Issue #33, November 10, 2006

Selling a Pollock

$140 Million Would Make It the Biggest Sale in History

By Dan Rattiner

The New York Times is reporting that last week Hollywood music billionaire David Geffen sold a Jackson Pollock painting that he owns to financier David Martinez for $140 million. The painting is a drip painting called No. 5, 1948 and was created either in Jackson’s studio on Springs Fireplace Road in East Hampton, or on the back lawn between the house and Accabonac Harbor. It was, apparently, the fifth painting he did during 1948. Martinez has not yet confirmed the sale, so it may or may not be true, but if it is, it will be the largest sum ever paid for a painting in the history of the world.

The summer of 1948 was the fifth year that Jackson lived full time in the house in East Hampton. He continued to live there for the next eight years until the summer of 1956 when he died in an automobile accident on that road while en route to a homecoming party for Alfonso Ossorio, who had recently returned from a trip to the Philippines. The party took place at Ossorio’s house overlooking Georgica Pond without Jackson Pollock present. Where was he?

Pollock lived those first few years in East Hampton in about as hard circumstances as one could imagine. He had almost no money. The house was nice enough but it had no central heating and no indoor plumbing. It also wasn’t even his. The house was arranged for Pollock to live in by art gallery owner Peggy Guggenheim of New York City, who felt he would benefit from peace and quiet in a small town. She paid the rent. And she paid him a monthly stipend. In return, she got a percentage of whatever he made by selling any of the paintings he did while out there. It was an odd arrangement, but it worked and it would last for a number of years.

Jackson Pollock lived in this house with his girlfriend, a Brooklyn girl named Lee Krasner whom he had met in Greenwich Village. Both painted and both were members of the New York City art community. They were married here in 1945.

In 1948, in East Hampton, there lived about 150 members of this bohemian art community from New York City. The community of Springs, where almost all of them rented or built homes, depending upon their circumstances, was at that time populated by about 1,500 baymen, their wives and their families who called themselves Bonackers. They clammed, they fished, they haulseined, which was a unique way of taking fish from the sea, they were dirt farmers and blue-collar workers and boat captains. An insular group, they occupied small homes in the area, lived hand-to-mouth, and did the same work their fathers and their father’s fathers did before them, going back 300 years. They either developed a dislike or became fond of some of the city bohemians in their midst, and often traded stories with them at some of the local hangouts.

They also traded merchandise for paintings. Jackson Pollock famously traded paintings with a man named Miller who owned a general store, receiving groceries in return. Peggy Guggenheim knew nothing of this.

Five years after Pollock’s death, I drove up to the Springs to interview some of the Bonackers about Jackson Pollock. I went to a bar called Jungle Pete’s on Fort Pond Boulevard where, I was told, Pollock frequently hung out. It was a fifteen-minute walk to the house. If you were sober. About a dozen people were at the bar there when I walked in.

One Bonacker told me he went over to wake Pollock up one morning and simply walked into his studio, calling his name several times, before realizing that a. Pollock was not in the studio, and b. he had just tracked his muddy feet across a still wet drip painting that was lying on the floor.

Later, he told Pollock what happened, and Pollock told him “oh, don’t worry about it, it probably improved it.”

You can visit the home of Jackson Pollock and his wife Lee today. It’s open on the weekends and by appointment during the week about six months of the year. It is closed in the heart of the winter. One of the more interesting things you will find there in this home is a recessed set of speakers in the living room wall, including a tweeter, several midranges and a big woofer. There is also a Garrard turntable and amplifier, if not the exact original the Pollocks owned, at least two like them. Jackson Pollock liked to paint with records playing very loud.

$140 million is a whole lot of money. It is more than the gross national product of several Pacific Island nations and at least four countries in Africa. Several Major League Baseball stadiums have recently been built for not much more than $140 million.

David Geffen, the record mogul, had, for a long time, a vacation home on Hook Pond in East Hampton. He didn’t use it much, but it does make one wonder where he might have picked up that painting and for how much. It would also be interesting to know if there are any footprints running along a part of “No. 5, 1948.”