Lee Krasner (43 page)

To Rubenfeld, Greenberg also complained about “Lee's self-centeredness…. Lee had a lot of character but she didn't have the essence of character…. She's so self-centered. And Jackson was so self-centered too. The two of them.”
⁸⁰
He also admitted, “I still admire Lee. How she intimidated me, that's what I admired.” Greenberg acknowledged that Krasner was the only one who
could always intimidate him. For Greenberg, it was her “force of character…and boy she had it.”
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In Greenberg's view, he let Lee know that he did not like her work and she canceled both her show and Pollock's show scheduled for French & Company.

Krasner told her friend the critic and art historian Barbara Rose that “we had words and he exited.” Rose commented, “I imagine the words and the exit. I also realize it was her last chance to become part of the official avant-garde and that she deliberately refuses to conform.”
⁸²
But Krasner explained more than once that Greenberg canceled the show that he had promised her at French & Company because she refused to give him access to the Pollock estate and let him show it there.
⁸³

In 1981 Krasner told another interviewer, “People treated me as Pollock's wife, not as a painter…. Someone like Greenberg, because I didn't hand over to him the Pollock estate, did his job well to make sure I didn't come through as a painter. He had power.”
⁸⁴

It is clear that at this particular moment Greenberg was under pressure to produce sales for French & Company, and Pollock was then, after his death, a very “hot” artist with escalating prices.

Instead of the prestigious show she had anticipated at French & Company, Krasner had a solo show, “Lee Krasner, Paintings 1947–59,” in East Hampton with the Signa Gallery from July 24 to August 20, 1959. The show ranged from her Little Images to recent works like
Cornucopia
(1958) or
Breath
(1959). There were a total of fifteen pictures, of which two canvases,
Noon
and
Yes & No,
were not for sale. The prices went from $600 for the collage,
Forest I
(1954), to $1,800 for the canvases,
Birth
(1956),
The Bull
(1958), and
Cornucopia.

Meanwhile, helped by her relationship with the French critic Michel Tapié, Krasner managed to take part in several group shows in Europe, such as the “Arte Nuova” show that took place at the Circolo degli Artisti at Palazzo Granieri della Roccia in Turin, Italy, during the spring of 1959. Both
Spring Memory
(1959), an
oil on canvas, and
Broken Gray,
an oil and collage on Masonite, were shown, though the latter was misdated as 1958, when it was actually from 1955.
⁸⁵
As when she had work on view in Japan, Krasner made no effort to travel to Turin for the opening. Had she done so, her international recognition would surely have expanded.

Krasner's association with Tapié came from her long and close friendship with Ossorio and his companion, Ted Dragon. In February 1959, the East Hampton police apprehended Dragon while he was burglarizing a house and carrying a chair out of a second-floor bedroom window. For four years, while he was left to guard The Creeks house, Dragon had been “rescuing” antiques and art from homes and estates left vacant over the winter.
⁸⁶
He never sold anything but, without Ossorio's knowledge, stored most of his booty in their attic, telling Ossorio that he got these things from his relatives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

After he was caught, Dragon's only explanation was that he “just loved beautiful things so much, and sometimes I was appalled at how badly the furniture was being kept.”
⁸⁷
In fact Dragon restored and reupholstered some of the furniture he took, even eliciting thank-you notes from a few of the victims when they got their antiques back in better condition. Among Dragon's targets was the art dealer Leo Castelli, whose home Ossorio and Dragon had visited together on several occasions. Instead of prison, Dragon was sent for two years to West Hill, a private sanitarium in Connecticut, where he produced needlepoint and taught the other patients ballet. While there, he received a note from Grace Hartigan, saying, “Thank God we have a Robin Hood out on Long Island.”
⁸⁸

Some rejected Dragon for his criminal activity and referred to The Creeks as “the Creeps.”
⁸⁹
To the contrary, Krasner loyally stood by Dragon, saying she thought his rescues were “terrific.” She enjoyed his tales of acquisition and his taste for antiques. As
she began to have more disposable income, Dragon began to help her shop for antiques to redecorate. Krasner's stance also helped to cement her relationship with Ossorio.

