By 1945 Pollock had found the support of a major art dealer and had gained the attention of the Museum of Modern Art. His work was included in major traveling exhibitions, and he was getting a lot of press. Nonetheless, Pollock would probably be only a footnote in the history of modern art were it not for the works he produced after 1945—the drip paintings for which he is now world famous. Their creation coincided with a dramatic change in lifestyle. As Benton had done precisely ten years earlier, Pollock decided to leave New York City. The impetus for this decision came in the summer of 1945, when Jackson and Lee stayed with Reuben and Barbara Kadish at their beach house on the eastern tip of Long Island. Lee noted that while Jackson didn’t do any work to speak of, he also stopped getting drunk. With fewer outside distractions, such as bars or friends dropping by, he was easier to keep in line. The notion occurred to her that it might be good to move out of the city.
As usual, with Lee and Jackson, the process of coming to a final decision was argumentative and difficult. When Lee first proposed leaving New York, Jackson was extremely resistant. After a while he became enthusiastic, but Lee in turn began to balk. Finally they both decided it would be a good idea.
Lee made all the arrangements and was the one who got in touch with a real estate agent. She quickly settled on a two-story, nineteenth-century farm house in Springs, near Amagansett, with a small barn and some other sheds in the back. It had running water in the kitchen and electricity but no bathroom and no heat. The rent was forty dollars a month or five thousand dollars to purchase. They decided to rent for six months with an option to buy within that period. To come up with the money they wheedled a loan out of Peggy Guggenheim, to be paid for with the sale of future paintings. As usual when dealing with Peggy, she was generous in a way that made gratitude difficult: the terms were confusing and complicated.
On October 25, 1945, while these arrangements were moving forward, Jackson and Lee were married, in a hastily arranged ceremony with just two witnesses, strangely reminiscent of the marriage forty-three years earlier of Pollock’s parents, Stella and Roy. Again, it was the woman who took the dominant role. Alma Pollock, the wife of Jackson’s brother Jay, later commented that “the marriage did what it was supposed to do. It gave Lee more control.” A few days later they left New York.
Springs was strikingly like the Benton place on Martha’s Vineyard—in snapshots it would be easy to get the two places confused—and Pollock’s barn, where he made his most famous paintings, was strikingly similar to the barns and sheds on the Benton compound. In fact, it was a slightly larger version of Jack’s Shack. When Pollock arrived, Springs, just like the Vineyard, was still dominated by a handful of families—Bennett, Miller, King, Parson, Talmage—who had been there for generations and still made their living from the sea. The residents viewed Lee and Jackson with skepticism because of their different last names and because no one ever saw Pollock do a day’s work. They were suspicious because he used a rope rather than a belt to hold up his pants, because he often didn’t shave, nor did he dress up or go to church.
The period from 1946 to 1950 was the longest sustained period of productivity of Pollock’s life. The move was something close to a new start. When they quit New York, they left all of Pollock’s finished canvases at Art of This Century and took only sketchbooks, canvas, and artist’s materials—a blank slate on which to begin afresh. Most of their New York friends were no longer welcome, at least as casual drop-bys, for Lee feared they would encourage Jackson to start drinking again. When the Kadishes dropped by to visit, Lee shooed them away. Jackson soon found a local bar, Jungle Pete’s, but he seems to have kept his drinking under control, in part because he didn’t have a car and getting away from the house wasn’t easy. For the most part his only excursion was to ride his bicycle to Miller’s store to get groceries.
Pollock’s house at Springs (top) looked very much like the Benton place on Martha’s Vineyard. (Top: Photo by Hans Namuth [1950]. Estate of Hans Namuth, courtesy of the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona. Bottom: Photograph by Fritz Menle. Courtesy of Jessie Benton.)
