboard boxes, a few pieces of furniture, and a pair of old boots, all spattered with paint, like the patches of floor left uncovered when Pollock worked. Through the barn's slatted walls came wide beams of silvery light and, in winter, chilly drafts of ocean air. Pollock's property fronted on Fire-place Road. In back, the yard and a marshy verge led down to Accabonac Creek, which runs slowly for half a mile to Napeague Bay. On the harshest winter afternoons, he staved off the cold with a kerosene stove. This was a clumsy piece of equipment; paint fumes are flammable and the barn was made of tindery, weather-beaten wood. No mishap ever occurred, though Krasner, also a painter, fretted whenever he lit the stove.

Working with a brush in the usual way, Pollock had been clumsy. Now, as he flung his paints into the air, he became elegant. This is puzzling, though almost everyone remembers moments when a sudden cessation of doubt permits an utterly graceful gesture. Nonetheless, it's hard to imagine how Pollock could make gestures like that one after another, as the texture of a painting grew dense. In the best of the poured paintings, this density is airy and luminous, and the tangles of paint are splendidly legible. You can see how the texture weaves itself. Not every canvas was a success, yet Pollock wrote in 1947, "I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess."

"Pollock said he liked to be in the painting when he worked," says Burckhardt. "He was submerged, in a way. To see everything he had done, he had to hang the canvas on the wall. Or if he wanted a quick look, he would leave it on the floor and get up on a ladder." By climbing Pollock's ladder, the photographer could see what the painter could not: artist and artwork entangled. In Number 32, 1950, the canvas Pollock pretended to paint for Burckhardt's camera, spidery strands of black enamel loop over a large field of white duck canvas. Shot from above in black and white, the poured pattern engulfs the arm that made it. Pollock's dark T-shirt is the largest of the blotches that gather filaments of paint into crossing points like synapses.

When Burckhardt was done taking pictures, Krasner invited him and Goodnough to stay the night. They accepted the offer. It was late in the afternoon; they were more than a hundred miles from Manhattan; and, anyway, Krasner's wish felt more like a command. Her charm resided in the force of her will. Pollock had let himself be seduced by it almost immediately. He doted on her strength, though he sometimes complained to friends, with childish cruelty, that she had a homely face. Mouth, chin, nose, eyes—each was large, and she could arrange them in an expression of iron hauteur. In command of art theory and art gossip, she knew how to survive and prevail in the impatient debates that had given the New York art world its ragged unity ever since the early days of the Depression. Acquainted with the scene's leading contenders, Krasner had counted as one of them.

Toward the end of 1941, a painter and occasional impresario named John Graham asked her to lend work to a show called American and French Paintings. The exhibition was to open the following January at the McMillen Gallery. Krasner was pleased. Her pictures would appear in the company of works by Old World masters: Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Henri Matisse. Stuart Davis, Willem de Kooning, and the other American names on Graham's roster were less illustrious but just as familiar, save one: Jackson Pollock. Assuming that she "knew all the abstract artists in New York," she felt "simply furious because here was a name that I hadn't heard of." None of her close friends could tell her anything about him. Stubbornly digging, she learned that he lived on East Eighth Street, not far from her studio on Ninth. She found his building and, five flights up, knocked on his door. Hung over, Pollock let her in and showed her his work.

Then, in her repeated telling, came a moment of revelation: Krasner saw the light of Pollock's greatness. "To say that I flipped my lid would be an understatement," she said in one version of the tale. "I was totally bowled over." What she didn't say was that Pollock, not his pictures, impressed her. Only with the help of friends whose eyes she trusted did she learn to see promise in the rough, desperate pictures Pollock was painting. Later she convinced herself that her love for him and for his art had been identical from the first dazzling instant. "I was terribly drawn to Jackson," she said in the late sixties. "I fell in love with him—physically, mentally—in every sense of the word. I had a conviction when I met Jackson that he had something important to say. When we began going together, my own work became irrelevant. He was the important thing. I couldn't do enough for him. He was not easy."

