Pollock and Krasner moved to a house at 830 Springs-Fireplace Road in Springs, East Hampton, which they’d purchased with a $2,000 down payment from Guggenheim. Unlike today’s playground for the rich, East Hampton back then was rural, and the property had been a farmstead with a small barn that became Pollock’s studio.
The barn’s interior was barely large enough to accommodate the canvases Pollock rolled out onto the floor, restricting him to working along a shallow perimeter between the walls and the painting. In winter he could work just a couple of hours each day, since the space was unheated.
Pollock used household enamel diluted to a syrupy consistency, using stirring sticks as tools along with brushes. Thinned pigments and drips weren’t exactly new: Whistler had used a washy concoction he labeled “sauce,” while Max Ernst had developed a technique called oscillation in which he hung a paint-filled can above a canvas, swinging it back and forth as pigment trickled through a hole punched in the bottom. There was also the little-remembered, self-taught painter Janet Sobel, who in the late 1930s adopted a sort of DIY method of automatism, resulting in all-over compositions of dribbles and whorls that were also painted with enamel. According to the art critic Clement Greenberg, Pollock was familiar with one such work, titled Milky Way (1945).
Pollock, however, took his compositions to heights that were far more intentional, sustained, and expansive than anything by Sobel or anyone else. Still, they weren’t entirely abstract: Pollock applied paint in layers that, as infrared photography would later uncover, contained sketchy images of humans and animals, as well as ideographs of his own invention. Pollock’s abstractions, in other words, were representational sandwiches.
Pollock debuted his drip paintings at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1948, and like his earlier canvases, they didn’t sell. They were also mocked in print: One article in the August 8, 1949, issue of Life Magazine was published under the headline “Is Jackson Pollock the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?” The question was meant to be negatively rhetorical, but the accompanying color photographs of Pollock and his work by Arnold Newman were so compelling that what was meant to be a takedown vaulted him to fame. This success proved to be too much for Pollock, initiating a period of personal and artistic decline.
Although Arnold Newman’s images for Life minted Pollock’s celebrity, another photographer, Hans Namuth (1915–1990), became nearly as prominent as Pollock himself by capturing the artist in action. In 1950 Namuth contacted Pollock about documenting him while painting in his studio, and once again, Krasner was indispensable to making it happen. The project yielded some 500 photographs as well as two films, including one shot from the underside of a sheet of Plexiglas as Pollock applied paint overhead.
Ironically, Namuth wound up demystifying Pollock’s ostensibly spontaneous execution by showing how deliberate it actually was. Pollock understood how this revelation ran counter to the public image that Krasner and Guggenheim had fostered of him, prompting a fight with Namuth in which each called the other a phony. During the confrontation, Pollock fell off the wagon by pouring himself a drink, thus ending the most productive phase of his career.
