Beach Boys, Part 4: Tracking Pollock
from the Cavern to the abyss
Lots of people can point out on a map the exact place where James Dean crashed his Porsche Spyder into that Turnipseed fella’s car on the highway outside Bakersfield, California, at the end of September 1955. But how many know where Jackson Pollock wrecked his hulking Oldsmobile convertible 11 months later?
If you do, fill me in. Meanwhile, in the interest of mythology, as opposed to morbidity, I’m going to make an educated guess.
The Beach Boys series: Part 1 with Max Ernst and the gang, Part 2 with other Long Island artists both older and younger, and Part 3 with the Murphys and Picasso.
Download my Murphys-Jackson Pollock Google Earth post.
Pollock’s “Reflection of the Big Dipper”
There are websites that keep step with artists’ every breathing moment — the superb WarholStars.com is an outstanding resource, and I’ve used it extensively for this post. And then there are websites that say (or repeat without checking) that Pollock met his brutal demise after leaving his beloved Cedar Tavern on University Place and heading “further north on University Place to a more handsome venue”.
University Place is in Manhattan. Going further north would still be Manhattan. He’d have had to drive a long way east along Long Island to be in East Hampton, where he lived and where he actually left the road and whacked into a tree, killing himself and Edith Metzger. Photos from the scene and the Ed Harris movie version clearly place the crash in a more or less rural location, not Manhattan.
Pollock and his wife Lee Krasner
Am I being ghoulish wanting to know? Pollock was an obnoxious boor, but a lot of my heroes are when you manage to glimpse inside the inferno of their genius. And while I never have fully comprehended abstract expressionism, I know how important Pollock is in the apparatus of art history.
If I lived in New York I might consider seeking out the places he lived and died, but since I’m nowhere near, I’ll make the pilgrimage in my mind (and on Google Earth), and seek out shrines made of splintered wood.
