On Aug. 11, 1956, Jackson Pollock sat on a granite boulder and grasped the bare leg his bathing suit-clad mistress, aspiring artist Ruth Kligman, had thrown over his lap as they squinted into the sun and posed for a photo together on his estate in Springs, a hamlet in East Hampton. The seemingly happy moment the camera captured that afternoon — Pollock, his back stooped, flashed an impish grin as his 26-year-old lover beamed and clung to him — belied the drama roiling the life of the alcoholic Abstract Expressionist. Hours after the shutter clicked, Pollock, 44, was dead.
Fifteen years earlier, before his boozing, philandering, and bouts of depression took their toll on his personal and professional life, Pollock was on an upswing. In 1941, he met contemporary artist Lenore “Lee” Krasner when she went to his New York City studio and introduced herself. Krasner became Pollock’s most devoted and dogged supporter. She fell in love first with his work, which was a sharp contrast from what she and other avant-garde artists were doing at the time, and then with him.
The couple wed in October 1945, and Krasner set into motion a plan to rescue Pollock from himself. She suggested to her new husband they head to the East End and rent a house for the winter, a solution she knew would pry him loose, at least temporarily, from his drinking buddies in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. Jackson grew up in rural Arizona and California and initially resisted returning to a more secluded lifestyle, but he surprised his wife by deciding he wanted to move away from the city full time and purchase a property. With the financial help of socialite art collector Peggy Guggenheim — Pollock’s patron and rumored lover — the newlyweds spent $5,000 on a farmhouse, now known as the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, at 830 Springs-Fireplace Road in East Hampton.
Krasner’s plan initially seemed to be going better than she could have hoped. In June 1946, Pollock converted a small barn on the property into his studio, where he spread canvases on the floor and approached his artwork from all four sides. During those first few years in the Hamptons, by all accounts Pollock’s most productive, he perfected his signature drip technique. Not coincidentally, his creativity, always hampered by alcohol, was unleashed during a two-year period of sobriety, 1948 to 1950.
Artforum later noted Pollock’s drip-painting masterpieces from that clear-headed era, including Autumn Rhythm and Lavender Mist: Number One, 1950, contained some violence but far more “passion, joy, exuberance, ecstasy, delight, gravity, tenderness, suffering, grace, fragility, and, at moments, even charm.”
Pollock explained his paintings had a life of their own and he tried to allow them to emerge with minimal guidance. “It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess,” he noted. “Otherwise, there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.”
Sadly, life imitated art for the man splattering canvases when he returned to the bottle in 1951. His battle with alcoholism lost, Pollock fell out of touch with his creative side, and the work turned stark and colorless. His life turned into the mess he most feared his artwork had the potential to become. He’d gone from drawing inspiration from the watery light and eelgrass marshes outside his studio on Accabonac Creek to drowning in drinks at his favorite local Hamptons haunt, Jungle Pete’s, where he was famous not for his artistic genius, but for his violent temper and the chaos he sowed when wasted.
By the summer of 1956, Pollock was all but washed up. He had largely abandoned his painting, trading art for alcohol and Krasner for Kligman. Her marriage in shambles, Krasner was tired of her husband’s abusive rants and she could no longer turn a blind eye to her ruined relationship with him — especially after she caught Pollock with his new young lover, Kligman. Krasner decamped to Paris to distance herself from the situation and weigh her options. Kligman moved into the Hamptons farmhouse.
The fateful August afternoon in 1956 when Pollock and Kligman posed together for the photograph at his estate, he spent the day like he had on so many others that summer — drunk. Late that evening, he climbed into his Oldsmobile 88 convertible with Kligman and her friend, Edith Metzger, and was driving to a local concert when he flew into a rage, turned the car around and sped back home. “Edith started screaming, ‘Stop the car, let me out!’” Kligman wrote in her 1974 book Love Affair: A Memoir of Jackson Pollock. “He put his foot all the way to the floor. He was speeding wildly.”
Pollock lost control of the vehicle as he rounded a corner about a mile from his house. The car cartwheeled and he and his two passengers flew out. Pollack slammed into a tree and died instantly. The car rolled over Metzger, breaking her neck and killing her. Only Kligman survived. Krasner rushed home from Europe to bury her husband.
In her later years, Kligman, who passed away in 2010, said she hoped part of her “destiny” would be “to overcome the image of just being the girl sitting on Jackson’s lap” and gain recognition as a talented artist in her own right. Whether that happened or not is debatable.
By contrast, as Pollock’s sole heir, Krasner’s destiny turned out to be a continuation of the role she had always played while her husband was alive: championing his work and burnishing his image. But she also took over his beloved barn studio and focused on her own career. In June 1984, she died an accomplished painter at age 75.
“I am never free of the past,” Krasner once said. “I have made it crystal clear that I believe the past is part of the present, which becomes part of the future.” And because of her steadfast devotion to a man who arguably didn’t deserve it, the legacy she created for Pollock from their home in the Hamptons lives on.