Dragon later commented that, except for Lee Krasner, “most of the people who passed in and out of the house weren't interested in me in the least.”
⁹⁰
Krasner instead empathized with anyone who had to play the role of spouse to a famous artist. Despite her compassion, Dragon could be critical of Krasner: “Lee knew how to manipulate. From the moment I met that woman, her mind had one channel: Art, the making of Pollock, and the making of herself.”
⁹¹
Dragon recalled Krasner's sessions of calculating who in the art world could do what she needed for her. She even spread out small papers with their names on a table to study: “It was stepping stone after stepping stone. And if they didn't come through, the relationship ended—like opening a trap door.”

Lee Krasner and David Gibbs walking on the beach in East Hampton, July 1960. Krasner was so taken with the handsome Englishman that she gave him the choice assignment of finding a gallery to represent the Pollock estate. Courtesy of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, East Hampton, New York.

A
LFONSO
O
SSORIO WAS
“
DEVOTED TO
L
EE
”
AND SEVERAL TIMES
asked her to marry him, but always when he was “very drunk,” according to Richard Howard.
¹
Cile said that Alfonso was sort of “appealing,” but Lee said that she found him “revolting”
²
and refused to marry him. Ossorio had been married once, in 1940, to Bridget Hubrecht, though they divorced the next year. Krasner often saw Ossorio socially and, for a time, frequently. Through Ossorio she first met Dubuffet and saw more of
Clyfford Still, with whom she stayed friendly long after Pollock's death.

During the summer of 1959, Ossorio asked Krasner over for a Saturday-evening dinner. Betty Parsons was there as well and had brought along David Gibbs, a good-looking Englishman who had just introduced himself to Parsons and had managed to get a weekend invitation to The Creeks. Gibbs had served in the Welsh Guards in World War II and worked as a stockbroker but now was a self-proclaimed “art dealer” who dreamed of becoming a painter. His marriage was disintegrating as he began dividing his time between New York and London. His experience working in the financial sector had evidently whetted his appetite for rich women. To an outside observer, it may have appeared as if Gibbs was “on the make,” professionally and otherwise, as if he were planning to settle down and start afresh in the United States.

Krasner fell for Gibbs's British charm and good looks, just as she had once been attracted to Igor Pantuhoff's European style. She was clearly attracted to handsome men, and she was not inhibited by her own lack of beauty. Gibbs, then only thirty-three, was seventeen years younger than Krasner at fifty; but this didn't deter her.
³
Gibbs was “tall, gray-haired and urbane even for this most urbane of professions,” according to a British newspaper's description just a year later.
⁴

At The Creeks, Gibbs spent Friday night in a room with works by Dubuffet, Pollock, and Krasner on the walls. He claimed to like Krasner's small painting “enormously” and told her so at dinner the next evening, while requesting to see more of her work.
⁵
She invited him to drop by on Sunday, when, without missing a beat, he purchased one of her new large canvases,
Cool White
(1959). It was one of her first large pictures to sell, and Gibbs later resold it for a handsome profit.
⁶

The purchase was the ultimate flattery, and Krasner was disarmed. He later claimed that he and other Brits were seen by New Yorkers as invigorating because they were not felt to be tainted by
the art world. He may have been thinking of the British critic and curator Bryan Robertson, who served as curator of the first Pollock retrospective in Europe.
⁷
However, Robertson was openly gay and did not tease Krasner with a romantic entanglement. A year later, in May 1960, the
Sunday Times
of London included Gibbs in a feature story called “Atticus among the Art Dealers,” about a “handful of dealers who still manage to keep London at the head of the art-dealing centres of Europe.”
⁸
The headline's classical reference is to Roman times, when Atticus, a friend of Cicero's, was an Epicurean who collected art.

Gibbs's treatment of Krasner was more than just professional. In a letter postmarked December 21, 1959, he addressed her as “Dearest Lee” and told her how he thought of her frequently, longed for her, and missed hearing from her, which, he claimed, left him unable to sleep. He said that he worried about the dangerous steering wheel on her car and urged her to take care of herself. Gibbs praised her gift to him of jazz record albums, especially the ones by Ornette Coleman and Miles Davis. He also implored her to come see him in England early in the new year. He told her how close he still felt to New York and fondly referred to her painting that he had picked out, though he had yet to pay.

