Jackson Pollock: an American Genius.

Jackson Pollock: An American Genius, by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith (Clarkson Potter, 944 pp., $27.95)

WHY WRITE THE biography of an artist? Surely the work speaks for itself? Not quite. Biographers gravitate to artists out of the belief that what artists create can only be adequately explained by studying their lives.

By that rule of thumb, Jackson Pollock must be a fascinating artist indeed. Considered strictly as a painter, he certainly is. After forty years, his classic drip pictures, in which he poured pigment on the floor-bound canvas rather than apply it with a brush in the traditional manner, remain powerful enigmas, at once transparently simple and more than the sum of their parts.

But as a person? That's a different matter. Like other troubled artists, Pollock created paintings that were radiant exceptions to an otherwise ugly life. The story is a familiar one by now: the moody, insecure, but ambitious artist, so shy he can hardly bring himself to speak, so arrogant he disparages his betters, rises to the top of the heap with an important artistic breakthrough and, unable to take the celebrity or develop his insight, destroys himself through drink. As an artist Pollock is interesting; as a person he's pathetic.

There are some half-dozen biographies or biographical studies on him already in print, with more to come. The latest is surely the most complete. It is also, without a doubt, the worst, most disreputable biography of the artist to date--another example of the degraded condition of the entire genre.

Reviewing a bland life of Pollock two years ago, I cited an essay by Brian O'Doherty from American Masters: The Voice and the Myth in Modern Art as an example of good writing on the painter. Admittedly, O'Doherty's essay is more monographic than strictly biographical--an artist and critic, his interest lies in the relationship between public persona and finished work. What is notable in O'Doherty's view of Pollock is precisely that--it is a view. O'Doherty sees Pollock in terms of a "fusion of certain American (noble savage and frontiersman) and modern (artist-outcast) legends."

Modern art, since World War II, has been more thoroughly documented than any other period in art history. Turn to a Renaissance artist, for example, and there's a good chance of coming up with a document--a contract, a letter, a marriage certificate --that will materially alter the established view of him. This isn't true of art produced since 1940. Every phase, encounter, influence, conversation, exhibition, love affair, and more is documented almost as soon as it happens. It is remembered and passed on by generations of lovers current and past, studio assistants, dealers, critics, graduate students, academics, and hangers-on.

Now one would think that a writer's response to this overabundance of information would be to follow along the lines of someone like Brian O'Doherty, namely to try to make something out of it all. In fact, it seems to be an authors' rule in biographies of artists to avoid such a hazardous course at all costs. Instead, they follow one of two roads, sometimes both: they add even more information to the pile, thus merely enlarging on the picture of the subject; or they come up with an angle we haven't heard about, one too inconsequential to alter our existing view of the artist, but scandalous enough to ensure the book sufficient publicity and sales.

The authors of this latest Pollock biography have done both. They have packed their book with inconsequential detail, the kind of stuff that allows them to claim to have produced the most comprehensive life of the artist to date. And they have manufactured a scandal.

On the detail: is it really necessary to know that Mondrian repeatedly scratched his chin while evaluating an early Pollock for possible inclusion in a show at Peggy Guggenheim's gallery? Or that the young Pollock boys used old Sears Roebuck catalogues for toilet paper? Not only is this sort of thing superfluous, it's boring; the kind of wasteful drain on the narrative flow that leads the reader to despair of learning anything really useful about the subject, let alone of reading the book to the end.

On the "scandal": the authors have resorted to the most lurid accusation of all: that Pollock was a homosexual. It was this, rather than low self-esteem stemming from a troubled childhood (the usual explanation), that prompted his insatiable appetite for alcohol. They even have him hanging around gay bars and mysteriously being hauled off in the middle of the night, on more than one occasion, by a shadowy male cabal and raped.

This is all pretty degrading, to be sure, although in a way it comes as no surprise. Once Picasso, whose appetite for women was legendary, was tagged a homosexual (as Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington did recently), it became open season on all artists. No matter that Pollock, drunk as he was most of the time, was hardly in a position to do anything to anybody.

But there is more--or less. Inevitably with a life of Pollock, one has to somehow explain the drip technique, or at least discuss it in a way that doesn't make it sound mindless. The ability to do so amounts to a kind of litmus test for any Pollock biographer.

Naifeh and Smith fail this test miserably. They give a good enough description of the process of drip-painting (although in too much detail). When the time comes to account for its origins biographically, in terms of some episode or impulse of the subject's life, their account--and the technique--turns to farce. The source of Pollock's dripping, they tell us, was the memory of his father urinating on the flat rocks of the West in which he grew up. Ironically, this is not the first time abstract expressionism has been equated with relieving oneself.

In a series of paintings coyly entitled the Oxidation Series, Andy Warhol and his assistants urinated on canvas covered with a metallic ground, later exhibiting the greenish spatters as genuine abstract paintings. Warhol's intention, of course, was to mock, in the most visceral way possible, abstract-expressionist heroics, which he loathed, and the whole notion of non-objective art, as well as to make a fool of the viewer.

Naifeh and Smith's intention isn't the same, of course, but it amounts to the same thing: trivializing and rendering absurd the processes of modern art, and by extension debunking modernism generally. It's the anti-intellectual's approach, the "my six-year-old child could do this" attitude expressed in a different form.

Their approach, along with the sensationalism and diligent gathering of details, shows that these two authors have nothing remotely important to say about their subject, and aren't even interested in it in any real sense. Pollock the man as the key to the artist doesn't interest them. It's his club foot they want to probe, and when they can't find one, they manufacture it. Jackson Pollock: An American Genius is a portrait of the artist as a buffoon.

Mr. Eric Gibson is the art critic of the Washington Times.