Lee Krasner (31 page)

Krasner's own struggle to change her mode of painting may explain why she declined to take part in a June 1945 group show titled “The Women,” held at Art of This Century. Jewell reported in the
New York Times,
“Although Gypsy Rose Lee, Loren McIver [
sic
] and Lenore Krasner are listed as participants in this vehement June gambado, work by them could not be secured, so their names must, with regret, be crossed off.”
¹⁰⁰
The show also featured a number of women artists, who, like Krasner, were closely associated with male artists, including Kay Sage, the French Surrealist
Yves Tanguy's American wife; Hedda Sterne, wife of the artist-illustrator Saul Steinberg; and Jacqueline Lamba, who divorced the Surrealist André Breton and married the American sculptor David Hare. Krasner no doubt resented being segregated into a show of only women and already disliked Peggy intensely. She admitted years later that she “hated her attitude toward women. I didn't want to show. She wasn't friendly to women. She didn't like women.”
¹⁰¹

Because Guggenheim was constantly supporting needy friends, it seems less likely that she resented Krasner merely for asking her to renew Pollock's contract or to raise his stipend enough so that they could live on it. In retrospect, the antipathy between Krasner and Guggenheim seems inevitable. Guggenheim, the descendant of an earlier migration of Swiss and German Jews, came from inherited wealth. Many German Jews viewed Russian Jews like Krasner with condescension and considered themselves respectable in contrast to the “uncouth, unwashed Russians,” creating much resentment.
¹⁰²
Peggy had descended from two well-established families—the Guggenheims, but also the Seligmans on her mother's side—and she must have viewed Krasner as true to stereotype: irksome, loud, pushy, and aggressive. Indeed, she was forceful and intense in her promotion of Pollock's art.

Guggenheim's supposed prejudices do not account for her friendship with the anarchist Emma Goldman, whom she knew well in France during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Peggy financially supported Emma, who helped her separate from her abusive husband, the artist Laurence Vail, which allowed her to regain her “lost self-respect.”
¹⁰³
Eventually, however, Peggy turned on Emma (who declined to mention Peggy's support in her memoir) after deciding she was an “awful fake.”
¹⁰⁴

In the case of Krasner, it is also possible that Guggenheim was jealous of Pollock's wife. After all, she was aging and was twice divorced. Guggenheim wrote, “My relationship with Pollock was
purely that of artist and patron, and Lee was the intermediary. Pollock himself was rather difficult; he drank too much and became so unpleasant, one might say devilish, on these occasions.”
¹⁰⁵

Despite her personal feelings about Guggenheim, Krasner always made sure to credit her accomplishments: “Art of This Century was of the utmost importance as the first place where the New York School could be seen. That can never be minimized, and Peggy's achievement should not be underestimated; she did major things for the so-called Abstract Expressionist group. Her gallery was the foundation, it's where it all started to happen…. Peggy was invaluable…. That must be kept in history.”
¹⁰⁶

And even though the couple met such art world luminaries as Duchamp, Matta, Sweeney, Soby, and Barr at Peggy's parties at her home, these events were taxing for Krasner—she always had to keep her eye on Pollock, his drinking, and the resulting behavior.
¹⁰⁷
It was a time when he should have been making contacts to help promote his work and she did as much as she could to help him.

Even Krasner needed a break from her constant efforts to promote Pollock. In August 1945, she and Pollock joined Barbara and Reuben Kadish, who were looking to purchase a house in Amagansett, in eastern Long Island. They were able to use a small shack at Louse Point on the bay in Springs, a small hamlet, about three miles outside of East Hampton village.
¹⁰⁸
The printmaker Stanley William Hayter, who knew Pollock, had originally rented the shack, but he found it too remote to bike to the train in town. Hayter needed to make regular trips to the city to supervise Atelier 17, his graphic workshop, so he and his wife, the sculptor Helen Phillips, preferred to live in Amagansett, which was more of a village, less isolated than Louse Point, and had its own train station for easy access to the city.

