The Fitzgerald family had decided to visit Guild Hall’s annual invitational exhibition by artists of the region—which was, as usual, a reflection of the cultural center’s split personality.
At one extreme were the conservatives, an odd-bedfellows mixture of wealthy summer folks and old-family locals who resisted change in all things cultural as well as social, political, and gastronomic. When they attended any of Guild Hall’s many arts events, they wanted music you could hum along to, poetry that rhymed, movies and plays with plenty of laughs and happy endings, and pictures of familiar scenery, attractive people, pretty floral arrangements, and thoroughbred animals.
At the other end of the spectrum were the radicals who believed that the old barn needed a thorough airing out. They wanted fare that challenged rather than satisfied—progressive jazz, Beat poetry, Brecht and Beckett instead of drawing room comedy, experimental cinema, preferably European or Japanese, and abstract art, the more incomprehensible the better. Ever since 1949, when the spatter-and-daub school first invaded, the landscapists and flower painters had been on the defensive and were not beating a quiet retreat.
Trying to please as wide an audience as possible, Guild Hall’s beleaguered administration was engaged in a perpetual balancing act, nowhere better illustrated than in the annual invitational. Dubbed the Art Wars by the Star’s art critic, the show always provoked heated debate between the Old Guard and vanguard factions and their fans. “So far at least,” wrote the critic, “all the bloodshed has been verbal. There will be violence, but it will exhaust itself in a few well-worn phrases, such as every museum guard knows by heart.”
Unaware of the long-running controversy, Nita, Fitz, and TJ visited Guild Hall with open minds and eyes recently opened by Ossorio. As they entered the lobby, which also served as the theater’s foyer, they had a choice of turning right or left into one of the two flanking galleries. The double doors on each side were open, revealing tantalizing glimpses of the delights inside—or the horrors, depending on which side, literally, you were on.
To the right, the smaller of the two galleries—another bone of contention—was devoted to representational paintings, punctuated by the occasional marble portrait bust or piece of bronze garden statuary. To the left, the larger room held the big, bold canvases and sculptures made of welded metal, found objects, and other unconventional materials that prompted the traditionalists to utter those well-worn phrases.
In search of the Pollock painting they had been told would be there, the Fitzgeralds turned left. It was immediately obvious why the abstractionists had been given the larger room—some of their things were enormous. Sprawling along one wall was Ossorio’s four-part construction, its sections joined by copper piping and decorated with lively swirling threads of black paint over multicolored backgrounds. James Brooks’s piece was a scroll-like canvas, some eight feet long, into which he had soaked diluted paint instead of brushing it on. In fact the image was actually the back of the canvas, not the painted side. His wife, Charlotte Park, had submitted a more modestly scaled effort, a mere five by four feet, in oil paint applied with brushes in the traditional way, which was nonetheless just as abstract, equally improvisational, and even more colorful.
Bracketed by a dynamic Lee Krasner collage, nearly seven feet tall, composed of shredded canvas and black photographer’s backdrop paper on top of one of her recycled 1951 paintings, and an even taller abstraction of energetically brushed, fragmented forms by Willem de Kooning—Pollock’s Springs neighbor, drinking buddy, and rival for the title of America’s Number One Action Painter—was the Pollock. Whoever had hung the exhibition, which opened the day before the accident, must now be aware of the irony of that juxtaposition, as was nearly everyone who saw it. On one side of the Pollock was the heir to his legacy, and on the other, the inheritor of his mantle.
The canvas itself, titled Search, was modest by Pollock standards—only about five by seven feet—but it overflowed with the turbulent energy for which he was famous. After years of simply numbering his paintings he had recently gone back to naming them at the request of his dealer, Sidney Janis, who had a hard time keeping track of the inventory, since the artist started a new Number 1 each year. And titles, Janis had persuaded him, made the paintings easier to sell.
Search was dated 1955. Although most exhibition-goers didn’t know it, this was the last canvas Pollock had ever painted, more than a year earlier.
As they had been when confronted with Number 1, 1950 at The Creeks, Fitz and Nita were initially perplexed, and they were not alone. Another couple was also pondering the composition, an amalgam of several techniques, each vying for dominance. Areas of raw canvas were stained with thinned black enamel, a tactic Pollock had pioneered and Brooks had adopted. Touches of brushed-on green danced around the edges and filled in some of the gaps, while others were in-painted with a rusty red that looked disconcertingly like blood. The whole thing was overlaid with blotches of thick white oil paint that appeared to have been applied straight from the tube. Desultory trickles of black enamel had been poured on top, almost like an afterthought. It seemed that Search was an apt name for it.
“I don’t understand the title, much less the picture itself,” said the man to his wife. “What’s it supposed to mean?”
“What does it mean to you?” came a youthful but confident voice, and the couple turned to find that their questioner was an eight-year-old boy, who was about to give them an art appreciation lesson.