Conrad Marca-Relli The Springs Years, 1953 –1956
Conrad Marca-Relli The Springs Years, 1953 – 1956
MAY 5 – JULY 30, 2011
ESSAY BY CARTER RATCLIFF
IN ASSOCIATION WITH ARCHIVIO MARCA-RELLI, PARMA AND KNOEDLER & COMPANY, NEW YORK
Pollock-Krasner house and study center 830 SPRINGS-FIREPLACE ROAD EAST HAMPTON, NY 11937-1512
Conrad Marca-Relli and his wife Anita Gibson in their Springs home, 1954. Photograph by Walter Silver.
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FOREWORD In his autobiographical essay, “I remember when…,” Conrad Marca-Relli explained his decision to buy and renovate the cottage at 852 Springs-Fireplace Road, just north of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner’s property. “In 1953 my wife [Anita] and I moved to East Hampton,” he wrote. “I felt that moving away from the city would give me the peace necessary to pursue my work without too many interruptions.” This had also been Pollock’s rationale for moving to Springs-—a hamlet in the Town of East Hampton—in 1945. For both artists, country living had a highly favorable, perhaps even decisive, influence on their work. Of the four years he spent in Springs, Marca-Relli recalled: "I was deeply involved in my painting. Especially in the winter, there was a poetic quietness." Using a small outbuilding as his studio, he enjoyed a period of intense productivity, as well as a deepening friendship with Pollock and Krasner. He was profoundly affected by Pollock's tragic death in an automobile accident on August 11, 1956, when he was called to identify his friend's body. This experience is poignantly reflected in his major collage, Death of Jackson Pollock. Shortly after its completion, Marca-Relli and his wife left for Europe, and although they later returned to East Hampton they never again lived in Springs. This exhibition, which focuses on the period when the Pollocks and the Marca-Rellis were neighbors, could not have been possible without the ever generous cooperation and support of the Archivio Marca-Relli—Giuseppe, Roberto, and Marco Niccoli. I am most grateful to Knoedler's director, Frank Del Deo, for his collaboration with Marco in seeing this exhibition through from inception to completion. This publication was made possible through generous support from the Archivio Marca-Relli and Knoedler & Company. I also want to thank Carter Ratcliff for his insightful catalogue essay; Ann Freedman, for introducing me to Marco two years ago; Magdalena Dabrowski for her illuminating gallery talk; and C.Y. Wilder, who now owns the Marca-Relli property, for graciously allowing access to his former home and studio. — HELEN A. HARRISON, DIRECTOR
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CONRAD MARCA-RELLI—A TRIBUTE In 1988 our father decided to set out on a journey to New York with the precise intention of forming a relationship with three artists of Italian origin: Angelo Savelli, Salvatore Scarpitta and Conrad Marca-Relli. All three were and are important for various reasons. All three with a great story behind them, but little attention from the wider public and therefore little market success. It was in that same period that my brother and I, not quite twenty, started to work intensely in the gallery. We held exhibitions and made publications for each of the artists and over time the relationships turned into solid friendships, especially with Savelli and Scarpitta. Marca-Relli was more isolated and aloof, and the working relationship was bumpy and erratic. Years later, following a distressing private incident that struck our family, the relationship with Conrad was suddenly restored and his unexpected affection caught us almost unprepared. Perhaps in his own way he wanted to show his respect for the work that we had done up to then, which he had never clearly acknowledged or valued. Perhaps we had misunderstood his often contrasting behavior: capable of great panache followed by rapid retreats and irrational bursts of rage. That’s how Conrad was. He survived himself. The burdensome history that touched him and that he had lived out with all his friends and companions along the way: Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Alfonso Ossorio, Larry Rivers, Jackson Pollock. He survived their—in many cases—premature and violent deaths. Alive and restless. Always on the move and never happy with the point of 6
arrival, the stop-off point.
In a very hot July in the mid-1990s, in New Jersey where he lived, we decided, with lucid and reciprocal folly, to buy up his entire oeuvre and to found the Archive in Italy, in Parma, where we still live today. Conrad and his adorable wife Anita moved to Parma to be with us. In 1998, the year when we organized the first big exhibition at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, another chapter began: to tidy up a beautiful story and reappraise his position, which in our opinion was much more important than had been acknowledged thus far. And so we put on the exhibition in Darmstadt in 2000, and in the splendid setting of the Rotonda della Besana in Milan in 2008, together with important exhibitions in private galleries around the world. For us this presentation in East Hampton in the home of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, his dear friends and neighbors, is quite moving and marks a heralded return to the great history of postwar American art. In this context, it is useful to underscore that the work Death of Jackson Pollock, presented here, was protectively kept—guarded almost—behind closed doors by Conrad until 2000. He didn’t want to take advantage of the resonance of his real and deep friendship with Pollock in any way. We were the ones who convinced him, insisting that the time had come to unveil it to the public. The rest is recorded in his wonderful autobiography, excerpts of which have been republished in this book, and in his ever extraordinary and growing museum presence. While thanking Helen Harrison for her support of this exhibition, we can only be proud to be representing and honoring such a great artist and friend here today.
ROBERTO AND MARCO NICCOLI
Archivio Marca-Relli, Parma Parma, 4 April 2011
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XM-40-56, 1956 Collage and mixed media on canvas 36 1/4 x 26 3/4 inches (92 x 68 cm.)
