Jackson Pollock (17 page)

Pollock led her to his studio. Four or five canvases were hanging on the wall. “To
say that I flipped my lid would be an understatement,” she said. “I was totally bowled
over by what I saw.”

She invited Pollock to visit her on Ninth Street the following week, and he showed
up as scheduled, entering through a narrow hallway that doubled as a kitchen and sitting
down in the apartment’s one room. Lee asked him if he wanted some coffee. Yes, he
said. She stood up and went to get her coat from the hall closet.

“Let’s go,” she said.

Pollock looked bewildered. “But you offered me coffee,” he protested.

Lee had never used her gas stove, and she didn’t even know if it worked. When she
offered her friends coffee, she meant “Let’s go to the corner drugstore.”

“I’ve never seen anyone so shocked to death when I told him,” she later said.

They went out for coffee, once, twice, a dozen times, discovering mutual interests
as if discovering the interests anew. He told her he was in Jungian analysis, and
she was excited. “I was reading Jung on my own,” she said, “so we had that as a common
denominator.” Naturally they also had art. He was Presbyterian and she was Jewish,
but they worshiped the same god—Picasso. She told him about the first time she had
seen
Guernica
, about how it had “knocked” her out of the room; she had had to circle the block
five times before she could look again. They talked
about art constantly but never asked “What does your work mean?” or “Why do you do
it?”—questions that would have seemed as absurd as “Why were you born?” They were
both born painters, and they accepted each other’s fates, talking about art only in
terms of “shop talk,” as Lee called it. She asked Pollock if he knew the other Americans
who were going to be in Graham’s show. Did he know de Kooning? No, Pollock said. So
she told him about de Kooning. She promised she’d take him to meet de Kooning. She
wanted to take him to meet
everyone
.

It was a union based on shared passions, yet also on differences of temperament. Even
in the way they moved they complemented each other. Pollock moved like a heavy, lumbering
bear, his arms hanging at his sides “like tree trunks,” as William Phillips once wrote.
Lee was lithe and graceful, a good dancer, able to move swiftly through the situations
that made him falter. Pollock spoke in an agonized, halting way, as if the words had
been torn from his flesh. Lee spoke aggressively, firing words like bullets. He was
withdrawn; she was brazen. He avoided people, but she confronted them. She demanded
justice, and since life is unjust, she was often angry. She sized up situations in
seconds, usually with contempt. She was controlled and controlling, and because those
qualities were so alien to him, he admired the way she took charge of things.

They complemented each other in their art too. By her own admission, Lee was overly
disciplined. At the time she met Pollock she was a first-rate abstract painter who
had mastered Cubism and was trying to unlearn her learning, to loosen up, to discover
the kind of authenticity and vigor that come from direct feeling. He, to the contrary,
was undisciplined. He was independent and original. From his earliest years his art
had been distinguished by a quality that was felt rather than learned, and because
hers was not, she recognized his genius.

“I was terribly drawn to Jackson,” she said, “and I fell in love with him—physically,
mentally—in every sense of the word. I had a conviction when I met Jackson that he
had something important to say. When we began going together, my own work became irrelevant.
He was the important thing.”

A few months after they met, Pollock and Lee were walking along Varick Street one
blustery winter afternoon when they ran into Clement Greenberg outside the U.S. Customs
Office. He would later become Pollock’s chief champion as well as the leading art
critic of his generation, but in 1941 he was working as a customs clerk and writing
articles on the side. Greenberg said hello to Lee, then glanced at her new friend,
waiting for an introduction. “This is Jackson Pollock,” she announced. “He’s going
to be a great painter.”

“Oh,” Greenberg moaned to himself, “that’s no way to size up a human being.”

To Lee Krasner it was the only way.

It is a cliché by now to say that Lee Krasner sacrificed her career for Jackson Pollock.
It is also a falsehood. From childhood on she was determined to become a great painter,
and she did.

