ACA Charles and Jackson Pollock

The Society of the Four Arts Lenders to the exhibition Randolph H. Guthrie, Chairman of the Board Philip Rylands, President and CEO Exhibitions Bridget Baratta, Director of Advancement Rebecca A. Dunham, Head of Fine Arts and Curator Sofia Vollmer Maduro, Director of Programs Ron Minnicks, Director of Buildings and Grounds Gloria Ortega Rex, Director of Finance Fine Arts Committee Mary-Randolph Ballinger Robert G. Donnelley Rebecca A. Dunham - Curator Robert B. Goergen Pam Goergen Randolph H. Guthrie - Ex-officio James S. Karp Irene Karp Gretchen Leach Lance D. Mahaney David G. Ober Thomas Peterffy Philip Rylands - Ex-officio Sally Soter Lynne Wheat Michel Witmer - Chairman Prof. Dr. Dr. Margot Albus american contemporary art GALLERY, Munich, Germany Hans-Jürgen and Dr. Sabine Benze Jost and Elisabeth Hieronymus HOK AG, Teufen, Switzerland Maximilian Hübner Otto and Kirstin Hübner Tobias Hübner Ernst Jost Dr. Joachim and Dagmar Kaske Prof. Dr. André and Liliane Lacroix, Montreal, Canada Will and Lisa Mesdag Franz Moll and Katharina von Werz Olnick Spanu Collection, New York Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, Stony Brook University Charles Pollock Archives, Paris Thomas and Karin Riegel Dr. Michael Rosenthal Ronnie and John Shore Michael and Edigna Turi ___________________________________ Private collection, courtesy of the Jason McCoy Gallery, New York Private collection, Palm Beach, Florida Private collections Designer: David Darby, Head of Communications Copy Editor: Kristin Aiello, Communications Associate Printed January 2021 by Southeastern Printing, Stuart, FL ISBN # 978-1-7923-5799-2 Texts: © Philip Rylands, Jason McCoy Images: Jackson Pollock © 2021 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Charles Pollock © Charles Pollock Archives, Paris Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 4

Preface and Acknowledgments Above all, this exhibition introduces us to the art of Charles Pollock. It confirms the importance of showing the work of a little-known artist in relatively large numbers and in such a way as to reveal the chronological evolution of his work. The curatorial choice was made to confine the exhibition to the abstract work, which followed almost three decades of apprenticeship and of the populist realism which he derived from the most important influence on his early career, Thomas Hart Benton. They were years mingled with government work, work with a labor union, and ultimately with a University department in which Charles was a charismatic and much-loved teacher. The value of showing his abstract painting as a single body of work, rather than as the sequel to his Regionalism, is vivid to me after showing both together on a previous occasion. A full-blown exhibition of Charles’s youngest brother Jackson Pollock is beyond the powers of The Society of the Four Arts at this time. His paintings are the most highly prized of any American artists and no museum of twentieth-century art is complete without at least one of them. The Society is therefore fortunate to present here a small number of paintings and rarely seen and intimate works on paper that, being more or less figurative, contribute to the debate over the degree to which Pollock was or was not an abstract painter. It is a special privilege to be able to show the last complete set of six ‘Black Painting’ silkscreens of 1951, the last of only five extant notebooks (the only one still in private hands), a rare example of Jackson’s ‘psycho-analytical’ drawings, what may be Jackson’s first drip painting, and a fine work from the US Pavilion of the 1950 Venice Biennale. It would not have been possible to mount this exhibition without the blessing and the cooperation of Sylvia Winter Pollock, Charles’s widow, and their daughter Francesca, who together manage the Charles Pollock Archives in Paris. Similarly, the 6

Four Arts has benefited from the support of Jason McCoy, son of Sanford (‘Sande’) McCoy, who was the closest among the Pollock brothers to Jackson, and who worked with Jackson to create the suite of silkscreens. I am grateful too for the friendship of Helen Harrison and her unhesitant support of the exhibition through the Pollock- Krasner House and Study Center at The Springs, East Hampton, NY. It has been an enormous pleasure to co-curate this exhibition with Otto Hübner, a dear friend, together with his wife Kirstin. Together they operate the American Contemporary Art Gallery in Munich, Germany, to which many of the estates of American Abstract Expressionist artists have entrusted their works. Otto, with our Head of Fine Arts, Rebecca Dunham, and our Head of Communications, David Darby, has worked generously and selflessly to bring about this exhibition, lending furthermore from his and Kirstin’s own collection, and encouraging loans from friends whose collections they are in turn helping to form. I thank them all, and all others who have lent works to this exhibition, some whose names are printed elsewhere in this catalogue, and others who have preferred anonymity. Originating an exhibition here in Palm Beach — one in which the two Pollock brothers are presented together for the first time — is something to be proud of. It has however placed an added burden on the Four Arts finances. I am therefore extraordinarily grateful to those members of the Four Arts who have chosen to participate in a Leadership Committee, and no less grateful to The Cornelia T. Bailey Foundation for providing additional funding. Like the lenders, they have made the exhibition possible. Philip Rylands Palm Beach, January 2021 7

Pollock Leadership Committee On the occasion of the exhibition ‘Charles and Jackson Pollock’ The Society of the Four Arts would like to thank the Members of The Pollock Leadership Committee for supporting this first for The Society: Visionary Alice “Kit” Pannill Mr. and Mrs. Frank Pao William and Sally Ross Soter Innovator Michele Beyer Bob and Miranda Donnelley, The Donnelley Foundation Pam and Bob Goergen Kay and Peter Lyons Friend Christine and Bill Aylward Mr. and Mrs. Thomas D. Gill, Jr. Laura and Lewis Kruger The Lunder Foundation – Peter & Paula Lunder Family Linda R. Olsson, Inc., Realtor Mr. and Mrs. Thomas W. Smith Alberto and Gioietta Vitale Michel Witmer Patron Beatrice and Bob Guthrie Leslie S. Hindman Thanks also to The Cornelia T. Bailey Foundation, West Palm Beach, FL, for additional support 8

