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"View Slideshow\n\nThere's been a lot of auction action on the old abstract expressionist front lately, culminating with David Rockefeller's Rothko selling for $72.8 million at Sotheby's last spring.\n\nAs it happens, I appraised that painting for him\u2014I sort of help and advise on his pictures; I'm very close to him that way\u2014and I appraised it at $10 million. This was only nine months or so before it went to auction, and believe me, that would have been a very good price\u2014it would have been a victory to get that kind of sum for it at that time.\n\nReally? Weren't Rothkos going a lot higher than that?\n\nNot that size and not that type of Rothko. It's a relatively small one, and also it's early\u20141950. It does have nice colors\u2014the yellow, the lavender, the pink, with the nice white center.\n\nIt's a happy Rothko.\n\nThat's precisely my point, that it's not one of the great magisterial double-width ones, which are the wines\u2014the deep, deep reds and purples\u2014and the dark blues and greens. Those are the tragic and sublime Rothkos, and I'm using the concept of sublimity in the 18th-century-philosophical sense of majesty and awe. David bought his for $10,000 in 1960 from Mrs. Bliss Parkinson, Eliza, whose aunt had founded the Museum of Modern Art with his mother. She needed to sell some things, and as a matter of fact, a year or two after that, I sold her other Rothko for her, for around the same price.\n\nSo do you think, with this one, that it was just the aura of its provenance\u2014that it went sky-high simply because it was David Rockefeller's?\n\nPartially. And partially because it was so widely and intensively advertised\u2014reproduced in newspapers and magazines the world over and in glowing full color to reinforce how decoratively employable it could be. And maybe also because Rothko was Russian-born, because the speculation is that a Russian bought it. I've been, frankly, afraid to call David, because I obviously don't know how to guess what anything could possibly be worth anymore. The problem is there's no real market\u2014there's just trophies and what they can be hyped up to.\n\nAnd in your view, the bigger the canvas the better\u2014at least in the case of Rothko.\n\nHe himself said\u2014he was given to oracular statements\u2014\"I paint big to be intimate.\" He wanted his pictures to surround you, to be there with you in some special kind of environment\u2014in a different way than if they were just hung on a big wall of a museum where even a giant painting can look like a postage stamp. The ultimate Rothko space, of course, is the famous nondenominational chapel in Houston, which has become a place of pilgrimage. But those lavender-and-black canvases that are hanging there have darkened terribly over the years, almost to black\u2014I have to say to the detriment of the statement. They've tried to revive the saturated color, but they really can't. When you go into the Rothko Chapel, what you find is all these young people sitting cross-legged on the floor\u2014some with sleeping bags\u2014worshipping, meditating, hallucinating, waiting for some big Zen experience, and that in itself constitutes a phenomenon. From all over the world they come.\n\nApparently the odd visitor is there to observe people observing Rothkos... I was watching a documentary on him the other day, and some talking head said of another group of Rothko murals, the ones in the Tate: \"they're paintings that you can sit in front of for hours and get sad.\" How funny.\n\nWell, clearly, they do do something to you.\n\nWhich of the abstract expressionist painters did you yourself know personally?\n\nI knew Mark Rothko only in passing, Clyfford Still not at all, Philip Guston and Barnett Newman slightly, Franz Kline a bit better, Adolph Gottlieb very well, and Robert Motherwell, the youngest of the group, a little. The oldest, the German \u00E9migr\u00E9 Hans Hofmann, I met once or twice, and I consider him an Abstract Expressionist only because of his rich late work, executed in the movement's own epilogue years. And Willem de Kooning I did get to know\u2014he was a raconteur, a real pleasure to engage, with his charming Dutch accent and strong, witty personality, and he was good-looking into the bargain. He used to bicycle over to our house in East Hampton.\n\nThese abstract expressionists pretty much stuck together, didn't they? They were a real social unit. And one of the ways they liked to \"communicate\" was by drinking and brawling. This was clearly a time when resolute masculinity ruled\u2014it all sounds very \"apes beating their chests\" to me.\n\nThey could certainly be considered a kind of fraternity, but you have to remember that, though they were often referred to as the New York School, they didn't form a unified school in any real sense of the word. Theirs was not a group effort of any kind\u2014each of them painted his own individual way. What they did all share, in that great simultaneous breakthrough moment at the end of the Second World War, was a belief that old conventions of painting, such as representation, were pass\u00E9. The way I group them, Rothko, Gottlieb, Still, and Newman were the metaphysicians. And that's how they saw themselves\u2014as kind of magician-priests for whom paintings had to have a shamanistic quality and purpose; beauty they felt free to write off as a deceptive and unworthy goal. Rothko, you know, truly believed that his work provided the viewer with a mystical experience\u2014something akin to, let's say, Stonehenge at the moment of solstice.