Jackson Pollock's death, recalled by Rabo Karabekian, is both a specific 1956 car crash and a recurring point in Rabo's account of friendship, bereavement, and the limits of artistic explanation. Pollock drove into a tree while drunk on a deserted road; the death entered Rabo's life alongside Terry Kitchen's suicide and the collapse of his own family and paintings, but Rabo ultimately rejected the idea that these violent deaths were caused by art.

Circumstances and Immediate Aftermath

In Rabo's roll-call of painter friends who died by suicide or other violent means, Pollock's death is precisely situated: in 1956, while drunk, he drove his car into a tree along a deserted road. Rabo notes that it happened shortly before his first wife and children left him. Three weeks later, Terry Kitchen died by suicide, making Pollock's death the first in a closely spaced sequence of losses that Rabo would revisit in conversation.

The account also gives the crash a local witness and aftermath. Gerald Hildreth, a local taxi driver who had formerly served on the Rescue Squad, found Pollock's body sixty feet from where the car had hit the tree. Rabo later places Hildreth in the grim sequence of responses to both Pollock's crash and Kitchen's death. The detail makes the death part of the community's lived history as well as of the painters' story: Hildreth's ordinary local role carried him into the aftermath of events Rabo calls part of art history.

Friendship and the Three Musketeers

Back when Pollock, Kitchen, and Rabo all lived in New York City, the three heavy drinkers were known at the Cedar Tavern as the Three Musketeers. Rabo later qualifies the name. It described their drinking, he says, not a shared commitment to painting; they might just as well have been plumbers. Their companionship had already faded whenever one or more of them stopped drinking, and Rabo says they had ceased to be friends long before Pollock and Kitchen died.

This distinction shapes Rabo's account of bereavement. When Circe Berman raises the deaths, Rabo denies that he was struck by Pollock and Kitchen's deaths in the way her phrase suggests. His stated response was to become a hermit for about eight years. The account does not erase the deaths' place in his history, but it refuses to equate a shared public nickname with enduring intimacy or a unified artistic fellowship.

Losses in Rabo's Retrospective

Pollock's death returns in Rabo's recollection of the period when his life was coming apart. When his wife and children left, they took the portraits he had painted for them by cutting the pictures from the Sheetrock; the empty house contained two large square holes. Rabo tells Circe that Pollock and Kitchen had died only a few weeks earlier and that his own paintings were falling apart. He stops before completing his thought about the two holes, then, prompted to finish, compares the loneliness of that moment with what his father must have felt after the massacre left him alone in his village.

The comparison does not make Pollock's death the cause of Rabo's family separation or failing paintings. Instead, it shows how the deaths recur in Rabo's memory as part of a cluster of losses: the deaths of companions, the departure of his family, and the disintegration of his work. The scene's interruption and eventual completion make the association visible without turning it into a simple explanation.

Art, Death, and the Limits of Explanation

Rabo repeatedly lists Pollock's death among the deaths of successful or soon-to-be-successful painter friends. In a later conversation with Circe, he again names the sequence: Arshile Gorky died by hanging in 1948, Pollock died in a drunk-driving crash in 1956, Kitchen died by suicide shortly afterward, and Mark Rothko died by suicide in 1970. The list gives Pollock's death a place in a melancholy history of the Abstract Expressionist circle, while Rabo resists the suggestion that the deaths were artistic acts or consequences of artistic practice.

His conclusion is emphatic: the violent deaths, like the men's drinking, had nothing to do with their painting. That assertion sits beside his earlier admission that he had never understood the dramatic necessity Marilee saw in suicide, and his description of his own response as retreat into hermit-like isolation. Pollock's death therefore remains significant without becoming a theory of the artist: it is a concrete loss in Rabo's social and personal history, while the meaning of that loss is shaped by his insistence on separating life, drinking, and death from the work of painting.