Two Brothers, Two Artists Charles and Jackson Pollock brings together, for the first time, art by two brothers: Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), the most famous and arguably the most important American painter of the 20th century, and Charles Pollock (1902–1988), his eldest brother, whose career and reputation are less well known. Charles was the first of the five sons of LeRoy and Stella Pollock. At the age of fifteen he began seriously to paint and draw, with the approval of his parents and to the fascination of his siblings. His first job (what he referred to as the ‘start of his professional career’) was in the art department of the Los Angeles Times in 1922. From the earliest, he acquired skills in the graphic arts — typography, design and the mechanics of printing for publication. He had become familiar with Mexican culture among migrant workers in Arizona and at about this time he learned of Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, transmitting to his brothers, Jackson in particular, his admiration for their murals: their grandeur and their social content. Charles moved to New York in 1926, where he chose to study art under Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League, and became a favorite pupil, as did Jackson later. This was precisely when Benton was conceiving the theory and practice of American Regionalist painting, traveling the vast spaces of ‘fly-over country’ and imagining a mural-scale painting titled The American Historical Epic. It was to Charles that he wrote (September 1927): “I become more and more in love with America the more I get out in it […] Most of our critics judge America from the lobbies of its first class hotels or from the drawing rooms of people already corroded with cultural aspirations […] To see America you have to get down in the dust, under the wheels, where the struggle is.”1 Charles’s earnest and altruistic wish was that his art should make the world a better place: hence his long career as an art teacher, through 1968. His social commitment, Regionalist imagery, and mural work for the Works Progress Administration of the New Deal make his biography prototypical of many artists’ experiences in the decade of the 1930s, including that of his brother Jackson. But in 1935 he left New York for Washington, DC, to work for the Resettlement Administration — a decision that Charles Pollock working on the Waterworks mural, Michigan, 1940. © Charles Pollock Archives, Paris 9

disengaged him from the emerging group of painters in New York, the same embattled, avant-gardist culture that was eventually to engender Jackson’s ‘breakthrough’ to a new art. In the fall of 1937, disenchanted with government work, he moved to Detroit as political cartoonist and layout editor for the weekly newspaper of the United Automobile Workers. The following year, he became a supervisor of the mural painting and graphic arts division of the Federal Art Project at the Works Progress Administration and settled in Michigan, where he taught typographical design and etching at Michigan State University in East Lansing (called Michigan State College of Agriculture and Applied Sciences until 1964) from 1942 to 1968. Charles Pollock, Proclamation of Emancipation, 1943-44, mural, casein on canvas, Fairchild Auditorium, East Lansing. Courtesy Michigan State University Charles’s crisis of confidence in Regionalist painting and the transfer of his idiom to abstraction occurred in 1944. He spoke bluntly about this in an interview in 1977: Well, you see, you get taken in with concepts, social concepts, social ideas, and I think this, at the root – government, trade-union movement, academia, etc., none of it is very satisfying. And it’s painful to have to live so goddamn long until you discover what it’s all about, get some insight into it. So I went to Michigan State, painted a mural for the university, and was so fed up with it I had a breakdown actually, took a term off, went back to 10

Arizona and spent three months painting in the desert. I erased that whole social realist stuff. It happened at the end of 1944, when I finished the mural. The point at which it turned round was the necessity for teaching. [….] Abstract painting was simply bringing it back to where I’d started from, if I’d had sense enough to stay there. It didn’t seem possible to teach students realist painting. The other part of the story is that I didn’t have to teach painting most of the time. I taught lettering, calligraphy.2 Oddly enough this was the reverse of Benton’s progress from abstraction to realism: from the Synchromism with which he was involved in the 1910s to the Regionalism of the 1920s. Charles was privy to what was, at the time, a closeted episode of abstraction in Benton’s early career. In 1929, when he moved into Benton’s vacated apartment in New York, Benton gave him a suitcase-full of his abstract work. Charles’s volte face was by no means a mere Kafkaesque metamorphosis. It required, as Terence Maloon has written, “a huge mental adjustment, a much greater investment of subjectivity in his work, a heightening of sensitivity, an extension of his knowledge of painting in general and modern art in particular, and an increase in his critical powers.”3 The challenge consisted above all in achieving a convincing evocation, through the eye, of a realm of the mind and spirit in which pictorial events, stylistically distinctive to the artist his- or herself, could take place — a realm not dominated by the foreground noise of gesture, but pervasively silent. It has been argued that this, as in the work of Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still in the same years, was a flight from the materialistic commodification of art — art as commerce. The painting was to give the sensation of its own life: in Charles’s own words, by means of “breathing and expanding, of rhythmic attack and retreat, and of an infinite variety of pulsations.”4 The endowment of a work of art with ‘life’ has been an aim of artists at least since painted classical statuary and Byzantium. Charles made his first successful, extant abstract painting in 1950 (Untitled [Fireworks]) and in 1956, in Mexico, produced his first substantial body of work, the Chapala series. Fireworks may superficially evoke the work of Jackson, who was producing his most celebrated works, the drip paintings, at this time — something Charles certainly knew given that he had begun making occasional trips to New York from 1949 on. Nevertheless the difference is fundamental. The image, clearly compacted within its boundaries (not, in other words, ‘all-over’) is a dense agglomeration of differing marks, applied manually, and in a narrow range of colors. The mark, as a nuanced vehicle for sensation, prevails in one form or another in Charles’s subsequent work. Unlike the drip paintings, the process was mediated, deliberate and constructive. 11

The Chapala series, consisting both of paintings and drawings and named for Charles’s long and solitary sojourn in Ajijic on Mexico’s largest lake, Chapala, is like an exercise in theme and variations, testing in a similar format the shapes, expression and variety of the abstract mark, fueled by decades of interest in calligraphy and, more recently, his teaching at Michigan State University. They hold their own in quality to the orientalist paintings of Mark Tobey and the Abstract Expressionism of the late Bradley Walker Tomlin, who had shared the limelight with Jackson in Nina Leen’s photograph of ‘The Irascibles’, a group of American abstract artists who boycotted the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition American Painting Today - 1950. In August 1956, within days of his return to Michigan, Charles learned of Jackson’s untimely death, and traveled to Long Island for the funeral. In the wake of this, Charles’s painting took second place to his teaching, whether because of the family tragedy, or for the difficulties of his divorce from his first wife, or for the death of his mother in 1958, or for faculty strife in his department at the University, or indeed for a mild heart attack he himself experienced. But from 1959-60 he committed fully once more to painting. A stimulus for his return to work may have been his friendship with Clement Greenberg, the champion of Jackson and at this time the most authoritative critic in New York. Thanks to Greenberg, over the next decade, Charles met and befriended artists, dealers and curators from whom he had been isolated in the mid-west. Thus from 1960 we find him linked to an avant- garde mainstream from which he had broken a generation earlier. Even while neo-Dada, Pop Art, and Minimalism were emerging to dominate the art market, Charles was confirmed in his direction by acquaintance and affinity with artists such as Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Noland, Piero Dorazio and Jules Olitski, and in general for what Greenberg would call, in the title of an exhibition in 1964 at the Los Angeles County Museum, ‘color field painting’. Charles Pollock, Untitled [Black], 1962, oil on canvas, 71 by 59.6 in. Private collection Not on display in exhibition Different from the Chapala series, the paintings of this period are somber, even dark in their mysterious, black, hovering shapes, suspended neither within nor above their monochrome backgrounds. Whether or not we attribute this to the 12

