Page Title

In February 1949, Pollock was visited in Springs, a remote village on Long Island to which the artist had relocated his studio after moving from the turmoil and temptations of New York’s Greenwich Village, by a 30-year-old freelance photographer called Arnold Newman. Newman was on assignment from Life magazine, perhaps the most influential illustrated publication in America, with around five million readers per issue, but he had received no specific instructions from the editor. All he knew was that the story would appear the following summer. It duly did so, in August 1949 – a two-and-a-half page spread, in black-and-white and colour, headed ‘Is the greatest living painter in the United States?’ A statement borrowed from Clement Greenberg had been turned into a provocative question.

Newman spent a day with Pollock, who willingly posed for pictures, but in and around Springs, and in the barn he used as studio. In the studio, he put a sheet of canvas on the floor and began to create a painting, “giving a performance,” as one description has it, “as the rough, rugged all-American genius of his ambitions.”

The anonymous text of the article in Life made it plain that a kind of magic was involved – how you interpreted the artist’s efforts was a personal matter. It quoted a local grocer who “bought one [of Pollock’s paintings] which he identifies for bewildered visiting salesmen as an aerial view of Siberia.”

This wasn’t the only occasion on which Pollock allowed himself to be pictured at work. In May 1951 ARTnews published an article entitled ‘Pollock Paints a Picture’ with a text by the critic and painter Robert Goodnough, richly illustrated with photographs of the artist in his studio made by Hans Namuth that had originally appeared in Portfolio magazine.

“He has found that what he has to say is best accomplished by laying the canvas on the floor, “Goodnough wrote. “Starting automatically, almost as a ritual dance might begin, the gradual rhythms of his movements seem to determine to a large extent the way the paint is applied, but underlying this is the complex Pollock mind.”

In other words, ‘Jack the Dripper’, as Time magazine, Life’s sister periodical, dubbed Pollock at around this time, combined two apparently antithetic roles, that of shaman, and that of all-American ‘good ole boy’. To the great convenience of his supporters, the one thing he didn’t go in for was social or political commentary.