“If Pollock’s life in art was a struggle to find a way around, or through, his own manifest shortcomings, deKooning’s was the exact opposite; it was a prolonged effort to set aside, or pick apart, his native mastery.”
- Sebastian Smee in The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art
This Patron article is the second of three discussions based on Sebastian Smee’s great book.
The quote above beautifully sums up the various struggles each of them went through all their lives – deKooning to get past the training he’d had and to “loosen up” mentally and for Pollock to create and make an impact despite his limitations. Use your favorite search engine to look up biographical details on each of them, but I’ll briefly discuss parts of them both.
Willem deKooning was born in the Netherlands and grew up in a disruptive house. His parents eventually divorced, and he was the object of a nasty custody battle. Despite this rough beginning, he took night classes in what we would know as commercial art between 1917 and 1921 and eventually found some work for department stores. He had a natural gift for drawing. He stowed away in the lower decks of a ship going to the US in July 1926 and quickly began to seek relationships with people in the nascent art communities in and around New York City.
Jackson Pollock (eight years younger than deKooning) was born in Cody, WY but grew up in California. He was the youngest of 5 sons and spoiled rotten by his and anyone else’s accounts. He was not very articulate but sensitive with a quick temper; he had his first drink when he was 14 years old. His brother, Charles, was an artist and early influence to the point that when Charles moved to New York City to study with Thomas Hart Benton, Jackson followed him there as soon as he could. Unlike deKooning, Pollock had no aptitude for drawing whatsoever and struggled with it. However, Pollock learned from Benton that art could be a “manly” pursuit that could change the world.
Pollock and deKooning met in early 1942, and Pollock made his impact in the art world soon after in no small way due to the largesse and help from Peggy Guggenheim. He painted a mural for her townhouse in 1942 and sold a work to the Museum of Modern Art in 1944. When he and his wife, artist Lee Krasner, moved to Springs Long Island, Peggy loaned them the money for the down payment for their house and set up a stipend of $350/month.
deKooning was not jealous of Pollock’s success. He was a representation of AMERICAN art, and anyone in that group who was a success helped everyone else as far as deKooning was concerned. He thought Peggy Guggenheim was a bit of a snob and generally did not trust the very rich. deKooning kept at his art encouraged by the atmosphere and excitement that was growing. His first show was in April 1948, and, while not a huge commercial success for him, the show was favorably reviewed by the important critics of the day. In 1955, he would sell his biggest painting to date to the Art Institute in Chicago.
The circumstances of Pollock’s decline and early death are well known. He was a mean drunk; his temper and sensitive insecure natures were only made worse by the drinking. Toward the end, one of the very few people who could stand to be around him for any amount of time was deKooning. Eerily enough, within a year of Pollock’s death, deKooning began to date Ruth Kligman, Pollock’s girlfriend and the sole survivor of the crash that killed him and her friend, Edith Metzger.
deKooning, too, eventually had HIS struggles with alcoholism but kept painting and kept creating, and his success skyrocketed and continued even though the art world around him changed. He lived to the age of 92 and died of complications due to Alzheimer’s Disease.
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