Jackson Pollock Read online

  Jackson

  Pollock

  A BIOGRAPHY

  Deborah Solomon

  First Cooper Square Press edition 2001

  This Cooper Square Press paperback edition of Jackson Pollock is an unabridged republication of the edition first published in New York in 1987. It is reprinted by arrangement with the author.

  Copyright © 1987 by Deborah Solomon

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  Designed by Eve Kirch

  Published by Cooper Square Press

  An Imprint of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group

  150 Fifth Avenue, Suite 817

  New York, New York 10011

  Distributed by National Book Network

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Solomon, Deborah.

  Jackson Pollock : a biography / Deborah Solomon.

  p. cm.

  Originally Published: New York : Simon and Schuster, 1987.

  ISBN: 978-0-8454-1182-6

  1. Pollock, Jackson, 1912–1956. 2. Painters—United States—Biography. 3. Abstract expressionism—United States. I. Title.

  ND237.P73 S65 2001

  759.13—dc21

  2001028915

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992.

  Manufactured in the United States of America.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For helping me tell this story I am indebted to the following individuals: Mary Abbott-Clyde, Frances Avery, Will Barnet, Ethel Baziotes, Josephine Ben-Shmuel, Thomas P. Benton, Grace Borgenicht, Carol Braider, the late Fritz Bultman, Rudy Burckhardt, Peter Busa, Leo Castelli, Janet Chase-Hauck, Herman Cherry, Irene Crippen, Whitney Darrow, Jr., Fielding Dawson, Dorothy Dehner, Joseph Delaney, Paul Falkenberg, Herbert Ferber, Helen Frankenthaler, Constance Garner, Sidney Geist, Max Granick, Clement Greenberg, Florence and Peter Grippe, David Hare, Ben Heller, Joseph L. Henderson, Clair Heyer, Rebecca Hicks, Harry Holtzman, Axel Horn, Elizabeth Hubbard, Merle Hubbard, Vetta Huston, Sidney Janis, Paul Jenkins, Buffie Johnson, Mervin Jules, Reuben Kadish, Jacob Kainen, Jerome Kamrowski, Nathaniel Kaz, Ruth Kligman, Joyce Kootz, the late Lee Krasner, Ibram Lassaw, Berthe Laxineta, Violet de Laszlo, Harold Lehman, the late John Little, Josephine Little, Cile Lord, Jessie Benton Lyman, Arloie McCoy, Jason McCoy, Yvonne McKinney, George Sid Miller, Sue Mitchell, Robert Motherwell, Hans Namuth, Annalee Newman, Ruth and Tino Nivola, Alfonso Ossorio, Frances and Wayne Overholtzer, Philip Pavia, Eleanor Piacenza, Alma and Jay Pollock, Charles Pollock, Elizabeth Pollock, Frank and Marie Pollock, Herbert L. Pratt, Milton Resnick, Dan Rice, Dorothea Rockburne, May Tabak Rosenberg, Patia Rosenberg, Lou Rosenthal, Berton Roueché, Irving Sandler, Nene Schardt, Rachel Scott, Dorothy Seiberling, Charles Seliger, Jane Smith, Eleanor Steffen, Ronald Stein, Ruth Stein, Hedda Sterne, Wally Strautin, the late James Johnson Sweeney, Allene Talmage, Araks Tolegian, the late Manuel Tolegian, Esteban and Harriet Vicente, Theodore Wahl, James H. Wall, Joan Ward, Enez Whipple, Roger Wilcox, Reginald Wilson, Maia Wojciechowska, Elisabeth Zogbaum, and the late Marta Vivas-Zogbaum.

  I am grateful to Lee Krasner for granting me unrestricted access to Pollock’s papers. Eugene Victor Thaw, the executor of the Pollock estate since Miss Krasner’s death, has kindly given me permission to quote from those papers.

  Most of Pollock’s papers are located at the Archives of American Art in Washington, DC. I owe special thanks to the Archives staff, particularly Bill McNaught and Jemison Hammond, for their gracious assistance and patience.

  Some of Pollock’s letters remain in private hands. I am grateful to Arloie McCoy, Rebecca Hicks, and Charles Seliger for letting me examine their letters. Frank Pollock made available to me the letters of his mother, and Irene Crippen allowed me to consult some additional letters from Stella Pollock.

