Dig Jackson Pollock in the August 8, 1949, issue of Life magazine: in paint-spattered blue denims, his arms folded across his chest, and his sleeves rolled up like he’s ready to change your oil. An unfiltered cigarette dangles from the right corner of his mouth. He leans back, poised like a coiled spring against a wall on which he’s tacked his eighteen-foot-long painting Summertime, which he’s just finished. His head is at a cocky, fuck-you-and-the-horse-you-rode-in-on angle.
His eyes, though, look puzzled; his brow is furrowed. He squints through the cigarette smoke as if he can’t believe that anybody could possibly want to know where he’s coming from or what he’s gone through to get to where he is now: in color when color was special, on page 42 of Life, his well-worn work boots crossed between the words “greatest” and “living” in the headline IS HE THE GREATEST LIVING PAINTER IN THE UNITED STATES?
In the Los Angeles Central Library half a century later, staring down at his frayed and yellowing image in Arnold Newman’s photo, I can still feel the kundalini crawling up my spine as I study Pollock. As I turn the pages of the magazine, studying the images in the articles and advertising, Jackson Pollock is the only one among them all who looks cool.
In 1949, Jackson Pollock, at thirty-seven, was making some of his greatest paintings—gigantic, gorgeous drip masterpieces like Lavender Mist and Autumn Rhythm—infinitely intricate webs of color, rhythm, and line so far beyond the realm of language that in some cases, Pollock could only give them numbers, like Number 28, 1949.
In 1949—four years after his first one-man show at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery, Art of This Century—the debate over Pollock’s work was raging, spreading from the Waldorf’s Cafeteria on Sixth Avenue—the all-night eatery where the painters gathered to unwind—to the mass media and the culture at large. Clement Greenberg, already the leading theoretician of American action painting, had declared Pollock “the most powerful painter in contemporary America.” On the other hand, in a Life magazine “Round Table” on modern art, Pollock had been denounced by Alfred Frankfurter, the editor and publisher of Art News; and Leigh Ashton, the director of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, who sniffed that Pollock’s painting Cathedral “would make a most enchanting printed silk.” Time magazine dubbed Pollock “Jack the Dripper.”
Jackson Pollock at the Springs, Long Island, New York, 1947.