Lee Krasner (35 page)

In May 1950, Barnett Newman phoned to invite Pollock to sign an open letter of protest to the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art alongside other vanguard painters. The protest was over the museum's director, Francis Henry Taylor, publicly declaring “his contempt for modern painting.” The letter, published in both the
New York Times
and the
Herald Tribune,
said that the protestors refused to participate in the museum's national juried exhibition of contemporary American painting because the
“choice of jurors…does not warrant any hope that a just proportion of advanced art will be included.”
⁵⁵

Lee had answered Newman's phone call, only to have him ignore her and ask to speak to Jackson, who agreed to lend his name. Hedda Sterne became the only woman to participate in the protest and in the now-notorious publicity photograph of the group, which was published in
Life
magazine on January 15, 1951, as “The Irascibles.”
⁵⁶
Krasner believed that the only reason one woman—Hedda Sterne—made the list is that Betty Parsons saw to it that she was. “She was [showing] in Betty's gallery and Betty said, ‘you've got to put Hedda Sterne in,' and so they put Hedda Sterne in.”
⁵⁷
The photograph was shot for
Life
by Nina Leen on November 24, 1950, in a room rented for the occasion.

On August 5, 1950,
The New Yorker
's “Talk of the Town” featured an interview with Jackson and Lee that some critics have interpreted as pushing a sexist stereotype.
⁵⁸
Pollock is described as “watching his wife, the former Lee Krasner, a slim auburn-haired young woman who also is an artist, as she bent over a hot stove, making currant jelly.” In all likelihood, however, Krasner was putting on a show of domestic creative activity for the
New Yorker
writer. Perhaps she wanted to make their home life seem idyllic and justify their residence far from the center of New York's art world. In fact she had already bragged to Mercedes of having developed cooking skills worthy of “Cordon Bleu,” which she had been using to promote Pollock.
⁵⁹

Pollock told the writer that “I've got the old Eighth Street habit of sleeping all day and working all night pretty well licked. So has Lee. We had to, or lose the respect of the neighbors. I can't deny, though, that it's taken a little while…. It's marvelous the way Lee's adjusted herself…. She's a native New Yorker, but she's turned into a hell of a good gardener, and she's always up by nine. Ten at the latest. I'm way behind her in orientation.”
⁶⁰

Jackson spoke of his childhood on his father's farm near Cody,
Wyoming, to which Krasner added, “Jackson's work is full of the West. That's what gives it that feeling of spaciousness. It's what makes it so American.” From someone like Krasner, who repeatedly decried nationalism, this was a ploy at creating a niche for Pollock and eliciting good press.

Pollock recounted his journey from study with Benton to patronage from Peggy Guggenheim to the move out to Springs. “Somebody had bought one of my pictures. We lived for a year on that picture and a few clams I dug out of the bay with my toes. Since then things have been a little easier.” The writer noted that “Mrs. Pollock smiled. ‘Quite a little,' she said. ‘Jackson showed thirty pictures last fall and sold all but five. And his collectors are nibbling at those.' Pollock grunted. ‘Be nice if it lasts,' he said.”
⁶¹

The writer then asked to see Pollock's work. On the wall of the living room was
Number Two,
1949. The writer noted that he had forgotten the title and Krasner piped up, “Jackson used to give his pictures conventional titles—‘Eyes in the Heat' and ‘The Blue Unconscious' and so on—but now he simply numbers them. Numbers are neutral. They make people look at a picture for what it is—pure painting.” Pollock averred, “I decided to stop adding to the confusion. Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was. Only he didn't know it.” Looking for another public relations angle, Krasner redoubled, “That's exactly what Jackson's work is…sort of unframed space.”
⁶²

Even though Krasner did enjoy cooking, she understood that by presenting herself to the
New Yorker
reporter in the stereotypical role of homemaker, she would appear less threatening and Pollock would appear more conventional. The low status of women at this time is also behind Barnett Newman's failure to invite Krasner to join the men in making their protest to the Metropolitan Museum and to be in the photograph known as “The Irascibles.” Naturally, male artists were reluctant to share their privileged
status with women in a profession where success was already so elusive.