\n\nWhat's interesting to me is how vivid, how even immediate, they still seem.\n\nAnd yet, look how far back in time they are\u20141945-1955! We look back now at them as a historic age the way they were able to look back\u2014it's the same span\u2014at the European powerhouses, the pioneer pictorial Modernists like Monet and C\u00E9zanne and the great creator-inventors like Picasso, Matisse, Braque, and Gris. The Abstract Expressionists reached just as high\u2014their aims were no less grand. Pollock once told his wife, Lee Krasner, that he aspired to go past Picasso, and she even overheard him cursing, \"Goddamn it, that guy missed nothing!\" They were the next great wave, and they did indeed create a radically new way of painting.\n\nSome of them have survived in human and personal terms as well. I mean as something more\u2014or at least other\u2014than artists.\n\nIt's true that they went from the folklore of the art world into the consciousness of the general public or American culture or whatever you want to call it. Which, incidentally, was a much harder thing to do then than it is today, when artists routinely achieve instant superstar status on the basis of practically no talent whatsoever. Pollock's outrageous behavior was a big help\u2014his drinking and his penchant for picking fights. And then the crash in 1956 that took his life when he was only 44, not to mention the life of one of the two women who were in the car with him, didn't hurt. It all became fodder for tabloid exploitation. And ended up as myth.\n\nI guess it was irresistible\u2014a do-or-die painter who did and died anyway. At the risk of sounding like a tabloid myself, what make was the deathmobile?\n\nA 1950 Oldsmobile convertible coupe that Pollock had traded the art dealer Martha Jackson two black-and-white paintings for. The car was green. The young woman who survived, Ruth Kligman\u2014the poet Frank O'Hara dubbed her \"death car girl\"\u2014took up with de Kooning within the year, as his passionately painted and named picture Ruth's Zowie more or less attests. And let's not forget the shock value of Rothko slitting his wrists in his Manhattan studio, in 1970. Or way back in '48, the suicide of Arshile Gorky\u2014he hanged himself in a woodshed on his farm in Connecticut. The Armenian-born Gorky was the original Abstract Expressionist, the first fully mature artist of the new American painting\u2014the bridge, if you will, from Surrealism and European Modernism to the more provincial American styles. He influenced Pollock to some extent and de Kooning tremendously\u2014they even shared a studio for a time.\n\nI have to hope that some of the other abstract expressionists fared a little better.\n\nBarnett Newman was this big imposing intellectual with the pince-nez\u2014or maybe it was a monocle. Now, not everybody bought the whole mythological quality of his approach: you know, being above it all and not interested in commerce or anything. And of course he was supported by his wife\u2014she taught stenography, of all things. But to me, his quest for the outer limits of the pictorial always seemed heroic. His pictures didn't sell when he was still with us, but they were taken up by curators and museum directors and became icons of their period. I'm thinking of those wall-size fields of undifferentiated color with the one vertical line\u2014the so-called \"zip\"\u2014resonating in them. It was almost as if Newman were presuming to liken himself to God the Father in the Old Testament, separating light from darkness.\n\nWhat about Clyfford Still?\n\nHe came to New York from the Northwest and was, and remained, much more of an American American than any of the others, if you know what I mean. He withdrew from society, preferring to cultivate his recondite image in seclusion; it goes without saying that he became a kind of guru. Like Newman and Rothko, only more so, Still was reluctant to release his work into what he held to be a deeply flawed world\u2014for years he would neither exhibit nor sell any of those compellingly original paintings of his. To get a Still was a triumph.\n\nPollock was a Westerner, too\u2014born in Cody, Wyoming, and raised in Arizona and Northern and Southern California. He retained his enthusiasm for the West long after coming East\u2014he used to enjoy taking motor trips back there and watching the American Indians doing their sand paintings on the ground, which is supposed to have influenced his dripping. De Kooning called him \"the painting cowboy.\"\n\nLeo Castelli, who, as you know, was diplomatic to a fault, once went so far as to characterize the relationship between De Kooning and Pollock for me as \"friendship with enmity.\"\n\nHe was certainly in a position to know\u2014at one point, de Kooning was living in Leo's house in East Hampton, and Pollock was a frequent visitor. Was there competition? \"De Kooning\" may mean \"the king\" in Dutch, but it was Pollock who was in the lead, breaking through first to new artistic terrain.