mood of the artist himself, these are majestic masterpieces. Color gradually returns, especially during a trip to Rome in 1962-63, and becomes joyful again in the post- Rome paintings of the mid-1960s, in which the dominance of the marks and free- floating shapes yields to expanses of color spliced by fluvial or geological divisions. According to Maloon: The dark profiles make simple figure-ground reversal with the lighter- toned grounds, incorporating these ‘negative’ shapes into a unitary image. In fact, everything the viewer beholds seems to be co-extensive with the surface, shape and size of the stretched canvas. Due to the coincidence of image and surface there results an impressive effect of ‘openness’, a sense of whole and grandeur that typify the Rome series.5 Charles found a fresh possibility for this when he turned, from 1964, to the new acrylics that enabled staining and working paint directly without corroding the unprimed canvas. Now well into his sixties, they became for him an essential component of his experimental last decades. When he retired from Michigan State University in 1968 and moved with his wife Sylvia to New York, he found himself with nothing to do but paint. Working now, as many artists did at that time, in ‘series’ he began exploring pictorial ideas of color and form of extreme elegance. His position was of precise and careful calculation, at the polar opposite of the gesture and improvisation of Jackson’s technique. The thinly applied ground creates an atmospheric, imaginary space within which the motif floats adrift from the margins of the canvas, in color combinations and shapes, implying more or less movement, stability or instability. Like the still lifes of Giorgio Morandi, Charles practiced a quintessence of the language of visual art: the relations of form to the frame, of form to other forms, proportions, motif versus ground, color tones and adjacencies, all continuously assessed by the painter’s critical eye. Testifying to his search for successful outcomes, he is known to have destroyed many works during his last years. The refined color abstractions continued after Charles’s move with his family to Paris in 1971. In the 1980s he returned, with his ‘Arches’ series, to an exploration of the mark as an abstract and rococo calligraphy. The aim was Charles Pollock photographed by Hans Namuth in his Parisian studio in 1982. © Charles Pollock Archives, Paris 13

always to create images of the greatest felicity, and given that aesthetics spill over into ethics, we are reminded of how he was inspired, as a young man, by “a certain feeling for the good society.”6 Art was for him a moral obligation. He learned this from his father and, in his early years, he tried hard to convey to brother Jackson. Charles was a mentor and an example to Jackson in his aspiration to be an artist, and also a ‘minder’ when Jackson’s self-destructive tendencies prevailed. In 1930, together with his brother Frank, he persuaded Jackson to join them in New York and to study at the Art Students League under Thomas Hart Benton. Their early training was the same, studying the dynamics of figuration from ‘Renaissance’ masters such as Tintoretto and Luca Cambiaso and being indoctrinated with Benton’s Regionalism. Jackson’s story is well-known and central to the development of Abstract Expressionism, the first American avant-garde of international influence: the experimental laboratory in New York in 1936 conducted by David Alfaro Siqueiros (which, significantly, Charles missed, having recently departed for Washington, DC); the circle that championed him in the early 1940s (John Graham, James Johnson Jackson Pollock, Bucks County, PA, 1939. Photo by Sanford McCoy Sanford McCoy, Bucks County, PA, 1939. Photo by Jackson Pollock 14

Jackson Pollock, Mural, 1943, Oil on canvas, 97.2 by 239 in. University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art, Iowa City. Not on display in exhibition Sweeney, Howard Putzel, above all Peggy Guggenheim, and later Clement Greenberg); the stabilizing influence of his wife Lee Krasner, herself a very talented painter; his ‘myth’ paintings in the early 1940s inspired by Native American art, Picasso and Miró; from 1943 his practice of semi-figured abstraction on outsize canvases; from 1947 his radical technique of dripped and poured painting, and in 1950 his central position in the iconic photograph of ‘The Irascibles’, which served to coalesce the idea of a New York School of painter. His Mural, commissioned by Peggy Guggenheim in 1943 and now in the University of Iowa Stanley Art Museum, was Jackson’s single largest painting and set the great precedent for the ambitious scale of American painting in the work of de Kooning, Rothko, Newman, and Still that followed. More, the mural had components of allover composition and action painting that were hallmarks of the Abstract Expressionist art that was in a phase of ‘becoming’ at this very time. It has been considered by David Anfam the most influential painting of twentieth-century American art, on a par, for Europe, with Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. The works in this exhibition reveal a Jackson Pollock little known to the general public: paintings, drawings (including six sheets from a notepad of Japanese commercial airmail stationery), his sole surviving sculpture, a wide selection of prints (monotypes, etchings produced in the studio of Stanley William Hayter, and silkscreens of his ‘black paintings’).7 It can be argued that Jackson never really let go of the figurative component in his art, unless briefly at the height of his period of dripped and poured paintings. It is significant that, wracked by self-doubt, he returned to drawing and the figure at the end of 1950 with the so-called ‘Black Paintings’, 15

Jackson Pollock, 6 Sheets from Notebook, ca. 1950-54, Graphite, blue colored pencil, blue and black ink, and ink wash on Japanese commercial airmail stationery, each sheet 11 by 8.5 in. Courtesy american contemporary art GALLERY, Munich documented here by the silkscreens that he and his brother Sanford pulled in 1951. The six sheets drawn in various media on Japanese commercial airmail stationery bring us as close to Jackson’s sub-conscious mental activity as we may ever be. They show us with immediacy how Pollock’s thoughts are organized visually, and with mentation, not self-consciousness. A drawing on pink paper, of similar size and date, also makes clear the artist’s direct control of scale, fluidity, and in this case, his acute awareness of material in creating his drawing against the support of the paper. Visitors to this exhibition are encouraged to seek and interpret the figure as a projection of Jackson’s psyche. Jackson was in fact never so pure an abstractionist as was his brother Charles. The two brothers had different personalities and were different painters: the one, a sober mentor to his young brother, self-effacing but with altruism and a strong social commitment, an aptitude for graphic art, design, illustration and teaching, and a career in abstract painting that substantially began only in 1956, the year of his brother’s early death aged 44 in a car crash. The other a tormented genius, self-obsessed, a self- doubting alcoholic and yet a key figure in American Abstract Expressionism, the most powerful force in Western art in the 1950s. Philip Rylands 16

Jackson Pollock at work on One: Number 31, 1950. The stool on which Jackson sits is on display in the exhibition (see Page 77). Photo by Hans Namuth. Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona. © Hans Namuth Estate 1 Francesca Pollock and Sylvia Winter Pollock, American Letters 1927-1947. Jackson Pollock and Family, Cambridge (UK) and Malden (Mass.): Polity Press, 2011, p. 4. 2 Artscribe 8, Interview with Peter Rippon and Terence Maloon, London 1977. Source: Charles Pollock Archives, Paris. 3 Terence Maloon, The Art of Charles Pollock. Sweet Reason, exhibition catalogue, Ball State University Museum of Art, Muncie, Indiana, 2003, p. 13. Maloon’s essay for this catalogue is the best and most extensive account of Charles Pollock’s art and life. 4 Quoted by Maloon in idem, p. 16. 5 Idem, p. 42. 6 Idem, p. 163. 7 Some of these works are discussed in greater detail in Jackson Pollock. Simply Is: Up Close and Personal, catalogue of the exhibition at the American Contemporary Art Gallery, Munich, September 18, 2018 - March 20, 2019, with essays by Jason McCoy and Philip Rylands 17

