Dali House

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.

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.

There’s a website that has a page about Matt Marello’s video installation, which utilised bits of wood from the Pollock crash site to pay homage to him, Bruce Lee and John Bonham. Marello shaped those shards of a tree — maybe the very one that Jackson smashed into, maybe not — into a paint brush, a set of nunchakus and a pair of drumsticks … but he doesn’t mention where the crash site was.

The California Digital Library has a lengthy oral memoir by Matsumi Kanemitsu, a painter who was close to the big guns of abstraction in New York in those important days. He remembers that there was a party on the night of August 11, 1956, at Alphonso Ossorio’s place on Georgica Pond. Robert Motherwell had a four-acre lot near the pond, at the corner of Georgica and Jericho Roads. There were a lot of now-famous artists living around there.

Ossorio’s “place” was, of course, quite the place. The aerial image above shows it today. It was The Creeks, the estate developed in the grandest possible style by Albert Herter (1871-1950), the wealthy Paris-taught muralist and portrait painter.

In 1952, after Herter died, Ossorio paid $35,000 for the 80-acre property and another $20,000 for 48 adjacent acres. By the time the predatory investor Ronald Perelman became the owner around 1992, the asking price was $25 billion, but of course Perelman was at one time the richest man in America, and Georgica Pond was ringed with celebrities.

Martha Stewart and Calvin Klein have since moved elsewhere, but Steven Spielberg is still on the banks of the 290-acre lagoon, which rumour has it that his guests in 1998 and 1999, Bill and Hillary Clinton, ordered the Secret Service to drain, just in case, you know, there were any submarines in it.

Anyway, it was Ossorio and his partner, former ballet dancer Ted Dragon, who really went to town on The Creeks.

They filled the 40-room house and the “his and hers” studios where Albert and Adele Herter painted with every conceivable knickknack on earth, plus cages holding exotic birds, expensive paintings hung in the toilets and on the inside of closet doors, Oriental rugs piled three deep, elephant tusks, Waterford chandeliers, lanterns from the Grand Canal in Venice, Oceanic carved heads, a Chinese opium bed and a dried shark. There was also a 15,000-volume library of rare books and a studio-theatre in which Enrico Caruso and Isadora Duncan once performed for the Herters.

The grounds became over the course of two decades a vast jungle of evergreens, including some of the rarest conifers on earth, punctuated with more than 100 of Ossorio’s own brightly painted “congregations” — sculptures made of found objects.

Ossorio, who was born in the Philippines to a Spanish father and Chinese-Filipino mother and earned his fortune refining sugar, died in 1991 at age 74, having gradually sold off many of the valuable paintings he’d collected, including some of Pollock’s, to cover the property’s million-dollar-a-year maintenance bill.

It was going to be quite a party that night in 1956.

“My wife and I,” said Kanemitsu, “were in East Hampton to go to the grocery shopping in supermarket, and my wife said she have to get gasoline. So I stand by in front of supermarket, and here is Jackson Pollock with Ruth Kligman — that his girlfriend. And they both waved to me when they passed me. Then they come back again, and they say, ‘Are you coming to Ossorio’s party tonight?’ So I say I might go there. And he say, ‘Maybe I see you there.’”

Was it the Springs General Store? Its website actually remembers Pollock fondly for once settling a bill by handing over a painting that “now belongs to the Pompidou Centre in Paris”. They don’t say which painting, but the Pompidou has at least four Pollocks — “The Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle, 1943″, “Number 26 A, Black and White, 1948″, “Painting (Silver over Black, White, Yellow and Red), 1948″ and “The Deep, 1953″.

Kanemitsu said he soon got bored with Ossorio’s musicale and left, as did Jackson, Kligman and Ruth Kligman’s friend Edith Metzger. They headed “back to their house in Spring. I went home, and then suddenly somebody knocked on my door frantically. So I open, [and it] is that old-time painter named Julien Levy. And Julien Levy said, ‘Mike, hurry up! — Jackson has die.’ I say, ‘What?’ ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘his car has crashed!’”

(Levy’s granddaughter Kimrey tells me, in fact, that the celebrated art dealer was never an artist himself.)

Kanemitsu’s recollections extended to getting to know Pollock better while he was separated from his wife, Lee Krasner. He said they’d meet at 10 in the morning at a bar he thought was called “Caviano”, next to the East Hampton railway station.

“Jackson Pollock, if he don’t drink, is the most quiet and shy person. Then, if he start drink, he change the whole personality … He was drinking beer or scotch and then slowly he’s a live person. But early in the morning, he’s very sad man. And, of course, Jackson Pollock’s most fear is his mother. He is scared to death of his mother. When his mother used to visit him, he hid.”

I can’t find any reference online to a bar called Caviano, or even Cavagnaro’s, which is apparently its actual name, but Pollock preferred little holes in the wall. Over in Manhattan, the Cedar Street Tavern, while famous, was a workingman’s hole in the wall.

Opened a century earlier on Cedar Street and located in Pollock’s day at 24 University Place between Eighth and Ninth Streets, the Cedar moved in 1963 up the road to #82 and is currently closed for “renovation”, but is more likely waiting for a sweet sell-out to the local condo developers.

Inside, its enormous, late-1800s-vintage bar — salvaged from the Susquahana Hotel when it was pulled down to make way for the World Trade Center — had seen a lot of history: most of the abstract expressionists, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Gregory Corso, and apparently Bob Dylan too, working out the details of “Don’t Look Back” with the film’s director, DA Pennebaker.

Kerouac was banned from the Cedar for pissing in an ashtray and, not to be outdone, Pollock got thrown out (temporarily, of course) for ripping the toilet door off by its hinges. The bartender, fed up with him staring thirstily through the window, finally let him back inside in June 1956. He promptly started flirting with other guys’ dates.

By then Pollock had already been on a long, strange trip, but it was almost over.

April 1950: Robert Motherwell co-organises a symposium at Studio 35 called “Modern Artists in America” to, among other things, come up with a name for New York’s fledgling abstract-art movement. But the boys are also restless about the “hostile” jurors selected for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s national contemporary-art competition. A letter of protest to the New York Times is circulated for everyone to sign.

Pollock is at home in Springs working, but Barnett Newman has already secured a telegram of support from him (though no one asked Lee Krasner to sign up, much to her annoyance). On the letter are the signatures of painters Newman, Pollock, Motherwell, Jimmy Ernst, Adolph Gottlieb, William Baziotes, Hans Hofmann, Clyfford Still, Richard Pousette-Dart, Theodoros Stamos, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Willem de Kooning, Hedda Sterne, James Brooks, Weldon Kees and Fritz Bultman and sculptors Herbert Ferber, David Smith, Ibram Lassaw, Mary Callery, Day Schnabel, Seymour Lipton, Peter Grippe, Theodore Roszak, David Hare and Louise Bourgeois.

In May a lot of the artists actually picket the museum. The New York Herald Tribune says “the Irascible Eighteen” are distorting the facts of the jury selection, but Life magazine rolls with the fun of it, arranging a special photo shoot of the same “Irascible Eighteen”. Life wanted Nina Leen to picture them on the steps of the Met, but they refused and posed in a studio on West 44th Street.

And a formidable gang they are — below, front row from left, Stamos, Ernst, Newman, Brooks, Rothko; middle row, Pousette-Dart, Baziotes, Pollock, Still, Motherwell, Tomlin; back row, de Kooning, Gottlieb, Reinhardt, Sterne

The abstract expressionist yakuza will lose one of its own in Beach Boys, Part 5.