Phenomenal Paul Jenkins

The story begins like any other New York art story of the midcentury: the young Missourian Paul Jenkins, a GI Biller at the Art Students League on West Fifty-seventh Street, encounters the work of Jackson Pollock and resolves to accept its "cataclysmic challenge." On its face, this makes for an unremarkable addition to the era's litany of dewy-eyed novices galvanized by Pollock's explosive theatrics. But Jenkins is tied up with Pollock in unusual ways. In the spring of 1956 Jenkins, who had by this time moved to Paris, shown solo in New York, and exhibited at MoMA visited Pollock at his studio on Long Island. He left him with a copy of Herrigel's Zen in the Art of Archery, still retrievable on the shelves of the Pollock-Krasner house in Springs. A few months later, Lee Krasner was traveling through Europe and decided to stay a while at Jenkins's studio on the rue Decrès. There, she received a phone call from Clement Greenberg informing her that Pollock had died.