Lee Krasner (28 page)

Ray Eames's
For C in Limited Palette
(1943), a small oil, just ten by thirteen and a half inches, was even more hard-edged than Krasner's larger
Composition,
measuring thirty by twenty-four inches. Eames delved into “the recovery of form through movement and balance and depth and light.”
²¹
Whereas Krasner employed heavy black outlines and mainly geometric shapes, Eames's shapes included several that were clearly biomorphic, closer to de Kooning's
The Wave
(1942–43), which was much more ambitious in scale at forty-eight inches square. Mercedes Carles's
Still Life in Red and Green
(1935) reveals a thick application of paint, but forms that depend upon color do not read well in a small black-and-white reproduction of an original only sixteen by twenty inches.

It was Krasner who got Janis to look at Pollock's work, which he had never seen.
²²
Janis recalled, “While I was working on the book, I was interested in meeting some of Hans Hofmann's pupils. One of them was Lee Krasner. During the course of my visit, she asked me if I knew an artist by the name of Jackson Pollock. I said no. She then said that he was completely unknown and would I like to see his work? I said, by all means—especially if you recommend him. I did not know at the time that she was interested in Pollock in any way except artistically.” Janis told how Krasner took him to Pollock's Eighth Street studio, where he saw the artist, whom he recalled as “a dour-looking fellow, who didn't say one word during my entire visit. He was quiet and stood in a corner of his studio. He let Lee do all of the talking. Jackson just listened. He was that way, until he got to know you. A very reticent man, he was. And of course, he was cold sober. When not so sober, he did quite a lot of talking.”
²³

In his book, Janis categorized Pollock as one of the “American
Surrealist Painters,” along with artists such as Arshile Gorky, Mark Tobey, William Baziotes, Jimmy Ernst, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, among others. Janis featured Pollock's forty-two-and-a-half-by-sixty-seven-inch painting
The She-Wolf
(1943) with a color plate, an honor Janis had also bestowed upon Hans Hofmann's
Painting
(1944) in an earlier section of the book. Pollock, unlike Krasner, who was uncharacteristically silent, offered the following statement to Janis for his book: “[
The
]
She-Wolf
came into existence because I had to paint it. Any attempt on my part to say something about it, to attempt explanation of the inexplicable, could only destroy it.”
²⁴

Janis was so impressed by Pollock's work that he recommended
The She-Wolf
for purchase by the Museum of Modern Art, where he served on the Advisory Committee, which bought the painting for $600. He wrote to Pollock about how impressed he was and told Pollock that “L.K. is to phone when you feel like visiting me. Best to you both.”
²⁵

But with Pollock's success came frustration for Krasner. Mercedes had just moved to Santa Monica, California, and Krasner wrote to her to say, “I'm painting and nothing happens its [
sic
] maddening.”
²⁶
She complained, “I showed Janis my last three paintings—He said they were to [
sic
] much Pollocks. It's completely idiotic but I have a feeling from now on that's going to be the story.”
²⁷

The Matters had gone to California so that Herbert, still a Swiss citizen, could remain in the United States during World War II. He was allowed to work in the office of the designers Charles and Ray “Buddha” Eames, who had married in 1941 and were designing furniture and doing government work as part of the war effort.
²⁸
Krasner assured her chum how much she missed them and how it seemed like they were just on a long vacation. “Your shack sounds wonderful and I really wish I was there. However don't start getting ideas—I just don't like the sound of California—but the waves and the aloneness that kind of alone
ness seems wonderful—the fact that you can think about painting again and be away from the hysteria of the city—all that I envy.”
²⁹

“I'm posing for Sara [Johns] now—They've asked her to try some covers and of course she gets more vague every day—But I'm sure she'll get it done in her own strange way,” Lee wrote to Mercedes about their mutual friend and classmate, Buddha.

Ray Eames was born as Bernice Alexandra Kaiser in Sacramento, California, where she developed an interest in new forms of art, design, dance, and film. Later, short and squat, she seemed to have earned her nickname, though it probably reflected her serene personality. She studied at Sacramento Junior College before moving with her widowed mother to New York in 1932, in order to be closer to her brother, who was at West Point. She landed in the German emigré Hans Hofmann's class at the Art Students League and followed him when he set up his own school later that year. She attended the Hofmann School in both New York and Provincetown, joined and exhibited with the American Abstract Artists, and also studied modern dance with Martha Graham and Hanya Holm. In the autumn of 1940, Kaiser left the Hofmann School to study modern design at the Cranbrook Academy in Michigan, where she met the designer Charles Eames, whom she married and with whom she would successfully collaborate. Buddha's productive work relationship with Charles was in great contrast to Lee's struggle to support Jackson's career in the face of his alcoholism, while sometimes neglecting her own.