Charles Pollock, Chapala Drawing, Small Series 3, 1956, ink on paper, 11 by 8.5 in. Courtesy american contemporary art GALLERY, Munich Charles Pollock, Chapala Drawing, Small Series 4, 1956, ink on paper, 11 by 8.5 in. Courtesy american contemporary art GALLERY, Munich Charles Pollock, Chapala Drawing, Small Series 5, 1956, ink on paper, 11 by 8.5 in. Courtesy american contemporary art GALLERY, Munich Charles Pollock, Chapala Drawing, Small Series 6, 1956, ink on paper, 11 by 8.5 in. Courtesy american contemporary art GALLERY, Munich Charles Pollock, Chapala Drawing, Small Series 9, 1956, ink on paper, 11 by 8.5 in. Private collection Charles Pollock 29

Jackson Pollock, Untitled (Composition with Red Arc and Horses), ca. 1938, oil on coated board, 12 by 20.5 in. Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, East Hampton, New York The powerful small Composition with Red Arc and Horses indicates how far from Benton’s Regionalism Jackson had travelled. The black background, the earth tones, and the flickering forms evoke the murals of the great Mexican painters of the period. Jackson admired not just the appearance of these murals, but their grandiose content: the hieratic figures standing beside a burning pyre create an aura of myth and momentous ritual. The composition resembles that of José Clemente Orozco’s The Epic of American Civilization: Gods of the Modern World, (1932-34) in Dartmouth College. The drawing to the right reveals two other important sources for Jackson’s experiments with imagery: the art of the Native American Indian and Cubism. He had first encountered Picasso in 1922, thanks to copies of The Dial magazine sent to him by Charles. In May 1939 he made repeated visits to the Valentine Dudensing Gallery on 57th Street, New York, to study Picasso’s Guernica and in November the same year the Museum of Modern Art exhibited Picasso: 40 Years of his Art. Philip Rylands 56 Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock, Untitled [CR518], 1939-40, pencil and orange pencil on paper, 14 by 11 in. Private collection, courtesy of the Jason McCoy Gallery, New York recto verso This drawing was once the property of Dr. Joseph L. Henderson. Henderson, a student of Carl Gustav Jung in 1929, accepted Jackson as almost his first, pro bono, patient in 1939 when he moved to New York. Unable or reluctant to recount his dreams, and in order to make the weekly sessions productive, Jackson would bring a drawing, for discussion. This is one of them. They are ‘Jungian’ only in the general sense that Jackson seems to be in search of symbolic shapes and devices: the mandala on the recto and the sun and moon on the verso for example. The face or form within a kernel or crucible recurs in several drawings of this period. The upper left corner depicts the well-rounded forms of a matronly figure bending over, abstracted in the motif above into a diagram. The crescent moon anticipates three of Jackson’s paintings in the early 1940s on the theme of the ‘Moon-Woman’. The fascination of this drawing (and of others in this exhibition) consists in its immediacy as a vision of the well-springs of Jackson’s creativity, as if we are allowed to look over his shoulder as he draws. Philip Rylands 58 Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock, Untitled, ca. 1944-45, printed 1967, engraving and drypoint, ed. 10/50, CR 1078 (P16). Sheet: 19.8 by 27.3 in. Image: 14.7 by 17.9 in. Printed by Emiliano Sorini, New York. Courtesy american contemporary art GALLERY, Munich Jackson Pollock, Untitled, ca. 1944-45, printed 1967, engraving and drypoint, ed. 10/50, CR 1082 (P19). Sheet: 19.8 by 27.3 in. Image: 15.8 by 23.8 in. Printed by Emiliano Sorini, New York. Courtesy american contemporary art GALLERY, Munich Jackson Pollock, Untitled, ca. 1944-45, printed 1967, engraving and drypoint, ed. 10/50, CR 1081 (P18). Sheet: 20 by 13.6 in. Image: 11.8 by 8.8 in. Printed by Emiliano Sorini, New York. Courtesy american contemporary art GALLERY, Munich Jackson Pollock, Untitled, ca. 1944, printed 1967, engraving and drypoint, ed. 10/50, CR 1071 (P13). Sheet: 20 by 13.6 in. Image: 11.9 by 10 in. Printed by Emiliano Sorini, New York. Courtesy american contemporary art GALLERY, Munich 60 Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock, Untitled, ca. 1944, printed 1967, engraving and drypoint, ed. 10/50, CR 1074 (P14). Sheet: 20.1 by 13.8 in. Image: 11.8 by 10 in. Print- ed by Emiliano Sorini, New York. Courtesy american contemporary art GALLERY, Munich Jackson Pollock, Untitled, ca. 1944, printed 1967, engraving and drypoint, ed. 10/50, CR 1075 (P15). Sheet: 20 by 13.6 in. Image: 11.6 by 8.8 in. Printed by Emiliano Sorini, New York. Courtesy american contemporary art GALLERY, Munich Jackson Pollock, Untitled, ca. 1944- 45, printed 1967, engraving and drypoint, artist’s proof, edition of 10, CR 1079 (P17). Sheet: 13.6 by 19.8 in. Image: 8.9 by 11.8 in. Printed by Emiliano Sorini, New York. Private collection Jackson Pollock 61

Jackson Pollock at work on Alchemy (Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice), 1947. Behind him to the left, Composition with Black Pouring (Olnick Spanu Collection, New York) and above him, on the easel, Galaxy (Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha), 1947. Photo by Herbert Matter Composition with Black Pouring is among the first works that initiate the celebrated period of Jackson’s poured or dripped paintings, executed with the support placed on a flat surface. The visual evidence for this is clear: the dripped paint, creating slender lines in curves and spatters of blots, combined with the poured paint in dense uneven lines that create the ‘figure’, and which puddle unevenly, cover the applied paint (with whatever instrument: fingers, palette knife, stick or stiff brush) of an image characteristic of his work in the previous year, through to the first weeks of 1947. Jackson Pollock 63

Jackson’s biographers have recited the legion precedents for the practice of drip painting, whether the Surrealists, Hans Hofmann, Jackson’s contemporaries or even the younger Pollock himself (Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock. An American Saga, 1989, pp. 532ff). Who ‘invented’ drip painting, and whether this was Jackson or not, is beside the point. What is vivid from this work, and very few others of the same moment, such as Galaxy, is that we are witnessing the transition from one period of Jackson’s production to another, the period which qualifies his work as ‘Action Painting’, which leads directly to the first outsize dripped canvas, Alchemy, so thickly encrusted with poured paint that the issue of stretching it and raising it from the floor without damage constituted a problem to be solved (in the case of Alchemy, by the use of his mother’s quilting frame). These were the paintings that established his position as one of the key artists of the American twentieth century. The clarity with which pouring overlays the painted ground, with the stark delineation of a figure, qualifies Composition with Black Pouring as a manifesto, or program for the new epoch-making phase of Jackson’s art. Furthermore it illustrates for us how the black lines in his paintings, of Cubist provenance, articulate primitive figures, as they did in the Iowa Mural (1943) or in Peggy Guggenheim’s Eyes in the Heat (1946). The figure, with splayed arms and running legs, appears again in a 1948 enamel drawing, Figure (Städel Museum, Frankfurt), and in the enigmatic Cut Out of 1948-58 (Ohara Museum of Art, Kurashiki). the time he was photographing and videoing Jackson at work. In 1950, Hans Namuth chose this painting when Jackson offered him a gift at Philip Rylands 64 Jackson Pollock RIGHT: Jackson Pollock, Composition with Black Pouring, 1947, oil and enamel on canvas mounted on Masonite, 17.3 x 9.3 in. Olnick Spanu Collection, New York

