It’s Time To Call A Murderer A Murderer
In the run up to their 1998 Jackson Pollock retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the show’s curator received a disturbing letter from a Mr Metzger. Metzger wanted to know, “Why are you honoring the man who murdered my sister?”
If you know anything at all about Pollock the artist then you probably know he died famously in a car crash, aged 44 August of 1956. He’s mentioned in the same breath with other famous mavericks who likewise died in car accidents, Tom Mix, Steve Prefontaine and (need I even say it?) James Dean. Yet what sets Pollock’s death apart from those others was that he didn’t die alone. He had two women with him, his mistress, who survived, and her friend Edith Metzger, who did not.
That Pollock was drunk, that Ms Metzger became terrified of his recklessness and repeatedly screamed for him to stop – at one point actually exiting the car and then being coaxed back in with intimidation and threats – certainly does not militate in Pollock’s favor. Had Jackson Pollock survived the crash he almost certainly would have been tried for second degree murder. He was rescued from this inglorious consequence by dying himself.
Yet this part of the Pollock story is seldom told, and whenever it is, it is usually told with a dispassionate and baffling absence of moral denunciation. Men of accomplishment are often forgiven their sins, sometimes even if their sins include murder, (and let’s face it, it’s usually men.) Ordinary murderers are justly treated like the scum they are. Why are some murderers (and other kinds of evildoers) too frequently immune because of their fame or status? The artist Caravaggio murdered a man in cold blood with a sword, yet he remains, in our minds, a great artist. Why?
Why, for instance, does the word “reverend” in front of a name so often miraculously transform its wearer from a rogue, into a person whose opinions and values we are expected to take seriously, when he’d be more at home screaming on a street corner and holding a tin cup? Why are titles moral antiseptics, like “chairman,” “prime minister” or “president?” Why do we so frequently let these bastards off the hook?