In truth, Pollock was nearly impossible, a brutal and infantile drunk. The point of moving from Eighth Street to Springs was to extract him from the swilling, brawling routines he had developed in downtown Manhattan. Of course he developed new ones in his new setting. Too poor to afford a car, he rode a secondhand bicycle to a restaurant called Jungle Pete's. After an excess of beer, he sometimes failed to find his way back to the house on Fireplace Road. Yet Pollock drank less in the country than in the city, and painted more. At the time of Burckhardt's visit, he had touched no alcohol for nearly two years.

"After dinner," the photographer recalls, "there was an evening to get through. Pollock was pleasant but he didn't talk much. He hardly said anything. Goodnough wasn't a big talker either, so things got a little boring. But Lee Krasner made it pleasant. In fact, she did all the talking and she was very gracious." It was more usual for her to be pugnacious, and Pollock's silences could have the sullen force of temper tantrums. That evening, Krasner behaved well and Pollock did the best he could. Their effort was strongly motivated; as Burckhardt says, "Artnews was a big deal in those days."

The art world had begun to honor Pollock. In return, he could muster only the most awkward civilities. The economy of his psyche encouraged no exchanges of any sort—courtesies, feelings, thoughts. Ordinary patterns of reciprocity baffled him, and the memory of his bafflement returns us to the small living room at Springs, where he and Krasner entertained the emissaries from Artnews. As the minutes inch by, Pollock tries to be pleasant and Krasner succeeds, her every word—her every lively inflection—driven by a sense of mission. They are an intense and dreary couple.

Though the aura of Pollock's importance was brightening in the summer of 1950, it still seemed patchy and thin. A year before, Life magazine had shown him standing before the eighteen-foot-long Summertime: Number 9A, 1948 (1948). A headline asked: "Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?" The article that followed left the question open. Illustrated by three color reproductions of poured paintings, Life's report had the look —if not the tone—of an accolade. Pollock was delighted. True to the form of familiar, avant-garde legend, he had aroused the popular press. The time had come for the art magazines to announce his greatness. Over the past few seasons they had taken brief and sometimes respectful notice of his shows at New York galleries, but there had been no prospect of a full-length essay, in Artnews least of all.

Now, with "Pollock Paints a Picture" in the works, he was being fitted to one of the art world's major formats. Krasner saw in Goodnough's article a necessity dictated by Pollock's importance. Yet editorial policy can be touched by caprice, sometimes at the last moment, as Krasner knew. She behaved nicely to Goodnough and Burckhardt in a chatty effort to prevent a cruel surprise. Writer and photographer counted only as the means to an end, yet we should hear no false notes in her cordiality. Because she truly believed that Pollock's career was a transcendently worthy cause, anything she did to serve it, no matter how calculated, blazed with a righteous sincerity.

2

Ashamed of his family background, Pollock glamorized it, mentioning often that he was born in Cody, Wyoming, in 1912. Maybe he liked the allusion to Buffalo Bill Cody, the founder of the town. At the Art Students League in Manhattan, he wore western boots and a cowboy hat, though he never rode herd on cattle. Few Westerners did. Most were farmers or laborers or pursued small-town lines of work. For a time, Jackson's father, Roy Pollock, hauled boulders in a horse-drawn wagon from riverbanks to a crushing plant.

Roy was born in 1877 to a couple named McCoy, who had migrated three years earlier from Ohio to a homestead in southwestern Iowa. When he was two, his mother died and his father gave him to James and Lizzie Pollock, the proprietors of a poor farm in the same corner of the state. Though they didn't adopt him formally until he was nineteen years old, Roy always went by his foster parents' name. Studious enough to graduate from high school at a time when most Iowans did not, he nonetheless lacked gumption. After a few haphazard attempts to escape the place of his birth, he drifted through half a decade of unambitious work, then married Stella McClure, the daughter of a mason in the nearby town of Tingley. Stella was a year older than Roy, and came from a more respectable family.