The sculptor David Slivka, just released from the Merchant Marines, was another link among the Kadishes, Krasner and Pollock, and Hayter. He had gone to school with Phillips in San
Francisco before the war and had been invited by Phillips and Hayter to Amagansett as their guest. Since Slivka also knew Kadish from their WPA days in San Francisco, he brought out his bicycle on the train and biked back and forth between Louse Point and Amagansett, visiting both sets of friends. Slivka recalled that when he arrived at Louse Point, he did not yet know Krasner was an artist. He remembered her as “an attractive, Eastern-European-Jewish type.”
¹⁰⁹

For Lee and Jackson, the time at Louse Point was just a splendid vacation, though she was always anxious that his drinking would turn excessive. Pollock found instead less temptation and a lot of distraction in the bicycle trips, clamming expeditions, and relaxed atmosphere. The beaches were spectacular and the experience was surprisingly therapeutic.

On August 3, 1945, Mercer wrote to Krasner in East Hampton, telling her how he longed for the days of Provincetown and painting “those beautiful broad beaches” and “that perfectly clear sky, clear water and the vast stretches of sand.” Mercer's glowing description must have helped Krasner realize that Eastern Long Island equaled the Cape in beauty but was much closer to the art scene in New York City. “I remember liking the ‘vie boheme,'” Mercer noted, “and finding it quite a natural expression. But now, I'm afraid I would look on it differently, wondering if it wasn't all right for youth but not for adulthood. The great thing that I have lost is my optimism. I am even pessimistic about the possibilities of being a painter.”
¹¹⁰
Mercer told how he longed to talk with her and Jackson and anticipated his return to the East.

Nevertheless, by September 18, 1945, Mercer had been east and had missed Krasner and Pollock, who were then still on Long Island. In a letter, Mercer expressed his anxiety about life after the army, when he hoped to paint again: “I have a hunch that 4 years away from the brush don't leave me in no good shape to become the American Picasso overnight. I got dough, but I got a little laziness too and the old question—Will I succeed if I take your
course, Mr Hofmann? I.E. I am seriously thinking of painting before my money runs out.”
¹¹¹
“I am directing some of my questions to you, Madam, because the parents suggested it when I saw them in New York and because I have always considered you my technical advisor.”
¹¹²

Mercer talked about studying with a teacher again to get “back into the groove and save some time” and mentioned the possibility of “Arthur Carles, particularly if he is still alive. I saw a painting of his at the Chicago Art Institute on my way to Calif. and thought it was a good painting. Not a Picasso, but a Redon, perhaps or perhaps better…. I trust Carles, so is he living, so should I let him teach me?”
¹¹³

He also expressed his existential fear about the state of the world. “And what do you think of the atomic bomb, my little ones. (It's the fastest-acting bedtime story ever told.) I am a little less concerned about it than I was at first. Perhaps it is another poison gas and the protection against it will be easy to find. We can always burrow under the ground, even if it has to be hundreds of feet. That will protect us at present, as far as I can see.”
¹¹⁴

Now a seasoned pessimist, Mercer maintained that the bomb had “answered quite to the point that question that Lewis Mumford asked when he titled one of his books, ‘Can The City Survive?' I never did take much stock in those literary characters who proposed colossal questions and solved them by wagging the finger.”
¹¹⁵
“This is the way the world ends,” he concluded, “not with a bang but with an atomic bomb. (I always knew that T. S. Eliot was fighting a losing game, but was surprised to see the score announced so early).”
¹¹⁶

Despite Mercer's cynicism, Krasner and Pollock enjoyed their time at the beach. There were artists showing that summer in East Hampton's Guild Hall, a local museum and theater in the center of town. According to Francis Newton, who had worked with the illustrator Howard Pyle, it was “often difficult to locate all the artists living in the community.”
¹¹⁷
Among those groups of
artists showing at Guild Hall that summer was the conservative American Watercolor Society. Pollock and Krasner would have no part of such an academic tradition.
¹¹⁸

Lee Krasner holding brushes and cigarette, c. 1941, photographed by Maurice Berezov. She recommended to George Mercer that he read Henry Miller's
The Cosmological Eye,
where she found a similar world view: “The times are permanently bad,” but she made the best of the hand that she was dealt.

