Jackson Pollock Read online

The studio was cold and dark, a palpable reflection of Pollock’s creative state. The yellow light of the candelabrum spread across the rows of paintings that lined the walls: small black-and-white ones recently returned from Sidney Janis in front; huge “classic” ones like Autumn Rhythm and Number 32 looming in back, their monumental calligraphy stark in the dim light. Pollock held the candelabrum aloft and walked to the kerosene stove in the corner. The grim poetry of Jackson moving unsteadily through the dark, holding the light in front of him, surrounded by the huge apparitions of his paintings could not have escaped the poet in Tony Smith. When Jackson lit the stove and flames began to shoot from the flue and lick the ceiling beams, the vision turned demonic. “For Chrissakes, Jackson, put it out,” Smith blurted. Obediently, Jackson picked up the iron lid with a pair of pliers and dropped it over the fire. A few minutes later, he relit it.

  On the floor lay a painting that Jackson had been working on recently, a network of delicate circles painted with a light, tentative brush—unlike anything he had done before. Seeing it, Smith thought of something George Grosz had told him once: “When a painter works in circles … he is near madness.” Look at van Gogh, he had said.

  To get Pollock “out of himself,” Smith suggested that they do a painting together. Between swigs of bourbon, the two men unwrapped a fresh roll of Belgian linen and unfurled it across the studio’s cement floor. Jackson searched through a box of paint for the right color to begin. The first tube he pulled out was cadmium red; so was the second; and the third. After four or five more tries, he cried out in exasperation, “I can’t start a painting with cadmium red!” and threw the tubes down. Gently, Smith volunteered to begin. He reached into the box and pulled out a tube of cadmium orange. “Well, I come from Orange, New Jersey,” he joked. He squeezed a long line of orange at the edge of the canvas, then laid a piece of waxed paper over the line and walked on it. Where he stepped, the paint oozed out, forming a trail of uneven blotches.

  “So that’s the way you do it,” Jackson sneered. “Here’s how I do it.” In a sudden, sweeping motion, he grabbed a big bucket of black Duco in his pawlike hands and began to pour it on the canvas. For just an instant, he could have been the “old” Jackson Pollock, the Jackson Pollock who, four years before, had stunned the world with his inexplicable skeins of paint; the Jackson Pollock whose image would be indelibly etched in the public consciousness for decades after his death: a brooding, slope-shouldered figure in a black T-shirt, bent over a huge canvas, flinging lariats of paint from a stick or dribbling them from a stiff brush, stepping lightly into the middle of the canvas, his arm describing circles in the air, moving laterally, rhythmically, throwing tight loops of glistening paint in lace-like lines across the expanse of white, then stepping back to look, wholly focused, as the lines continued to unwind out of his unconscious, into his eyes, and finally, in another burst, onto the canvas. “Forget the hand,” Barnett Newman said of Pollock at work. “It’s the mind—not brain, but mind—soul, concentration, gut. I’ve seen him come out of his studio like a wet rag.” For just a moment, through the alcoholic haze, Smith must have glimpsed the apparition of that Jackson Pollock moving among his candlelit creations.

  The demons demanded recognition. For Pollock, success was more than a goal, it was a visceral necessity. Born the youngest in a family of five boys, all vying ferociously for scraps of attention from a distant father and a granite-faced mother, Jackson learned early the hard art of breaking through. Neighbors remember him as a “crybaby” and a “mama’s boy,” always running to his mother to bewail some imagined abuse. Behind a facade of robustness, as a child and even as an adult, he was sickly and accident-prone. As an adolescent, he learned to test his mother’s tolerance with alcohol and his father’s with failure. During the long years of anonymity in Depression-era New York when he was cleaning floors or silk-screening neckties, he would wander the streets at night in a drunken stupor, shouting at passersby, “I’ll show them someday.” Even the untouchable Picasso was the object of his vaulting envy. “That fucking Picasso,” he would fume. “He’s done everything.”