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REINVENTING COLLAGE—A REDEMPTIVE ORDER
Conrad Marca-Relli’s XM-40-56, 1956, is a panoply of ovals. Some are nearly circular, others are elongated and notched. These are elegant shapes, in all their variety, and the artist has deployed them with a brilliant eye for pictorial structure. We could admire this work as an abstraction. Yet a narrowly formalist view is difficult to maintain, for it is impossible to see the light beige oval near the upper edge of XM-40-56 as anything other than a human head. In fact, there are two cranial ovals, side by side, though one doesn’t linger on this oddity. Marca-Relli’s forms draw the eye onward, to the rest of the image, which resolves itself into a seated figure. A solution to the two-head problem would be to see one of the ovals as the shadow of the other. The logic of the figure’s anatomy nominates the oval to the left for this role, which raises another problem: this shadow is just barely a single shade darker than the form supposedly casting it. But why shouldn’t a shadow be luminous? This may be a figurative image but Marca-Relli is not a realist. XM-40-56 makes no assertions about the way things are. With its subtly inspired ambiguities, it encourages us to speculate, to look for possible interpretations of the way things might be. Perhaps the figure is restless. In Cubist paintings, we often see two views of an ordinary object—a cup, a glass—conflated into a single image. This was called “simultaneity,” and there is an echo of it in XM-40-56, for the double head is just one of the repetitions to be seen here. On the left, a shoulder-form is reprised, with variations, and so are several of the shapes suggesting arms and legs. The surface of this work flickers
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with movement, as if revisions of a pose—and thus separate moments—have been layered over one another. But if the figure in XM-40-56 is restless, the work itself is not. Marca-Relli built this image to be stable. The overall effect is of radiant calm.
XM-40-56 is thirty-six and a quarter inches high by twenty-six and threequarter inches wide—medium-size for a painting of its time and place: the New York art world of the mid-1950s. Yet it is a collage, not a painting, and large for a work in that medium. The art historian William Agee was among the first to remark on the significance of this development. Writing in the catalogue of the artist’s retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in 1967, Agee noted that there is a hierarchy of two-dimensional mediums. Painting is seen as primary and collage, like drawing, is relegated to a secondary position. Now, however, Marca-Relli “has extended collage to the point where it carries its own full and distinct range of formal and emotive means.”1 He has raised this medium “to a scale and complexity equal to that of monumental painting.” Invented early in the twentieth century by the Cubists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, collage began as a play of wit. For centuries, painters had worked to give the painted surface a convincing integrity. By pasting scraps of paper to their paintings, Braque and Picasso destroyed the traditional effect of wholeness only to reassert it—for these scraps always make a snug compositional fit with the images they have invaded. Thus, to disrupt a painting’s unity is to reinforce it. If small bits of paper are to produce this large irony, a Cubist collage must itself be small. Works in this medium stayed small in the hands of a Surrealist like Max Ernst, who cut fragments from picture books and arranged them in startling new configurations. The idea was to illustrate the far 10
reaches of a fantastic universe. Marca-Relli’s idea was very different, and it might never have occurred to him if not for the happenstance of travel. Though he was born in Boston, the artist spent much of his childhood abroad. Marca-Relli’s parents were Italian and, when his father’s work as a journalist took him to Europe, the boy and his mother would come along. Schooled partly in Rome, he was fluent in Italian and English, and felt as much at home in Europe as in the United States. When he was fourteen, his family moved to New York, where he attended an art school directed by the sculptor Onorio Ruotolo. Later, he studied at the Cooper Union and found a small studio in Greenwich Village. During the Depression, Marca-Relli joined the Works Progress Administration and met several of the artists who would become close friends, among them Franz Kline. Drafted into the United States Army in 1941, he was discharged in 1945. By the end of the 1940s, he had established himself in a studio on East Ninth Street, in Manhattan. Marca-Relli was becoming prominent among those artists who would come to be known as the first, heroic generation of the New York School, yet he was forever traveling—to Paris and Rome in 1947– 48 and again in 1951. The following year, the artist and his new wife Anita Gibson traveled to Mexico, where he set up a studio in San Miguel Allende. Over a decade earlier, a trip to Mexico had produced an austerely geometric painting of adobe buildings. In the autobiographical notes he made over the years, Marca-Relli says that on this second visit he was again fascinated by “the pure white walls of adobe huts, the cubistic architecture, the clarity of the light . . . I began making small paintings of streets and buildings. Paints were not easy to find, so I began 11