She was born Lenore Krassner (she later dropped the second “s” in Krassner) on Schenck
Avenue, in the East New York section of Brooklyn, on October 27, 1908. Her mother
thought birthdays were frivolous holidays, and when Lee later asked about her date
of birth, Anna Krassner replied curtly in Yiddish, “You were born on a cold day.”

It was an immigrant household dominated by practical concerns and the problems of
subsistence. Her parents, Anna Weiss and Joseph Krassner, had settled in Brooklyn
among thousands of immigrants early in the century after arriving from Shpikov, a
forest village near Odessa. Lee was the sixth of their seven children and the first
born in the United States. Soon after her birth her parents closed their grocery store
and moved to a two-family row house on Jerome Street, in Brooklyn. They rented a stall
at the Blake Street Market, where they worked from dawn to late afternoon selling
fish—pike, carp, and whitefish—which they hauled from Manhattan to Brooklyn by horse
and wagon, keeping it fresh in ice-packed wooden crates. They worked every day except
Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath. The Krassners were Orthodox Jews who required their
children to attend Hebrew school and synagogue. At home they spoke Yiddish and Russian.

Lee quickly established herself as the family rebel. As a little girl, she was resentful
that she and her mother had to sit upstairs at synagogue while the men sat downstairs.
When she was twelve years old, she stormed into the living room one day to announce
to her parents that she was through with Judaism.

Art became her new religion. She loved to draw and was good at it. She copied pictures
of women from fashion advertisements in the newspaper. Her sisters would sit and watch,
marveling at her ability to create beautiful women out of nothing. “She used to draw
clothed women figures all the time,” said her sister Ruth. “We were all aware of that—how
marvelous it was to be able to put her pencil to paper and get a figure.” The Krassner
children had never seen art before, with the exception of a dimestore reproduction
of Queen Isabella giving jewels to Columbus, which hung over the fireplace in the
living room. By the time Lee was fourteen she was commuting daily by subway from Brooklyn
to Manhattan to attend the Washington Irving High School for Girls, the only public
school in New York that offered a special art program. She couldn’t imagine becoming
anything other than an artist.

Lee’s mother sometimes complained that she was “too independent” for a young girl.
Anna Krassner couldn’t understand her defiant daughter, for it was not in Anna’s nature
to question tradition. One afternoon she was sitting at the kitchen table trying to
learn to write her name in English. Her husband walked into the room, looked at her
pad, and scolded her for attempting such nonsense. She put down her pencil and never
tried again.

Lee’s mother was a superstitious, fearful woman, and she made her children afraid
of everything. Whenever it thundered, she gathered her daughters around her by the
wood-burning stove in the kitchen and wouldn’t let them go until the storm subsided.
Sometimes, late at night, she would kneel on the bed that Lee shared with her two
little sisters and peer out the window at Mrs. MacAvoy, the neighborhood kook, who
would emerge from her house at the same time every night to talk to the moon, thinking
she was talking to her dead husband. The Krassner girls would clutch each other beneath
the bed sheet and scream.

Lee’s father, by comparison, was stern and distant. But he too instilled in his children
a belief in mystical powers. On cold winter nights he would sit by the kitchen stove
smoking cigars and telling tales about life in the village of Shpikov. Most of them
were about Pesa, his mother, who was known in Shpikov as a woman of magical gifts.
Villagers would visit the old woman seeking forgiveness for their sins, which Pesa
delivered by swinging a chicken above her head and allowing their sins to pass to
the fowl in a ceremony known as
kapores
. “I’d sit close to him, and he’d tell the stories,” Lee once said. “Oh, I was terribly
scared at night, scared of the dark, still am.”

