Pollock’s Last Summer

It is late morning on 11 August 1956, a Saturday. We are in Springs, in the Hamptons, the furthest tip of Long Island, a holiday resort for wealthy New Yorkers and an artists’ enclave, two and a half hours’ drive from the skyscrapers of Manhattan. Jackson Pollock is sitting on a large granite boulder on the lawn of his house: wearing a sailor’s T-shirt, with an unkempt beard, scruffy trousers, his back hunched, and a forced smile etched on his alcohol-swollen face. Sitting on his lap is his lover, Ruth Kligman, in a swimsuit. She is clinging to his left arm in a possessive gesture, with her right leg stretched out across Jackson’s lap. He is gripping her bare thigh with both hands. He is 44, she is 26; they have known and loved each other for four months. With them is Edith Metzger, a friend of Ruth’s, who is taking the photograph.

It is the last known photograph of Pollock. A few hours later, the three of them were found beside the wreckage of the painter’s Oldsmobile 88 convertible, which had overturned in a ditch along Springs Fireplace Road, not far from the house. Jackson and Edith were dead; Ruth was seriously injured, but she would survive to tell the story and go on to live a long life haunted by the ghost of Pollock. It is the epilogue to a summer of madness, alcohol, sex and loneliness. Jackson Pollock’s final summer, seventy years ago. One of the greatest geniuses of the twentieth century, who no longer knew what to do with his art, passed away. And the myth was born – a myth that remains indestructible and continues to grow to this day.

A farewell as violent as his life, over which the shadow of a deliberate act has always lingered: a spectacular suicide, almost a cinematic gesture inspired by James Dean, who had died less than a year earlier in a road accident. An end that came, not coincidentally, at a time when his wife, the artist and guardian angel Lee Krasner, had not been by his side for several weeks, having flown to Europe to try to heal the wounds caused by Jackson’s constant betrayals. She was the defining figure in his life and also in his art, as the exhibition “Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous”, opening on 4 October at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, will seek to demonstrate. This is the first major exhibition in twenty years that Manhattan will dedicate to the most famous of the Abstract Expressionists who took the city by storm in the 1950s, and to his wife. It is significant that Lee’s surname appears before Jackson’s this time, confirming the critics’ growing appreciation for her works, as well as recognition of the importance she played in his artistic career.

Without Lee, Jackson was lost, as demonstrated by that final, tragic summer seventy years ago, during which he did everything in his power to drive her away, only to pay the price with a complete loss of self-control. But the epilogue was merely the culmination of a year – 1956 – that had got off to a bad start for Pollock. In January, Time magazine had dubbed him ‘Jack the Dripper’, a pun that stuck to him like a label and which played on the nickname of the famous serial killer ‘Jack the Ripper’. For the then all-powerful American magazine, the latest work presented by Pollock at the end of 1955, "Scent", was proof that the artist had nothing left to say other than to repeat himself. “The result of brushwork rather than the famous ‘dripping’ technique,” wrote Time, “the work nevertheless aims to evoke nothing in the viewer’s mind but the artist’s previous works, succeeding perfectly in this modest aim. In essence, what it conveys is simply that Jack the Dripper, at the age of forty-four, continues to stand on his own two feet relying solely on his previous works.”

If Pollock was already in crisis before that article, afterwards he simply could not bring himself to pick up a brush. He never painted again until his death. His famous studio in the shed opposite his house in Springs became filled with dust and cobwebs. The peak of his creativity was now a distant memory. The Time article brought to a close a golden age that had begun with the masterpieces of the ‘dripping’ years from 1947 onwards. This period was cemented by another article, published in Life magazine in August 1949, which had made Pollock world-famous with an extraordinary photo spread and a headline featuring a question mark: ‘Is this the greatest living painter in the United States?’. But by the autumn of 1950, when Hans Namuth filmed Pollock at work in his Springs home and astonished the world with footage of his technique, a crisis had already begun for the artist. In 1951–52 came the shift to black on unprimed canvases, followed by a return to colour with "Blue Poles" and "Convergence", and then the last major series in 1953: "The Deep", "Ocean Greyness", "Portrait" and "A Dream". From 1954 onwards, his great creative streak seemed to run dry; he produced "White Light", then "Scent" and "Search". Then came a void. As Lee would later recount, Jackson had reached a dead end; his revolution had gone as far as it could go, and he did not know how to proceed.

Compounding the situation was the realisation that, whilst he was paralysed, the New York School – of which he was one of the leading figures – was at its zenith in 1956: with de Kooning, Rothko, Kline, Newman, Still and Motherwell, American Abstract Expressionism had, for the first time, stolen the limelight from Paris. The leading critics who had ‘invented’ the movement, Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, were themselves at the height of their influence, yet they did not spare Pollock their criticism. And already on the horizon were the young artists jostling to make their mark: Pop Art was on the rise, with Rauschenberg, Johns, Warhol and Lichtenstein ready to stake their claim in the galleries of the Village and at Leo Castelli’s on the Upper East Side. Meanwhile, in Springs, far from Manhattan, amidst the tranquillity of the Hamptons, Jackson Pollock no longer seemed to find inspiration in the bucolic landscape, the ocean or solitude.