working in collage.” This was the turning point—a moment of transition recapitulated in “Ora” Seated Figure, a work from 1953. Marca-Relli made this figure with oil paints laid on so heavily that the human presence merges with its surroundings. Though this blending of anatomy and architecture originates in the fluidity of paint, the artist built portions of Ora’s surroundings with roughly rectangular strips of canvas. Some look flat, others recede, and still others are ambiguous. As Marca-Relli recalled, collage “fascinated me because it offered me a chance to . . . move the positive and negative spaces with ease.” Painting, too, permits this sort of revision and yet there is always the risk of miring the image in an overload of overworked pigment. With collage, the image “retained the quality of immediacy I wanted.”2 Exhilarated by this immediacy and alive to its potential, Marca-Relli scaled a secondary medium up to the stature of painting. In 1953, he showed a selection of large figurative collages at the Stable Gallery, in New York. The exhibition was a critical success—sophisticated eyes saw the significance of Marca-Relli’s innovation—and he decided it was now time to settle down in a quiet place far from the accelerating commotion of the Manhattan art world. With help from his father, he purchased a small house in Springs, a rural enclave in the town of East Hampton, Long Island. After months of effort, Marca-Relli and his wife made the place habitable, turning a warren of small rooms into a large, all-white interior with sixteen-foot ceilings. A barn in back of the house became a studio. Living next door to the Marca-Rellis were Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. The two couples got along well. Dinner invitations were exchanged. Occasionally, Pollock helped his neighbors with their renovations. Still, he was an 12
“Ora” Seated Figure, 1953 Collage and oil on wood 13 1/2 X 11 7/8 inches (34.5 x 30 cm.) Private collection, Bassano del Grappa, Italy
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infamous alcoholic. Even sober he inspired apprehension in many of his friends, including Marca-Relli, though his self-confidence shielded him from Pollock’s most aggressive behavior. Each took the other’s art seriously, though Pollock questioned Marca-Relli’s devotion to the figure. And Marca-Relli doubted the value of Pollock’s drip-and-pour method, describing it as “primitive,” a sign of “desperation.” Nonetheless, he saw Pollock’s canvases not so much as “violent and savage” as “gentle and sensitive: in his desperation, he had found himself.”3 Several years earlier, Harold Rosenberg had published “The American Action Painters,” an essay claiming that the point of painting was no longer to “reproduce, re-design, analyze, or ‘express’ an object.” The point was to define oneself. With traditional values discredited in the wake of the destruction Seated Figure, 1956 Collage on canvas 20 3/4 x 18 inches (52.5 x 45.5 cm.) Private collection, Parma, Italy
wrought by the Second World War, all that counted was the authenticity of the individual’s self-shaping actions—or so Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and other Existentialist writers argued. During the late 1940s and early ’50s, a mood of Existentialist desperation infiltrated the New York art world. Nothing was certain, all was contingent. Rosenberg evoked the pervasive sense of crisis with his claim that painters had come to see the canvas “as an arena in which to act.”4 But what, in practical terms, did that mean? It was clear only that familiar techniques were falling away as Pollock sent colors sailing through the air with sticks and hardened brushes, Willem de Kooning attacked the canvas with slow-motion violence, and Clyfford Still covered his canvases with wide fields of gashed and furrowed pigments. Reinventing collage, Marca-Relli dispensed with paints altogether. He would begin with a quick sketch on canvas—just a few lines to provide the image with a tentative anchor. Though the artist brought it to airy
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completion, this exhibition’s ink-on-canvas Figure, 1955, gives an idea of those preliminary marks. Next, Marca-Relli would cut various shapes from rolls of canvas and pin them to a stretched canvas. Then he repositioned them, as many times as necessary. Having found the right configuration of forms, he would glue them in place. If the glue was dark and oozed out a bit, the equivalent of a drawn line would appear. Experimenting, Marca-Relli discovered that oil paint could be used as an adhesive. Soon he took up a brush and began, once more, to apply paint in the usual manner—not only to the underlying canvas but to the shapes he had pasted there. In “Seated Figure Outdoors” S-54-18, 1954, the beiges and off-whites of the early collages are accented with precise smudges of black, many of them surrounded by haloes of luminous gray. Originally, pieces of pasted paper—papier
collé—were meant to disrupt the unity of a painted surface. Here, paint is the
Seated Figure, 1955 Collage and mixed media on canvas 20 7/8 x 15 1/2 inches (53 x 39.5 cm.) Private collection, Lugano, Switzerland
disruption and unity belongs to the image built from collage elements. Redefining the premises of collage, Marca-Relli invented a new medium. He redefined, as well, the pictorial accident that was so important to the improvisatory aesthetic of Action Painting. Struggling for authenticity in Rosenberg’s “arena,” painters encouraged their paints to splash, spatter, and drip. The results were far from random—Pollock exercised a surprising degree of control over his colors—yet there were always unexpected effects, contingencies that might well lead to painterly revelations. And of course they often didn’t. The artist could never be sure. Pollock, de Kooning, and their colleagues cast themselves as heroes in a Theater of Existential Anxiety. Marca-Relli was calmer, by far. Speaking to Dorothy Seckler, in 1965, Marca-Relli said, “I accepted the accident . . . knew its power, knew its possibilities . . . However, as much as I 15
S-54-5, 1954, collage on wood 30 x 24 inches (76 x 61 cm.)