It was Krasner's threat that Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, the well-known architect and painter known as Le Corbusier, saw that summer when he paid a visit to the Pollocks with their friend and Springs neighbor, the sculptor Costantino Nivola. “I took Le Corbusier to see Jackson—he was suspicious of Abstract Expressionists, calling them noisy and trying to get away from discipline—but he was pleased Jackson had his book,” recalled Nivola. Le Corbusier, he reported, said of Jackson's work, “This man is like a hunter who shoots without aiming. But his wife, she has talent—women always have too much talent.”
⁶³

In the fall, Pollock's works were on view in Venice in both the XXV Biennale and as part of Peggy Guggenheim's collection at the Museo Correr. On November 20,
Time
published an article, “Chaos, Damn It!,” which claimed that Pollock had “followed his canvases to Italy.” Yet
Time
took remarks made by the Italian critic Bruno Alfieri in
L'Arte Moderna
(and reprinted in Guggenheim's catalogue) out of context, and Pollock became distressed over the emphasis on “chaos” in the
Time
article. In response, Krasner helped Pollock draft a telegram to
Time:
“
NO CHAOS DAMN IT. DAMNED BUSY PAINTING AS YOU CAN SEE BY MY SHOW COMING UP NOV.
28
I'VE NEVER BEEN TO EUROPE. THINK YOU LEFT OUT MOST EXCITING PART OF MR. ALFIERI'S PIECE
.”
⁶⁴

“What they want is to stop modern art,” Pollock exclaimed to his friend Jeffrey Potter. “It's not just me they're after, but taking me as a symbol sure works.”
⁶⁵
When the painter Gina Knee ran into Pollock on the street in Amagansett, she sensed that he was “very upset” about the piece in
Time:
“I didn't try to console him but reasoned with him; how good he was and how wonderful that he was in that show. He brightened a bit but I thought, ‘Oh—there's more than that churning inside of him.'”
⁶⁶
Sensing a storm brewing in Jackson, she decided to decline the Pollocks' invitation to a dinner the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Years later,
she claimed that her husband, Alexander Brook, the academic portraitist, was not fond of Lee, implying that he preferred prettier women, since he was always looking for new subjects to paint.

Soon after Knee's encounter with Pollock, Hans Namuth filmed him painting on glass. He shot from below, catching the action through the glass surface of Jackson laying down the paint. What was usually the act of painting privately in one's studio suddenly was recorded for all to see. In a sense this was a psychic violation. Yet Pollock had not only acceded in advance, but also actually performed by painting while being filmed for the first time. The film was finished late on the cold and windy Saturday following Thanksgiving. Pollock and Namuth came into the house just as Lee had finished preparing an elaborate dinner party. The other guests included the photographer's wife, Carmen, Alfonso Ossorio and Ted Dragon, Josephine and John Little, Penny and Jeffrey Potter, Betsy and Wilfrid Zogbaum, and the architect and critic, Peter Blake.
⁶⁷

But Lee had made a mistake in not removing all alcohol from the house, and soon she was stunned to see Pollock pull a bottle of whiskey from under the sink and fill two large glasses as he said to Namuth: “This is the first drink I've had in two years. Dammit, we need it!”
⁶⁸
Lee was horrified at the tragedy of Pollock's act. In fact, Pollock got so drunk that he turned the dinner table over onto the laps of their guests, destroying both the food and the evening. Pollock didn't even try to justify himself. A few days later, he told a concerned Jeffrey Potter: “Shit, I wasn't upset! The table was.”
⁶⁹

And Pollock's doctor, Edwin H. Heller, had been killed in a car crash six months earlier. The death was devastating, and sudden. He had been the only doctor who succeeded in keeping Pollock away from alcohol. The nasty comment published in
Time
and the disturbance Namuth caused by filming the insecure artist in the process of painting combined to wear away Pollock's resolve to stay on the wagon.

Pollock's fourth solo show with Betty Parsons opened on the evening of November 28 and remained on view through December 16, 1950. Among the thirty-two works were several now considered his best:
Autumn Rhythm, Lavender Mist,
and
One,
which, ironically, given the show's failure to sell, are now in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art.
⁷⁰
Only
Lavender Mist
did sell, to Ossorio for $1,500.
⁷¹

Parsons had crammed Pollock's monumental paintings into an inadequate space that didn't do them justice. “The show was a disaster,” Parsons recalled. “For me it was heartbreaking, those big paintings at a mere $1200. For Jackson it was ghastly; here was beauty, but instead of admiration it brought contempt.”
⁷²