  In his harrowing exploits of drunkenness—assaulting policemen, driving insanely, destroying property, terrorizing parties, peeing in public (the list is endless)—Pollock was only testing. One friend likened him to “Peck’s bad boy, who later apologizes and says ‘I didn’t mean to do it.’ Jackson wanted you to suffer forgiveness.” His frequent drinking binges almost always ended the same way: someone—first his brothers, then Lee—would come to the bar where he had passed out or pick him up out of the gutter and carry him home. Even the fights he provoked were exercises in forgiveness. “He didn’t want to really hurt anybody,” remembers Herman Cherry.*1 “He’d start a fight and then try to get out of it. It’s like insulting somebody, then going up and kissing them and saying, ‘Oh, I didn’t mean it.’”

  No one in Jackson’s life was tested more searchingly or suffered more forgiveness than Lee Krasner. From the beginning of their relationship in 1941, the boundaries of tolerance were redrawn almost daily. Drinking, of course, was the fundamental, continuing provocation: what he said when he was drunk, what he did, what he threatened to do. At times—when he turned his phonograph up full blast in the middle of the night or upended the table at a dinner party—tolerance was relatively easy. At other times, when he drove ninety miles an hour down rural Fireplace Road or flaunted his mistress in front of her, it wasn’t easy at all.

  As it mixed with Smith’s blotches of orange, Pollock’s black Duco turned a “bilious green.” Tony muttered, “It looks like vomit,” but to keep Jackson’s mind off his problems he pressed ahead, grabbing a brush and another color and “laying it on” with calculated abandon. Jackson joined in and they “splashed and drooled” paint until the luminous expanse of Belgian linen was covered with a half-inch of the bilious green. As he often did, Jackson applied the paint with basting syringes made of thin glass with a rubber bulb at one end. When a syringe clogged, he would fling it at the canvas in disgust and fill another with paint. When that one clogged, another. Each time he threw a syringe down, it shattered against the concrete floor. He went through a dozen syringes until the paint surface around him glinted with shivers of glass. Defiantly, he took off his shoes and waded through the dark, sparkling slime in his bare feet, daring Smith to follow. Numbed by the cold and the bourbon, Smith waded in behind him.

  Only in his art could Pollock find the concealment, the recognition, and the forgiveness he craved. Before the canvas, his demons were transformed into muses, and the result was an art that, like its creator, tested the bounds of tolerance. The final target of Jackson’s hunger for attention was the world, and his art was the provocation. “Abstract painting is abstract,” he said. “It confronts you.” His paintings “caused a kind of havoc,” wrote the New York Times of the drip paintings in the 1950 Venice Biennale. Like a well-placed insult in a crowded bar, they touched off “violent arguments.” “Compared to Pollock,” marveled one critic, “Picasso … becomes a quiet conformist, a painter of the past.”

  Jackson Pollock found himself on the leading edge of the Abstract Expressionist movement for reasons that had little or nothing to do with abstraction or expressionism or art itself. He was drawn to that position by the same forces that had been directing his art from the beginning. As a child, he had shown no inclination toward drawing or painting and, more pointedly, no proficiency. His decision to become an artist was born less out of artistic inspiration than out of the compulsion to compete with his brothers and to test his parents’ love. For the rest of his artistic career, he piled outrage on outrage, searching for new, ever more unpalatable risks. The great successes of 1949 and 1950, which another artist might have taken as definitive approval, Jackson saw as only an invitation to the next step. “He was always in transition,” said Betty Parsons. “His vibrations, to me, were always those of a driven creature. There was futility at the end of all his rainbows.”

  Like the dru
nken binges that grew wilder and more destructive, the car rides that grew faster and more reckless, the rages that grew sharper and more abusive, Jackson’s art reached always for new outrages, new tests, all of them built on the original outrage of which Jackson was always preciously aware: that he was an artist who could not draw—at least not the way artists were supposed to draw. He would eventually force the world, just as he had forced his mother, his brothers, and finally Lee, to give him the attention he craved; to suffer forgiveness for his outrages; not just to tolerate him, but to love him, or at least his art; to accept him, and finally to concede that he was a great artist.

  By morning, Tony Smith had returned to the house to clean off and sober up. Lee was waiting to help. “We spent a long time getting glass out of my feet,” Smith recalled. Together they carried Jackson, who had passed out in the studio, back to the house. In the kitchen, while Jackson slept fitfully in a chair, Lee bathed his feet. The painting that the two men had begun lay on the studio floor, stiff with wet paint and broken glass. Over the next six months, Jackson would return to it again and again, scraping away the bilious green, applying new layers of yellow, red, light blue, aluminum, and finally—using a long piece of two-by-four—eight deep blue vertical “poles.”

