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But it is a bit suspicious that some versions of the story have him walking into the room naked, while others have him clothed and simply unzipping his fly. And though it’s the one story everyone seems to know about Pollock, there is not a single eyewitness account of the 38 Chapter Three incident. Nor has anyone ever said what he did next: Did he pass out in front of the fireplace, did he slug one of the guests, did he proposition the hostess? It would have been a hard act to follow. Whatever the true story behind the creation and hanging of the Guggenheim mural, it remains a seminal work in both Pollock’s oeuvre and the history of art.

One of the immediate effects was the winding down of the Federal Art Project, known by then as the Program, which had come under mounting attack as the exigencies of war increasingly required that resources be allocated elsewhere. After a brief period working under Krasner doing window displays for the Program’s War Services Division, and another stint as a “trainee in aviation sheet metal,” Pollock was let go, along with all the other Program artists, in January 1943. He had already been classified 4F—unfit to serve in the armed forces—due to his alcoholism and depressive illness.

In July, Pollock knocked down a wall between his and Krasner’s studios in their Eighth Street apartment to create a big enough space for a twentyfoot-long painting; he bought the canvas, he bought the paint. But for weeks, then months, according to Krasner, nothing at all happened with the mural. When his show at Art of This Century came down and there was still no sign of it, the story goes, Guggenheim began to complain, to expostulate, to make the sort of imperious threats for which she was notorious.