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Pollock and de Kooning: American Ambition and Artistic Brotherhood
Outside the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village one night in the early 1950s, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock sat on the curb passing a bottle back and forth. De Kooning, in his early fifties, intelligent and mischievous, told Pollock, "Jackson, you're the greatest painter in America!" Pollock, volatile and often drunk, replied, "No, Bill, you're the greatest painter in America." The exchange continued until Pollock passed out. Though cast as rivals by the growing art world, their relationship was far more complex than simple competition.
Every truly memorable success comes despite a handicap, but sometimes the handicap isn't a deficiency but an outsized talent. While Pollock struggled to overcome his manifest shortcomings as an artist, de Kooning's challenge was the opposite - a prolonged effort to set aside his native mastery. Amazingly, it was the example of the inept stumblebum Pollock that helped de Kooning, the trained virtuoso, unpick his mastery and find true originality.
De Kooning arrived in America as a brilliant draftsman with classical training from Rotterdam, but wanted to purge himself of these advantages. "I'm in my element when I am a little bit out of this world," he later said. "When I'm falling, I'm doing all right; when I'm slipping, I say, hey, this is interesting!" Meanwhile, Pollock suffered deeply from his lack of drawing aptitude compared to his brothers and classmates. His early efforts in life-drawing classes were ham-fisted and clunky. "My drawing I will tell you frankly," he wrote to his brother Charles in 1930, "is rotten it seems to lack freedom and rhythem it is cold and lifeless."
The two men first met in 1942 through an exhibition organized by artist John Graham that mixed talented American painters with better-known European modernists. Lee Krasner, who would later marry Pollock, took him to meet de Kooning at his West 21st Street studio. The encounter brought together two very different men: de Kooning with his rough Dutch drawl, Pollock with his nasal midwestern cadences. Neither was talkative, and Krasner likely carried most of the conversation. This potentially momentous first meeting between two artists who would transform twentieth-century art somehow misfired. As Krasner bluntly recalled: "I don't think either of them was very impressed."
By late 1943, Peggy Guggenheim offered Pollock his first solo show and a contract guaranteeing regular income - unprecedented for an American modernist. Though financially unsuccessful (only one drawing sold), the exhibition garnered reviews in eight major publications. Alfred Barr of MoMA purchased The She-Wolf for $650 in 1944, and after Pollock's second show in 1945, Clement Greenberg declared him "the strongest painter of his generation."
De Kooning observed Pollock's rise with envy but also excitement. At forty, eight years older than Pollock, he'd sold exactly one painting. Yet he didn't begrudge Pollock's success, admiring his independence and "contempt for people who talk." He recognized that Pollock's breakthrough could benefit them all - here was art "free of Paris" with "a disciplined American fury." "Pollock was the leader," de Kooning later acknowledged. "He was the painting cowboy, the first to get recognition...He had come much further than I. I was still seeking my way."
Inspired by Pollock's spontaneity, de Kooning began to "cut loose" in his own painting. Though still working primarily with brushes at an upright easel, he embraced a new level of spontaneity - painting wet-into-wet, utilizing drips and varying viscosities, and rotating his canvas like Pollock. The resulting black and white abstract paintings finally convinced him to make his public stand with a solo show at Charlie Egan's gallery in April 1948.
Despite being cast as rivals by critics, Pollock and de Kooning's tension soon relaxed into genuine mutual admiration. That spring, de Kooning made his first visit to Long Island to see Pollock and Krasner. The trip evidently affected him deeply - over the following years, de Kooning spent increasing time in the region before eventually moving to East Hampton, choosing a house just minutes from Pollock and Krasner, across from the cemetery where Pollock would later be buried.
In August 1949, Life magazine published a two-and-a-half-page spread titled "IS HE THE GREATEST LIVING PAINTER IN THE UNITED STATES?" featuring Pollock posing arrogantly before one of his horizontal drip paintings. This article proved pivotal not just for Pollock but for American culture, crystallizing America's postwar confidence. Pollock's paintings resonated because they were simultaneously modern, aggressive, difficult, yet also beautiful and transcendent - they looked like nothing before them.
By 1950, both artists were ascendant. Pollock had achieved unimaginable fame, while de Kooning's "Excavation" won a prize from the Art Institute of Chicago. Both represented the United States at the Venice Biennale, were collected by MoMA, and featured in popular magazines. Yet their paths diverged dramatically. De Kooning retreated from abstraction to create his aggressive "Woman" series - monstrous, big-busted figures with bared teeth. Meanwhile, Pollock began a precipitous decline, breaking three years of sobriety and descending into alcoholism.
Pollock's relationship with de Kooning deteriorated into physical confrontations. The nadir came in summer 1954 when de Kooning and Franz Kline were horsing around with an inebriated Pollock. They fell, with de Kooning landing on top of Pollock, breaking Pollock's ankle. On August 11, 1956, driving drunk with his girlfriend Ruth Kligman and her friend Edith Metzger, Pollock crashed his Oldsmobile, killing himself and Metzger instantly. Only Kligman survived.
At Pollock's funeral, de Kooning was among the last mourners to leave. Later, at Conrad Marca-Relli's home, when Pollock's dogs wandered in, de Kooning declared, "I saw Jackson in his grave. And he's dead. It's over. I'm number one." Yet moments later, he was discovered weeping in the garden. Though de Kooning was now undisputedly "number one," he behaved as if still needing to prove himself. Within a year of Pollock's death, he began an affair with Ruth Kligman, shocking their friends. As one observer noted, this "really put the stone on Jackson's grave."