Pollock's brother Marvin Jay wrote from New York to their brother Frank in Los Angeles: “The big thing right now is Jack's show. Alma and I were there and it was bigger than ever this year and many important people in the art world were present. Lee seemed very happy and greeted every one with a big smile.”
⁷³

Among those whom she could not have been pleased to see was Elaine de Kooning, still married to (though estranged from) Willem de Kooning. According to Clement Greenberg, “This was Jackson's best show, and up came Elaine de Kooning, who said the show was no good except for one painting—the only weak picture in the show, the one he painted [on glass] when they were working on the movie. The show was so good, it's unbelievable.”
⁷⁴
Elaine de Kooning's comment can only have irritated Krasner. She must have noted that Ossorio purchased not only the Pollock but also three oils on paper from de Kooning's women series.

Even the reviews for the show were mixed. The critic for the
New York Times,
Howard Devree, called Pollock one of two (with Mark Tobey) of “the most controversial figures in the field” and declared that the “content” in Pollock's work was “almost negligible.” He trivialized the artist by asking, “But isn't all this rather in the nature of day-dreaming we have all done while staring at a
wallpaper pattern and ourselves investing it with ideas?”
⁷⁵
Robert Coates of
The New Yorker
also professed doubt about the work, asking, “Does personal comment ever come through to us?”
⁷⁶

Even though more positive notices appeared in
Art News
and
Art Digest,
they were not enough to boost Pollock's sinking spirits.
⁷⁷
Art News
chose Pollock's show as one of the three best one-man shows of the year, ranking it ahead of the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti's, but behind the early American modernist John Marin's.
⁷⁸
When the sales that Pollock had hoped for did not materialize, it compounded his letdown.
⁷⁹
His serious lack of self-esteem made things worse. Krasner had her hands full.

Lee Krasner with her painting
Stop and Go,
c. 1950, photographer unknown. Ever frugal, she created this tondo of 1949–50 by reusing the round wooden base that had served her while making the two mosaic tables. She invented repeated hieroglyphic-like symbols that were reminiscent of some of the rhythmic forms on the tables.

P
OLLOCK'S RELAPSE SUBJECTED
K
RASNER TO INCREASED STRESS
. “As Jackson's fame grew, he became more and more tortured,” she reflected. “My help, assistance, and encouragement seemed insufficient. His feelings towards me became somewhat ambiguous. Of course, he had many other supporters. Tony Smith, then an architect (later a sculptor), was among the strongest, as was [the abstract painter] Clyfford Still, whose letters and comments meant a great deal to Jackson. He adored Franz
Kline [another abstract painter]—whom he could talk to. And of course there was Clement Greenberg, who from the very first was one of his most avid supporters.”
¹
Fritz Bultman blamed Lee for Jackson's problems, claiming, “In a way Jackson was Lee's creation, her Frankenstein; she set him going. And she saw
where
he was going, aside from the talent and all that, but he was devastated by fame coming to him.”
²

Pollock began to deteriorate rapidly. Nothing seemed to go right for him. He wrote to Ossorio and Dragon in January 1951, “I found New York terribly depressing after my show—and nearly impossible—but I am coming out of it now.”
³
In late January 1951, Ossorio offered Pollock $200 a month “towards the next painting of yours that we acquire.” Yet other anticipated sales did not materialize. A few weeks later, he wrote Ossorio, “I really hit an all time low—with depression and drinking—NYC is brutal.”
⁴
Pollock tried seeing his regular homeopathic doctor, Elizabeth Hubbard, but nothing mitigated his depression.

Ossorio also lent Jackson and Lee his New York town house so Jackson could be in the city to see a new therapist, Ruth Fox, M.D., beginning in March 1951. Fox served as president of the New York City Medical Society on Alcoholism and vice president of the National Committee on Alcoholism. Lee had learned about the doctor through Elizabeth Hubbard. Fox treated alcoholism through psychoanalytic therapy combined with participation in Alcoholics Anonymous, which meant that Jackson had to adhere to total abstinence.
⁵
Fox prescribed a drug called Antabuse, which makes the patient sick if he or she drinks alcohol. In 1948 Fox had helped bring the drug to the United States from Denmark, where it was developed.
⁶
Pollock resisted both taking Antabuse and going to meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous in Southampton, which he did not like, perhaps because of its group interaction and its religious invocations.

