Sebastian Smee, who wrote about Jackson Pollock in “The Art of Rivalry,” reconstructed the story of the Isaacs family’s relationship with Pollock and subsequent art theft from interviews over more than three years with Merry White, her siblings and lawyer George Abrams, contemporaneous notes, unpublished letters, archival newspaper accounts and court records.
Decades after a brazen art theft drove Merry White’s father to despair, federal agents closed in on one last missing work. For White, the search is personal.
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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.
“Number 7, 1951,” as the painting is titled, is from a brief period near the end of Pollock’s life when he was experimenting again with figurative art. On the right you can make out a female-looking figure with a face divided, almost in the manner of late Pablo Picasso. Her body is crudely drawn, shaded with a welter of different-size dots. The work’s left side, meanwhile, is a thicket of tilting verticals punctuated by driplike splotches — not unlike the “poles” in Pollock’s “Blue Poles.”
"Number 7, 1951" by Jackson Pollock. (Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society)
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.
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.
Married American painters Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner enter the barn door of their studio in Springs, New York. (Tony Vaccaro/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
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