Sanitizing Jackson Pollock
Those of you who were in Aspen, St. Moritz, South Beach, or some other glammy place in late January missed an interesting gathering in The Springs. At the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, on Fireplace Road, the United States Postal Service officially introduced its commemorative stamp titled Abstract Expressionism, showing Jackson Pollock at work in his studio. In attendance was a curious assembly of art collectors, historians, local politicos, federal bureaucrats, schoolchildren, and winter-weary residents of the East End. Much as they might have admired Pollock, it was clear from the way the group sipped hot apple cider and munched on cookies that they were not his spiritual heirs.
The event took place on January 28th –the 87th anniversary of Jackson Pollock’s birth. It beggars the imagination to think that Pollock would have been 87 years old—ever. One can only picture him in jeans and T-shirt, like James Dean, young, sexy, rebellious and enduringly of his time. There is now a certain morbid logic to Pollock living fast with extraordinary bursts of creativity, and dying a violent death while still young. It’s tragic—but as a romantic notion, it makes absolute sense, and we have lived so long now with the facts and myths of the Pollock trajectory through post-war American culture that any less prodigal a concept would be unacceptable.
It’s been quite a year for Pollock. We’ve now had the show, the immense and important retrospective. (If you missed it at MoMA, just hop on the Concorde and catch it at the Tate.) Soon we will have the movie. Ed Harris, who is starring and directing, has already filmed on location at and near the house. And, in unexpected recognition of Pollock’s iconic status, we also have the stamp. It was issued by the Post Office in a series called “Celebrate the Century”.
The idea for the stamp was submitted to the Postal Service in 1993 by a staff member of the P-K House. Only one in twenty-five thousand proposals make it to the envelopes of America, so the idea really beat the odds. The color illustration for the stamp is based on a famous 1949 black-and-white photograph by Martha Holmes of Pollock pouring paint onto a canvas on the floor of his Springs studio. The canvas became “Number 1, 1949”, a major work from his most creative period. As we viewed the oversized rendering of the stamp, Frank Newbold said to me, “Look, no cigarette”. I looked, and indeed the Camel cigarette seen in so many photographs was missing, and Pollock’s lower lip seemed to be hanging in the air.
The Postal Service position is that representing the cigarette could be viewed as endorsing smoking. (What, I wonder, would the Feds do with Winston Churchill’s cigar?) People I have asked about it feel the importance of the government honoring an artist outweighs tampering with the truth. I see it as a 33-cent fraud—if not a Stalinist rewriting of history. It’s too much like the way those Red generals used to get sent to Siberia and then get airbrushed out of official photographs of Politburo fat-cats viewing the May Day parade in front of Lenin’s Tomb.
I do not think that portraying Pollock with his familiar Camel, even in an illustration that is not obliged to be literal, is an endorsement of smoking. After all, we know that smoking is not good for our health, and we also know that many people used to smoke and some still do. We stamp-lickers are smart enough to distinguish between a roughly accurate historical depiction and smoking propaganda.
Jackson Pollock smoked—and he drank a lot, and he drove drunk and tragically he paid for that with his life. Those are the facts and constructing a cordon sanitaire around his image will not make him a Boy Scout. We do not look at Pollock as a role model for clean living. We honor him because he is the foremost American artist of the century, a man with a dynamic vision that irrevocably changed the culture of our time. And perhaps he had to have been a bad boy to accomplish that. The Postal Service should at least let him be who he was, enjoying his cigarette unabashedly in front of first-class mail patrons. Canceling a stamp should not cancel history.