In his letter Gibbs encouraged Krasner to break from her past and begin anew without the weight of old memories. He cheered her on, telling her what a terrific person she was, which was just what he thought she wanted to hear. He pledged to help her manage the Pollock estate with all of his energy, declaring that it was just the challenge he truly wanted to take on and that he would soon return to New York. He urged her to keep painting and encouraged her to write to him. The effusions concluded with his wishing her a happy new year and sending his love.
⁹

Gibbs wrote this last letter on stationery imprinted with “David Gibbs & Co. Ltd c/o Louis Poirer & Co. LTD. Wine Shippers, 15 Old Bond Street, London.”
¹⁰
He shared an office with a Bond Street wine merchant and, according to a London reporter,
“believes that a good dealer should be a cross between a psychoanalyst and a stockbroker. He has been a soldier, biscuit manufacturer and stockbroker but prefers selling pictures to anything else. He believes that most galleries are far too forbidding to the new potential picture-buying public, and does most of his business from his commodious flat in Chesham Place.”
¹¹
Gibbs proudly sent this article to Krasner.

Krasner fell hard for Gibbs. In a letter of April 6, 1960, he again addressed her as “Dearest” and said that he was thrilled she had called him earlier. It's clear that Gibbs was after Pollock's estate. But how he ended up getting ahold of it so efficiently is somewhat complicated. From a letter that he wrote to Clement Greenberg on May 6, 1960, it appears that Gibbs carefully calculated and arranged meetings with Parsons and Ossorio—all along he was working toward getting to Krasner, his ultimate target. A year earlier, he had met Greenberg at the opening of an exhibition of Barnett Newman's work, organized by Greenberg for French & Company before Krasner's show had been canceled.
¹²
Gibbs had done his homework.

In the letter, Gibbs described having had an immediate insight when he first met Greenberg at Newman's exhibition. He then recalled how he had followed up the meeting by paying a call the following Sunday morning, when Greenberg was at home with the flu. He avowed that he had liked Greenberg. If the feeling hadn't been mutual, Gibbs would have let the matter drop. Instead the two men got together during the critic's visit to London and became friendly.
¹³
Gibbs wrote that he presumed that Greenberg could teach him about American paintings, which he did. He also assumed that Greenberg benefited from their friendship because such relationships (he described them metaphorically as “traffic”) are always mutual and reciprocal.

Gibbs pretended to be amazed by the turn of events over the previous few weeks—he had been asked by Krasner to help handle Pollock's estate—and he attributed his success to Green
berg and his wife, Jenny, who he claimed gave him his start in America. He stated that the purpose of his letter was to protect their friendship against a possible breach.

At the letter's climax, Gibbs exposed his underlying purpose—traveling to East Hampton and meeting Krasner. Artfully, he asserted that she made him feel the immediate sensation of mutual understanding—the same feeling that he had felt with Greenberg some ten months before. Thus because Greenberg and Krasner were no longer on good terms, when he came to New York, Gibbs claimed that he faced divided loyalties. He did not want to choose one new friend over the other.
¹⁴

He described an extraordinary dinner with Krasner at the elegant New York restaurant “21,” at which he agreed to go back to London and promote a small number of American paintings. Afterward Krasner called him to ask if he would help her decide where she should show her work. In particular, should she accept the overtures of Howard Wise, the latest dealer pursuing her painting? Then, dropping the bomb on Greenberg, he wrote that she had asked him if he would be interested in assisting her to place the Pollock estate.

It was disingenuous of Gibbs to feign surprise to Greenberg. After all, he had been working to obtain Pollock's estate even before he first set eyes on Krasner. He clearly knew that the news of his success would be devastating to Greenberg. After Greenberg's long years of promoting Pollock's work, a Johnny-come-lately from abroad had snatched the right to work with Krasner on the Pollock estate right from Greenberg's grasp.