  I am especially indebted to Stephen Campbell of the Thomas H. and Rita P. Benton Testamentary Trusts, United Missouri Bank, Kansas City, for granting me unrestricted access to and permission to quote from the Bentons’ personal papers.

  Many people aided me in my search for pertinent documents. My thanks to Ray Ferren of Guild Hall; Bonnie Clearwater of the Rothko Foundation; Sandy Hirsh of the Adolph Gottlieb Foundation; Marilyn Cohen of the Betty Parsons Foundation; Lawrence Campbell of the Art Students League; Altamae Markham of the Park County Library, in Cody, Wyoming; Ward Jackson of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Dorothy King of the East Hampton Free Library; and Stephen L. Schlesinger of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Time-Life, Inc. provided me with transcripts of unpublished interviews with Jackson Pollock, Betty Parsons, and several others. Pat Carlton shared with me her research on Caroline Pratt, and Constance Schwartz shared her research on Lee Krasner. Clair Heyer led me through an overgrown church cemetery in Tingley, Iowa, in search of the gravestones of Pollock’s ancestors.

  I am grateful to the New York Public Library for use of the Frederick Lewis Allen Memorial Room and to the Dallas Public Library for use of the Frances Sanger Mossiker study room.

  John Herman, my first editor, got me off on a strong start. Bob Bender provided superb editorial advice later on and improved my manuscript immeasurably. Kathy Robbins, my literary agent, has done as much as anyone to encourage me and has also provided essential editorial guidance. Her assistant, Loretta Fidel, has been most helpful. Many others have supported me over the past few years, but I am particularly grateful to Kent Sepkowitz, Karen Marder, Douglas Pollack, David Firestone, Lee Stern, Jesse Kornbluth, and James Atlas.

  To my parents

  and my sisters Lisa and Cherise

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  1. Origins: 1912–28

  2. Manual Arts High School: 1928–30

  3. Art Students League: 1930–33

  4. Life with the Bentons: 1933–35

  5. The Project: 1935–38

  6. Still Struggling: 1939–41

  7. Enter L.K.

  8. Surrealists in New York: 1942–43

  9. Mural: 1943–45

  10. The Springs: 1945–46

  11. “Grand Feeling When It Happens”: 1947–48

  12. “The Greatest Living Painter”: 1949–50

  13. The “Black” Paintings: 1951

  14. Blue Poles: 1952

  15. Final Years: 1953–56

  16. Lee by Herself

  Notes

  Index

  My God! I’d rather go to Europe than to heaven!

  —American painter William Merritt Chase (1849–1916)

  when offered the chance to study abroad

  Everyone is going or gone to Paris. With the old shit (that you can’t paint in America). Have an idea they will all be back.

  —Jackson Pollock, 1946

  1

  Origins

  1912–28

  Jackson Pollock’s mother, Stella May McClure, was born in May 1875 in a two-room log cabin in Tingley, Iowa, an isolated farming town in the southernmost part of the state. As the oldest child in a struggling pioneer family, Stella was saddled with responsibilities from her earliest years. She quit school after the sixth grade to help raise her six brothers and sisters, two of whom died in childhood. The family was poor but respectable, and it gave them an edge of distinction to earn their livelihood by a means other than farming. Stella’s father, John McClure, was a mason and carpenter who laid most of the foundations in Tingley; and her mo
ther, Cordelia, was known among the townspeople for her weaving. Stella, like her parents, was good with her hands. Besides sewing all the clothes for her family, by the time she was a teen she was sewing beautiful long dresses that she sold to the wealthier women in town. She loved fine, well-crafted things, and it made her proud to be descended on both sides from weavers. Once when she was asked to write a family history, the only people she included were the craftsmen, as if no one else really mattered. “Great Grand Pa Boyd was born in Ireland was a linen weaver,” she noted. “Great Grand Mother Speck weaver of woolens and carpets. My mother wove first piece of linen when she was sixteen.”