To others, though, Lee seemed fearless, willing to defy any orthodoxy for the sake
of her art. She studied at the Women’s Art School of Cooper Union and continued her
education at the National Academy of Design. Unlike the Art Students League, the Academy
was a bastion of conservative, academic-style painting where students were required
to draw from antique casts before being allowed to draw from life models. Lee, however,
did not want to draw from antique casts. She was put on probation in January 1929,
only four months after she started school. “This student is always a bother,” a teacher
jotted in her file. In December 1929 Lee was suspended from the Academy for “painting
figures without permission,” according to school records. That would always be true
of her; she did things without permission.

She finished art school at the height of the Depression. Deciding she might as well
be practical, she went to City College to get a teaching degree. Then she tore it
up. “The last thing in the world I wanted to do was teach art,” she said. She managed
to support herself in the early thirties by painting stripes on china and hats (“I
ruined more felt hats . . .”) and donning silk pajamas to wait tables at Sam Johnson’s,
a Third Avenue bar and nightclub, where she got to know such Village intellectuals
as Harold Rosenberg and Lionel Abel. “I remember Harold Rosenberg,” she says, “because
he never tipped.”

She was rescued from waitressing by the Project, on which she worked primarily as
a mural assistant. She resented having to carry out other people’s plans and wanted
to do a mural of her
own. Maybe she’d have a better chance if the government didn’t know she was a woman,
she thought. So she changed her name from Lenore to Lee, but her assignments remained
the same.

While Pollock’s studies at the Art Students League insulated him from the avant-garde
movements of the thirties, Lee joined with the avant-garde early in her career. In
1937 she signed up to study under Hans Hofmann, the leading proselytizer of Cubist
doctrine in New York. He had his own school on West Eighth Street. Born in Munich,
Hofmann had lived in Paris from 1904 to 1914, when he worked with Matisse, befriended
Picasso, and saw the emergence of Cubism firsthand, and he brought to his students
a deep appreciation of modern European art movements. Hofmann spoke with a heavy German
accent, and Lee had difficulty understanding him—her friend Fritz Bultman used to
translate for her in class—but she had no trouble putting his theories into paint.
Hofmann was very impressed with her work, and once tried to offer her a compliment.
“This is so good you would not know it was done by a woman,” he told her. Lee was
furious at him, even though she knew that Degas had said the same thing to Mary Cassatt
a half-century earlier.

Another of Lee’s early mentors was Piet Mondrian, whom she befriended when he came
to New York in 1940. She once escorted him to an exhibit organized by the American
Abstract Artists, the group of abstract painters through which she had met him. Mondrian
paused in front of each painting and asked her “Who is this? Who is this?” When they
came to Lee’s painting she proudly told him, “This is mine.” “Very strong inner rhythm,”
he said. “Stay with it.”

Lee learned early in life that to be an artist is to assert one’s will, but to be
a woman is to relinquish it. She was drawn to talented men, which usually meant making
less of her own abilities. Her first love was Igor Pantuhoff. A Russian émigré, Igor
had studied abstract painting under Hofmann along with Lee but was known as a portrait
painter and had won the prestigious Prix de Rome before moving to New York. Igor was
a man of sure charm and expensive tastes who refused to let poverty interfere with
his ways. He always carried a hundred-dollar bill, and since no one could break it,
he was often able to eat without paying for his
meal. His trademark was a fine camel’s hair coat, which he had acquired by walking
into a department store and announcing, “I’m Igor Pantuhoff. Great artist. Give me
coat and I give you painting in return.” The store manager said he wasn’t allowed
to give coats away. “But I’m Igor Pantuhoff! Great artist!” He got the coat.

Lee and Igor lived together for two years, sharing with Harold and May Rosenberg a
twenty-three-dollar-a-month cold-water flat overlooking the Hudson River. May Rosenberg
recalls the morning that Igor ended the relationship. “Igor couldn’t understand what
Hofmann was doing,” she once explained. “Hofmann would look at Igor’s work and say,
‘No, that’s wrong’ and put a scratch across it. With their accents—Igor’s Russian
and Hofmann’s German—they couldn’t understand each other. So Igor just decided one
morning that he was taking a bus across the country and going to become a great portrait
painter.”