Jackson Pollock Biography--Just Too Personal? : Art: The authors see his drip painting style as emanating from childhood experiences. Some formalists are outraged by the psychological theorizing.

“Jackson Pollock: An American Saga,” an epic biography of a troubled artist, hit the bookshops only this week, but the lines of criticism are firmly drawn.

On one side are formalists who object to analyzing Pollock’s art in terms of his inadequate personality and untidy life. Reviewing the book for the New York Times, Elizabeth Frank took this art-for-art-sake’s point of view. Warning against accepting Pollock’s statement that his work came from his unconscious--and not from earlier forms of art--she said the collaborative style of authors Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith is “based on the kind of glib, reckless, off-the-rack psychobiography that is dazzling in its lack of speculative humility and intellectual caution.”

On the other side are such critics as Peter Schjeldahl who not only approve of mixing art with life but rave about Naifeh and Smith’s tell-all approach. “This great biography doubles as the best thing ever written about the native roots and cosmopolitan strivings of American modern art. . . . The book read like a novel, only better--because it is true, and its truth is so significant,” Schjeldahl wrote in Elle magazine.

At the center of the controversy are two authors who spent eight years conducting more than 2,000 interviews and writing a 934-page book that will surely be required reading for students of the Abstract Expressionist period. Naifeh and Smith, whose books include “Culture Making: Money, Success and the New York Art World” and “The Mormon Murders,” have compiled a staggering amount of research on American art’s search for its identity in the ‘40s and ‘50s, as well as reams of information on Pollock and his family.

This research is not the source of the controversy. The problem, as purists see it, is the authors’ psychological approach to Pollock’s art. And the really big problem is that they see his drip paintings as reflecting his fears about masculine potency and his obsession with urination--dating back to a childhood memory of watching his father urinating on a rock in a field.

“Standing over the canvas, flinging a stream of paint from the end of a stick, Jackson found the potency that had eluded him in real life,” Naifeh and Smith write. “When a woman asked him, ‘How do you know when you’re finished (with a painting)?’ Jackson replied, ‘How do you know when you’re finished making love?’ ”

“People seem to think we dreamed up this notion of relating urination to the drip painting, but the incident of watching his father urinate on rock existed,” Smith said. “All we really are saying is that, for Jackson, it made a connection and that the act of dripping paint on a canvas had that psychological resonance--by his own admission.

“What we did discover was that he had a lifelong obsession with urination. He used to follow the paths of horses’ urine. He urinated on the Prometheus statue in Rockefeller Center. And everybody knows he urinated in flowerpots and Peggy Guggenheim’s fireplace. When you begin to ask questions, then the pieces begin to relate to each other,” Smith said.

Pollock was an artist who couldn’t draw by conventional standards. He was also a wretchedly frustrated man who spent much of his life roaring drunk, never resolved his sexuality, clung to his strong-willed mother and abused his long-suffering wife, Lee Krasner, before dying in a 1956 automobile accident that is widely considered to have been suicide. Though much of this is not news to art aficionados, some critics of the new biography say that by exposing all these frailties the authors have demeaned Pollock’s intelligence and his art.

“That’s baloney,” Smith said.

“Some educated people have a hard time seeing that people can be intelligent without being verbal, without being articulate, without being logical, that there is an intelligence that is intuitive and emotional and visual without being translated into words,” Naifeh said. “What’s wonderful about Jackson is the triumph over vulgarity of human life and his own desires and the coarseness and brutishness of his own life to create these incredible, lyrical, magical images. Jackson took the most tormented aspects of his daily life and worked them into his masterpieces.”

“His art was the only way he could resolve his inadequacies as a human being,” Smith added.

Both authors believe that Pollock is the most important American artist in the 20th Century. Naifeh, who did graduate work in art history at Harvard University, had been a Pollock fan since he was 12 years old and copied one of his works in an art class. Smith, on the other hand, began the project as a skeptic but was persuaded of Pollock’s importance by studying his paintings.

“We’re both big fans of biography and we wanted to do a book that we could invest all of ourselves in,” Naifeh said. “I have always been interested in how childhood experience affects human behavior. My art training at Harvard and Princeton suggested that we do an artist. Once that decision was made, it wasn’t that hard to arrive at Jackson Pollock. In the 20th Century, Picasso is the only other artist who seems to have turned his artistic predecessors on their heads.

“A perfect artist subject should have enormous influence on other artists, should have to his credit works of extraordinary importance and also lead an interesting life, a dramatic life and a life that in some ways had impact on the making of the art, so that one isn’t just telling the life for curiosity reasons but because it in some way informs your experience of the achievement.”

The authors blame much of the flak on a predominance of “puffery” in the art press and “an anti-biographical bias in the art field.”

“There’s very little written about incredibly important artists,” added Naifeh. “And because it’s never done, it seems unethical. Fifty percent of the people we talked to spent all of their spare time gossiping about everybody else’s sex life, but the idea that you would actually talk about sex in a book, no matter how relevant that might be to the works of art, is somehow unseemly. The ironies are not subtle.

“We knew we would get flak from certain quarters for writing a book that was readable. There’s no jargon in it. That’s one reason for the record number of notes. We knew that we had to document everything in a book as novelistic in tone as this is. Someone writing about a literary figure would be excused the effort to make the product a literary experience in its own right, whereas the art world will not make such allowances.”

Besieged as they may be by discussions of their work, the authors seem sure to make it a financial success. Though their $22,000 advance paid only about one-fifth of their expenses, they have sold film rights to the book to Keith Barish Productions for $700,000, the authors say. Jeffrey Potter, a writer and friend of Pollock, is trying to prevent the making of the film, claiming that Naifeh and Smith have infringed his copyright on his oral biography of Pollock, “To a Violent Grave,” published in 1985.

Naifeh and Smith have filed suit against Potter for “interference with business relations.” The authors, who are both lawyers, say that Potter has no copyright interest because his book is formed entirely of quotations. “You have no copyright interest in what other people have said to you,” Smith said.

Barish’s assistant said that the producer was “hopeful” that the copyright matter “would be resolved soon.”

Meanwhile, the art world is already speculating on who will play Pollock in the film. Robert Duvall, Jack Nicholson, John Malkovich and Harrison Ford are all on the list. Naifeh and Smith have even given some thought to the actress who will play Lee Krasner. They see Meryl Streep as a possibility and Bette Midler as an interesting offbeat choice. “But no one is asking us,” Smith said.