Lee probably first met Buddha Eames through Mercedes—in the early 1930s, both had attended the May Friend Bennett School in Millbrook, New York, where they studied art with the sculptor Lu Duble.
³⁰
Also Buddha, Mercedes, and Lee then studied together at the Hofmann School. Lee also noted that she was amazed “you still speak to each other at all. I warned you not to break up a life long friendship.”
³¹

Lee told Mercedes about a dinner party she gave a week earlier, where the guests included Hans and Miz Hofmann, Janet Hauke
(a fellow student from the Hofmann School) and her husband, the artist Frederick Hauke (who had been on Krasner's War Services Project), Peggy Guggenheim, and Howard Putzel. She pronounced the dinner “a complete success—food superb (Quote a line from Mr. Putzel to Mr. Pollock the following day ‘My Very Best regards to your Cordon Bleu chef”) Yes I'm cooking these days—seriously. As I was saying after a most charming dinner we all went up [to] Hans' place to show Peggy his work—now mind—this business of casually walking down four flights at 46 E. 8th & walking up 3 flights at 44 E. 8th took all winter to plot—nothing must go wrong.”
³²
Cooking “seriously” meant that she was using her “womanly” skills to promote the art of Pollock and her former teacher—even as she struggled with her own painting.

Krasner complained that Janet Hauke “didn't shut her mouth for one second & we were there for hours…. How ever the gods had destined a successful evening and Peggy was terribly excited about the work & asked if she couldn't come up & see them quitely [
sic
] & to sum up she's giving Hans a show this March—I think that [Sidney] Janis is in Calif. now & if you see him be sure to tell him about it. I think he'll be quite surprised.”
³³

Sometime in July 1943, on their Eighth Street rooftop, Krasner took a snapshot of Pollock, Morris Kadish, an unidentified friend (who appears to be George Mercer), and the artist Reuben Kadish, who, having headed the mural division for the Federal Art Project in San Francisco, was then serving in the army's Artist Unit to document wartime life.
³⁴
Krasner was probably using Kadish's camera because he also photographed Pollock in the Eighth Street studio he shared with Krasner in front of his unfinished painting
Guardians of the Secret,
with her painting visible in the distance.
³⁵

By August 1943, with Lee's help, Jackson had ended Jungian analysis, which he entered in 1939 with Joseph Henderson and then, when the therapist moved to California in September
of 1940, continued with Violet Staub de Laszlo. Instead, Pollock began treatment with Elizabeth Wright Hubbard, M.D., a homeopathic physician in New York. Hubbard practiced “holistic” medicine, characterized by exploring the psychological as well as the physical. Today Hubbard is considered to have been one of the foremost homeopaths, whose extensive writings are still influential. Hubbard was one of the first six women to graduate from the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University, and was a pioneer in the field of holistic medicine before her death in 1967.
³⁶
One of the first to understand the significance of the mind-body connection, Hubbard treated a number of culturally prominent patients, including Alexander Calder, Darius Milhaud, and Marlene Dietrich.
³⁷
Years later, Krasner recalled that Dr. Hubbard was a Theosophist.
³⁸
Though Krasner only had a passing interest in such esoteric ideas, the spiritual leader Krishnamurti, who had himself been connected to Theosophy in his youth, had attracted Pollock's attention during his high school days in California. After Pollock entered treatment with Dr. Hubbard, Krasner felt freer to focus on other goals.

By now it was clear that Krasner was Pollock's facilitator in the world. She saw him as “riddled with doubt,” but believed that “no one knew as much about himself as Jackson did. He knew what he was about.”
³⁹
She was also his cheerleader, guardian, and secretary. On November 1, Peggy Guggenheim's assistant, Putzel, wrote to Krasner, asking her, “Lee, if you have time Tuesday can (or will) you help fold 1200 catalogues?”
⁴⁰
He also invited them to join him at a concert by the classical guitarist Segovia.

