Jackson Pollock Read online

  “Monumental and impressive.”

  —Washington Post

  “For once, with this intense, engrossing, and indeed brilliant work, we have a biography that justifies its length. Seldom have the history of an artist, the development of his imagination, the fevers of his soul been more grandly yet intimately described.”

  —Interview

  “Brilliant and definitive … so absorbing in its narrative drive and so exhaustively detailed that it makes everything that came before seem like trial balloons.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Unprecedented. … Never before have we had such a thorough and affecting account of an American artist.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “A superb biography. … lavishly illustrated, it reads with the fluid grace of a fine novel. … [Naifeh and Smith] succeed at making art history a good read. … In a period of many fine biographies, this ranks among the best.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “This great biography doubles as the best thing ever written about the native roots and cosmopolitan strivings of American modern art. … it reaps an avalanche of information which it sorts judiciously and delivers with terrific flair. … [Pollock] hereby enters our collective imagination as a full-blown historical character. … An overwhelmingly convincing portrait.”

  —Elle

  “Amazing. … An extraordinarily riveting work, full of miraculous research.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “[Pollock’s] story has never been told better or in more detail. … An awesome tapestry of interwoven stories … Wonderfully rich, evocative and concrete.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Brilliant. … As no other biography has managed to do, the authors make a cogent case for the greatness of [Pollock’s] art and the complex web of ideas, predispositions, childhood traumas and adult ambitions that made it as astounding, as lyrical and as complex as it was.”

  —New York Newsday

  “Richly satisfying … one is awestruck that so much creativity flowed from such self-destructive havoc.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “A huge page-turner … sensational.”

  —Wilson Library Journal

  “The most thoroughly detailed biographical portrait ever of a U.S. artist. It’s as imposing as a history book, as entertaining as a novel and as close as the reader may ever come to sharing the breadth—and sensing the madness—of artistic genius and the genesis of a masterpiece.”

  —USA Today

  “Clearly the definitive work.”

  —Financial Times (London)

  “The authors of this huge biography have probably come as close as anyone can to solving the enigmas of Jackson Pollock’s psyche.”

  —Boston Sunday Globe

  “In the hands of Naifeh and Smith, the world of twentieth-century American art comes sparklingly alive.”

  —Charleston Evening Post

  “Controversial … a blockbuster biography with mass appeal.”

  —Smart

  “Comprehensive, crammed with facts, details and anecdotes gathered over seven years of exhaustive research, including interviews with the painter Lee Krasner, who was Pollock’s wife; the art critic Clement Greenberg; many of Pollock’s friends, and surviving members of the Pollock family.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  [JACKSON POLLOCK]

  © 2014 Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith

  All rights reserved.

  CAUTION: “JACKSON POLLOCK” is fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America and of all countries covered by the International Copyright Union (including the Dominion of Canada and the rest of the British Commonwealth), the Berne Convention, the Pan-American Copyright Convention and the Universal Copyright Convention as well as all countries with which the United States has reciprocal copyright relations. All rights, including excerpting, professional/amateur stage rights, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio broadcasting, television, video or sound recording, all other forms of mechanical or electronic reproduction, such as CD-ROM, CD-I, information storage and retrieval systems and photocopying, and the rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved.

  Inquiries concerning rights should be addressed to:

  William Morris Endeavor Entertainment, LLC

  1325 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, New York 10019

  Attn: Kathleen Nishimoto

  For our parents

  William and Kathryn Smith

  and

  George and Marion Naifeh

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  EPIGRAPH

  COPYRIGHT & PERMISSIONS

  DEDICATION

  PROLOGUE: DEMONS

  PART ONE: THE WEST

  CHAPTER 1: STRONG-MINDED WOMEN

  CHAPTER 2: SENSITIVE MEN

  CHAPTER 3: STELLA’S BOYS

  CHAPTER 4: SENSITIVE TO AN UNNATURAL DEGREE

  CHAPTER 5: AN ORDINARY FAMILY

  CHAPTER 6: ABANDONED

  CHAPTER 7: LOST IN THE DESERT

  CHAPTER 8: JACK AND SANDE

  CHAPTER 9: LIGHT ON THE PATH

  CHAPTER 10: A ROTTEN REBEL

  PART TWO: NEW YORK

  CHAPTER 11: THE BEST PAINTER IN THE FAMILY

  CHAPTER 12: BENTON

  CHAPTER 13: JACK SASS

  CHAPTER 14: THE OLD LOVE

  CHAPTER 15: INTO THE PAST

  CHAPTER 16: OUT OF THE VOID

  CHAPTER 17: THE DARING YOUNG MAN ON THE FLYING TRAPEZE

  CHAPTER 18: A GREAT HOPE FOR AMERICAN PAINTING

  CHAPTER 19: AN ANTIDOTE TO REGIONALISM

  CHAPTER 20: THIS UNNATURAL MASS OF HUMAN EMOTIONS

  CHAPTER 21: RETREAT

  CHAPTER 22: ARCHETYPES AND ALCHEMY

  CHAPTER 23: INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY

  CHAPTER 24: THE WAGES OF GENIUS

  CHAPTER 25: LENA KRASSNER

  CHAPTER 26: LEGENDS

  CHAPTER 27: A WELLSPRING OF INSPIRATION

  CHAPTER 28: EXCITING AS ALL HELL

  CHAPTER 29: BEHIND THE VEIL

  CHAPTER 30: FRUITS AND NUTS

  CHAPTER 31: ESCAPE

  COLOR INSERT

  PART 3: THE SPRINGS

  CHAPTER 32: STARTING OVER

  CHAPTER 33: MEMORIES ARRESTED IN SPACE

  CHAPTER 34: A PERFECT MATCH

  CHAPTER 35: CELEBRITY

  CHAPTER 36: BREAKING THE ICE

  CHAPTER 37: RECOLLECTIONS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD

  CHAPTER 38: A CLAM WITHOUT A SHELL

  CHAPTER 39: THE UNRAVELING

  CHAPTER 40: MIRACLE CURES

  CHAPTER 41: AGAINST THE WORLD

  CHAPTER 42: ABANDONED

  CHAPTER 43: THE LAST ACT

  CHAPTER 44: ESCAPE VELOCITY

  EPILOGUE: GLACIAL ERRATIC

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  FOOTNOTES

  NOTES

  CREDITS

  PROLOGUE

  DEMONS

  “I’m going to kill myself.”

  Tony Smith recognized Jackson Pollock’s whiskey voice. The late night call was not unusual for Jackson. Even talk of suicide had the air of ritual about it. Yet there was something in Pollock’s voice that Smith hadn’t heard before, a harder edge that alarmed him. With his ample Irish charm he tried to calm the distant voice, but Pollock was inconsolable. “Hold on,” Smith finally said. “I’ll be out.” He put down the phone and drove off into the night in the middle of an early spring downpour. It would be hours before he could reach Pollock’s house at the eastern end of Long Island—hours in whic
h, knowing Jackson, anything could happen.

  It was March 1952, only two years after Pollock’s breakthrough 1949 show at the Betty Parsons Gallery gave the emerging avant-garde art world its first bright, bumptious triumph; only a little more than a year after the vast, luminous landscapes of Autumn Rhythm and Lavender Mist dazzled and confounded the critics; only five years after Clement Greenberg pronounced him “the most powerful painter in contemporary America”; only two and a half years after Life magazine thrust him into the spotlight of America’s celebrity-mad postwar media, making him, virtually overnight, American art’s first “star.”

  As the drive through the darkness and the downpour stretched into its fourth hour, Tony Smith must have wondered, as many others had, what strange, reverse alchemy could have transformed so much acclamation into such self-destructive agony.

  Smith knew that Pollock was drinking again. After two enormously productive and relatively dry years—even in the driest seasons he kept cooking sherry buried in the backyard—Jackson had gone back to the bottle. He had always been, in Greenberg’s phrase, “an alcoholic in excelsis,” but drinking itself was never the problem. Even when it began with beer in the morning and ended with bourbon at night; even when its roots reached back to junior high school, or further, to an alcoholic father; even when his life dissolved, as it had several times over the last twenty years, into a series of drunken binges punctuated by hospitalization, drinking alone could not explain what was happening to Pollock. It couldn’t explain the long, plaintive discussions about suicide with friends. “It’s a way out,” he told Roger Wilcox one day, to which Wilcox replied, “How the hell do you know? You may get yourself into worse trouble.”

  Drinking alone couldn’t explain why, just a few months earlier, Pollock’s new Cadillac convertible—bought as a boast of success—had skidded off a dry road and wrapped itself around a tree. Jackson walked away unhurt, but those who knew him, like Tony Smith, knew that he would try again—and not because of alcohol. There was something behind the drinking that was pushing at Jackson from within, tormenting him, even trying to kill him. Jackson Pollock had demons inside. Everyone could see that. But no one knew where they came from or what they wanted.

  There were no streetlights along rural Fireplace Road, but Smith knew well to turn at the second drive on the right after passing Ashawagh Hall and Old Stone Highway. In the turbulent darkness, the house was invisible until his headlights swept the driveway, illuminating on the right the old farmhouse, ghostly pale behind a veil of rain, and on the left the barn that Jackson had converted into a studio. The storm had blown down the electrical lines; there were no lights on inside, just a faint, yellowish glow in the studio windows.

  Whatever anxieties weighed on Smith during the five-hour trip, he could not have been prepared for the scene inside. Illuminated only by candlelight, Jackson stood in the middle of the studio clutching a knife and hurling obscenities. “I was afraid,” Smith later admitted, “because Pollock, even in his last years, was very strong. He could have done me in with a swipe of the knife.” Despite the liquor and the rage, Jackson looked surprisingly lean and fit. On the advice of a self-promoting “organic healer” on Park Avenue, he had been bathing in a solution of rock salt and drinking an emulsion of guano and ground beets in order to establish “a proper balance of gold and silver in his urine.” This grueling, expensive regimen was supposed to cure his craving for alcohol, but it turned out to be just the latest in a series of failed attempts to quiet the clamorous voices in his head. According to Reuben Kadish, one of his closest friends, “He liked to put himself in the hands of people that he thought could control his life and straighten it out for him.”