In those late Victorian times, pious and market-driven, the need to be good was indistinguishable from the hope of betterment. To become a proper sort of person—an upstanding American—you had to improve your lot in life, tangibly and otherwise. As much as money, you needed gentility. That Roy Pollock was incorrigibly countrified, a tobacco chewer who found dull contentment in slopping livestock, disappointed his wife more deeply than his failure to earn a good living.

Weakened by six years of hauling rocks, he took a job managing a sheep ranch. Four years later, the family doctor found he had rheumatic fever and recommended a warmer climate. He set out for California, with Stella and their five boys. -Jackson, the youngest, was less than a year old. Not long after the family's arrival in San Diego, the unforeseeable—a freak blizzard—deflected Roy from his plan of raising citrus fruit. The Pollocks settled on a thirty-acre truck farm near Phoenix, Arizona. Jackson grew up as a farm boy, not a cowboy.

In photographs of the Arizona and California farmhouses where Pollock spent his childhood, you see at first a cluttered dreariness. Another look turns clutter into a Victorian plenitude of textures, patterns, and overwrought shapes. Stella Pollock plucked her notions of elegance from ladies' magazines and department-store catalogs. With her loud voice, abrupt manner, and strong hand with a team of horses went dreams of refinement. Entranced by a domestic ideal, she surrounded herself with furnishings as fancy as her husband's income would allow. No one now has her taste, though many still believe, as she did, that an ever more sophisticated sense of beauty must guide the acquisition of material things. When she was old and three of her five sons had become painters, Stella Pollock told a daughter-in-law that as a girl in Iowa she wanted to study art but never found the chance.

When Jackson was eight, his father bought a hotel in Janesville, a small town on the northern slopes of California's Sierra Nevada mountains. For half a year, Roy Pollock helped his wife run the establishment. Then, frustrated and restless, he joined a team of surveyors on its way through town. Though he never returned for good, his desertion was not complete. As Stella Pollock moved their five boys from town to farm to town, Roy occasionally visited or sent money. In 1928, after years of uncertain scrabbling in the Southwestern countryside, Stella Pollock settled the remnants of her household in Los Angeles. Two years earlier her eldest son, Charles, had gone to study with Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League in New York. Now sixteen years old, Jackson entered Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles as a sophomore.

There he found a substitute father of sorts in Frederick John de St. Vrain Schwankovsky, an art teacher with a mustache, a goatee, and flowing hair. His shoes were sandals and he wore a velvet jacket. Schwankovsky was a bohernian with a teacher's license who took seriously his mission of bringing aesthetic enlightenment to young men. Pollock learned from Schwankovsky an unfocused awe of art but no facility with a pencil. Writing to his brother in New York, Pollock said his drawings were "rotten." They lacked "freedom and rhythem."

When Pollock was suspended from Manual Arts for distributing subversive broadsides, Schwankovsky arranged for him to keep attending art classes. The handouts had proclaimed that varsity letters should be awarded to artists and musicians, not football players. This theory drew Pollock into a scuffle with a gym teacher. He was suspended again, and again Schwankovsky intervened. His earliest drawings may indeed have been rotten. Still, some quality in them or their maker impressed Schwankovsky, who went far out of his way to encourage Pollock in the one hope for himself that he had ever expressed: to become "an Artist of some kind."

When Jackson came to Manhattan in September 1930, he moved in with his brother, who lived in a walk-up apartment on Union Square, just north of Fourteenth Street. At the Art Students League, he signed up for the course Charles had taken from Benton: Life Drawing, Painting, and Composition. Charles enjoyed that knack for likenesses which makes drawing instructors look better than they are. Because the fl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• Contents
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART 1 THE AMERICAN INFINITE
• PART 2 THE ACTION PAINTER
• PART 3 FRAGMENTS OF THE ORDINARY
• PART 4 A DAZZLING CONTINUUM
• PART 5 GLAMOUR AND DEATH
• PART 6 THE QUEST FOR PURITY
• PART 7 FROM DOLDRUMS TO BOOM
• EPILOGUE
• NOTES
• ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
• INDEX