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accepted it I denied it . . . I would accept the accident but control it.”5 With no paint to splash about, he would invite accident by arranging and rearranging his pieces of canvas in a state of entranced concentration, always watching for a configuration worthy of being fixed in place. In response to Rosenberg’s talk of Action Painting, Marca-Relli said that Collage allows me to achieve purity of action . . . I can create a figure and change it immediately. I can contemplate the result and if I don’t like it get rid of it, change parts of it, build in a different space, because to paint is to meditate and act simultaneously, which is something the paintbrush technique does not allow you to do.6 Marca-Relli saw himself as painting with his collage elements, and it is notable that many of these canvas strips have the scale of the brush marks we see in the work of other members of his generation—de Kooning, for example, or Franz Kline. The human figure is present in nearly all the collages that Marca-Relli made between 1953 and 1956, the years when he lived at Springs. An exception is
S-54-5, 1954, which has a squared-away, architectural feel and thus points to his other great theme: the city. Here, urban walls look battered but they are not in ruin, as were so many European cities after the Second World War. Along with the destruction of buildings went a loss of faith in the foundations of Western culture. From this loss followed doubts about the hope for certainty of any kind. History was incoherent, according to the Existentialists, and personal identity had become so unstable that artists could do little more than look for fragments of themselves amid traces of their desperate gestures. Though Marca-Relli felt the prevailing mood, he never let it overwhelm him. 17
Fully aware of the darkness of his era, he nonetheless preserved a belief in the possibility of beauty in art and humane order in life. In violent contrast, Jackson Pollock—his neighbor at Springs—lived in a state of perpetual self-doubt and arrived when he was still young at a point of absolute despair. Marca-Relli’s autobiographical notes begin with his recollection of a tapping on a studio window, one night in the summer of 1956. Investigating, he found a man who asked if he was a friend of Pollock’s. When Marca-Relli said that he was, the man led him to the scene of an accident on Fireplace Road. There a policeman asked him to identify a body. It was Pollock. Drunk at the wheel, he had missed a curve in the road and sent his car careening end over end. One of his passengers, a woman, was also killed. Another woman was injured.7 No one who knew Pollock was surprised by his death. A desperate uncertainty had driven his art to innovative extremes. Many half-expected that his desperation would drive him, as well, to suicidal recklessness. Later that year, Marca-Relli made a large horizontal collage entitled “Death
of Jackson Pollock” L-8-56, 1956. The wide band of interlocked forms that stretches from left to right is an image of Pollock’s lifeless body. We can also see it as a wall, a barrier between us and any real understanding of death. The subject of this work fills it with grief and yet it is tranquil. This is a monumentally dignified work. As it acknowledges death’s ultimate unintelligibility, it testifies even more powerfully to the redemptive order that art brings to life. — CARTER RATCLIFF
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1. William Agee, Marca-Relli. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967, p. 9. 2 . Conrad Marca-Relli, “I remember when . . .” in Conrad Marca-Relli, Milan: Bruno Alfieri Editore, 2008, p. 59. 3. Marca-Relli, “I remember when . . .,” p. 62. 4. Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” 1952. Reprinted in Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record, eds. David Shapiro and Cecile Shapiro, University of Cambridge Press, 1990, p. 76. 5. Dorothy Seckler, unpublished interview with Conrad Marca-Relli. June 10, 1965. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 6. Luca Massimo Barbero, “Painting as the Space of a Dynamic Architecture of Vision: An Interview with Marca-Relli.” Conrad Marca-Relli, ed. Luca Massimo Barbero, Milan: Electa, 1998, p. 19. 7. Marca-Relli, “I Remember When . . .,” pp. 44–45.
Carter Ratcliff is a poet and art critic. A contributing editor of Art in America, he has received several awards for his work, including the College Art Association's 1987 Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts' Art Critics Grants, and a Poets Foundation Grant. His writings have appeared in American and European journals and in the publications of museums including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Guggenheim in New York, and the Royal Academy in London. He has taught at the School of Visual Arts and Hunter College and has lectured at a variety of institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Among his books are monographs on Andy Warhol, John Singer Sargent, and Georgia O'Keeffe. He is the author of The Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Postwar American Art (1996); The Figure of the Artist (2000); and Out of the Box: The Reinvention of Art: 1965 –1975 (2000).
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Marca-Relli in his Springs studio, 1956
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EXCERPT, INTERVIEW WITH CONRAD MARCA-RELLI CONDUCTED BY DOROTHY SECKLER, JUNE 10, 1965 ARCHIVES OF AMERICAN ART, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION DOROTHY SECKLER: Resuming our discussion of your painting right after the war
we have these two different styles, the abstract and the figurative . . . both alternately developed, apparently. What was it that happened to move you into a new development which I assume synthesized these or replaced the duality? CONRAD MARCA-RELLI: I don’t think I’ve ever replaced that duality. Maybe that’s
because I was born in June and I’m a Gemini. I feel the duality very strongly in all my work and everything I do. By this time now I’ve got to it but I felt that I was always being somewhere in between; I would accept abstraction and reject it and then I would turn to an object, to a figure or to a symbol or anything and paint that. But of course even when I did figures I was never naturalistic. In other words, I was always searching for some other dimension and that was the challenge of it. The challenge always exists for me. The sculpture in my last shows became purer and simpler and the shapes larger and more and more, we’ll say, abstract. But many times while doing that work, I would be working on a figure for two months— simultaneously. I’d be painting on a figure as if to get some kind of oxygen in my lungs and recharge myself with some other kind of contact with a point, with a place, because I feel the problem is always the same. It’s not going to be said in five seconds—but whatever the things I feel about painting, whatever the strength, the duality, the interlocking forms, whether the kind of space I’m looking for exists— abstractly or with the figure content, it means nothing to me. In other words, the figure is brought to that solution and the abstraction is brought to the same solution whether it’s a simple shape or whether it’s a head. There’s no great difference except that it starts you off or keeps a point of departure where you can start a new problem, a new challenge.
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P-S-66-53 (Seated Woman), 1953, mixed media on cardboard, 21 x 14 1/2 inches (53.5 x 37 cm.)
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P-S-54-53, 1953, mixed media on cardboard mounted on canvas, 14 x 20 inches (35.7 x 50.4 cm.)
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“Seated Figure Outdoors� S-54-18, 1954, collage and mixed media on paper, 20 x 15 inches (50.5 x 38 cm.)
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Untitled (S.T.), 1954, collage and ink on canvas, 18 x 23 inches (46 x 58.5 cm.)