The United States Pavilion at the 1950 Venice Biennale was dominated by a retrospective of the elderly John Marin. However, Commissioner Alfred M. Frankfurter, editor of ARTnews, asked Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Director of Collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to curate a section of his own, and Barr chose the late Arshile Gorky (d. 1948), Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock, whom he knew through Peggy Guggenheim. This was not quite the first sighting of Jackson’s paintings in Europe, but it was the first time that the drip paintings had been seen. He selected only three: Number 1, 1948, Number 12, 1949, and this painting, then in the collection of Mrs John D. Rockefeller. It was subsequently owned by the distinguished Jackson Pollock scholar Eugene V. Thaw, co-author of the catalogue raisonné. Barr considered these paintings as pinnacles of Jackson’s achievement. He described his trio of artists as “three of the young leaders” and declared that Jackson “has developed perhaps the most original art among the painters of his generation.” During the Venice Biennale, in July 1950, Peggy Guggenheim opened an exhibition of her collection of twenty-three paintings by Jackson in the Museo Correr on Piazza San Marco, including Number 16, 1949 (now in a private Swiss collection) that is similar to this. Both shows were met with derision by the press. In response to a review from Time magazine, Jackson telegrammed one of his rare utterances: “No Chaos, Damn It.” Notwithstanding, Number 23, 1949 achieved a certain iconic celebrity in the 1950s, appearing in Time magazine in 1951, in a beer ad in Life Magazine in 1952, in an art history textbook on American painting in 1957, and in a 1959 article in ARTnews on the collection of Blanchette Rockefeller. Like a beacon it helped to light the way in the decade of gradual public acceptance of Jackson’s radical art. It was included in two major Jackson Pollock exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1967 and 1999. Number 23, 1949 is evidence of Jackson’s perfect confidence in what he was doing, knowing precisely the moment when its lyrical composition was complete. Its surging vitality is held in check by the green, red and black lines that pin the motif to the canvas edges. The lariat loops of black, the sparing use of yellow, the dominant teal green, and the expressionist force of the liquid scarlet make this one of Jackson’s quintessential drip paintings. Philip Rylands LEFT: Jackson Pollock, Number 23, 1949, 1949, oil and enamel on canvas mounted to composition board, 26.5 by 12.1 in. Private collection Jackson Pollock 67

These silkscreens are based on six of Jackson’s ‘Black Paintings’ of 1951, and were made with the help of his technically proficient brother Sanford McCoy. They are in mint condition and are the last complete set. These images, energetic, supra-human, mythic, were what Pollock had admired in the Mexican muralists. When asked what for him was the greatest painting in America he replied José Clemente Orozco’s Prometheus mural at Pomona College in Claremont, CA – a dense, airless composition with slicing, intersecting, diagonal forms dominated by a heroic nude. The images are expressionistic (painting out of his unconscious), dark (given his depression), and forceful (expressions of his fragile conviction of superior talent and using reserves of experience and skill that he had matured over more than a decade). They have control, but also spontaneity, ‘accident’ (a circular drop jumps to life as an eye for example), and a hyper-active variety of marks and lines. Whatever the observer brings to interpreting them, whatever figures may emerge, these are undeniably powerful. We must imagine him in conversation with Sanford, thoughtfully selecting six paintings to reproduce. They were more or less similar in scale, though their dimensions varied. Three vertical format and three broad format images are shrunk by approximately 60-70%. The sheets, unlike the canvases, have precisely the same dimensions. Pollock has foregone the fully immersive visual field of the large poured paintings, something that was, for critics in the 1950s and still today, a defining feature of the new American painting. Size ceases to matter. Jason McCoy learned from his father Sanford that their intention (Sanford’s and Jackson’s) was that the suite should remain together (although it did not turn out this way). The prints were to be numbered and signed as they were sold, but numbering was not a priority. Owners could frame and then hang them in any order they wished. The images could talk to each other, change by contiguity, profess their differences, and share their similarities. The relations of figure to ground are varied, complex, even ambiguous. ‘Figures’ are sometimes reserved on the white paper, with black counting as filled-in dark ground, or as contour, emphasis and shadow. But this is not consistent. Sometimes a ‘figure’ asserts itself as black against a white ground. The Picasso-like blots and lines of marsh flora on the left side of Number 7 are the most obvious example of the latter. The vertical prints are unified as dense, black ground pictures, while in the horizontal formats white oxygenates the composition. In 1953 the motifs of Number 27, in a rare case for Pollock of the reworking of an earlier idea, reappeared in Portrait and a Dream (Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas). The title of the latter would seem to authorize the interpretation of the former as a standoff between outward appearance (the portrait) and inward mental activity (the dream). That the left side of the Number 27, 1951 painting configures a crouched, heavily built nude does not necessarily preclude ‘mental activity’. Automatism still has a tempered role, but the translation of these paintings into prints – uniform in texture, chroma, and size – diffuses the existential drama in favor of image-making: cogitated, selected and released for sale as a ‘certificate’ of completeness. Pollock’s decision to make these prints renders palpable the change in his approach to painting in 1951. Philip Rylands 70 Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock, The Arts Manual by Jackson Pollock, (#22A), 1951, ink and pale water- color washes on Howell paper, 17.8 by 21.5 in. Collection of Ronnie and John Shore, Cincinnati, Ohio ‘#22A’ is a fascinating and mysterious drawing indeed. Mysterious because of course, there is no Arts Manual by Pollock. What we know however is that this image on handmade Howell paper was made by Jackson with focus and intent. Jackson valued the very paper it is made upon too highly to think of wasting a precious sheet. What we see, I believe, is a work of art more literal than ever as Pollock addressed himself to the mirror of painting or drawing in this instance. This is the essence of art making to the artist. As in the stone ‘Head’, the object is best seen as a reflection of Pollock looking from himself directly to the support: stone for the head, Howell paper for the ‘The Arts Manual’. My thought is that the present drawing is not be design at all but by fiat, as so is a presentation as it is, to be accepted as an open book. Jason McCoy 72 Jackson Pollock