It is curious that Newton had so much trouble finding artists in the community. Remarkably he seemed to have no awareness that so many artists interested in Surrealism were then summering on the East End of Long Island. One wonders how he missed some of the tiny, hand-woven bikinis that some of the women wore on the beach, those who went nude in violation of local codes, or the bare feet pattering down Main Street.
¹¹⁹

Many artists Krasner knew from New York were staying on the East End of Long Island that summer—Max Ernst, his son Jimmy, Dorothea Tanning (who would marry Max Ernst the following year), and Jean Hélion and his wife, Pegeen Vail (Peggy
Guggenheim's daughter), were also staying at the Ernsts' rented summer home in Amagansett, when he was not in his own studio in nearby Hampton Bays. Léger had come out with the painter Lucia Christofanetti, and Robert Motherwell was renting nearby, since his new East Hampton house was being designed by French émigré and architect Pierre Chareau. The sculptor Isamu Noguchi, and Chilean Surrealist Matta, whom Pollock had met in New York in 1942, also frequented the area.

Many in the area were shocked by the news of Howard Putzel's death from a heart attack at the age of just forty-six, on August 7, 1945. Peggy Guggenheim insisted his death was a suicide. Putzel, whom Macpherson had backed, had not been able to manage finances well and had been reduced to living in his gallery, where he died.
¹²⁰
For Krasner, Putzel had been an enthusiastic supporter, gallerist, and friend—unusual because he did not overlook or trivialize artists because they happened to be women or wives. There weren't many out there like him.

Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, Springs, c. 1946, photographed by her nephew Ronald Stein. Their quiet life in the country was “a beautiful new experience,” Krasner recalled, saying how much the house meant to Pollock: “He loved the grounds, he loved gardening…”

L
EE AND
J
ACKSON'S TIME IN
E
AST
H
AMPTON HAD BEEN SO GOOD
for Pollock she proposed that they get a rental for the winter. At first Pollock refused, but then after a week back in New York, he felt overwhelmed by the city's heat and noise. He abruptly declared they should move to Long Island year-round. Their friends Harold and May Rosenberg had just purchased an old house on Neck Path in Springs, which inspired them to think they could too. “I wanted to get away from the wear and tear,”
Pollock recalled. “Besides, I had an underneath confidence that I could begin to live on my painting.”
¹
They stayed with the Rosenbergs while looking for a house of their own.

The idea of moving to a small town coincided with Krasner's desire to be married. She later attributed this to the loss of her father. “Jackson and I had been living together for three years, and I gave him an ultimatum—either we get married or we split.”
²
Pollock agreed but rejected going to City Hall and insisted on a church wedding, claiming, “I'm not a dog; I won't go get a license.”
³
It was left for Krasner to arrange the church. After encountering refusals to marry a mixed couple—unbaptized Christian and Jew—she found a minister reputed to be liberal at Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue and Twenty-ninth Street.

Lee asked May Tabak Rosenberg and Peggy Guggenheim to stand as witnesses, but the latter demurred with a query that reflects her own checkered matrimonial history: “Aren't you already married enough?” The church janitor stepped up to take her place. Krasner, when asked if she recalled what she wore, told an interviewer years later, “No, oh, what a question! I'm sure I must have thought ‘what shall I wear.' But, now I can't remember.” She did, however, claim to remember the service and that “Pollock liked ritual…. I think he always had the need for ritual and the family background had none of it and had total contempt for it, in fact.”
⁴

The one willing witness, however, May Rosenberg, did remember that they “ran around looking for a hat” for Lee to wear. “It was a beautiful ceremony,” said May. “The minister spoke about…beauties in faith…. It was a lovely simple ceremony. Quite wonderful. Then we left, and I took them to breakfast or brunch. We were ecstatic.”
⁵

The newlyweds set out to look for a place that fall and found an empty farmhouse in Springs on Fireplace Road with a view out over Accabonac Creek. The price, $5,000, though not high, was more than they could muster. They rented for $40 a month with
an option to buy.
⁶
At the time East Hampton was experiencing a boom in housing sales and rentals. The village was just three hours out of New York City, where returning GIs had caused a housing crisis. The local paper in East Hampton noted, “The possibility of serious inflation has made people eager to own something tangible, and living under one's own roof is particularly attractive after the renting difficulties of [the] war years.”
⁷