Fox also insisted that alcoholics realize how much their families suffered. Sober partners had to deal with an alcoholic's mood
changes and their demands for “exclusive attention,” and they became exposed to ostracism and shame in the community.
⁷
For Krasner, Pollock's behavior when drunk was so outrageous that their marriage and their social life withered. Their friends were amazed at the extent of Krasner's devotion under such trying circumstances. Linda Lindeberg, a painter who had been a Hofmann student, recalled that Lee “was like his left hand and though she lived with an alcoholic, never, never did I hear her say anything against Jackson.”
⁸

In an essay, “The Alcoholic Spouse,” published in 1956, Fox wrote: “The wives of alcoholic men…will make almost any sacrifice to help their husbands once they have learned to look upon them as sick individuals. This is partly because of their greater tendency to mother and sympathize with the husband, sensing that he cannot help himself.”
⁹
Fox also defined three types of alcoholics, of which she would have placed Pollock among the “primary addicts…persons who have been psychoneurotic throughout their lives, with alcoholism starting at an early age, often in their teens. These individuals were obviously maladjusted on an emotional level prior to their compulsive drinking. They might have been introverted or insecure with respect to interpersonal relations, or excessively dependent.”
¹⁰

Years later Krasner told a journalist who inquired about Pollock's drinking, “Who knows why people drink? With all that's been written about alcoholism, we still don't know what really causes it. In all the years I knew him, he drank off and on except for one two-year period. He tried every known way to stop, except for AA, which for some reason he couldn't accept, and I still have all the bills to prove it. He never drank when he was working; it was two different cycles of his life.”
¹¹
Another time she commented that Pollock's heavy drinking related to the macho image that “originated as far back as [his teacher] Benton, where it was he-man stuff to do.”
¹²

On March 9, 1951, Pollock signed a will, leaving everything
to Krasner. In the event she predeceased him, he left everything to his brother Sande McCoy. In the event that neither survived him, he arranged to have his estate divided among his other three brothers, Frank, Jay, and Charles. Alternative executors included Sande McCoy, Clement Greenberg, and Alfonso Ossorio, in that order. In a separate letter that accompanied the will, Pollock wrote, “Lee—if you are the Executrix lend some of the paintings to my brothers then living. Remember those paintings will belong to you alone and you alone can decide which paintings are to be borrowed and for how long. This is a request which I have purposely omitted from my will because of its complicating nature.”
¹³

Krasner and Pollock showed together with many other abstract artists in the Artists Club's 9th Street Show. The show was curated by Leo Castelli and opened on May 21, 1951. The announcement for the show still spelled her name with the double
s
. The few other women artists in the large show included Elaine de Kooning and Grace Hartigan.
¹⁴

On June 7 the Pollocks were back in Springs, and Jackson wrote to Ossorio that Krasner was preparing for her first solo exhibition in New York City.
¹⁵
Pollock had persuaded his dealer, Betty Parsons, to show her work. Parsons later explained that she “didn't believe in having husband and wife in the same gallery. Jackson knew this—he said they shouldn't be with the same analyst either—but for Lee he could be persistent. And I felt if I didn't show her, there would be problems.”
¹⁶
So Parsons agreed to give Krasner a show to satisfy Pollock.

Though some deny that Pollock supported Krasner as an artist, Parson's statement corroborates Krasner's claims that he did. Certainly Pollock might have pretended otherwise on occasion, especially to please his male colleagues, but in the letter he wrote to Ossorio and Dragon and in the efforts he made with Parsons, his actions confirm Krasner's sense of the matter.

Krasner always said that Parsons gave her a show because
“Jackson asked Betty…to come and look at my work with regard to giving me a show. And so she came, and she looked, and scheduled a show. But the show was like nine months away or something. And right after she left…my image so-called broke…. A whole new thing happened and that became my first show with Betty Parsons.”
¹⁷

Krasner tried to explain the concept of her art changing as “going for a certain length of time” before “the image breaks again.”
¹⁸
From the time Parsons saw her work and agreed to a show, Krasner admitted, “it was a far cry from what is now known as the ‘Little Image.'”
¹⁹
Krasner's show “Paintings 1951, Lee Krasner” presented canvases that were larger than she had been making. “You could say they maybe started to blow up. For me it was only holding the vertical, though some of them move horizontally as well.” After making this comment to the critic Cindy Nemser in an interview in 1972, Krasner proudly quoted Pollock's 1951 letter to Ossorio: “‘Lee is doing some of her best painting. It has a freshness and bigness that she didn't get before. I think she will have a handsome show.'”
²⁰
This was Krasner's first solo show ever, and it ran for a month, starting on October 15.