CR871 CR872 PAGES 73-75: Jackson Pollock, 6 Sheets from Notebook, ca. 1950-54, graphite, blue colored pencil, blue and black ink, and ink wash on Japanese commercial airmail stationery, each sheet 11 by 8.5 in. Courtesy american contemporary art GALLERY, Munich Jackson Pollock made five notebooks in his lifetime. Three are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum, given to the Museum by Lee Krasner. They were drawn by the artist between 1933 and 1939. A fourth (‘The last notebook’) is in the collection of the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, and dates from 1950-1956. The six sheets exhibited here were from the collection of Lee Krasner, who gave the notepad to her nephew when she died. It is the only one still in private hands. All the notebooks were intimate and personal – made by Jackson in private moments, giving us evidence of how the artist’s hand and mind come together, offering no beginning and no end. They reveal the fine line between consciousness and unconsciousness. The six sheets exhibited here are on delicate Japanese commercial airmail paper, detached from what Francis V. O’Connor described as “a telephone-table scratchpad,” Jackson Pollock 73

CR873 CR874 and are dated by the Jackson Pollock catalogue raisonné from 1950-54. One sheet makes apparent three phases of evolution — first as the bearer of commonplace annotations, then augmented with diminutive linear structures, and finally evolving, motivated by horror vacui, with the use of blue crayon in place of the ballpoint pen, into a jazzy all- over composition in the manner of Mark Tobey. Some numbers belong to the first phase (‘123’ appears more than once: is this a telephone number or a sign of tedium?) as well as some names. Peter Blake was curator of architecture at MoMA. He and Jackson met in the summer of 1949 and planned a museum of Jackson’s paintings. In the upper left appear four names in a list — perhaps the first notes on the sheet: Peters (Donald and Harriet Peters? they were local collectors; she later married the Spanish-American painter Esteban Vicente), Motherwell (Robert), Namuth (Hans), and Sykes (Gerald? novelist and philosopher, who wrote for the New York Times, and husband of the artist Buffie Johnson who was in turn a friend of Jackson and Lee). 74 Jackson Pollock

CR875 CR878 Another sheet bears the name of Harry Frank Guggenheim and of his third wife Alicia, aunt-in-law of sometime Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. In a third sheet oriental-looking brushstrokes dominate, filling the gaps and overwhelming the ballpoint notes and marks. This exercise so sustained Jackson’s attention that he apparently continued on another sheet which lacks scratchpad notes. He several times experimented by flicking the fountain pen at the paper. The variegated marks on a fifth sheet include numbers, letters, a schematic face with a round ear, and a relief sculpture at the top. The black signs seem not to be made with a brush but with a blunt instrument. A last sheet different from the others, reveals with no less intensity the ‘form-making’ movement of the artist’s hand, pressuring and testing the nib in insistent strokes. Part utility and part work on paper, they convey Pollock’s creative mind at work. Similar marks in black wash and ink splashes can be seen in technically identical drawings as early as 1950. Philip Rylands Jackson Pollock 75

Jackson Pollock, Drawing, 1952-56, Ink on pink paper, 11 by 8.5 in. Private collection It is often tempting to ‘read’ or project interpretations onto drawings which are inherently abstract. At the core, CR861 reads to me not as abstract but as figurative – a figure in dancing motion, the motion created by the artist’s energy with ink and pen. The intensity of the drawing is heightened by the kinds of drawn line, from thick to thin, and from literal ‘eyes’ and wriggly feet, lower mid- center. There is also a face in profile, lower center, which appears to be exhaling and so animating nerve cells making the whole drawing active, floating as if supported by warm air currents. The pleasure of this sheet is enhanced by the rich color of the pink ground, and the paper itself reminds us of the vitality that is essential to human life, made visible as only a master artist can. Jason McCoy 76 Jackson Pollock

Formerly property of Jackson Pollock, Stool, wood and paint, 13.5 by 13 in. Private collection Formerly property of Jackson Pollock, Stool, wood and paint, 13.3 by 12.8 in. Private collection These stools, that appear sometimes in Hans Namuth’s and Arnold Newman’s photographs of the barn-studio in The Springs, exist in limbo between different classes of object and between furniture and painted sculpture. Their numinous power transcends both. Silent witnesses, they received unblinking the spattering from Jackson’s dripping, pouring, lobbing and flicking of paint across the unstretched canvases laid on the floor – most intensely in 1949-50 judging by the character and colors of the spots: blueish on one and reddish on the other. One is reminded of royal stools of the peoples of the grasslands of Cameroon, which were ‘empowered’ by animal sacrifice and the rubbing-on of sacred materials. Jackson’s stools, with time and the power of the photographic record, have become manifestations of the Pollock ‘myth’. But the opposite is also true: as Jackson and his extraordinarily vivid life slip into the past, these stools, like the notepad sheets, reconnect us to the living man – instruments of repose and contemplation during the lonely vigils in the studio. They contradict the memento mori: they remind us that Jackson lived. Philip Rylands Jackson Pollock 77

Timeline — Charles Pollock 1902 December 25: Charles Cecil Pollock is born to Stella May McClure (1875-1958), and LeRoy (Roy) [McCoy] Pollock (1876-1933). He is the oldest of five brothers. Marvin Jay (1904-1986), Frank Leslie (1907-1994), Sanford (Sande) LeRoy (1909-1963), and Paul Jackson (1912-1956). His father, who was born McCoy, had taken the surname of his parents’ neighbors, who adopted him 1903 Charles and his parents, who are farmers, move to Cody, Wyoming. He plays marbles with Western legend Buffalo Bill 1913 The Pollock family moves to Phoenix, Arizona, where they buy a twenty-acre farm with a brick house. Charles attends weekly drawing classes at the age of eleven 1917 Charles works in Yuba City, Sacramento Valley. The Pollock family moves to Chico, California, and buys a farm 1920 The Pollock family moves to Janesville, California, where they buy a hotel 1921 The Pollock family moves to Orland, California in the spring 1922 Charles quits high school in Chico, California. He goes to Los Angeles and attends the Otis Art Institute. Thanks to Arthur Millier, a local art critic, he finds a job at the Los Angeles Times. He sends copies of The Dial to his family, providing youngest brother Jackson with his first exposure to modern art 1926 Moves to New York to study at the Arts Students League under Thomas Hart Benton, and later becomes his assistant and friend 1929 In a letter to Jackson, Charles encourages him to pursue a career in painting 1930 Charles and Jackson travel to Pomona College in California to see José Clemente Orozco’s Prometheus mural and describe it as an almost spiritual experience. Charles makes a living teaching art at the City and Country School in Manhattan and also earns money by painting posters for cinema marquees 1931 Charles marries Elizabeth Feinberg 1933 Charles goes to Chicago to make sketches for Thomas Hart Benton, who was asked to paint a mural of the social history of Illinois for the next World’s Fair. He creates images of workers in the docks and shipyards 78