  Ultimately, painting was the only way Jackson Pollock could appease the demons that tormented him. In the veil of paint, he could conceal himself, and in the celebrity that followed, satisfy his hunger for attention; he could best his brothers and command his parents’ love. In the end, painting was a way to test the world, to probe its heart, and to make it suffer forgiveness.

  Twenty years after Tony Smith’s visit, sixteen years after Pollock’s death, the same painting—Jackson titled it Blue Poles—was sold to the government of Australia for two million dollars. No American painting had ever sold for more, and in the entire history of Western art, only works by Rembrandt, Velazquez, and Leonardo da Vinci had commanded more “respect” in the marketplace. Even Picasso, who had “done everything,” had never done better than one million.

  The world had forgiven Jackson Pollock—even if it didn’t yet know what for.

  1

  STRONG-MINDED WOMEN

  One image dominated Jackson Pollock’s imagination. Like all five Pollock brothers, he could close his eyes and see a figure emerging from the shadow of a porch into the bright Phoenix sun: her thick, pale ankles; her black dress; her stout frame, round as a tree trunk; her abundant bosom; her white gloves and intricate lace collar; her huge, fair-skinned face obscured by a black veil from the brim of her hat to the right angle of her jaw; her light brown hair coiled and pinned at the nape of her neck. “My earliest impression of my mother,” says Charles Pollock, reaching back almost eighty years, “is of a woman dressed in the most elegant fashion, climbing into a four-wheel buggy, grabbing the reins, and going off to town behind two very proud horses. It took some strength to keep those horses from running away or tipping the buggy over, but Mother always had control.”

  For all her power over him, Jackson Pollock knew surprisingly little about his mother, Stella. In a 1944 interview, he described her ancestors as “Scotch and Irish,” ignoring or forgetting the strong current of German blood that ran in her veins. He claimed she came from pioneer stock, savoring, undoubtedly, the image of his forebears playing their small roles in the great drama of westward expansion, of pioneering men and devoted women suffering the hardships of an untamed continent.

  In fact, for three generations in Stella’s family, it was the women who pioneered and the devoted men who suffered.

  Godfrey Augustus Speck set this improbable pattern when he stepped off a boat in Baltimore harbor in 1774—by mistake. Hardly the energetic, fortune-seeking immigrant of family legends, Speck had never entertained the notion of traveling to America. He was a simple twenty-year-old journeyman in Dresden, Saxony, when a gang of thugs, “recruiting” for the Hessian king, shanghaied him to America to help George III put down the rebellion in the United Colonies.

  By 1779 Speck had met and married a sixteen-year-old Virginia girl named Sarah Townsend. Hers is the first appearance of a woman in the recorded history of the Speck family, and an auspicious debut it was. After bearing four children in eight years, she loaded the family possessions into a handcart and dragged her unwilling husband over a hundred miles of rough roads to more promising land in the south of Maryland. By 1800, she had borne four more children and moved her family twice more—first to Virginia, then across the Appalachians into the Ohio Territory. There, in what might have been an effort to curb his wife’s wanderlust, Godfrey Augustus built her a stone farmhouse near Freeport.

  Archibald and Eliza Jane Speck, Jackson Pollock’s great-grandparents

  Following in the family tradition, Sarah Speck’s second child, Samuel, attached himself to Jane Leach, another raw-willed woman with little tolerance for domesticity or motherhood, although a talented “weaver of woolens and carpets.” Ignoring her husband’s wishes and, presumably, his advances, and defying the hard odds of frontier mortality, she quit childbearing after her fourth child, at the age of twenty-nine, and devoted herself exclusively to sabotaging her only daughter, Sarah. Forbidden by her mother to marry, Sarah Speck—“a beautiful and promising young lady”—died a spinster at the age of eighty-six.

