The hunt for a stolen Jackson Pollock — and answers to a family’s pain
The Emotional Core
Merry White crumpled to the gallery floor. She had been walking around the East Building at the National Gallery of Art in 1984 when she’d suddenly found herself standing in front of a painting by Jackson Pollock. She recognized the work — a 1951 painting in black enamel on canvas, splashy but not abstract — and was suddenly so overwhelmed that she felt her legs about to give way.
The Controversy & Comment Hooks
But here's where it gets controversial: White knew "Number 7, 1951" intimately because her father, Reginald Isaacs, had acquired the painting directly from Pollock. It used to hang over her bed when she was a child. This raises the question: How should we interpret the emotional traces left by a Jackson Pollock painting in a family's life? Should we dwell on the negative associations or wish the whole episode to vanish, leaving no trace?
The Story Unfolds
White — who goes by "Corky" because her mother was a painting student at Washington’s Corcoran Institute when she had her — remembers resenting its presence there. Like any teenage girl, she would have preferred to decorate her bedroom with her own things. But her discomfit was more acute than that. The painting reminded her of the man who had created it — a man whose intense anger and volatility had made family visits to his house profoundly uncomfortable.
In the late 1940s and early ’50s, she, her parents and two younger brothers used to visit Pollock and his wife, the painter Lee Krasner, at their home in Springs, an artsy hamlet in East Hampton, Long Island. On those visits, Pollock was often drunk and sometimes violent. Being in the same house as him, White felt vulnerable and unprotected. But she felt she could not communicate this, because her parents were so proud of their friendship.
"Dad was always interested in proximity to fame," remembers White. "He wore his proximity to Pollock like a medal." So "Number 7, 1951" stayed on the wall above her bed.
If the painting triggered unpleasant childhood memories, it also triggered memories of the days and weeks after an afternoon in 1973 when thieves broke into her parents’ apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and stole "Number 7, 1951," along with two other paintings by Pollock. One of those works, a combination of paint and collaged ink drawings called "Painting 1028," 1948, is still missing. Eric Gleason of Olney Gleason, which represents Pollock’s estate, told The Washington Post that depending on several factors, especially its condition, the missing artwork could be valued at up to $20 million.
The feeling White had that day in the National Gallery was overwhelming. A guard who saw her sit down on the gallery floor walked over to check if she was all right. When she told him the painting used to hang over her bed, he looked at White, she recalls, as if she were "a nutcase."
But he seemed to believe her after she stood up and showed him the label, which had her father’s name on it: Reginald Isaacs.
The Complex Relationship with Pollock
Jackson Pollock continues to divide people. He is one of the most important American cultural figures of the 20th century — as influential as Marlon Brando, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday or Frank Sinatra. Yet even today, when people stand in front of Pollock’s paintings, they’re often unsure about what to make of what they’re looking at.
One way to think of Pollock’s paintings is as traces of a sequence of actions. In one sense, a painting is always a "trace." It’s what remains after someone applies a paint-loaded brush to canvas. But Pollock dramatized this action-based aspect of creation. Placing his canvases on the floor of his studio, he used a stick or turkey baster to flick and drip liquid paint onto them, as if he were drawing in the air above the canvas and letting gravity do the rest. Because he moved his entire body as he performed these actions, the finished paintings are sometimes described as a kind of index to a physical performance — a performance that was liberated, explosive and more instinctual than intentional. Pollock was treating the canvas as "an arena in which to act," as the critic Harold Rosenberg put it.
The Theft and Its Aftermath
The Isaacs family’s apartment was in Riverview, a large block at a 180-degree bend in the Charles River in Cambridge. In 1973, when the theft took place, Reginald Isaacs was a professor at Harvard University. Though trained as an architect, he became an internationally recognized expert in regional planning.
The two men maintained their friendship even as Pollock rocketed to fame. No American artist before Pollock had experienced anything like the level of exposure that came to him when Life magazine published an Aug. 8, 1949, story under the headline: "Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?"
But celebrity was a mixed blessing for Pollock. Although he craved recognition, he wasn’t mentally equipped to cope with sudden fame. Nor did the renown bring instant wealth. Pollock and Krasner continued to struggle financially. Isaacs acquired more artwork. At one time, according to Mark Isaacs, he was in possession of "Lavender Mist," one of Pollock’s most celebrated canvases, also now in the National Gallery of Art. But he came to feel that he couldn’t afford the $150-a-month payments to the artist. When, on a visit to Springs, he admitted as much to Pollock, the painter took Isaacs into the studio, pulled out a portfolio of works on paper and helped his friend pick out three more affordable things to replace "Lavender Mist."
The Recovery of the Paintings
After hearing word of the crash, Isaacs rushed to Springs. He walked down to the beach with Krasner and five or six other people who knew the couple. They all sat on the sand in a circle trying to figure out what to do. Isaacs then walked back up to the house alone and went to the old barn converted by Pollock into a studio to have a final look.
In 1973, the National Gallery of Australia purchased Pollock’s "Blue Poles" (originally known as "Number 11, 1952") for a whopping $1.3 million — a sum so outrageous it smashed the record for a contemporary American painting and required sign-off by Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. The ensuing scandal fed into a narrative about his government’s financial mismanagement and ended with Whitlam’s downfall amid a constitutional crisis in 1975. "Never had such a picture moved and disturbed the Australian public," said art historian Patrick McCaughey.
The sale of "Blue Poles" kicked off a period of dramatic increases in valuations of modern art. Pollock’s works have typified that explosion: In 2015, billionaire Kenneth Griffin reportedly paid $200 million for "Number 17A," a 1948 painting by Pollock.
The Missing Painting
Now only one of the three Pollock paintings stolen from Riverview remained missing: "Painting 1028," 1948.
Merry White is now a professor emerita of anthropology at Boston University and an authority on food culture. Although Merry has mostly tried to forget Pollock, she inherited his record collection and various other low-value items, including letters to her father by Pollock, from Isaacs. Meanwhile, she can’t help but be acutely conscious that if the third work were recovered, she and her children — and possibly their children — might be financially secure for life.
This prospect became a distinct possibility in 2014 when a special agent for Homeland Security Investigations in Paris received a tip from a source, representing an organization in possession of stolen artworks willing to return them in exchange for compensation.
The missing Pollock painting, "Painting 1028," 1948, is still missing. Merry White’s younger brothers, Mark and Henry, both took up painting (Henry Isaacs is a well-known Vermont-based painter), and both speak about the influence Pollock had on their art. Although Merry has mostly tried to forget Pollock, she inherited his record collection and various other low-value items, including letters to her father by Pollock, from Isaacs.