Krasner warned Herbert and Mercedes, who were planning to return to New York, about the postwar housing shortage. She hoped they might consider the Springs–East Hampton alternative. After warning Mercedes that she no longer had any New York gossip, she added an afterthought, “I forgot to mention that I am now legally Mrs. Jackson Pollock—also the fact that this house we have rented with an option to buy—which gives me about three months to raise $2,000. Its [
sic
] 5,000 but they'll carry a 3,000 mortgage which we can pay off in a sort of monthly rental. I have three of Jackson's paintings which I'm able to sell outside of his contract & hope to be able to raise the 2000 that way.”
⁸

Krasner told Mercedes that Hofmann was trying to find someone to buy one of the paintings they had to sell. “Of course all three are gigantic paintings and since I had choice I took the best—I don't suppose you got to see Jackson's show in San Francisco? The museum purchased ‘Guardians of the Secret' & he may have a show in Paris this winter.”
⁹

Despite Peggy's stance on their marriage, Lee set about getting her to lend them $2000 as a down payment on the Springs house. Peggy wrote years later, “Lee was so dedicated to Pollock that when I was sick in bed, she came every morning to try to persuade me to lend them two thousand dollars to buy a home on Long Island. She thought that if Pollock got out of New York, he would stop drinking. Though I did not see how I could produce any extra funds, I finally agreed to do so as it was the only way to get rid of Lee.”
¹⁰

Peggy and Lee worked out a new two-year contract for
Pollock, raising his stipend to $300 a month, minus a deduction to pay off the loan. In exchange, Pollock was to give her virtually his total output of finished work. The Pollocks moved in the autumn of 1945, loading books, canvases—everything they owned—into a truck they borrowed from a butcher who was May Rosenberg's brother.
¹¹
“We arrived in Springs in November during a Northeaster—what an entrance. We knew no one. I wondered what we were doing there,” recalled Krasner.
¹²
For their first three days it rained solid, which was no small matter—at first they had no inside toilet, tub, or hot water—just a hand pump and a small basin for drawing water to wash.
¹³
Wartime rationing still prevailed, and they could get just one bucket of coal at a time, not enough for warmth. The house was dead cold during the night.
¹⁴

“We had given up the New York place and burned all our bridges. When we arrived, the house was stuffed from floor to ceiling with the belongings of the people who had lived there. The macanaw [Mackinaw] of the man who had lived there was still hanging on the rocker in the kitchen. It was a rough scene we walked into. The barn was packed solid with cast iron farm tools.”
¹⁵

They found the interior covered with layers of wallpaper, which they started to peel away. The three kinds of gold leaf paper that survived in the front parlor, along with the old carpet and a chandelier, appealed to Krasner enough that she kept that room intact for years.
¹⁶
She recalled that Pollock “broke down the walls to create spaces to hang paintings…. He loved having the house. He loved the grounds, he loved gardening.”
¹⁷
“We were so busy for about two years tearing off wall paper and burning up the contents of the house (which we finally had to buy because the owners wouldn't clean it out) that we didn't have time to do much else.”
¹⁸

Their life in the country was “most conservative, quiet.”
¹⁹

Krasner recalled that “in the early days it wasn't an art colony…. A lot of our friends then were writers, very few artists. Ashawagh Hall, the little building down the road, was the community cen
ter.”
²⁰
She reminisced that they “cooked, canned, gardened; it was all a beautiful new experience.”
²¹
Jackson “did the baking in our family…. If he wanted apple pie, he baked it. I didn't know how to bake. I cooked—but he cooked too. He also cut the lawn (I couldn't run the machine). He more than pitched in. Perhaps if we'd had more money, we would have hired people to do things. But we didn't, so we had to do everything ourselves, and we shared the work to be done.”
²²
They acquired both a boat and a goat, which might have helped keep the grass trimmed.

Krasner reflected, “One thing Jackson and I had in common was experience on the same level…feeling the same things about landscape, for instance, or about the moon. He did a series around the moon. He had mysterious involvement with it. I had my own way of using that material. Very often I would get up at two or three and come out on the porch and just sit in the light here.”
²³

Away from the city's electric lights, the moon came into its own.

