Number 4, 1948: Gray and Red 1948
Pollock on Paper
By JERRY TALLMER
It was just a drawing, a very fierce, strong drawing, of a wolf – a many-teated she-wolf, the mother, presumably, of Romulus and Remus, founders of the city of Rome – but I could not have been more shocked.
Not because of the subject matter per se, but because of the 1,000-percent realistic exactitude of the drawing, and the label identifying the artist. Jackson Pollock. Until that moment – I don’t know when this was, maybe 30 years ago – I had only known the Pollock everyone else knew as they knew the time of day: the super-abstract American action painter sneered at by Time magazine as Jack the Dripper. A sneer with the implication: He has to drip because he can’t draw. Why, my kid – or your kid – could do that, eyes closed.
And here was this wolf, very well and very forcefully drawn indeed. It dates, I now know – Google has clued me in – to 1943, when Pollock, who had ridden in out of the West to the big town (this one) at age 28 in 1930, was having his first exhibition ever at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery on (I think) Madison Avenue.
Of the 65 works in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s current exhibition, “No Limits, Just Edges: Jackson Pollock Paintings on Paper,” five or six date from that same year of 1943. They include: One dark menacing gouache dominated by a scary Darth Vader-like head (before we ever knew of Darth Vader); one collage that contains, to the left, what might be taken for a Picasso-ish “Guernica”-like bull; another dark gouache of a turmoil that could be entitled “War Games”; one ink drawing on pink paper that has two eyes peering over its upper edge in the manner of World War II’s Kilroy Was Here; and one pen-and-inkblot perambulation that virtually shrieks “Miro was here.”
The point is not whatever ephemeral references I, or you, may or may not see in these five Pollocks on Paper, done in the same 1943 as that she-wolf, it’s that, taken together with all the rest in the show — not quite 10 percent of the 700 drawings like these that Pollock is known to have made in his short lifetime (1912-1956), they are way stations on a stubborn, intricate journey from so-called realism to free-swinging, paint-flinging, fame-gaining abstraction. Which is the idea of this whole exhibit, as laid out by curator Susan Davidson.
A joke in the years when Jack the Dripper was bursting upon us was to relate this wild man’s splashes and slashes and blobs to the ink blobs of the Rorschach Tests that were also in those years very much upon us, and which, for all I know, hard-drinking, hostile, bedeviled Pollock’s own shrinks were throwing at him to tell them what he saw therein. But a Rorschach inkblot is symmetrical, which a Pollock by definition is not, and a Rorschach pattern is boring in a narrative way that doesn’t apply to what we call “a Pollock.”
Yet in still other ways a Pollock – even a very large Pollock – can not infrequently be spacially, blobbishly, coloristically, abstractionally boring, at least to me, whether or not it runs off the edges of paper or canvas and brings $50 million in the process. Willem de Kooning said of Pollock, in blunt praise: “He broke the ice,” but a de Kooning in itself is always bolder, less repetitive, and more intellectually virile (to this eye) than a counterpane of a thousand oozing, swirling black, brown, silver, red, green, white, amber pulsations by Pollock.
If you want to know, I secretly suspect that Pollock’s arrival at the end of his long journey – that Dramatic Moment of First Drip, First Splash! as in the Ed Harris movie six years ago – may in fact all be reducible to cigarette-fueled impatience: How long do I have to plug along at this fucking painting stuff anyway? Let’s speed it up and see what happens.
The Guggenheim takes us through that transition, all the way from a soft, weird 1934 seascape-landscape complete with lighthouse to three or four examples in the early 1950s, still on paper, of the full all-out abstractions we will come to think of as “true Pollocks.” Along the route there will be hints and glints here and there – the ghost in the machine, the figure in the carpet – of spiky fingers, crucifixions, rude rough trees, fragile gardens, a hidden cow’s head, a vertebrae or two, some dancing skeletons (a la Jean Renoir), some gaunt skeletons (a la Giacometti) in what may be an amusement park, and so on and so forth, but no matter. That was then, this is now, end of the journey.
For all its virtues, which were many, the Ed Harris Pollock film did little justice to Lee Krasner, the excellent painter whose own talent — on screen as in life — was subsumed and down-rated thanks to her being the Mrs. Jackson Pollock who, as I wrote when the movie opened, kept guttily to her “year in, year out work of plugging Pollock’s greatness to one and all while keeping the wonder boy alive and well and fed and housed and sober and unsuicidal and productive and more or less sane … ”
All that came to an end on August 11, 1956, when Jackson Pollock, age 44, crashed his car into a tree on a Long Island road, killing himself and a young woman who was a passenger. (Another young woman, his girlfriend, survived.)
I met him, if that’s what you want to call it, only once in my life. It was a cliché straight out of Ed Harris’s movie, or any movie, and it took place in what must have been the early 1950s. There was a party on Bleecker Street. Jackson Pollock was sitting on a couch, front and center, bleary, blurry, very drunk. He took one woozy look at the girl who was with me – we’d just walked in the door – and with no further ado spat four words in her direction: “Can I fuck you?” Just like that. The girl had been a fan of his – of his work, his fame – until that moment.
You won’t find any such goings on in the Guggenheim show, even between the lines and swirls. But you will find how Jackson Pollock forged his way toward becoming Jackson Pollock.
