9/10/2023 0 Comments Freedom care manhattanGreenberg, Krasner, and Pollock-one of the most famous troikas of modern American art-drove over together to Pearce’s house. Feeling that this violent and ugly fighting would end up killing his friends, Greenberg insisted that Krasner see an analyst immediately, and he contacted Jane Pearce, hostess and mentor to his own therapist. “Jackson was in a rage at her from morning till night,” Greenberg recalled. Their house was a war zone, with a drunk, angry, and highly abusive Pollock tearing into Krasner all the time. In the midst of this crisis, Greenberg became the constant weekend guest of Pollock and Krasner so that he could continue seeing his therapist, Ralph Klein. You’re no good’ . . . So Pollock, who has had the assurance and confidence and backing of both Clem and Lee, has a nervous breakdown, and he starts drinking again.” “So, Clem, who created the myth of Pollock-‘this is the greatest living American painter’-goes out there and says, ‘You’ve lost it, Jackson,’” said Barbara Rose, who was a close friend of Krasner’s. Greenberg was unimpressed, describing Pollock’s 1954 show at the Janis Gallery as “forced, pumped, dressed up.” His review seemed to imply that Pollock had lost his way: Pollock “found himself straddled between the easel picture and something else hard to define, and in the last two or three years he has pulled back.” In the same essay, Greenberg seemed to place the crown of America’s preeminent painter on the head of Clyfford Still, calling him “one of the most important and original painters of our time.” Isn’t that what artists needed to do in order to unlock the full extent of their talent? It was easy to believe that a man (in those days, artists were usually men) who timidly obeyed middle-class convention in his personal life might also limit himself and fail to realize his potential in his artistic life. These were people who, after all, were questioning virtually every assumption in art: Does art have to represent something? Do I need to paint on an easel? Do I need to paint with a brush? Do I need paint at all? And so it seemed quite natural for them to question the traditional assumptions of mainstream American life: What is marriage? What is family? Is sexual fidelity necessary? Psychotherapy appeared to offer the prospect of tapping into the world of the unconscious and freeing the repressed forces and desires that lay buried there. It was natural for artists to turn to therapy as part of a process of contending with-or throwing off-their past and remaking themselves into the people they wanted to become. Psychotherapy and art in the 1950s were a good fit. This group was composed almost entirely of high-performing urban professionals-doctors, lawyers, computer programmers, successful artists and writers, professors-who went to normal jobs by day but returned in the evening to a very different and highly secretive world built around fellowship, polygamous sex, radical politics, and political theater.ĭuring its different phases the Sullivan Institute encapsulated many of the major themes-and pitfalls-of twentieth-century counterculture. Yet most of the era’s communes-an estimated three thousand in the 1960s and ’70s-lived in isolation in such places as rural Oregon and Vermont. In one sense, the group partook of the counterculture of the 1960s, the decade of sexual liberation and communal living. Under the direction of their therapists, the Sullivanians were trying to create a utopian world based on the principles of free love, collective living, self-actualization, and a commitment to socialism. They created a parallel world, living by precise rules and precepts almost entirely at odds with those of mainstream society. Its creators, the married psychotherapists Saul Newton and Jane Pearce, were influenced by the neo-Freudian psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan, who believed that psychological problems were inherently about interpersonal relationships. Founded in 1957, the Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis was a utopian community of a few hundred people in which therapists and their patients lived alongside each other in large group apartments. I had been living on the Upper West Side for decades when, in the 2010s, I realized I had been entirely unaware of what was, in effect, an alternate society in our midst, hidden in plain sight.
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