Figure, 1955, ink on canvas, 11 1/4 x 10 inches (28.5 x 25.5 cm.)
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M-11-56, 1956, collage and mixed media on canvas, 24 x 45 1/4 inches (61 x 115 cm.) Private collection, Parma, Italy
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“Death of Jackson Pollock” L-8-56, 1956, collage and mixed media on canvas, 43 3/4 x 88 inches (111 x 224 cm.)
Conrad Marca-Relli and Jackson Pollock in Marca-Relli’s house on Fireplace Road in Springs, East Hampton, 1956. Possibly photographed by Selden Rodman. Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, East Hampton, NY. Jeffrey Potter Collection.
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CONRAD MARCA-RELLI ON JACKSON POLLOCK
In 1953, my wife and I moved to East Hampton. I felt that moving away from the city would give me the peace necessary to pursue my work without too many interruptions. In spite of the success of my first show, paintings were selling at very low prices and we were still broke, like so many artists. We had found a small house on Fireplace Road in Springs, next to Jackson Pollock. It cost $4,000 with an acre of land. It was in terrible shape, but I knew we could fix it. My father, who was a wonderful man, had always given me the quiet support of believing in me, when at that time being an artist was hopeless. Though he was living modestly in retirement, he offered me $5,000, saying “I think this is an important moment in your life, so take it now instead of waiting for me to die.� I shall forever be grateful. I did not know Jackson at that time, having only said a few words at some party or opening. When my friends heard that I was moving next to Jackson, they were all alarmed and warned me of his reputation. I admit I was apprehensive, but decided to go ahead. For over six months, with the help of Anita, we did all the work ourselves, since we could not afford to hire anyone. It was a seven room shack, which we converted into a large one and a half room home with 16-foot ceilings, all white walls with black floors, an open kitchen and a small barn fifty feet in back of the house that became my studio. The change was impressive. Even Jackson, who had advised us against buying it, was impressed. From the very first day that we moved in, Jackson and Lee were most warm and helpful. They would constantly ask us over for dinner when they saw us in the middle of such exhausting work. I remember one evening, during the early period of our living out there, when I was still apprehensive of Jackson, not knowing him too well. I was mixing some 35
cement in order to work on a fireplace in the middle of the living room. There was a knock on the door and Jackson wandered in. He had that familiar, boyish grin that told me he had been drinking. He was wobbling a little, but when he saw the cement and the work I was doing he immediately offered to help. “Please Jackson,” I said, “sit down.” I was afraid the whole fireplace would come down. I stopped my work and joined him with a beer. As I was getting the beer, I had whispered to Anita to slip out and get Lee. I knew she would know how to handle him. We sat sipping our beer and I was making casual conversation. He suddenly stopped me and asked, “Where is Anita?” I tried to be casual, but a pained look came over his face. “You didn’t send her to get Lee?” He shook his head, “I wasn’t going to do anything . . .” He saw my embarrassment. I never felt so small. Lee came in a little while and Jackson went home. From that day on, I decided, I would treat Jackson straight and not be influenced by all the gossip that circulated about his character. Once the work on the house was terminated, I was deeply involved in my painting. Especially in the winter, there was a poetic quietness; sometimes it felt like High Noon. We were seeing Jim and Charlotte Brooks, who still lived in Montauk and came to East Hampton once a week. Jim knew Jackson from way back. There was also John Graham, who had recently married Castelli’s mother-in-law. He was now living in Southampton. He was a friend of Jackson’s and I had known him from before the war, in the Village. Ossorio had recently bought a large estate in the Creeks, outside of East Hampton. Nick Carone came up a year later and lived on Three Mile Harbor Road, with his new wife and twins. Harold Rosenberg and May had lived already for a while in Springs. Lassaw and Ernestine were building nearby, Zogbaum had been there, Jeff Potter was also an early settler and soon the community grew larger. But winters were always peaceful. Living so close by, we saw a lot of Jackson and Lee. Many times in the winter evenings we would have dinners together at Jackson’s or our house. Sometimes 36
for months, Jackson would go ‘on the wagon’; during those periods, Jackson would often be very quiet. Sometimes uncomfortably so. When he had just a few beers he was at his best. However, many times, if there were guests other than ourselves, the evenings could end in all kinds of explosions. This was a period when Jackson was having trouble with his work. Sometimes, for months on end, he would sit in the kitchen in the winter, looking out at his studio in the barn in back of the house. He told me he always kept the heat going just in case. But his periods of work were less and less. Most of the works he had completed were done during those periods of abstinence, contrary to the legend of his wild jumping around on his canvases. Although I respected Jackson’s work, I for myself could not accept Automatism. It had worked for Jackson and, in later years seeing those large paintings, properly hung in some exhibition, I realized how much they had expressed his true nature. In itself the act of pouring paint is an act of frustration, it was in his hands a primitive act, not a sophisticated technique. Nor was it the wild gesturing of a cowboy, as the legend had it in Europe. It was more the work of a child, a child trying to express himself, a child crying. It was an act of desperation. And in spite of all the stamping and stomping, he had woven a web which was delicate and sensitive, which was poetic and romantic, which expressed the part of him that lay hidden behind his acts of violence. Jackson’s paintings were not violent and savage; they were gentle and sensitive: in his desperation, he had found himself. Through Automatism, he had found the only way he could express himself. Later, I realized that it would explain why he never committed any violent acts toward me. He had felt he could trust me; I had learned to be honest with him. I recall that on one occasion he had come by in the afternoon. If I was in the studio, he would not call out, not wanting to interrupt me at my work: he would just walk around the area whistling some tune; I would hear him and call out to 37
him to come into the studio. He would never allude to the work. On this occasion, it was different. We had sat for a while almost in silence and then he suddenly looked up at a corner of my studio, where a small wooden anatomical mannequin was hanging. It was a relic from Rome. “That thing up there is your problem, why don’t you get rid of it?” I knew only too well what he meant. Working in any figurative manner was becoming very unpopular. Even Bill had stopped his “Women” series. I was not angered by his remark; in fact I took it as a concern for me. I answered, “I know Jackson, but I need to have something to start with, maybe it is a hang-up, but I can’t start with nothing.” He interrupted me: “You’re right, I’m sorry, I should never have said that.” He seemed genuinely sorry. Marca-Relli in his Springs studio, 1954. Photograph by Walter Silver.