1934 Charles’s first solo show at a commercial gallery is held at Ferargil Gallery in New York 1935 Charles leaves for Los Angeles with Jackson in a Model-T Ford they bought for $30. They cross eight states. During the trip they sleep outdoors in tents and make sketches. Charles goes to Washington, D.C., where he works for the Resettlement Administration (Special Skills Division) and travels through the South making drawings and studies 1936 Nine song sheets designed and illustrated by Charles are published. The music is written by musicologist Charles Seeger 1937 Moves to Detroit, Michigan, where he works for the United Automobile Workers’ Union newspaper as a political cartoonist and layout editor for its weekly newspaper 1938 Charles’s first daughter is born, Jeremy Eleanor Takes a position as Supervisor of Mural Painting and Graphic Arts for the Federal Arts Project (WPA) in Michigan. Over the next few years, he makes murals for the Water Conditioning Plant in the state capitol of Lansing and another for the Fairchild Auditorium at Michigan State College (later Michigan State University), in East Lansing 1942 The WPA project closes down. Charles becomes a book designer for Michigan State College Press, a position held through 1959, and begins teaching design, printmaking, calligraphy, and typography in the Art Department, where he would teach for twenty-five years 1944 Charles finishes the Fairchild Auditorium murals for Michigan State University 1945 After living and working in the Arizona desert for three months, Charles begins to explore abstraction in his artwork and breaks with Social Realist and Regionalist art 1952 One-man show at Circle Gallery, Detroit. This is the only time he uses the name Charles Pima to detract attention from the name ‘Pollock’ 79 Charles Pollock in front of his handpress at Michigan State University, 1953. © Charles Pollock Archives, Paris

1956 Charles takes his first sabbatical year and lives on Lake Chapala in Mexico. Charles’s Chapala paintings and drawings (a series of 30 paintings and ink drawings inspired by his interest in calligraphy) are exhibited at the Literature and Fine Arts Gallery at Michigan State University. He and Elizabeth divorce Charles Pollock teaching design at Michigan State University with Sylvia Winter, 1954. © Charles Pollock Archives, Paris 1957 Charles marries Sylvia Winter in Colorado. He meets Clement Greenberg at an exhibition opening in New York. The two exchange letters, and Greenberg goes on to introduce him to artists and art dealers 1959 First black and white collages lead to the series Black and Gray and Black and Color 1962 Takes his second sabbatical year in Rome, where he paints the somber and majestic Rome series and makes aquatints 1965 Charles is invited by the University of Pennsylvania as visiting critic in painting; he gives a series of lectures 1966 Second one-man show at the Gertrude Kalse Gallery in Detroit 1967 Charles’s second daughter is born, Francesca McCoy 80

1968 Charles retires from teaching and moves to New York where he installs his studio on the Bowery. This is where he paints the NY series. Charles’s wife works as a graphic designer for a fine printer 1970 Invited to participate in a group exhibition Color and Field — 1890–1970 at the Albright Knox Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y. 1971 Charles, Sylvia and Francesca move to Paris 1979 Solo show at the Acme Gallery, London. The exhibition travels throughout Great Britain 1981 Exhibition at the Paris Art Center in Paris. Sylvia publishes a book of poems, These Intensities, with drawings by Charles 1986 Charles returns to small formats, working with black and white and calligraphic forms Charles Pollock in his Bowery studio in New York, 1968, photographed by Peter Agard. © Charles Pollock Archives, Paris 1988 May 8: Charles Pollock dies at the age of 85 in Paris due to complications after a stroke. Charles Pollock photographed by Hans Namuth, 1980. © Charles Pollock Archives, Paris 81

Timeline — Jackson Pollock 1912 January 28: Paul Jackson Pollock is born in Cody, Wyoming. The Pollock family moves to Phoenix, Arizona, where Roy buys a twenty-acre farm with an adobe house 1927 Jackson enrolls at Riverside High School and joins the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) program. Although only fifteen, he is already drinking heavily. Jackson is expelled from the ROTC due to violent behavior while drinking 1928 Jackson withdraws from Riverside High School. The Pollock family moves to Los Angeles. Jackson enrolls at Manual Arts High School. Frederick Schwankovsky, head of the art department, introduces him to abstract art and to the writings of mystical thinkers such as Krishnamurti and Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Theosophy Jackson Pollock and Sanford (“Sande”) Pollock (later McCoy) at the Grand Canyon, 1927 1929 Jackson is expelled from Manual Arts High School but is later readmitted. He subscribes to the magazine Creative Art and is impressed by an article on the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera 1930 Jackson and Charles see José Clemente Orozco’s Prometheus fresco at Pomona College in Claremont, California. Jackson follows Charles and Frank to New York City. He begins classes at the Art Students League, enrolling with Charles in Thomas Hart Benton’s class 1931 Jackson hitchhikes with Manuel Tolegian from New York to Los Angeles. In late August, both men work briefly as lumberjacks. Jackson returns to New York, where he takes Benton’s mural class and is tutored privately by the artist 1932 Jackson makes another trip to Los Angeles, where a friend introduces him to the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. Returning to New York, he moves into Charles and his wife Elizabeth’s two-room apartment 1933 Jackson enrolls in John Sloan’s ‘Life Drawing, Painting, and Composition’ class at the Art Students League. He also joins a stone-carving class at Greenwich House Annex, on Jones Street, and takes a part-time job as a custodian. Jackson quits Sloan’s class and enrolls in Robert Laurent’s evening clay-modeling class. At the end of a month, he drops out of Laurent’s class to take up stone carving. Rents a room in a brownstone to live on his own and begins painting again. 82

1934 Jackson and Charles journey cross-country in a 1926 Model T Ford, the fourth such trip in five years. On returning to New York, he moves to a cold-water flat above a lumberyard. Sande moves in with him. Charles, now a part-time teacher at the City and Country School, and Benton help Sande and Jackson get a shared job cleaning the five-story school for $10 a week. Caroline Pratt, the school’s director, and Helen Marot, a teacher who has studied psychology, take an interest in Jackson; they will support and encourage his work throughout the rest of the decade. Unable to make ends meet, Jackson and Sande sign up to receive direct government aid 1935 Jackson shows Threshers in the Eighth Exhibition of Watercolors, Pastels, and Drawings by American and French Artists, at the Brooklyn Museum. He is hired as a stonecutter by the New York City Emergency Relief Bureau. He and Sande enlist with the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). To stay close to his brother Charles, Jackson joins the mural division rather than the easel division. Charles leaves New York for Washington, DC. With Sande, Jackson moves back to the 46 East 8th Street apartment vacated by Charles and Elizabeth 1936 Siqueiros organizes a ‘Laboratory of Modern Techniques in Art’ in his loft. Jackson and Sande participate. Siqueiros experiments with non-traditional materials such as enamel paint, and with unconventional techniques of paint application: dripping, pouring, and airbrushing. At a Christmas party, Jackson meets his future wife Lenore (Lee) Krasner, but they will not meet again until 1942 1937 At Sande’s insistence Jackson begins psychiatric treatment for alcoholism, under the care of a Jungian analyst 1938 Jackson’s employment with the Federal Arts Project is terminated due to “continued absence.” In the hope of curing Jackson’s drinking problem, Sande commits him as a ‘voluntary patient’ in the Westchester Division of New York Hospital in White Plains. Jackson is reassigned to the easel division of the WPA project 1939 Jackson begins sessions with Dr. Joseph A. Henderson. He brings drawings, and they are used as therapeutic and interpretive tools. Jackson sees Picasso’s Guernica at the Valentine Gallery, and returns repeatedly, sometimes sketching 1940 Helen Marot dies. A period of sustained depression begins for Jackson, marked by increased drinking and little painting 1941 The exhibition Indian Art of the United States is on view at The Museum of Modern Art. Jackson attends the exhibition and watches Navajo artists execute sand paintings on the gallery floor. Dr. de Laszlo writes on Jackson’s behalf to the medical officer of Local Board No. 17, requesting draft deferment for him on psychological grounds. He is classified unfit for service 83

