Dali House

Unless you really want to talk about Jackson Pollock some more, we don’t do “fight club” at Dali House — our boys are mostly the lovin’ type. Some of them get carried away with it, like JW “Bosom Buddy” Godward and Louis “The Ladies’ Man” Eilshemius, and this curious little Casanova here, Félicien Rops.

Though he wrestled with inner conflicts, Rops was gleeful in celebrating the female, and had as his resolute motto “No desire to be otherwise”.

His reputation precedes him, quite a long distance actually, from the pages of history: He’s been dead 110 years and people are still keen as hell to hear about his adventures.

“He never drew the nude but, rather, like Manet in ‘Olympia’, naked women,” Sotheby’s said enigmatically in its catalogue notes for last month’s European paintings sale in London, at which it was flogging the Rops “masterpiece” shown above — “Pornokrates”, also known as “Woman with a Pig” — for up to £350,000 … or more! (It’s “only” watercolour and pastel.)

Whatever term you use for bare flesh, Rops was a connoisseur, a nighthawking whirlwind of sketches and etches, many bags full. “I am Jack the Ripper!” he exclaimed of his own prolific output.

Ah, but he did rip well. Ensor, Munch, Beardsley and even Rodin thought he was the black cat’s meow and cheered every midnight howl from the leading devil of “Dark Symbolism”. Deliberately shocking to the lecherous edge of perversity, he was actually quite refined and a barrel of laughs, if occasionally struck by melancholy at the lash of women’s whimsy.

“The love of women, like Pandora’s Box,” he wrote, “contains all the grief of life, but they are enveloped in such luminous golden spangles, they are so brilliantly coloured and have such a perfume, that it is never necessary to repent for having opened it.”

Félicien Rops (1833-98) was born in Namur, Belgium, the son of an industrialist. Soon enough the Catholic Church surgically implanted the sacramental coal in his heart that spoils all Catholics’ fun for the rest of their lives. See the rest.

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.

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.

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.

See the rest.

The Munson-Williams Proctor Institute in Utica, New York, which has more than 25,000 artworks, including important pieces by Edward Hopper, Arshile Gorky, Pollock, Georgia O’Keeffe, Warhol, Kandinsky, Mondrian and Picasso, displays Dali’s “Cardinal, Cardinal!” from 1934 (detail seen here).

Far more than Chris Burden, Ed Kienholz has been much disparaged for throwing machismo around like it was nobody’s business, but although you can see where the critics were coming from when discussing installations like 1991’s “Mine Camp”, aka “Mein Kampf”, seen below, (and his work delved into rape and incest as well), I think in his case, brutish was beautiful.

If he had “an obvious desire to play God”, as one observer wrote — and he really was buried in his car, like a Chinese warlord on his chariot — Kienholz (1927-1994) was another take-no-shit American who scorned formal artistic training, took life by the horns and wrestled with it, starting with a Kesey-style gig as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital, where you’re bound to get a skewed view of evolution. See the rest.