On another occasion, Alan Davie, the English painter, and Gimpel, the art dealer, had come to visit Jackson. I had joined them and, after a while, they suggested coming to see my work at the studio. We all walked over. I had only a few smaller works. They looked at them a while making some polite remarks and then either Davie or Gimpel, asking permission, went up to one of the canvases and turned it around to see it upside down, perhaps so as to see the figurative element less. Anyhow, it seemed to irritate Jackson, he walked up to the painting and turned it back to its right side up, saying with a growl: “He painted it this way, so you look at it this way.” I was touched by his protective attitude. During the summers, many artists and friends would be renting places for a few months and the cocktails and parties would begin. On one occasion, Phillip Pavia called me. He had just rented a place near Three Mile Harbor Road. He listed a number of people that were coming for a drink and wanted me and Anita to come. Then in an anxious voice he said “But don’t tell Jackson, please don’t tell him, you know how he is.” All this time I was listening to him, Jackson was sitting close by, since he had just come by. I hung up the phone and tried to be casual, but Jackson
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had been all ears. Immediately he wanted to know who it was, what was going on, was there a party somewhere? I tried at first to pretend it was something else, but then I could not lie to him. I told him who it was and what it was all about. They specifically did not want him to come! I told him so in so many words, but that only made him laugh mischievously. He knew where the place was, he said. In my nervousness at the phone, I hadn’t even gotten the directions clear. But he wouldn’t hear of it: he would come; after all, they were all his friends as well. This sort of thing had happened before and I knew it was justified; still, it was cruel. And now, seeing Jackson so eager to go, I said OK and we went. I had not gotten the directions at all: we wandered from one road to another, but he would not give up. He knew all the summer rentals in that area and, sure enough, we found them. When we arrived, there was only a small group of people. Pavia and his wife, Harold Rosenberg with May and their daughter Pacia, who must have been about twelve. A few others that I don’t remember. Jackson stepped out of the car gingerly and we all entered the house. The concern on their faces was immediate. Pavia made an awkward attempt to greet us. Jackson seemed more pleased than ever. He walked over to a few people, warmly greeting them with his usual four-letter vocabulary. Everyone was pretty used to this by this time, but as his words began to fill the room, May suddenly let out a scream “you bastard,” she cried, approaching him with her hands raised as if to strike him and managing to scratch his face. “How dare you use such foul language when my daughter is here?” Jackson was taken completely by surprise at this outburst. Pavia was running back and forth trying to calm things. May ran out into the next room and was letting out a few screams of her own. The place was in utter confusion. Pavia edged over to me. “You’ve got to get him out of here. Why did you bring 39
him?” I explained what had happened, but he was too nervous to even listen. “Please get him out of here.” Jackson seemed stunned. He couldn’t understand what had happened. I approached him in a friendly way and said “Let’s get out of here.” He offered no resistance and we quietly walked toward the car. On the way back home, his eyes became filled with tears. “What happened, what did I do?” Jackson was not always so innocent. There had been parties where he had provoked situations beyond endurance, and brawls followed that ended by breaking up the parties. I knew this, but still felt sorry to see him excluded from so many summer parties that he looked forward to after the lonely winters. Many times, what started off as horseplay, by some wrong reaction of someone, would make him do things that could not be accepted as sane. This made people afraid. Perhaps it was because I considered him to be mischievous rather than mad that made the difference. I recall once coming home in my little green Jeepster, which he could easily recognize. I noticed, passing his house, that the lights were all on. I had only been home a few moments when the phone rang. It was Jackson: “I saw you go by,” he said, “Do you feel like coming over for a beer?” I said OK and a few moments later headed for his house. As I approached, I noticed all the lights were now out and the house was in total darkness. I wondered about this, but walked in after knocking on the screen door. I could barely see anything, but then I spied him sitting in the far end of the room. I walked toward him and, saying “Hi,” sat a few paces from him. This went on for quite a while. I had learned to do this when he fell into one of his silent moods. I had seen enough Westerns. After what seemed a long time, he finally growled, “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you notice anything?” “Oh,” I said, “you mean that it’s dark in here? Well, I thought that you felt like sitting in the dark.” He got up and turned on the lights and, grinning at me, said “You son of a bitch.” We had a beer and he became jovial. 40