Among the fourteen canvases she showed at Parsons, Krasner kept only two in their original state. She either reused the old canvases as backgrounds for the collages she made for a show in 1955 or cut them up.
²¹
She later described one of the fourteen as “a vertical-horizontal measurement of space in soft color.”
²²
She was probably referring to the canvas known as
Number 2
which survived rolled up as late as 1967, and measures 92.5 by 132 inches.
²³
The geometric shapes and overlapping forms relate to Mondrian, but the more innovative palette is composed mainly of earth tones.

Along with Krasner, Parsons also showed Anne Ryan, who had been active as a writer in Greenwich Village during the 1920s. Ryan was married, the mother of three children, and a poet. In 1941 she took up painting and then joined Atelier 17, Stanley Hayter's printmaking studio. Subsequently she produced prints
and collages, the latter after being inspired by a show of Kurt Schwitters's work.
²⁴
Ryan also designed scenery for the theater and costumes for the ballet. A generation older than Krasner, Ryan must have made an impression on Krasner. When interviewed later in life about women artists, Krasner named Ryan as one who had come to her attention.
²⁵

Both Ryan's small collages and Krasner's paintings were reviewed together, like their shows, by Stuart Preston in the
New York Times
. About Krasner, he wrote: “By means of their placid rectangular forms, by their discreet, limpid color and their unobtrusive handling, these paintings, large and small, emanate feelings of calm and restraint. Roughly, here is the Mondrian formula worked out with feminine acuteness and a searching for formal and chromatic harmonies rather than a delivery of water-tight solutions. Here designs are occasionally awkward, but they are ever clear and it is to her credit that the more complex they get the better they come off.” He even wrote of one work's “majestic and thoughtful construction.”
²⁶
How, one wonders, did he define “feminine acuteness,” and was it intended as a compliment?

Krasner must have longed for the more effusive enthusiasm Preston reserved for Ryan's collages, which he described as “abstracts made with bits of colored paper and cloth. Nothing new in the way of praise can be said about these fragments of delicacy that has not appeared in this column before. Their taste is as refined as it is unvarying and she seems to have a power of self-criticism that some of her more flamboyant colleagues lack. Free from ostentation, she stands in relation to them rather as Boudin to the great Impressionists.”
²⁷

Regardless of how Krasner judged herself in relation to Ryan, the more interesting question to ask is: what had influenced Krasner's shift in style before she showed with Ryan? One answer might be geometric abstractions by I. Rice Pereira, who was one of only three women in the Museum of Modern Art's 1946 show “Fourteen Americans.” Then, along with Ryan, she was
one of only seven women in that museum's 1951 traveling survey, “Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America.” Opinion remains divided as to whether the geometric work Krasner showed at Parsons owed a debt to Mondrian, whom she acknowledged, or Rice Pereira, whom she did not.
²⁸

The artist Robert Goodnough reviewed Krasner's show in
Art News,
noting: “One comes away with the feeling of having been journeying through a vast uninhabited land of quiet color.”
²⁹
Reviewing the show in
Art Digest,
the critic Dore Ashton also focused on her “love for delicate, closely related color tonalities,” remarking that she used “right-angle tensions related to Mondrian in structure, if more sensuous in color.”
³⁰

Another review, also clipped and saved by Krasner, which appears to be written by Emily Genauer, the chief art critic at the
New York Herald Tribune,
linked Krasner to “a purification of Mondrian, whose rigid formalism has been purged of all harshness.”
³¹
Given Krasner's strong interest in nature, she must have cringed when this same review stated: “This art seems to demand no identification with nature, nor does it command a vital illusion.” Still, this reviewer admitted to being “touched” by Krasner's “painted surfaces…beautifully smoothed into quietly innocuous patterns of arresting, sweetly cultivated tonal composition.”
³²
It was not a bad set of reviews for a solo debut in New York, but Parsons did not arrange much in the way of either sales or publicity, leading to Krasner's disappointment. Most likely the huge fuss made over Pollock's shows had raised her expectations beyond what was typical or likely, especially for a woman artist in 1951.