Jackson Pollock: An American Saga
Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith
Woodward/White (1989)

He had “almost unlimited potential for both creation and destruction”

I knew almost nothing about the life and work of Jackson Pollock until I read two biographies, this one and another written by Deborah Solomon.  I recently re-read them and highly recommend both. Now (finally!) I am sharing my thoughts about each in a review.

Solomon offers a sharper focus on the key periods of Pollock’s life and work. Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith offer a much wider and deeper analysis of the personal as well as professional circumstances of Pollock’s challenges throughout his childhood, adolescence, and adult years. All three agree that he was among the most important modern painters, while (more often than not) resembling a toddler having a tantrum or a drunken brawler in a waterfront tavern.

Naifeh and Smith carefully examine Pollock’s most significant relationships that developed and deteriorated over the years (in addition to those with  his parents  and four older brothers) as he achieved professional prominence as well as personal “obliteration.” They include, in alpha order: Rita and Tom Benton, Willem deKooning, Jack Graham, Clement Greenberg, Peggy Guggenheim, Hans Hoffman, Elizabeth Wright Hubbard, Sidney Janis, Ruth Kligman, Lenore (Lee) Krasner, Betty Parsons, May and Harold Rosenberg, and David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Here are several brief excerpts that give you an indication of the thrust and flavor of Naifeh and Smith’s lively, insightful narrative:

o “Pollock hid behind a facade of barroom bluster and macho posturing. By the age of thirty, he had perfected the ‘ugly-touch, Hemingway’s persona outbofwhich legens later grew: drinking, risk-taking, fast driving, foul talking, quick hitting, easy fucking, and nonapologies. 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 [four older brothers] had turned first to his mother, Stella, for support and a sense of identity; a boy who preferred the company of neighborhood girl 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 overhis own ambiguous urges.” (Page 3)

o “No one felt the force on [Tom] Benton’s oversized personality more fully or was more transfixed by it more than Jackson Pollock. No one outside the Pollock family would have a more enduring influence on Jackson’s development until, more than ten years later, he passed into the hands of Lee Krasner. Even then — long after Benton’s theories of art, his style, and his classroom techniques had sifted into Jackson’s subconscious or out of his art altogether — the irresistible imprinting force of Benton’s personality remained.” (171)

o “Fame and prosperity had allowed Jackson the ultimate fantasy: to play Stella Pollock. Like Stella, he lavished on his house [in Springs on Long Island, NY], making it his own, as if by decorating, he could pile up a barricade against a lifetime of emptiness and impermanence. For Jackson, the house was a way, as effective as distance or speed, to keep the demons at bay, to escape the noisy fear that his success was somehow a mistake — at best a fluke, at worst a fraud; that the spring of grand visions and summer of flattery would turn out to be as cruel an illusion as Stella’s mothering; that his fans would prove ultimately as uncaring as his family, his fellow artists, beneath the deference, as resentful; and that his second childhood would end, like his first, in betrayal and abandonment.” (627)

o   “In the midst of so many failed lives [in the Pollock family], Jackson’s success stood out in galling contrast. Everywhere his brothers looked, they saw its fruits: in the cut of the dinner roast, in the freshly painted guest room, in the elegant Herbert Brothers carpet in the living room, in the new furnishings, bathroom fixtures, and garden plantings…The walls were covered with his paintings, including two of his favorites, Gothic and Arabesque. What signs of prosperity his brothers couldn’t see,  Jackson eagerly reported.” (645)

Near the end of his life, Jackson Pollock, separated from Lee Krasner, stopped painting, began an affair with Ruth Kligman, and became a full-time alcoholic. And then one Sunday evening, drunk and driving his Oldsmobile convertible much too fast on a country road near his home, Pollock lost control and soon was airborne….

“For an instant, everything was silent — except the air rushing by. Escape velocity:  he had finally reached it. The car was gone. Ruth was gone.  Lee was gone,  Stella was gone.  He was free: not falling, flying; flung from the tumbling car in a straight trajectory fifty feet long and ten feet off the ground. He covered it in less than a second, but, according to the coroner’s report, was fully conscious, arrested in space, until he hit the tree.” (795)

That was in August, 1956.

The first call came in to the police station [in Springs on Long Island] at 10:15 P.M. Officer Earl Finch was dispatched to Fieplace Road [near Pollock’s home]. “Two dead at scene of accident,” he reported. “Edith Metzger was crushed to death beneath the car. Ruth Kligman was thrown clear and was taken to Southampton Hospital with major injuries; she survived. Pollock was killed instantly when his head hit a tree.” (249)

It seems amazing — if not totally unbelievable — that Jackson Pollock was able to create so many truly unique works of modern art while being so emotionally unstable. He destroyed so much property as well as relationships before eventually ending his own life…and one other.

I think Steven Naifeh and Gregory White’s biography of Pollock will be widely accepted as the single most valuable source for information and insights about his tragic life and singular work.

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Here are two suggestions while you are reading this definitive biography. First, highlight key passages. Also,  perhaps in a lined notebook kept near-at-hand, record your comments, questions, and page references. Be alert for indications of Pollock’s severe insecurity — sometimes self-loathing — throughout the narrative. His talent for obliteration alienated almost all of those who struggled without success to prevent or overcome his self-defeating misbehavior.

These two simple tactics — highlighting and documenting — will expedite frequent reviews of key material later.