Alcohol had always been his great temptation and his refuge, but by 1956 it had become an enemy he could no longer control. Every Monday he would go to New York to see his analyst, who tried to help him confront his demons, but as soon as the session was over he would rush to the Cedar Tavern in the Village, his kingdom and his downfall. The bar where people would come all the way from New Jersey just to see him lose his mind. Fielding Dawson, a pupil of Franz Kline, recounted an emblematic scene dating back to June 1956, at the start of that final summer. The owners of the Cedar had banned Jackson from the premises after he’d ripped the men’s toilet door off its hinges the last time he’d been there. “I was sitting at the bar having a beer,” wrote Dawson, “when I heard John, the barman, mutter: ‘Oh, no’. Through the small square window in the red front door, I could see part of Jackson’s face; one eye, vivid and restless, was peering inside. John walked along the wooden platform to the end of the bar near the door, stopped, placed his left fist on his hip and pointed his right index finger towards the window. He shook his head. The eye looked wounded. John’s lips were pressed tightly together. I was laughing. The eye disappeared. John muttered through clenched teeth: ‘He’ll be back.’ We stood there staring at the square peephole. Jackson’s eye peered in again. ‘No!’ John shouted. ‘You’re banned, Jackson!’ The eye looked sad and puzzled.” In the end, John let Pollock in (“What can you do? I can’t say no to that bastard,” he sighed). The artist came in, asked for a Scotch, then sat down at the table of a couple of strangers—a man and his girlfriend who’d come specifically to see him, as if he were a circus attraction. And a few seconds later, he knocked their dinner onto the floor.

He had become a sideshow attraction, in that very same venue where, two months earlier, he had met a young artist, Ruth Kligman, who had also come to Cedar solely to meet that half-mad painter everyone was talking about. A love affair had blossomed, the latest in a long line of betrayals of Lee. And with Ruth he had spent that final, dramatic summer between New York and Springs, of which we are left with the (biased) accounts of those who had, in one way or another, endured it: Lee, Ruth, Greenberg, and their neighbour Conrad ‘Corrado’ Marca-Relli, an Italian-American painter who bore the brunt of her confidences and outbursts.

There is also an account by the writer Selden Rodman, who went to interview him in June for his book "Conversations with Artists". Jackson took him to visit his studio, but he couldn’t even find the keys, such was the length of time that had passed since he’d last been inside. He smashed the window with his elbow, slipped in like a thief, and Rodman found himself surrounded by abandoned yet marvellous works of art that nobody looked at any more. In the midst of the dust-covered studio, Pollock burst into tears, shouting: ‘Do you think I’d have painted this rubbish if I could draw a hand?’. He then launched into a tirade against all his colleagues, saying that he no longer even recognised himself in the label of ‘abstract expressionist’.

He had become cruel towards Lee. On 5 July, Jackson had spent the night with Ruth in the studio in the barn, whilst his wife slept in the house. The mistress later recounted that they had taken refuge there after a car accident, because Jackson had lost control of the car: a premonition. The next morning, Lee caught them out: “Get that woman off my property before I call the police!”, he shouted, whilst the two lovers fled – as Ruth cruelly recounted – “laughing like two children being told off by a mean mum”.

For Lee, it was the last straw. She packed her bags and set off for Europe, seeking solace for her pain in art, museums and the Venice Biennale. Ruth moved into the house in Springs, leaving Pollock alone from time to time to return to work in New York. With his wife away, Jackson began spending whole days drinking. In the evenings, he would occasionally take Ruth to the same friends’ homes where they usually welcomed him and Lee. At one such dinner, at the home of Clement Greenberg – the great critic who had discovered him and made him famous – Greenberg did not merely attack him, as he always did, for failing to develop his art further: he backed him into a corner, forcing him to choose between Ruth and Lee. Pollock took it in silence, then stood up, took his lover by the arm and left without saying a word – behaviour that was unusual for him.

On the morning of 11 August, Ruth arrived by train from Manhattan with a German friend, Edith. When Pollock turned up to pick them up by car at the station, he was already drunk. They spent the day with him seeming distant. He carried on drinking, incessantly. That evening, he ordered the two girls to get dressed so he could take them to a party, but in the car – as Ruth would later recount – he seemed dazed. Every now and then he would stop and stare into space. Frightened, Edith tried to get him to drop her off at the Cottage Inn, a venue frequented by Black people. But Pollock, after making a few racist remarks, forced the girls back into the car and set off at breakneck speed. Edith was screaming, whilst Ruth tried to persuade Jackson to slow down. But his eyes were vacant. He kept accelerating until the Oldsmobile veered off the road, crashing into two small elm trees.

The very next day, the legend had already begun. Lee, devastated, set off once more for America from Paris, where she was at the time. The newspapers published extensive obituaries. The prices of her works immediately began to rise: they would never stop. Last May, at Christie’s, "Number 7A, 1948", which had been held for years in the private collection of media magnate S.I. Newhouse, was sold for $181 million, an auction record for Pollock. In a private sale in 2015, another painting from 1948, "Number 17A", passed from the hands of David Geffen to those of hedge fund magnate Ken Griffin for around $200 million – at the time a world record for any painting. Geffen himself sold "No. 5, 1948" to an unknown buyer in 2006 for $140 million. All the world’s major museums are vying for Pollock’s works, yet often cannot afford them: "Number 17A, 1948" was briefly exhibited on loan at the Art Institute of Chicago before returning to Griffin’s collection.

It fell to Ruth, as a survivor, to recount Pollock’s final summer. She continued to be a regular fixture in the Village: she became de Kooning’s partner, then the lover of other artists, and finally opened a gallery where she exhibited Andy Warhol, with whom she formed a long-standing partnership. At the Cedar Tavern, the evening after the crash at Springs, friends gathered to drink in Pollock’s memory. Franz Kline, slumped on a stool, delivered his eulogy: “He painted the whole sky, he rearranged the stars… But the reason I’ll miss him is that he’ll never walk through that door again.”