Jackson Pollock died on the night of 11 August 1956, when his Oldsmobile convertible left Fireplace Road in Springs, on Long Island, less than a mile from his house. He was 44, he was at the wheel, and he had been drinking all day.
Ruth Kligman, his lover, survived the crash. Her friend Edith Metzger died with him. His wife, the painter Lee Krasner, was in Paris.
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The crash is the famous part. What is far less known is that Pollock had once stopped drinking.
From 1948 to 1950, the years the world finally noticed him, he was "mostly on the wagon and in fine trim," in the words of the novelist John Updike. It ended in November 1950, on a cold day, with a film crew in the yard.
Fame came in those years. In August 1949 Life magazine ran a feature on him under the headline "Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" In 1950 Harper's Bazaar published Hans Namuth's photographs of him at work. The man the country was being asked to admire was sober for all of it.
I think that is where the wreck on Fireplace Road really began, years before the car.
What You'll Discover
What he did when the filming stopped.
Where his wife was that night.
Who was in the car with him.
Whether the crash was an accident.
What his first retrospective left out.