Beach Boys, Part 5: The last months
of Jackson Pollock
In 1945 Pollock and Krasner borrowed $5,000 from his dealer, Peggy Guggenheim, to buy their place in Springs, Long Island, a former fisherman’s house at 830 Springs-Fireplace Road. He’d had an apartment-studio at 46 East Eighth Street in Greenwich Village and Krasner lived at 51 East Ninth Street. Those stoic buildings no longer exist, but the fisherman’s shack still stands.
The Pollock-Krasner House and Studio is now owned by the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and welcomes visitors by appointment. The property is on the National Register of Historic Places.
Pollock piled the bookshelves with the works of Freud and Jung, Faulkner and Joyce, and they’re still there, along with Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong albums and Krasner’s seashell collection.
Some days Jackson and Lee loafed at nearby Louse Point, as did de Kooning, who painted the scene, though you have to squint to recognise it in “Rosy Fingered Dawn at Louse Point” (inset). Below, days at the beach, the couple on their own in about 1950 and flanking Clement Greenberg, an unidentified child and Helen Frankenthaler around 1952. These pictures come from the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
The Beach Boys series: Part 1 with Max Ernst and the gang, Part 2 with other Long Island artists both older and younger, Part 3 with the Murphys and Picasso, and Part 4 how Pollock got this far.
Download my Murphys-Jackson Pollock Google Earth post.
June 1950: Art News sends a reporter and photographer to Springs to chronicle Pollock’s creation of a painting, but when they’re ushered into the old barn that he uses for a studio (pictured below), he’s already more or less done (it’s “Number 32, 1950″). Nevertheless he picks up a brush and says, “I’ll pretend I’m painting.”
July 1950: Hans Namuth has a go, arriving on the promise that he can photograph Pollock starting and possibly even finishing a painting. Again, though, the work is already finished when he gets there. But when Namuth sets up to photograph the painting, Pollock grabs a brush and starts working on it again.
He gets to see the Big Dripper at full tilt — “Jack the Dripper” as Time magazine had dubbed him in February — doing his “personalised skywriting”. See the rest.