\n\nThere was also Franz Kline. He came from Pennsylvania coal-mining country, and he was a heavy drinker, though always geniality itself. He died relatively young, having in his last years turned to color, which, to me at least, meant he was losing it. I found his black-and-white abstractions much more dynamic and dramatic, more emotionally expressive\u2014the Zen-like brushstroke of that black and white was like a clash of forces. And I liked the early '50s better than the late. As for Adolph Gottlieb, he held steady doing his Pictographs and, after 1957, his Burst paintings, which are what he's now known and revered for\u2014they all have that sunlike disk that's an earnest of his identification with primitive art.\n\nWhere does De Kooning fit in?\n\nHere, there, and everywhere\u2014he exploded a number of bombshells, and he was actively painting into extreme old age. All the while, mind you, becoming a lesser artist\u2014some people think after the '70s, but I would say, really, after 1956, and that's a long way back. It's the year he finished his great Easter Monday, which the Met purchased while the paint was still wet\u2014its slashing brushwork caused the term \"action painting\" to be applied to the whole Abstract Expressionist movement. There's no denying he was a master at manipulating paint, a genius at texture, and remarkably personal in his touch and \"handwriting.\"\n\nWas he one of the artists you used to see regularly on the East Hampton beach in the '60s?\n\nNo, I never saw Bill de Kooning on the beach\u2014he didn't have what I call a blanket headquarters.\n\nA blanket headquarters?\n\nOn Georgica Beach and to a lesser degree on the Amagansett beach, there used to be power centers, which were these different blankets. Leo Castelli and his wife Toinie's was one, the dealer Ben Heller's another, the writer B. H. Friedman and his wife Abby's another . . . . My son, when he was four or five, used to go from blanket to blanket and get greeted on the beach. There was another group there as well, which entertained the artists\u2014people like the collectors Robert and Ethel Scull\u2014and at a certain point in our life in East Hampton, during one of our summers out there, I noticed that everybody had started talking about money. Speaking of which, since it's become all that anybody is interested in hearing about anymore, I sold the Sculls a great de Kooning in the late '60s\u2014an abstract landscape from 1955 called Police Gazette\u2014for $40,000; in 2006 the entertainment mogul David Geffen got $63.5 million for it from one of those big hedge-fund guys. Oh, and Bernard Reis and his wife were around a lot then, too\u2014he was the accountant to all the star artists who was later implicated in the Rothko scandal. Did you ever run across him?\n\nOnce\u2014in the mid-1970s, not all that long before he went on trial. It was at a dinner given by Tilly Losch, the viennese dancer and actress whom Cocteau had called the greatest performing artist since Duse, which she never let you forget. That, and the fact that she was the countess of Carnarvon\u2014divorced from the earl of, whose father had underwritten the unearthing of King Taut's tomb. The only other guest, aside from Reis's wife, was, oddly enough, Amy Vanderbilt, the then-reigning arbiter of etiquette\u2014the successor to emily post and the host of a program called the right thing to do. On the way down in the elevator she turned to me and said, \"it was very wrong of Tilly to invite me to dine with an accused criminal.\" I proceeded to walk Amy Vanderbilt home\u2014it seemed the \"right thing to do.\" she had a town house somewhere in the east 80s, and a couple of months after this she jumped out the window to her death\u2014from the second floor, as I recall, so it must have been a running jump.\n\nIt was maybe the longest-lasting trial in art history, and Reis was ultimately convicted\u2014of wasting the assets of the Rothko estate. He was de Kooning's accountant, too, by the way.\n\nDe Kooning is often quoted as having said, \"Jackson broke the ice.\"\n\nHe made that statement right after a great poured Pollock painting\u2014Autumn Rhythm, from 1950, with its wonderful whiplash energy\u2014was sold by the dealer Sidney Janis, the year after Pollock's death, to the Metropolitan Museum for $30,000, which was a huge sum at the time\u2014the most ever paid for an American painting. The part of the deal that people forget is that there was a previously bought black-and-white Pollock painting that the Met was allowed to return to Janis for a credit. Much later on, around 1980, the museum did give Pollock's widow, Lee Krasner, around a million dollars\u2014I helped to negotiate the sale\u2014for the 1943 oil Pasipha\u00EB, which I would not hesitate to describe as the first true masterwork of Abstract Expressionism. I mean, in that one painting we can observe classical mythology, Freudian and Jungian psychology, primitive art, and European Modernism all functioning together. It's not a drip picture, so I'd say it would go for only $50 million today. And I smile when I say \"only,\" because Pollock, though he was the most discussed artist probably in the world, sold very little during his lifetime. The highest price he ever got was $9,000\u2014for Blue Poles, the famous Blue Poles, from his first show at Janis, in 1952. Twenty years later it went to the Australian National Gallery for more than two million. Today, of course, we look at a Pollock as classic, but in the late '50s the work was still regarded as radical and extremist\u2014what we now see as lyrical was considered a wild man's dribblings, absolutely incomprehensible and perhaps even subversive.