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Though Willem de Kooning was distraught after the funeral of his great rival and sometime friend Jackson Pollock, the abstract expressionist painter was reported to have said, “It’s all right. That’s enough. I saw Jackson in his grave. And he’s dead. It’s over. I’m number one.”
De Kooning might have believed that he really was “number one,” but reality eventually caught up with him. Pollock—who suffered from alcoholism, depression, and general emotional instability—met his end when he plowed his car into a tree, killing himself and a passenger. His girlfriend, Ruth Kligman, survived the crash, and within a year started an affair with de Kooning. Kligman dated de Kooning for several years, but had spent only a couple of months with Pollock. Nevertheless, she reported in her book Love Affair: A Memoir of Jackson Pollock—whose title and subject matter must have gnawed at de Kooning—that de Kooning “never stopped being jealous of Jackson even long after he was dead.”