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When the United States Postal Service issued its Jackson Pollock commemorative stamp in 1999 the cigarette dangling from Pollock’s mouth had vanished. There in the original Martha Holmes photograph for Life magazine, it had vanished in the post office rendering. The government had good public health reasons, and the resulting stamp, although deplored by some cultural critics, still captured Pollock as the artist. But the truth is that Pollock does not clean up very well.
He lived fast and died young, and made a mess of things. Yet along the way he forever changed our understanding of art. His life and death have made him one of the twentieth century’s most notorious bad boys. The way he painted has made him the most pivotal figure in American art history.
It’s hard to conceive of Pollock being old at all, much less a century old, but the 100th anniversary of his birth is January 28th, 2012. Hard because bad boys don’t grow old. (If they happen to live long enough they grow out of being bad.) And hard because Pollock still seems to be with us. His vision remains remarkably vivid, an ingrained part of our culture, inescapably a component in viewing all art that followed, including the art movements created in the decades since that are in some ways a reaction to Abstract Expressionism. Because the studio on Fireplace Road in Springs where Pollock fashioned his celebrated and deeply influential drip paintings has been preserved and maintained, his presence in the Hamptons remains powerful. Art lovers from around the world have made the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center one of the most visited destinations in the Hamptons. (According to TripAdvisor it is number one of nine attractions in East Hampton.)
Pollock and his wife Lee Krasner, another pioneering Abstract Expressionist painter, moved to Springs in 1945, to get away from New York City life and his alcoholic binges. Once there, his work changed, became brighter and less dense, reflecting—abstractly of course—the openness and colors of Accabonac Creek and all the beauty of nature in this corner of East Hampton. Many of his most important and famous works were painted between 1947 and 1950 when Pollock laid his canvases on the floor of the outbuilding they had converted to a studio and in a process he called “direct painting” helped usher in a transformation in the way we view and perceive artworks. That floor, with its spatters of color, is a testimony to Pollock’s genius, and a shrine of sorts that visitors to the studio walk across in padded slippers, feet shuffling over the actual and identifiable residue of such iconic paintings as Autumn Rhythm, Blue Poles and Convergence.
The preservation of the floor is a phenomenon itself. Near the end of Pollock’s life the wood floor was covered with a different material (actually thick game boards made by Pollock’s brother) and remained that way until some thirty years later. The Stony Brook Foundation, which administered the property after Krasner’s death was in the process of preparing the site for visitors when the game board layer was removed revealing the vivid record, virtually a time capsule, of Pollock’s pouring technique.
During one of their difficult marital periods in 1956, while Krasner escaped to Europe, a drunken Pollock crashed his Oldsmobile into a tree about a mile from the house, killing himself and one of the two passengers. He was 44 years old. In December of that year the first major Pollock retrospective opened at the Museum of Modern Art. In the following years Krasner went on to produce her best work in that same studio while shrewdly handling her husband’s estate. She died in 1984 directing that the house and studio be preserved. The home along with the studio are considered among the nation’s most important art-related landmarks and an internationally recognized cultural heritage site
The biggest of the centennial year observances will be a benefit for the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center on April 25th hosted by Stony Brook University at the Chelsea Piers with Ed Harris as the guest of honor. Harris channeled Jackson Pollock as much as an actor possibly can, putting on weight, chain smoking and sleeping in the house when he directed and acted in the 2000 biographical film Pollock. Harris was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance, and Marcia Gay Harden won the Best Supporting Actress Award for her portrayal of Krasner. In the process Harris became—and remains—one of the Pollock-Krasner House and Studio’s most ardent supporters. The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, a separate organization, will soon offer a one million dollar challenge grant with the aim of establishing an endowment. Sotheby’s New York will host a reception and one-day exhibition of Pollock works lent by private collectors in the New York area.
The first of the centenary exhibits at the house, opening in May, will be “The Persistence of Pollock,” works associated with or inspired by Jackson Pollock, co-organized by Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center director Helen A. Harrison and art historian Bobbi Coller. This will be followed in August with “Men of Fire: Jose Clemente Orozco and Jackson Pollock.” The bold murals of Orozco, the Mexican social realist, had an important creative influence on Pollock. The exhibition will include include works by both men, lent by public and private sources, the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth, the Tate, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, among them.
There will no doubt be many articles and much commentary on Pollock all over the art world as the birthday approaches. The exhibition, “Jackson Pollock: A Centennial Retrospective,” opens at the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art in Nagoya, Japan, in November and travels to the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo in February. At the house itself, the January 28th observance will be simple and small and suitable: a screening of the Pollock film.