In New York Jackson had developed a schedule that was exactly the reverse of normal: sleeping all day and working through the night. At Springs he went back to a schedule that was a little more in tune with the pattern of the daylight, although he generally got up rather late, somewhere between ten and noon, and took an hour or two to get started while he sat quietly at the table, staring out the window and often nursing a cigarette or a cup of coffee. Lee, who got up earlier, cleaned the house and tended the garden while he slept. She kept the phone off the hook so he wouldn’t be wakened.
Around one o’clock, Jackson went to the barn to paint, and Lee spent the afternoon making phone calls to dealers and collectors. She seems to have enjoyed the constant bargaining. Around five or six, Jackson would emerge from the studio, and they would have a beer or a walk on the beach. Then they would have dinner and spend the evening conversing with friends. On the weekends they generally had houseguests. Lee did most of the cooking, although sometimes Jackson would take on some special task such as cooking spaghetti and meat sauce according to a recipe he had learned from Rita Benton.
The winter of 1945–46 was particularly brutal, and Lee recalled it later as hell, with no fuel, hot water, or bathroom. They spent weeks cleaning up the house so that Jackson could paint in an upstairs bedroom and Lee in the living room. Always uneven in his work habits, Jackson did no painting until his mother arrived in January 1946 (Jackson and Lee came to Springs in November), when he painted four or five canvases, including one of a mother giving birth to a child—The Child Proceeds. He also did a painting called Circumcision, which might be seen as a reflection of fear of castration. In a letter to Louis Bunce in 1946 he noted that the move to Long Island had been difficult, that changing his space and light had thrown off his painting, and that there was still much work to be done to fix up the place. “Lee and I are trying the country life for a while,” he noted. “[It’s] a good feeling to be out of New York for a spell.”
In April 1946 Pollock had another exhibition at Art of This Century, which was something of an anticlimax, since the work wasn’t notably different from what he had shown before and about half of the paintings had been executed before the move to Springs. Most of the reviews were reasonably favorable, no doubt because the critics had finally grown somewhat accustomed to his work and the show was somehow less frightening than earlier displays. As an event to talk about, it was completely overshadowed by the publication of Peggy Guggenheim’s scandalous memoir, Out of This Century, which had been released in March and was still stirring up violent reactions. Pollock, however, got good exposure from that controversy as well, since one of his paintings was reproduced on the back cover of the book, his only book cover. The front cover was designed by Max Ernst.
When the weather warmed in spring, Jackson spent a great deal of time roaming around the property, planted a vegetable garden, and adopted a mongrel collie he called Gyp, after his boyhood companion. Lee did little painting at this time. In June he converted the barn into a studio and began painting there. His works of the summer and fall are Matisse-like and not particularly commanding.
Jackson continued to drink and was added to the local police list of drinkers who often needed a ride home, but he mostly drank socially and seldom became violent. Greenberg was impressed with a new painting, Something of the Past, and said to Jackson, “That’s interesting. Why don’t you do eight or ten of those?” Jackson followed his advice and began producing more radical, more agonized paintings, such as Eyes in the Heat, Croaking Movement, Earth Worms, and Shimmering Substance. When he finished Eyes in the Heat he told Lee, “That’s for Clem.” In 1947, as has been noted, even as the weather grew cold, Jackson continued to paint. It was at this point that he began to produce the drip paintings for which he is now remembered.
Curiously, in the period just before his greatest achievements, Pol-lock lost two of his early supporters. In 1944 the gifted but unfortunate Howard Putzel, who had tired of working for Peggy Guggenheim, started his own gallery, where he staged remarkable shows of cutting-edge art but quickly fell into desperate financial straits. He committed suicide in August of 1945, and thus did not live to see Pollock fulfill his artistic promise. Two years later, in 1947, Peggy Guggenheim closed Art of This Century, in part because of the departure of Putzel, who had done much of the day-to-day work of keeping it going. She then moved back to Europe, settling in Venice, and largely abandoned her engagement with American art, staging a last show of Pollock’s work from January 14 to April 1 of 1947. Ironically, she cut herself off from Pollock at the very moment when he moved to leadership of American art.