\n\nKrasner said somewhere, \"the arrogance, the blindness, was killing. not only the outside world but the art world itself.\"\n\nIt's perfectly true\u2014most writers on art at the time were indifferent, if not downright inimical, to the new wave. Fortunately, there was a small contingent of farseeing critics and dealers who championed them. The first as well as the fiercest and most responsive of them was Clement Greenberg, who wrote art criticism for the serious liberal magazines like The Nation and the Partisan Review and who was partial to Pollock. He and his fellow critic Harold Rosenberg, who favored de Kooning, dealt with these artists the way a European philosopher would\u2014say, someone like Sartre. They were Jewish American highbrows operating in the downtown world that was the underpinning of the intellectual life in New York, which then, as now, spilled over into the rest of the country. So they were in a good position to help put these artists on the map. Clement Greenberg pronounced Pollock the greatest painter to appear since Mir\u00F3, and for one of the Pollock exhibits he wrote that the most adventurous painters in Paris had begun to look to America with \"apprehensive rivalry.\" Nobody could have put it better.\n\nBut still nobody was buying.\n\nNobody except other artists. Alfonso Ossorio, for instance, was the main buyer of Pollock. He snapped up Lavender Mist for a song, and in 1976 he sold it to the National Gallery of Art in Washington for a little over two million. One of the other ones he owned\u2014he paid his and Pollock's mutual dealer, Betty Parsons, $1,800 for it\u2014was an upright drip painting from 1948 or '49 that had been damaged a little bit and that he sent back to Pollock to be repainted. He had it hanging in The Creeks, his house in East Hampton, which now belongs to the billionaire Ronald Perelman. That painting eventually went to Baron L\u00E9on Lambert in Brussels, and David Geffen ended up owning it\u2014it's the one he reportedly sold for $140 million. Just think of it\u2014$1,800 to $140 million!\n\nAs the coauthor of the four-volume Jackson Pollock catalogue raisonn\u00E9, what did you think of the biopic?\n\nI thought Ed Harris's portrayal of Pollock was brilliant. Lee Krasner was portrayed from a time before I knew her, when she was what you would now have to call a kind of enabler of that troubled giant, but I have the feeling that the actress captured her very well. Some of the dialogue was pretty stupid: It has her saying things like\u2014when he drips a little paint\u2014\"You've done it, Pollock. You've cracked it wide open.\" And they had Clement Greenberg being played by somebody who was imitating Oscar Wilde, a sort of sybaritic, effeminate character, so they certainly didn't get that right. And Val Kilmer was de Kooning. And the Victoria's Secret model Stephanie Seymour was Helen Frankenthaler! But on the whole, I found it to be a good rendition of an artist going through what Pollock went through\u2014sitting there on the floor endlessly waiting for the inspiration to start that mural for the foyer of Peggy Guggenheim's town house, and then, finally, doing it, in one frenzied session.\n\nAnd today you have a Pollock hanging in your own foyer\u2014I couldn't help noticing that you've moved it to the stairwell since the last time I was in your apartment. How many have you had?\n\nTwo major drawings and a sketchbook, but this is the only Pollock oil on canvas that I've ever owned myself. The Museum of Modern Art used to have a thing called the Art Lending Service, which took paintings on consignment from prominent galleries. Museum members could rent any of these pictures for as long as three months, at the end of which they would have to decide whether or not they wanted to buy them, and then the rent they'd paid would be deducted from the purchase price. Well, it was a trustee\u2014none other than Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III, the great Blanchette\u2014who took this Pollock home. She was paying her $10 a month, or whatever it was, to rent it, and then at some point she decided to keep it\u2014the price was $150. This was in the early '50s, when Pollock was still very much alive\u2014in fact, he's said to have gone up to her at some function or other and told her she looked \"like a million bucks.\" Anyway, John D. III didn't like this kind of art, so Blanchette had made a little gallery of her own, down in the basement of their house on the Hudson, and it was there that she kept this Pollock and some other Abstract Expressionist pictures that she had. And I succeeded in buying it from her estate in the early '90s\u2014for, I might add, a hefty sum. Which goes to show that the old Art Lending Service wasn't such a bad place to find a good work of art."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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