Pollock's first solo show opened at Art of This Century on November 8, 1943. “Sweeney is very pleased with Jackson & Jackson is very pleased with Sweeney,” Krasner noted of James Johnson Sweeney, the curator who had penned the catalogue's brief note, which declared: “Pollock's talent is volcanic. It has fire. It is unpredictable. It is undisciplined,” and it also praised him for painting “from inner impulsion without an ear to what the critic or specta
tor may feel.”
⁴¹
Sweeney had been curator of the department of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art since 1935. The son of a rich importer of lace and textiles whose family had come from Donegal, Ireland, Sweeney had studied literature at Cambridge University and, among other work, assisted James Joyce in editing a manuscript. Well heeled and well educated, Sweeney probably had little in common with Krasner and Pollock, and they seem to have sensed that.

In addition to the activity at Guggenheim's gallery, Sidney Janis had organized an exhibition called “Abstract and Surrealist Art in America,” which featured the artists from his book, including Krasner and Pollock. It began at the Cincinnati Art Museum, in February 1944, billed as organized by the San Francisco Museum of Art and selected by Sidney Janis. The show then traveled to four museums across the country before it hit New York at the Mortimer Brandt Gallery from November 29 through December 30.
⁴²

After Pollock's show with Guggenheim closed on November 29, Krasner wrote to Mercedes (whom she addressed as “Carles Darling”), “We're just settling down to a normal existence. The show is over. Jackson says he isn't going to paint until Peggy sells all his paintings. No use painting new ones. The Museum of Modern Art is going to buy one when they can decide which of two canvases they like best (I hope they make up their minds some time this year). Three gouaches were sold and that's all—He got revues [
sic
] in the New Yorker, Art News, Art Digest—and the Nation—and one fan letter.”
⁴³

For Jackson and Lee, life was particularly fine. She later reflected, “Jackson had a delightful sense of humor, and when I'd rant and rave about someone being a son of a bitch, et cetera, he'd calm me down considerably. When I bellyached about my work, he'd say ‘Stay with it.' We had a continuing dialogue about our work and he always wanted me to see what he was doing; he was always asking my reaction.”
⁴⁴

In her letter to Mercedes, Krasner demanded news of Buddha and whether the Matters' young son, nicknamed “Pundit,” realized that he was in California: “I hope not—might have a bad psychological effect on him.”
⁴⁵
She also recounted a bit of gossip: “Sande [Alexander ‘Sandy' Calder] is
making
a bed for Peggy. Can't get metal so its [
sic
] going to be in silver. And I've heard plenty of wise cracks about all three Sande—Peggy—and the Bed.”
⁴⁶
Jackson too was taken with the bed project and later wrote about it to Herbert Matter: “Sande [
sic
] did an interesting end decoration for Peggy's bed, a sort of enlarged ear-ring that hangs on the wall. We seldom ever see him.”
⁴⁷

Pollock, thrilled with his “amazing success for my first year of showing,” wrote in 1944 to his mother and his brother Charles to recount the details of the magazine features. He was also relieved about having the security of a “contract set for next year” from Guggenheim.
⁴⁸
He was still getting $150 a month, which he quickly realized “just about doesn't meet the bills.”
⁴⁹
When he asked for an increase to meet minimal living expenses, Guggenheim replied, “Tell Lee to go out and get a job.” Recalling the moment, Krasner explained, “Pollock wouldn't accept that solution and she never dared mention it again.”
⁵⁰

During this period Krasner was busy corresponding with her closest friends. After Hans Hofmann's show at Art of This Century from March 7 to 31, 1944, Lee wrote about Guggenheim again to Mercedes. “To begin with ‘Peggy' after that visit to Hans' studio, had a severe change of heart—I couldn't track down who was responsible for it—to some extent those fucking sur-real-ist[s] around her—at any rate she got more & more impossible as the time for the opening approached. How ever the show was finally hung—(I stayed away.) Jackson was there—& it naturally looked very exciting and she seemed to relax some what—She hates his large oils—loves his gouaches.”
⁵¹
Krasner reported that Hans's wife, Meetz, “Miz,” was “behaving beautifully around this busi
ness,” but that she preferred that the show feature the large oils. Peggy took the opposite view and, naturally, got her way.