I recall that, on one occasion, we were having a drink at Ossorio’s. After we had been drinking a while, Alfonso proudly took out a new edition of black and white silk-screens of Jackson’s that he had just acquired. He placed them on a table next to Jackson. They were not signed, would he sign them? Jackson picked up the felt marker that was on the table and started to sign them. He then looked up at Ossorio and said, as if in thought, “I think there are some things that need to be changed.” He then proceeded to go over every print with the black marker, violently defacing them. Ossorio looked on in silence. He did this to each and every one of the prints. I think there were twelve, and then signed each one. Of course they had all been ruined, even though years later they became the most valued set of the edition. Jackson was always unpredictable. There was an opening at Guild Hall, in East Hampton, which had a large exhibition hall. We were having a show. I believe we were four artists being shown. Jim Brooks, myself, Jackson and another artist whose name escapes me. It was opening night. We all arrived at about the same time. The place was already filled with people. There were the usual gentle little old ladies to greet us at the entrance. As Jackson entered, one of the gentle ladies said: “Mr. Pollock, I’ve always been an admirer of yours.” He looked straight at her and said: “Go fuck yourself,” and kept walking towards the back of the hall. The lady stared after him and then called out: “Mr. Pollock, I’m sorry, I did not hear what you said.” She could not believe her ears. “I said go fuck yourself”: he said this loud and clear across the room to the consternation of everyone. After a while, everyone pretended to go about looking at the paintings on the walls. These were the familiar unpredictabilities of Pollock that soon became the conversation pieces at the various gatherings. It was during this period that Jackson had begun to receive a lot more attention in the press. Life magazine had printed a double-page spread with a reproduction. 41
It read “Jackson Pollock, America’s Greatest Artist or Fraud.” It was particularly cruel for Jackson, since he vacillated between arrogance and depressions. He had also begun to be under analysis. Every week on Tuesdays, he would get all dressed in this pinstriped suit and set out for the city to see his analyst. A day or two later, he would be back; clothes disheveled, bruised all over, unshaven, a total wreck. He would then get on a milk diet, cure his bruises and recuperate. By this time it was Tuesday again, and off he went to the city. He told me in confidence that what happened was that every time he went to see his analyst; after the session, he was in such a state that he went to the nearest bar and had to have a few. He then stopped somewhere to eat and would set off toward the Cedar Tavern in the Village. Since he knew that his friends—Bill, Franz etc.—would not get there till late evening, he would stop in several bars on the way. By the time he arrived at the Cedar, he was well tanked, so he had his entrance in style. The events of those evenings trickled down to us. He had been horse playing with Franz and ended up locked in the telephone booth. He had on one occasion torn the door of the men’s room off its hinges; he had climbed up the fire-escape to Franz’s studio at 3 in the morning to have a drink with him . . . on and on, these escapades would send him back to East Hampton a wreck. I asked him if he had ever told his analyst all this, but the analyst had told him his drinking problem was something he had to solve himself.
ON THE DEATH OF JACKSON POLLOCK
It was a hot summer night in East Hampton. We were to have gone to Ossorio’s house, where a musical evening had been planned. Somehow, we decided not to go. Perhaps it was for the usual reason, that my work was troubling me and it would 42
be better to stay home and work. I had been in the studio for some time when I became aware of a kind of tapping noise. I ignored it for a while, then called out to my wife, but she surprised me by answering that she had heard it, too, and assumed that it was I who was doing it. I walked into the adjoining room, which had a small oval window facing the road. Sure enough, the noise was coming from there. I peered into the darkness and could distinguish the form of a man. He was gently tapping against the windowpane. When he saw me he called out “Are you the friend of Mr. Pollock?” There was a trace of an accent that I recognized. I had seen him at Jackson’s house a few weeks earlier. He had been doing some work for Jackson. “Yes . . . yes,” I hastily
Jackson Pollock’s body at the accident scene, Fireplace Road, Springs, East Hampton, 11 August 1956. Photograph by Dave Edwardes. Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, East Hampton, NY. Jeffrey Potter Collection.
answered. He looked frightened. “You’d better go right away,” he pointed toward the road, “there has been a terrible accident . . . very bad . . .” he kept mumbling. I ran toward my Jeepster, which was parked in the driveway, and headed toward East Hampton on Fireplace Road. Jackson had come by only yesterday: I recalled he looked pretty bad. In fact, as he was leaving, he pointed to the can of beer I had given him and said, “this is the first time Pollock is known to leave a beer unfinished.” He gave me a strange smile and left. As I was driving away from the house, I recall thinking to myself, “I hope he has broken a leg. . . . I hope he has broken both legs. . . . ” That was what he needed, so he would be immobilized, so he would be hospitalized for a while and get a chance to recuperate. I came to the turn on the road and I could see a police car, with its bright lights facing me, stopped on the road. I slowed down and stopped. I stepped out of my car. It was pitch black save for the police car’s bright lights. I could hear the police car radio. My eyes became accustomed to the dark. I saw Jackson’s car across the road, a few paces away. It was completely overturned. I approached slowly, my heart was pounding. I got nearer and nearer and 43
