The Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center. Art history changed here.
If a visit to Monet’s studio in Giverney, or Cézanne’s in Aix-en-Provence, or Henry Moore’s in Much Haddam, sounds engaging to you, here is my advice: save the airfare and instead drive up Springs Fireplace Road to number 830.
Watch carefully for the number. Except for a small sign that is hung out on designated days, it would be difficult to distinguish the workplace of two of the world’s most important artists from the neighboring structures around Accabonac Harbor. Contextually, it is an architect’s dream, a 120 year old shingle house with barn and outbuildings, not very different from others in the general area, in the midst of a spacious green lawn with old trees, overlooking acres of salt marsh and a tranquil inlet. On the opposite shore are meadows and tall cedars. No other houses are in view.
It was here in late 1945 that Jackson Pollock moved with his wife, Lee Krasner, and here in 1947 that Pollock developed a painting technique that would profoundly change the way we view art, and, in certain ways, the way we define modern culture itself. It was here and in the surrounding hamlets and villages that the now-towering figures of Abstract Expressionism, urged on by Jackson and Lee, settled and worked--Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Grace Hartigan, Mark Rothko.
Jackson and Lee paid $5,000 for the place and spent another $1,000 to install heat and plumbing in the house. Pollock had the barn picked up and moved to a more secluded location on the property, and then converted it to his studio. Part of the purchase money was borrowed from Peggy Guggenheim, who was then Pollocks’s patron and dealer. She also gave him a monthly stipend, and, in return, received nearly all of his work until the loan was repaid.
This homestead is now a National Historic Landmark. The classification is important for legal reasons, but to me it seems a modest designation for a place that some scholars consider the Giverney or I Tatti of America.
I recently spent a quiet morning alone in the studio of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, as it is now known. I wanted to personally understand the power of it--how this place engaged the creativity of Pollock. I wanted to see if the splatters and splotches on the studio floor gave me more insight into his art. Most of all, I wanted to get beyond the structure and formalism of art appreciation. I happen to know Accabonac Harbor from the mud up, having dug clams there for much of my life, and I needed to reach my own understanding of how this simple place near the head of the harbor was instrumental in the course of art history in the twentieth century.
I am not enough of an art historian to explain how this studio floor is truly a document of Pollock in those years when he stunned the art world. (Helen A. Harrison, the director, can do that for you.) But I am enough of a local real estate guy to tell you that this is an acre and a half to be prized and cherished by our community. And there is no more opportune time to get to know it. A large retrospective exhibition will open at the Museum of Modern Art in November. It’s the first major Pollock show in thirty-one years, and his most important works are being gathered from around the world. I understand that as part of the show MoMA is going to reproduce the interior of the studio inside the museum—the same converted barn that stands on Fireplace Road here in the Hamptons.
The retrospective will undoubtedly bring a millennial quality to the stature of Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists. It will be one of those blockbuster shows that generates shock waves, and I think our appreciation will be enhanced, and certainly our conversation will be more substantial, if we understand where and how Jackson worked. The actor Ed Harris has been doing just that--spending time at the house in order to understand the artist--in preparation for directing and starring in a feature film about Pollock’s life.
If all this weren’t reason enough to visit, twenty extraordinary, mostly unpublished photographs of an iconic Jackson and Lee will be exhibited at the house from August through October. They were taken for Life magazine’s famous 1949 article, “Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” Only two appeared in the article, but fortunately all the negatives remained in Life photo files for these past fifty years.
The house remains much as Krasner left it when she died in 1984, with their artwork, furniture, library--even jazz recordings that are still played on the old hi-fi. And we can all look and listen. The Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center is open from May through October, by appointment, by phoning 324-4929. The phone number itself is part of history. It belonged to Jackson and Lee.