Art by Joe Fig
Dan’s Papers February 3, 2012 danshamptons.com Page 11
Jackson Pollock Dan’s Papers talks to Jackson Pollock on his 100th Birthday By Dan Rattiner Jackson Pollock turned 100 years old last Saturday, and on that day this reporter went to his house and talked to him for this article in Dan’s Papers. He’s a little frail, but he’s got all his marbles. Living alone in seclusion, as he has in The Springs since his terrible car accident in 1956 has done wonders for him. He was, as you probably know, reported dead after the accident. “Needless to say, the reports of my death are premature,” he said wryly after pouring me a drink. Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming as Paul Jackson Pollock, and by the time he was 16 had moved with his older brother, mother and father nine times. He did spend four years at the Los Angeles Manual Arts High School, and while at school there became fascinated with paintings by Frederick John de St. Vrain Schwankovsky. In 1930, when he was 28, he moved out of his family’s home with his older brother and came to New York City to live in Greenwich Village. There he became a student at the Art Student’s League. Much of his early works at the League were landscapes in the style of Albert Pinkham Ryder. Then, in 1933, in the bottom of the Depression, he began to paint in the Abstract Expressionist Style at his studio in New York City. While doing that and beginning to make his reputation, he also made a living wage as a painter through the auspices of the WPA, Dan Rattiner’s second memoir, IN THE HAMPTONS TOO: Further Encounters with Farmers, Fishermen, Artists, Billionaires and Celebrities, is available in hardcover wherever books are sold. The first memoir, IN THE HAMPTONS, published by Random House, is available in paperback. A third memoir, STILL IN THE HAMPTONS, will be published in May.
a government work project that hired many unemployed artists at that time. Pollock did numerous murals for public buildings. On the other hand, he was influenced by the abstract and surrealist work of Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro and Jose Clemente Orozco. In 1943, in the midst of the rise of Abstract Expressionism and at a time when the WPA was closing down, Pollock was taken under the wing of the prominent Manhattan gallery owner Peggy Guggenheim. She thought he
Pollock at 100
was brilliant but very volatile and erratic. You could not take him to any gallery openings for fear if he drank too much, he would become anti-social or perhaps even violent. He was a nasty drunk. As a result of Guggenheim’s interest in Pollock, she offered to rent him a home in the peaceful village of Springs for two years to get him into a more peaceful environment and perhaps to get him to calm down. In exchange, whatever he painted he would paint for Guggenheim. Pollock and his new bride– he’d just married Lee Krasner in 1945–then
took up residence in a big old house on SpringsFireplace Road with a wrap around porch and a big back lawn that led out to Accabonac Harbor. Pollock was to live in that house with Krasner until his “death” in 1956. Krasner lived there until her death in 1984. It was during this time in the late 1940s and the early 1950s that Pollock did his greatest work. He’d get up at dawn, roll out a canvas on the back lawn with the harbor wetlands in the background, climb up a wooden ladder with his brushes and paints and sprinkle down the paint onto the canvas in great drips and splashes. This work was so stunningly alive that it was proclaimed by critics to be a work of genius. It brought him worldwide acclaim. He was featured in LIFE Magazine in 1949 above a caption that read “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” During this time, perhaps because of Pollock, many other abstract expressionist painters began to move from Greenwich Village to the East End. They included Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Alfonso Ossorio and Fairfield Porter. Springs became the center of the art world for a period of time. Pollock, however, did not thrive for long in this hot spotlight of celebrity. He drank constantly, was so mean to his wife she often did not want to be around him, and by 1952, seemed to have lost his artistic focus. He was now still making drip paintings, but they seemed without fire. He soon turned to painting on black canvas. That bombed too. In 1956, in an article in TIME Magazine, he was referred to as “Jack the Dripper.” The car crash in which he was thought to have died took place on August 11, 1956. Money had come in because of his celebrity. However, Pollock didn’t change his lifestyle living here amidst the local clammers, known as Bonackers, whose company he enjoyed. (continued on page 14)