  Stella’s grandparents were Irish weavers of Presbyterian stock who had emigrated around the time of the great potato famine and settled in Ohio in the 1840s. Her parents, John and Cordelia McClure, both of whom grew up in Iowa, had traveled to Tingley by covered wagon in the 1870s, when land was selling for ten dollars an acre and farmers were burning fields of bluestem grass to make room for corn. Tingley was off the track of pioneer cross-state travel, but rumors of a coming railroad drew enough settlers to fill up the farms. When the Humeston & Shenandoah Railroad Company ran a line through Tingley in 1882, the town prospered quickly. Within two years its population swelled from one hundred to four hundred and its Main Street was lined with sixteen businesses, including two lumberyards, three general stores, a hotel, a blacksmith shop, and a livery stable. The townspeople were mostly farmers who grew crops, raised cattle, and shipped their livestock by railroad to faraway cities that the farmers themselves rarely visited.

  Stella grew up at a time when the railroads were changing the country. When she was seven years old the first locomotives had arrived in Tingley. She and her sisters Anna and Mary had spent many afternoons walking along the freshly laid tracks, picking wildflowers and watching the trains pull away. They listened to stories about young newlyweds who had gone west, and surely the McClure girls wondered when their turns would come. Mary McClure, four years younger than Stella, was the first of the sisters to leave, marrying a railroad conductor and moving to Denver. Anna McClure, two years younger than Stella and the first in the family to graduate from high school, never left at all; she died of tuberculosis when she was twenty-two. Stella was twenty-six when she finally left Tingley, but the circumstances of her departure were different from the ones she must have imagined as a girl. She was pregnant, and she was unmarried.

  Stella McClure left Tingley to hide the secret of her illegitimate pregnancy from the local farmers and their wives; she was too proud to become the object of their gossip. Alone, she rode the train to Denver, where she moved in with her sister Mary and awaited the birth of her first child, who was born on Christmas Day. She named him Charles. She sent news of the birth home and two weeks later traveled halfway back to Tingley, to Alliance, Nebraska, where she was met by the father of the baby boy. The Tingley Vindicator reported early in 1903: “Word has been received by Tingley relatives of the marriage of Mr. Roy Pollock and Miss Stella McClure, which took place January 13 at Alliance, Nebraska. They are now living in Wyoming.”

  The newspaper announcement made no mention of Stella’s infant boy, and the details of her marriage would remain a lifelong secret. She would never tell her children that she had left home pregnant and unwed, and she would never confess to having been married in Alliance in a service conducted by a Methodist minister she did not know. She told her children that LeRoy Pollock had courted her on moonlit sleigh rides through snow-covered fields. She said she had married him at the United Presbyterian Church in Tingley and the entire town had turned out for the happy event. The truth about her marriage, like all the disappointments in her life, Stella kept to herself.

  LeRoy Pollock was a quiet, serious, and sensitive man, a year younger than his wife. His marriage to Stella McClure, however imperfect, at least offered him the illusion of escape from the cruel indignities of his childhood and the town in which he had spent it. LeRoy was born in Tingley, in the township of Eugene, in February 1876, the son of Alexander and Rebecca McCoy, poor, coarse, Scotch-Irish farmers who had married in Pennsylvania and raised two sons in Peculiar, Missouri, before LeRoy, their youngest child, was born. According to the 1880 agricultural census, LeRoy’s father owned only “two horses, one milch cow, and ten swine.” His farm machinery was valued at a scant $30, and his forty-acre farm was valued at $700, which placed the family’s total worth sixth from the lowest among the township’s ninety-six farmers. When LeRoy was three years old his four-year-old sister Nina died of tuberculosis, and her death was followed two months later by that of his mother. LeRoy’s father, broken by hardship, felt he could not care for the little boy. He gave him away to neighbors and eventually returned to Missouri. LeRoy never saw his father again.

  LeRoy grew up with James and Lizzie Pollock—uneducated, religious, Ohio-born farmers who were no better off than the McCoys. The Pollocks, who were in their mid-forties when they took LeRoy in, believed they should be compensated for raising the orphan. They exploited him during his youth, sending him out with a horse and plow to labor for local farmers and demanding that he turn over his earnings to them. To the young LeRoy the Pollocks were small-minded, hypocritical people, and it made no sense to him that they forced him to study the Bible and attend services at the local Presbyterian church while keeping him out of school a few days a week so he could attend to farm duties. He managed to graduate from the Tingley School at the age of nineteen.