  In 1837, Jane Leach Speck’s oldest son, Archibald, married Eliza Jane Boyd, a young Irish girl whose father, William Boyd, had mastered the linen loom as an apprentice in southern Ireland before coming to America. Another of his daughters, Belle, earned a local reputation for her fine linen and embroidery work, and a granddaughter, Lettie, became an accomplished watercolorist. If one searches Jackson Pollock’s ancestry for the first signs of creativity, they are here among the Boyds of Ireland. Eliza Jane bore four children before concluding, on the basis of too little land and too many children, that she could never fulfill her ambitions in Ohio; that, once again, it was time to move on.

  She wasn’t alone. In the 1840s and 1850s, thousands of settlers in the Ohio Valley came to the same conclusion and began to move farther west, first in a trickle, then in a deluge. Most, like the Specks, were second-and third-generation pioneers whose parents or grandparents had struck out from the East Coast, filled the land with a surfeit of sons, and now were pushing the next generation deeper into the continent. They joined the continuing flow of foreign-born immigrants escaping famine in Ireland and military conscription or political persecution in Germany, as well as those fleeing debts of one sort or another by “declaring bankruptcy with their feet.”

  Archibald and Eliza Jane, Jackson Pollock’s great-grandparents, set out for the new promised land in 1844. Like most of the settlers on the road to Cincinnati, they were bound for the Black Hawk Purchase, otherwise known as the Iowa Territory. (No one could agree on the meaning of the name. Some said it was Sioux for “he who paints pictures,” but most preferred the more inspiring translation, “the beautiful land.”) Enticing accounts of the rich farmland and clement weather in the new territory had appeared in Ohio papers as early as 1835, soon after the capture of the last Indian leaders at the Black Axe River in southern Wisconsin. “It may be represented as one grand rolling prairie,” read one such account, widely reprinted by railroads, banks, and seed companies. “For richness of soil; for beauty of appearance; and for pleasantness of climate, it surpasses any portion of the United States.” Between 1833 and 1850, some 200,000 settlers responded to the glowing reports and the promise of land for themselves and their children.

  By Mississippi steamer, the trip from Cincinnati to Fort Madison at the southeastern tip of the territory could take as little as two weeks with good connections, compared to four or five months for the overland route. From Fort Madison, it was a relatively short ten-mile wagon ride to the new town of West Point, where, in all likelihood, either Archibald or Eliza Jane had relatives waiting to help them get started. There they bought some land for $200 a quarter-section, or about $1.25 an acre, and set about ca
rving a farm out of the wilderness.

  Despite the richness of the land, it wasn’t an easy task. For millions of years, nature had been generous to Iowa, depositing on its lumpy morainal substructure more than a quarter of all the top-grade soil on the continent. But separating the settler from it was a vast sea of “blue stem,” a thick covering of prairie grass, “higher than a horse’s back,” knotted into a thousand-year-old mat of roots reaching a foot or more into the black soil. When farmers like Archibald Speck tried to turn a furrow with the small European hand plows they had used back in Ohio, they discovered that it was rich soil, all right—some of the richest, blackest loam in the world—but the richness was buried under lifetimes of hardship and hard work, of terrible sacrifice for the benefit of the next generation. Those who were ambitious only for themselves quickly moved on from Iowa, usually farther west. For those who remained, family and land became as tightly intertwined as prairie grass and prairie soil.

  Archibald Speck was lucky to get even one corner of his land planted in his first Iowa spring. Even if there had been time, he could scarcely afford the $3.00 or more per acre charged by the local prairie breaker to bring in his team of eight oxen and his huge plow wagon with its iron-covered moldboard and hard steel share to cut a two-foot-wide furrow in the prairie mat. And clearing the land was only the beginning. Hardly a day passed without a threat of some kind. Except for occasional wild snowstorms that could “freeze chickens to their roosts,” the weather was generous to farmers during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, but recurring waves of rust, scab, and orchard blight, as well as plagues of grasshoppers, wildly fluctuating grain prices, and even occasional Indian raids, kept farmers like Archibald Speck perpetually on the edge of financial and emotional ruin.

  It would have been a struggle even for a hard, adventurous man, but Archibald Speck was neither. His dreams, like those of many frontier men, were incongruously modest for such a lavishly fertile land: “to get land, to better his own and his children’s condition, and to be left alone in the process.” The womenfolk had a scornful term—“do-less”—for men like Archibald Speck, men with dreams but without the blind determination and resourcefulness in adversity that the frontier demanded.