When he drank, Jackson Pollock could be mean, combative, and downright nasty. He engaged in everything from malicious insults to barroom brawls. It was an anger that allowed for no exceptions, including toward his wife, fellow painter Lee Krasner.
When Pollock was sober, however, he was a pleasant enough person. Artistically, his periods of non-drinking led to some of his finest “drip” paintings.
Sobriety, however, isn’t what Pollock is known for. When he died in a drunken driving incident, at just 44 years old, he also took the life of an innocent young woman. It was a violent end to a life of emotional and creative angst coupled with destructive habits.
In the words of famed art critic Clement Greenberg, “He felt his only justification as a human being was as an artist.” It’s no wonder that a torrent of conflict plagued the artist’s inner life.
In the documentary Portrait of an Artist: Jackson Pollock, viewers are given a well-rounded picture of the painter’s life, from his early days out west to his final days in New York. The film’s greatest strength is by far its many candid interviews with friends, family members, and critics. What better way to get to know a person than from those who knew him best?
Born in 1912, in the small town of Cody, Wyoming, Pollock grew up far away from the New York art scene he would one day inhabit. He was the youngest son of LeRoy and Stella Pollock’s five sons. The family had little money and often moved.
Despite the many hardships, Pollock’s formative years in the west at least gave him an appreciation for the vastness of America’s natural landscape. In part, this sensibility was cultivated from doing surveying jobs with his father, including at the Grand Canyon. “I think that sense of American space, scale, size, had a tremendous impact on Pollock’s work,” says one biographer in the film.
Pollock’s family moved from Wyoming not long after Pollock was born, and the whole of his upbringing was spent in Arizona and California. He wound up attending Manual Arts High School, in Los Angeles, until the unruly youth was given the boot. Pollock probably cared quite little, given that neither the school nor his overall environment was giving him the kind of stimuli he wanted.
According to Reuben Kadish, artist and close childhood friend of Pollock’s, the art scene in southern California at that time was “academic” and “regressive.” “There was absolutely no regard,” Kadish says, “for the energy and the vigor of what was currently taking place in France and in Mexico.”
Nonetheless, Kadish and Pollock were at least able to explore the basement of the museum, where they enjoyed works of ethnographic art.
In 1930, Pollock moved to New York, where his eldest brother had settled with his wife, Elizabeth. Already at this early stage in Pollock’s life, he was perpetuating a mythical persona: that of the macho man, the cowboy. It was a total sham.
In the words of his sister-in-law, Elizabeth, “[Jackson’s] ploy was to go around Manhattan like a cowboy, hinting at his cowboy past.” But cowboy he was not, and never would be. Instead, he was a “coddled” individual, and a man who was “exploitative, manipulative, selfish and lazy.”
When he arrived out east, he attended the Art Students League with his brother, also a budding artist. For a time, he received instruction from Thomas Hart Benton, the artist who would go on to make a name for himself with his large regionalist paintings. Pollock’s paintings from this time look nothing like the ones for which he’s now known; it would be roughly a decade before he came into his inimitable style.
When Pollock did come into his own, it was Peggy Guggenheim, the wealthy and insatiable art lover, who gave Pollock his first commission. Titled Mural, the massive canvas filled with repeating abstract patterns was hung outside her entrance hall.
Perhaps just as importantly, it was also Peggy Guggenheim who gave the talented but penniless artist a loan so that he could buy a small home. In 1946, Jackson Pollock and his wife, Lee Krasner, moved into an unremarkable dwelling. It would be Pollock’s home for the rest of his life.
Yet inside its walls, there was rarely ever marital bliss. It was often a tumultuous relationship, largely owing to Pollock’s cantankerous ego and inability to be at peace with himself. But despite sometimes being the punching bag for an emotionally deflated and self-centered artist, his wife tried to be as supportive as she could.
To Pollock’s credit, he received therapy on his own accord for many years. It seems odd to think of the self-proclaimed cowboy and tough guy sitting in a therapist’s office, but he was adamant about going. His analyst was of the Jungian sort, and Pollock gained a better understanding of his unconscious, which played an important role in his creative process.
Ultimately, however, the therapy seems to have done little to lessen Pollock’s inner crises. Towards the end of his life, he began an affair with a woman named Ruth Kligman. Pollock was dysfunctional and at a personal and creative standstill.
In the words of one critic in the film, “[Pollock] constantly criticized himself, and because he was so self-critical he really reduced his output to next to nothing in his last years.”
Today, his best paintings sell for millions, and hang on the walls inside prestigious museums and the homes of the ultra wealthy. It’s an odd dichotomy, given that Pollock flailed helplessly his entire life, trying to find a sense of self-worth.
Spectatio 