1942 Jackson exhibits Birth (ca. 1941) in American and French Paintings at McMillen Inc. The exhibition, organized by John Graham, includes works by Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, as well as Lee Krasner, who seeks out Jackson. She supports and promotes his work. Herbert Matter invites James Johnson Sweeney to visit Jackson’s studio. Sweeney tells Peggy Guggenheim that Jackson is “doing interesting work” and suggests she visit the studio. Krasner is assigned a project designing posters for navy recruiting stations and hires Jackson for the team. On October 21, Peggy Guggenheim opens her gallery, Art of This Century, in Manhattan. In addition to showing European modernism, Guggenheim will become interested in showing young American artists 1943 Jackson begins work as a custodian and preparator of paintings at The Museum of Non-Objective Painting. This museum will be renamed the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1952. In May, Jackson’s Stenographic Figure is included in the Spring Salon for Young Artists at Art of This Century. In July, Peggy Guggenheim signs a one-year contract paying Pollock $150 a month, which allows him to paint full time. She commissions Mural for the entrance hall of her town house. In November, she gives him his first solo show 1944 The Museum of Modern Art acquires The She-Wolf for $650 on the recommendation of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. It is Jackson’s first museum purchase. He begins making prints in Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier, across the street from his and Krasner’s apartment 1945 Solo exhibition of Jackson’s work at The Arts Club of Chicago. Later in the year a selection of works will travel to the San Francisco Museum of Art. Jackson’s second solo exhibition at Art of This Century. Visitors on the exhibition’s opening day are invited to Peggy Guggenheim’s town house to view Mural. Jackson’s contract with Guggenheim comes up for renewal. She doubles his monthly stipend. Jackson and Krasner marry at the Marble Collegiate Church on 5th Avenue and move into a farmhouse on Long Island. There is no hot water, no bathroom, and they have no car 1946 Jackson resumes painting, using an upstairs bedroom as a makeshift studio. He designs the dust jacket for Guggenheim’s memoir, Out of This Century. He starts to use the barn as his studio. Shows for the first time in the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the ‘Whitney Annual’ 1947 Jackson’s exhibits Mural in ‘Large Scale Modern Paintings’ at The Museum of Modern Art, alongside Picasso’s Guernica. Art of This Century closes when Guggenheim decides to return to Europe. She persuades Betty Parsons to show Jackson’s work. She will maintain her contract with him until early 1948, at which point Parsons will enter into a similar agreement. Jackson applies unsuccessfully for a Guggenheim Fellowship 84

1948 Jackson’s first show at the Betty Parsons Gallery. Guggenheim’s collection is shown at the XXIV Venice Biennale, including six works by Jackson. The collection travels to Florence in February 1949, and to Milan in June 1949. Thanks to the support of Sweeney, Jackson is awarded a one-year grant from the Eben Demarest Trust, which supplements his yearly income. He begins treatment for alcoholism with Dr. Edwin Heller, a general practitioner who has recently arrived in East Hampton. Under Heller’s care, he stops drinking 1949 Jackson signs a contract with Parsons through January 1, 1952. He begins making terracotta sculptures in the studio of East Hampton neighbor Roseanne Larkin. He exhibits two works in Sculpture by Painters, an exhibition organized at The Museum of Modern Art. Life magazine publishes an unsigned article: “Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner Pollock in Jackson Pollock’s studio, Springs, East Hampton, NY, 1950. Photo by Lawrence Larkin for The New Yorker 1950 The Museum of Modern Art acquires Number 1A, 1948. Jackson is a signator of a letter initiated by abstract artist Barnett Newman attacking The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Jackson exhibits three paintings in the U.S. Pavilion at the XXV Venice Biennale. Hans Namuth photographs Jackson while he paints, taking approximately 200 photographs of him at work on One: Number 31, 1950 and Autumn Rhythm: Number 30, 1950. In the summer, Guggenheim exhibits her collection of 23 works by Jackson at the Museo Correr, Venice. This is his first solo exhibition outside the U.S. 85

In October, Carlo Cardazzo organizes a selling exhibition at the Galleria del Naviglio, Milan. Namuth films Jackson at work on a painting on glass, Number 29, 1950. When the filming is over, Jackson drinks alcohol for the first time in two years Jackson’s Number 8, 1950 is included in a group show, Véhémences Confrontées, organized by the French critic Michel Tapié at the Galerie Nina Dausset, Paris. He shows Number 1, 1949 in the 9th Street Show, at 60 East 9th Street. Namuth’s film of Jackson at work premieres at The Museum of Modern Art 1951 January 15, Life magazine publishes Nina Leen’s photograph of Jackson and fourteen others of the ‘Irascible Eighteen’ — a group of artists protesting the juried exhibition of contemporary painting at The Metropolitan Museum of Art the previous year 1952 Jackson’s contract with Betty Parsons expires. Parsons convinces him to remain until May. Alfonso Ossorio arranges a solo show at Studio Paul Facchetti, Paris. Still unhappy with slow sales, Jackson leaves the Betty Parsons Gallery and moves to the Sidney Janis Gallery, across the hall from Parsons. His first solo exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery 1953 Artnews votes Jackson’s November show at the Sidney Janis Gallery the second-best exhibition of 1952, after an exhibition by Joan Miró. Four paintings by him are included in 12 Peintres et Sculpteurs Américains Contemporains, an exhibition circulated by the International Program of The Museum of Modern Art. It opens at the Musée national d’art moderne, Paris, and will travel to Zurich, Düsseldorf, Stockholm, Helsinki, and Oslo 1954 Jackson is inactive, painting few works 1955 Jackson reenters analysis, traveling to New York City for therapy sessions. As Krasner is beginning to emerge as an artist, he finds it harder to paint. Because he has produced so little new work his third solo exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery is organized as a retrospective titled 15 Years of Jackson Pollock 1956 Jackson has not painted in almost eighteen months. He receives a letter from Andrew Carnduff Ritchie announcing that The Museum of Modern Art is to begin a series of exhibitions on artists in mid-career, and that Jackson has been selected to inaugurate the series. Krasner leaves for a vacation in Europe. Their relationship has deteriorated as Jackson’s drinking and depression increase. Jackson becomes involved with Ruth Kligman, a young aspiring artist living in New York City. Kligman moves in with Jackson at The Springs for a brief period during Krasner’s absence August 11: driving drunk at night, Jackson hits a tree on Fireplace Road, Long Island, and is killed. The Museum of Modern Art’s show, intended as a mid-career exhibition, becomes instead a memorial retrospective 86