The Tamesis
Pollock and Krasner moved to a house at 830 Hearth Road in East Hampton Springs that they purchased from the Guggenheim with a $2,000 down payment. Unlike today’s rich man’s playground, East Hampton was rural at the time, a farmstead with a small barn that later became Pollock’s studio.
The barn’s interior was barely large enough to accommodate Pollock’s canvases spread out on the floor, limiting him to working along a shallow perimeter between the wall and the painting. In the winter he could only work a few hours a day because there was no heating.
Pollock used household enamel diluted to a syrupy consistency and used stirring rods and brushes as tools. Diluting paint and dripping is nothing new: Whistler used a watery mixture he called “sauce,” and Max Ernst developed a technique called oscillation, in which he hung a jar filled with paint above the canvas and swung it back and forth, with the paint dripping from holes punched in the bottom. There is also a little-known self-taught painter, Janet Sobel, who in the late 1930s adopted an automated DIY approach to create sweeping compositions of drops and whorls, painted in enamel. According to art critic Clement Greenberg, Pollock was familiar with such a work, titled Milky Way (1945).
Yet Pollock elevated his work to more intentional, sustained, and sweeping heights than that of Sobel or anyone else. Still, they were not entirely abstract: Pollock applied paint in layers that, as would later be discovered with infrared photography, contained crude images of humans and animals, as well as ideograms of his own invention. In other words, Pollock’s abstract paintings are representational sandwiches.
Pollock first exhibited his drip paintings at Betty Parsons Gallery in 1948, but like his earlier canvases, they did not sell. They were also ridiculed in print: an article in the August 8, 1949 issue lifestyle magazine The published title was “Is Jackson Pollock America’s greatest living painter?” The question was intended to be a negative rhetorical question, but the accompanying color photographs of Pollock and his Arnold Newman works were so compelling that what should have been refuted catapulted him to fame. This success proved to be too much for Pollock, ushering in a period of personal and artistic decline.
Despite the image of Arnold Newman Life Another photographer, Hans Namuth (1915-1990), became a celebrity for Pollock, becoming almost as famous as Pollock himself by capturing him in motion. In 1950, Names contacted Pollock about documenting the process of painting in his studio, and Krasner once again became integral to making this happen. The project resulted in approximately 500 photographs and two films, including one of Pollock taken from beneath a piece of Plexiglas as he painted overhead.
Ironically, Names ultimately demystifies Pollock’s apparently spontaneous execution, showing that it was actually well thought out. Pollock understood that this revelation was contrary to the public image that Krasner and Guggenheim had built for him, sparking a row with Names, with each calling the other a liar. During the confrontation, Pollock poured himself a drink and fell from the carriage, thus ending the most productive phase of his career.