  Twice during his childhood LeRoy ran away from home. Once he went to Missouri, where he worked as a harvest hand; he returned home starving a few weeks later. Another time, inspired by the story of Huck Finn, an orphan like himself, LeRoy and a schoolmate named Ralph Tidrick built a rowboat and traveled down the Mississippi to New Orleans. They checked into a cheap hotel and worked in the kitchen for their room and board. Two weeks later Ralph’s father mailed the boys train tickets back to Tingley. To keep LeRoy from running off again and abandoning his farm duties, his foster parents adopted him ten days before his twenty-first birthday. They didn’t want to lose a cheap farmhand.

  On the day he left home to meet his bride in Nebraska, LeRoy knew he would never return to Tingley to see his foster parents, nor would he ever practice their faith. He didn’t even want their name. He visited a lawyer to request that his name be changed back to McCoy. The lawyer asked him for a large fee, and it was more than LeRoy had. He could not afford his real name.

  After marrying in Nebraska, LeRoy and Stella and their infant son traveled by train to Cody, Wyoming, the last stop on the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad. The prairie town of five hundred had been founded six years earlier by Colonel William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, who, in an attempt to draw settlers to Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin, was constructing canals, irrigating the soil, and promising free land to anyone willing to build a house. For people as poor as the Pollocks, however, the boomtown offered virtually no opportunities. As LeRoy and Stella quickly learned, they could not claim land, for they could not build a house; they could not afford the considerable expense of freighting raw timber to Cody from across the Shoshone River. They ended up renting a tiny frame house on Bleistein Avenue, two short blocks from Buffalo Bill’s new Irma Hotel, where LeRoy found work washing dishes.

  The Pollocks remained in Cody ten years, but their situation hardly improved. LeRoy eventually left the Irma Hotel to join a friend from Tingley in a rock-crushing business, hauling boulders by horse and wagon from the banks of the Shoshone River to a plant where they were ground for construction. It was hard manual labor, and after six years he was too sick to continue. Meanwhile he had a large family to support. Besides Charles there were now two other sons, Jay and Frank, who had been born in 1904 and 1907. For lack of a better alternative, LeRoy accepted a job in 1908 as the manager of the Sanford Watkins sheep ranch, on Lower Sage Creek, and moved his family onto the ranch. Here, in a two-room frame house surrounded by wild sagebrush, at the base of the twin-peaked Hart Mou
ntain, the Pollocks’ last two sons would be born, the first of whom they named Sanford after their employer.

  Stella went into labor with her fifth and last son early one afternoon in January 1912, and though the birth should have been her easiest, it was her most difficult. Later that day LeRoy rode into town on his horse to ask a Dr. Waples to come out to the ranch and assist the midwife with the birth. Stella struggled with the delivery all through the night, and the following morning, in the predawn darkness of January 28, 1912, a healthy boy was born. He weighed more than Stella’s other infants had, almost twice as much as the average newborn. As the Cody newspaper reported: “A fine son, weighing twelve pounds and a quarter, was born Sunday morning to Mr. and Mrs. Roy Pollock of this city. This makes five sons that have come to live in this happy family and the Pollocks are quite the envy of the whole community.”

  They named the boy Paul Jackson Pollock, although by the time he was three everyone called him Jack. The name was probably chosen after his mother’s favorite town—Jackson, Wyoming, an open valley swept with sagebrush at the base of the Teton peaks. Stella was particularly enamored of Jackson from the moment he was born. She knew he was her last child, for Dr. Waples had told her that at age thirty-six, she was too old to have any more children. “He’s my baby,” Stella used to say, “Jack’s my baby.” Though Stella was not outwardly affectionate, she adored her sons and expressed her feelings by doing things for them. She was never idle. She had large, capable, graceful hands, described by one of her children as “the busiest hands I’ve ever seen,” and Jackson’s earliest impressions of life may well have been the image of his mother’s hands in motion: churning butter, pumping water, canning preserves, pouring candles, kneading bread, sewing clothes, crocheting the unadorned edges of bedspreads, curtains, and handkerchiefs.