then saw an arm sticking out from under the car. It was a woman’s arm. And only then I became aware that the horn was blowing. I felt a cold sweat all over, then a voice behind me said, “Come this way.” I had not heard the policeman coming toward me. He held my arm and led me away from the car. We walked a short distance and then I could see the form of a body stretched out on the side of the road. It was Jackson. He was flat on his back, his eyes open. There was no blood, no scars, in fact he looked so peaceful. I just stared. I must have stayed that way for quite a while and then I heard the officer’s voice. “Do you know this man?” “Yes,” I said listlessly, “yes, it’s Jackson Pollock.” He led me towards his car, asked me my name and told me to come by in the morning to the mortuary and sign an official statement and identify the body. By this time, I was feeling numb. I got in my car and drove back to my house, passing Jackson’s house, which was next door to mine. It looked so dark, so lonely already. . . . When I got back home, I told the sad news to Anita. She too had hoped it would be another one of Jackson’s accidents. Nothing too serious. I then called Ossorio’s house. Someone answered the phone saying that the musical concert was going on, and no one could come to the phone. I left the message. I then called Nick Carone, who lived nearby, and told him to meet me at the scene of the accident. When I got back to Fireplace Road, I saw that a number of cars were parked along the side of the road and I could see many figures walking in my direction. I walked toward Jackson’s body and the first person that greeted me was Clement Greenberg. He looked down at Jackson, then pulled out a handkerchief and closed Jackson’s eyes leaving the face covered. He then rose and, as he walked away, I heard him say, “The son of a bitch finally did it.” The following day, I found out more about what had happened. It seemed that Jackson had two passengers with him on that fatal night: one was Ruth Kligman, 44
with whom Jackson had become involved and who was, in fact, the reason why Lee had left a few weeks ago for Europe. The other girl was a friend of Ruth’s who had come for the weekend, her first visit to East Hampton, and had died pinned under the car. Ruth had escaped with minor injuries and had been taken to the Southampton Hospital just before I had arrived on the scene. I went to the Hospital to learn the facts before time distorted them as it usually does. I learned that Jackson had started to drink heavily after Lee had left and was not eating very much. He had slowly tapered off and was dozing a lot. He was very weak and depressed, with spurts of energy. That fatal night, they had started off to go to Ossorio’s musical evening. Before getting to East Hampton, Jackson suggested they stop and get some coffee: when they returned to the car, they found that Jackson had fallen asleep. They woke him up, but then he said he did not want to go to the musical after all and preferred to return home. They started back towards the house and Jackson seemed to pick up; he started driving faster and even skidded on the first curve. Now this friend of Ruth’s did not know Jackson, she became frightened and started to scream for him to stop the car. This only made Jackson laugh and drive faster. When he came to the last curve, a short distance from his home, his car veered off the road and he did not have the strength to set it back. The car went into a sapling that acted as a springboard and bounced it over. He and Ruth were thrown out of the car, but the girl who was sitting in the middle remained pinned underneath. During the next few days, frantic efforts were made to locate Lee in Europe. She was finally reached in the South of France and was on her way back. When Lee arrived, she immediately took charge. The house resembled an army headquarters. Everyone was delegated to different assignments. Jeff Potter arranged for a large boulder, which was to be Jackson’s tombstone, Ossorio and 45
Barney Newman were in charge of the pall bearers and so on . . . and so on. . . . Overnight, the house became Lee’s. I watched her. There was a change in her. She had always been a tough woman, but now it was different. It seemed as if she had removed her shackles, there seemed to be a cold determination in her that was not there before. She was taking everything over and, with it, Jackson. The days that followed were hectic. Bill de Kooning had flown in from Martha’s Vineyard, Franz Kline had come in from New York and scores of others. Finally, the day of the funeral arrived. A long procession of cars followed to the cemetery, which was nearby, and then we all went to Lee’s house for the wake. Jackson’s mother and brothers were there and, in no time at all, we were all drunk. After Jackson’s death, a silence seemed to descend over East Hampton. His presence was still around us. Many evenings were spent talking with friends at my house, and the conversation inevitably turned to Jackson. On one evening, I recall, we were all remarking on the fact that Jackson’s dogs had come over to my house looking for their master, something they had never done before. Suddenly, Bill rose and in an angry voice said “Listen, I was at Jackson’s funeral and I saw him in his grave; so he’s dead . . . and that is the end of it . . . and now I’m number one.” There was a long silence: we were all shocked. So then there was a side to gentle Bill that had not appeared before. East Hampton had quieted down. The winter was soon upon us and it was cold and clammy. . . . I began to yearn for the Mediterranean, so in the spring we left for Europe, with plans to spend the summer in Procida, a small island near Capri and Ischia. . . . Texts on Jackson Pollock excerpted from I remember when . . . an autobiographical commentary
on the Abstract Expressionist era and subsequent years, by Conrad Marca-Relli, written at different times between the 1950s and the mid-1980s. Published posthumously in Conrad Marca-Relli (Bruno Alfieri Editore, Milan, 2008) pages 43–83.
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Special thanks to the following sponsors for their generous support:
Published on the occasion of the exhibition CONRAD MARCA-RELLI THE SPRINGS YEARS, 1953–1956 May 5–July 30, 2011 Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center 830 Springs-Fireplace Road East Hampton, New York 11937 Tel 631-324-4929 www.pkhouse.org Cover: Conrad Marca-Relli and his wife, Anita Gibson, at their Springs home, 1954. Photograph by Walter Silver. Frontispiece: J-S-39-55, 1955, collage and mixed media on canvas 16 x 19 3/4 inches (40.3 x 50.1 cm.) Catalogue designed by The Grenfell Press, New York Printed by Trifolio, Verona, Italy All artworks copyright © Archivio Marca-Relli, Parma Essay copyright © 2011 Carter Ratcliff “Conrad Marca-Relli: A Tribute,” pages 6-7, translated from the Italian by Karen Whittle Publication copyright © 2011 Knoedler & Company All rights reserved Published in an edition of 2000 ISBN 978-0-9834365-1-5