Gibbs told Greenberg that he lost no time in flying to New York. Krasner telephoned on the Thursday before Easter, and he left the following Friday. He wrote about the previous two weeks in detail and feigned modesty by claiming that he had never before written a letter like this and that he would love to exchange letters with Greenberg over the matter. He also mentioned that he told Sidney Janis to forward all inquiries about Pollock on to him.
He ended the letter by asking how everything struck Greenberg. If Greenberg wrote a response, it hasn't been found; but Gibbs sent Krasner a copy of his typed letter that she kept, hence he clearly meant it also for her eyes.

Krasner was so taken with Gibbs that she gave him the choice assignment of finding a gallery to represent the Pollock estate, at once enhancing his income and his status. He managed not only to get the job, but he billed Krasner $1,000 ($100 a day for ten days) for his time, plus another $1,086 for his airfare, hotel, and sundry expenses. Payment was all handled by her attorney, Gerald Dickler. By October 26, 1960, he was about to visit her again and signed his business letter “with my fondest love.”
¹⁵

Krasner's friend Cile (Lord) Downs perceived Gibbs as “very personable, tall, and reedy,” and as “one of those borderline guys—gay—AC-DC so clever at handling Lee.”
¹⁶
Richard Howard recalled that Gibbs was “attractive in a way that was alien and new to Lee…a different model of man.”
¹⁷
Sanford Friedman, who was close to Krasner at this time, believed that Krasner and Gibbs were “lovers,” but admitted that Gibbs was “an ambitious careerist.”
¹⁸
Friedman later remarked, “I think that Lee was really in love with him, which if we look at all that precedes Gibbs in her life—how she fell for that—I don't know, but she did. How she would put aside her defiance, opposition, and toughness to surrender.”
¹⁹
Friedman was struck by how “out of character” Krasner's behavior was: “She was smitten. He played it for all it was worth.” The British critic Bryan Robertson was less harsh, perceiving Gibbs as not quite “a gigolo. A bit of a fancy boy, but not a villain, or cruel. He'd be nice to the woman he was with.”
²⁰

Gibbs knew Krasner wanted a large sum of money from a gallery up front, so his assignment was not as easy as it now sounds. Typical Pollocks were then selling for just three or four thousand dollars. When Gibbs sent Krasner the copy of his letter, he also wrote her that he had felt anxious about Greenberg and thus
wrote the letter to explain recent events and to bring Greenberg, whom he viewed as “deranged,” back to reality. He added with melodramatic hyperbole that if his letter failed, he would have no choice but to destroy this threat.
²¹

Gibbs didn't explain why Greenberg was a threat or why he thought he was disturbed. In the rest of the letter, Gibbs gushed about how marvelous the past two weeks had been and how he expected to go to Paris to see Alfonso Ossorio. He signed the letter, blessing her and wishing her well, adding a drawing of a flower emerging from a bulb while a bird pulls a worm from the earth. It's an ironic juxtaposition—the image of burgeoning love blended with the early grasp of prey.

The London
Sunday Times
wrote about Gibbs just a month later: “His chief task is acting as consultant to anyone who wishes to buy a modern painting but does not know how to go about it. His own taste is for modern American abstracts. He has just been appointed art advisor to the new foundation formed to promote the work of the late Jackson Pollock, the greatest of American action painters.”
²²
Gibbs was proud of this article, which he showed Krasner.

Greenberg had decided to write a book about Pollock. On September 1, 1960, he wrote Paul Jenkins to say that it was not going well because he wanted to express things that just did not belong in his text.
²³
The book never appeared, though the letter shows Greenberg's awareness of what was taking place in the market for Pollock. He also noted that David Gibbs spent two weeks in July in East Hampton, but that he had not seen him.

Despite Gibbs's early calculation and choreography with Krasner, he seems to have developed a genuine affection for her. Naturally this is understandable, given that she boosted his career and his income. Besides, he saw Krasner as a source of inspiration for becoming an artist because she was directly connected to the great Jackson Pollock. Evidently in his own ambition to become a painter, he felt enormous self-doubt, seeking advice and
encouragement from Krasner as a mentor, if not a muse. For her, Gibbs offered excitement, diversion, and an opening into a new world of European artists, galleries, and exhibitions. She believed that Pollock's higher prices “took European approval,” which happened when a “show went to Europe through the sponsorship of the Museum of Modern Art.”
²⁴