Not long after their move, Krasner wrote to Mercedes: “Well here we be in Springs East Hampton—3 hours from N.Y. and it might as well be 300 or 3000 miles. We've been here in this funny old Victorian bastard house & I begin to recall some of your early letters with all the trials & tribulations of trying to get settled.”
²⁴

There was a gigantic coal stove in the living room, but no coal yet, so that their only heat came from the kitchen. “I think it will be very comfortable when we do get it. A wood stove in the kitchen—running water (cold) and no bath—tub—otherwise all the comforts of our 8th St apt—Its [
sic
] very beautiful out here—the back of the house leads to a pond (inlet from the bay & with the house amongst other things is an old leaky row-boat).”
²⁵

Often the couple went clamming, and Jackson dug up clams with his bare toes.
²⁶
Bicycles were their sole means of transport: “so long as the weather permits we ride our sturdy steeds—I know you and Herbert will love the place.”
²⁷
“We had one bike for two years, and then we had two bikes,” Krasner later remembered, perhaps exaggerating their poverty to a journalist.
²⁸

Krasner wasn't sure if they were the first artists to move to Springs. “When we moved out, Motherwell was here,” Krasner recalled. He was “renting a house, but I believe he was here for about one season and we didn't see very much of him. We saw a little of him and then he went elsewhere and slowly the first artists came here. I think John Little came out first, followed by Wilfrid Zogbaum, and so the colony started.”
²⁹
She told how “when Zog and John were buying their houses, both Jackson and I were very involved with it and you know, went and saw the house they were getting, watched it getting in shape, saw each other closely, and so forth.”
³⁰

Another time she recalled that Motherwell was then “married to his first wife, a Mexican girl, Maria. And they had rented a guest house and were living there for a short time and then he left…and I think that was the end of East Hampton for him.”
³¹

Motherwell considered buying a piece of property across the road from the Pollocks. One evening at their place, after plenty of drinks, he remarked, “I'm going to be the best-known artist in America.” Lee replied, “I'd be very lucky to live opposite the best-known artist in America and be married to the best.”
³²

A studio space had to be found at once for Jackson, the potential star and breadwinner, so that he could prepare for his next solo show the following April.
³³
Krasner reported that his working space took priority over hers. “It was a matter of cleaning everything out before we could move in or work. So the first year was really about reclaiming the house. In the meantime, Jackson took one of the bedrooms to try to paint in.”
³⁴
He produced eleven oils and eight temperas for the show.

Many of Pollock's titles for his 1946 show had figurative references:
Circumcision, Water Figure, Troubled Queen, The Little King, The Child Proceeds, The White Angel,
and
High Priestess.
One source may have been the popular comic character the Little King, a King Features Sunday strip, created by Otto Soglow, who
narrated through pantomime with almost no words, just as some maintained Pollock communicated.
³⁵
Curves similar to those in Soglow's cartoons are visible in photographs of Pollock's painting
The Little King
before he painted over the canvas the following year and retitled it
Galaxy.
³⁶
Perhaps Pollock worried that his self-reflexive reference to the strip was too transparent, especially because it depicted a king who, like Pollock, just did not fit into society or his role in it. If he self-identified with the
Little King,
he must have seen Lee as the
Troubled Queen,
a sly acknowledgment of the trials he put her through.

The couple mainly struggled not with each other, but rather with Pollock's drinking bouts and the torments that drove him to drink. Krasner's hope that moving to East Hampton would stop Pollock from drinking had not panned out. He still drank to excess from time to time. She became preoccupied with keeping him from drinking, using distractions such as working on the house and in the garden.

After June 1946, the Pollocks had the small barn that came with the property moved from behind the house to the north side of the property. Not only could they now clearly see Accabonac Creek, but Jackson was able to use the barn as his studio, which in turn allowed him to enlarge the size of his paintings. Lee took a little upstairs bedroom as her work space, keeping another larger one free to accommodate guests. They began inviting more friends out to visit.
³⁷
“Exhibitions would bring us into the city and there were visits from people connected with the art world,” Lee remembered. “We were away from the city but we felt in touch.”
³⁸
“The people we wanted to see we invited out,” she explained.
³⁹