  But they never could. The studio reeked of liquor.

  Jackson’s leathery face was deeply creased across the forehead and around the-mouth. A soft fuzz covered the prominent crown of his head, where, years before, there had been a bumper crop of thick blond hair. Even without it, he was a handsome man—never more so than on the rare occasions when he smiled and showed his dimples. Like many others in the art world, women and men, Smith felt a physical attraction to Pollock. Part of that attraction, however, was the knowledge that beneath the boyish dimples and the tragicomic drunken antics lurked this towering, inexplicable rage.

  In the house, Pollock’s wife, Lee Krasner, cowered behind the bed. Since her childhood in Brooklyn, Lee had been terrified by storms of all kinds. She had spent the last seven hours sitting in darkness and fear as her husband stormed through the house, brandishing the knife—at himself, at her—roaring curses at the world. She had done what she always did when Jackson drank too much and the rage came out: tried to become invisible; slipped away to a distant corner and waited for the storm to pass. She knew better than to confront him. Eventually, he would fall down from exhaustion or from drink or both and she would come to him, cradle his head as she had seen his mother do, and shoulder his weight to bed.

  This time, however, the storm showed no sign of abating.

  Tony Smith knew both Jackson Pollocks: the shy, sober one, given to deprecating himself, saying in a soft voice, “I can’t do anything but paint” or “the pictures just come to me”; and the drunken one, the one Clement Greenberg said “behaved like a six-year-old, demanding to be the center of attention.” Smith had often gone drinking with Pollock and almost as often seen him drunk—playful drunk, dangerous drunk, depressed drunk. But even he, unlike Lee, had never seen this rage.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” Jackson roared.

  The demons demanded concealment. As a teenager, Pollock had written his brothers, “People have always frightened and bored me consequently I have been within my own shell.” At parties, he would stare wordlessly into his drink, feeling “stripped of his skin,” he said, by the unreturned glances of those around him. A friend described him as a “pained, painful person,” who, when he did speak, spaced his words out like poles along a desert road, with “awkward, long silences” strung between them. According to Roger Wilcox, Jackson needed to work up his courage with two or three beers before he could even set foot in a bar.

  At other times, Pollock hid behind a facade of barroom bluster and macho posturing. By the age of thirty, he had perfected the “ugly-touch, Hemingway” persona out of which legends later grew: drinking, risk-taking, fast driving, foul talking, quick hitting, easy fucking, and no apologies. But always underneath there was a shy, sensitive boy yearning to be liked: a boy who, despite having been raised in a family of men, had turned first to his mother, Stella, for support and a sense of identity; a boy who preferred the company of neighborhood girls and their games of “house”; a boy estranged from his father, unable to pass his brothers’ tests of manhood, and traumatized throughout his life by anxiety and dread over his own ambiguous sexual urges.

  Pollock’s efforts at concealment met with uncanny success. In an effort so thorough that it seems almost consciously designed to frustrate later chroniclers, he left no journals, only a score of letters and a scattering of postcards and business-related notes. He veiled his thoughts and emotions not only from posterity but also from the numerous analysts and doctors who attempted to pry their way into his private world. On those rare occasions when he tried to make contact, the telephone, with its anonymity and evanescence, proved the perfect confessional. His late night phone calls, like the one to Smith, were legendary. As he sat with his head bowed and his broad shoulders hunched over the phone as if to climb inside it, his low voice would open out on great green stretches of conversation.

  He was capable of sweetness and generosity as well as rage and insularity. In the midst of persistent—although often overstated—poverty, he lent other artists money, he helped friends remodel their houses, painted a bike for one neighbor’s child, taught another to use a bow and arrow. He could defuse barroom brawls with his notoriously beguiling smile or the “renowned twinkle in his eye,” with a few disarming words or a well-aimed apology.

  L
ike his rage, however, his sweetness was always followed by regret, a feeling that he had given away too much, and he would draw back into the hardshelled, cowboy persona that was Jackson Pollock to the world. His life was a give and take, giving a small piece of himself—often inadvertently—then desperately trying to reclaim it—or obliterate it. Give and take. The world demanded that he give; the demons demanded that he take back. In his art, he concealed his images within layers of paint, systematically weaving them into an impenetrable web of lines and dribbles, spills and drips. Show and conceal; give and take. He veiled his art just as he veiled his life, to protect himself from the world without and the terrors within.

  Against the incitement of the storm, Smith tried to calm his friend. He knew better than to refer directly to Jackson’s drinking. Nothing was more likely to set him off again than an effort to take away the bottle or suggest that he had had enough. Besides, he would just get in the car and race down the slick, dark highway looking for more. Desperately, Tony filled the air with art talk, probably about Pollock’s recent falling-out with Betty Parsons, at whose gallery the two men had become friends and over whose eccentricities they had shared more than a few laughs. Gradually, the rage began to subside. At some point, Jackson put down the knife and took up a cigarette and a bottle of bourbon.