Lee Krasner (50 page)

The London
Times
reviewer declared that “while participating in a general trend which places her in relation with other American abstract painters, Miss Krasner, it can be appreciated, has preserved an individuality of her own. A strong, decorative rhythm, very attractive in its expansion on a large scale, a sense of colour, sometimes employed with a deliberate restraint but on occasion rich and intricate and a capacity for bold design, exemplified in a number of collages, are the qualities that appear.”
³⁰
Writing in the
Observer,
Nigel Gosling declared, “I doubt whether anybody would guess from the paintings that they are by a woman. On the
other hand, they are unmistakably American. The free, confident handling, the relaxed bigness of scale, and the driving vigour which runs through the largest composition like sap, are enviable birthmarks of her time and place.”
³¹

John Russell, in the
Sunday Times,
pronounced the show “exhilarating.”
³²
Sheldon Williams, writing for the Paris edition of the
Herald Tribune,
declared Krasner “a prime mover in the abstract-expressionist revolution that fired the first shot in the battle to put U.S. modern artists into the front line of world appreciation.”
³³
At least three of Krasner's London reviewers saw the influence of Mark Tobey on her work, especially the last of her Little Images. This was an inaccurate judgment based on the journalists' greater and earlier familiarity with Tobey's work from his living, teaching, and exhibiting in England.
³⁴
Norbert Lynton, writing in
Art International,
made the boldest claim by stating that “Tobey's influence appears to have been disastrous and dominates her work round about 1948–9.” Nevertheless, Lynton still viewed Krasner as “a considerable and enjoyable follower, synthesizer, adapter and recreator of elements that have been presented by others. This is more than I should say of a great many artists who are more widely admired than she.”
³⁵
Despite such quibbles, most of the press was very positive, and Krasner was no doubt quite pleased.

When asked by Andrew Forge about the stylistic break from brown earth tones, which she had painted under artificial light, to the bold forms and bright colors in her recent work, Krasner admitted, “It used to frighten me, you know, work and then this break would happen and I would have to be the first to deal with the break and accept it.” She then commented that her show at Whitechapel was “the first opportunity I have to see a period of work from about '46 and the rewarding thing to see for me is that the break isn't quite so violent as it seems at the time it's taking place, and in that sense I think every painter should have an op
portunity to put up a ten-year period of work some place so that the painter can see what's taking place.”
³⁶

Included in the Whitechapel show was
Right Bird Left,
a canvas of 1965, painted in bright rich colors with biomorphic shapes repeated across the wide canvas. It is possible to see what could be a bird form, however abstract, on the left side of the painting. The title is noteworthy, though it is not known whether Krasner chose it herself or accepted a suggestion from one of her friends. This is the only painting in which she alludes to her difficulty in telling right from left.

During the festivities in London, Krasner did not see David Gibbs, who had been so central to her first London visit in 1961. The very week her show was opening in London, Gibbs, at age forty-three, had divorced his wife and was in New York marrying Geraldine Stutz, forty-one, described as “a 5'6", 110-pound, perfect size 6.” She was president of Henri Bendel, the chic Manhattan shop. The wedding notice identified him as an “abstract painter.”
³⁷

Before Gibbs's marriage to Stutz ended in 1976,
New York
featured them as a couple, stating, “Her elegant and erudite English husband discarded his lucrative career as a London art dealer when he decided he wanted to paint.”
³⁸
His decision was no doubt helped by Stutz's success, which was so great that she eventually bought Henri Bendel for a reputed eight million dollars.

Gibbs's actions may have affected Lee's work over the next year, 1966. Much is discernible from the titles of her paintings then—
Memory of Love, Courtship,
and
Siren.
Siren refers to the female Sirens in Homer's
Odyssey
who promise to sing of all history and nature to seafarers passing by their island. However, those who approach the Sirens die at their feet. Another title besides
Siren
was
Gaea
(“Earth”), which recalls another layered myth: primordial Earth gave virgin birth to Sky (Uranos), who promptly cohabited with his mother to produce offspring called Titans. When Sky blocked his mother, Gaea, from giving birth to monsters, she con
spired with their son, Kronos, who castrated his father. The painting's agitated biomorphic forms in bright magenta suggested the violence of the title.

Krasner defended her nomenclature, stating, “I wouldn't call it monstrous or underworld. You use the word monstrous as though it were relegated to a realm other than man. I would call it basic, insofar as I am drawing from sources that are basic.”
³⁹
Krasner herself named
Courtship,
which was most likely an allusion to David Gibbs. To Krasner, Gibbs was “a charming cad,” in the words of her friend the art dealer Nancy Schwartz.
⁴⁰
Yet Krasner had not lost out. Gibbs had given Krasner what she wanted—access to an international market for Pollock's work and a chance for her to exhibit in Europe—and she remained on friendly terms with him, even inviting him and his new wife to her events.

News of Krasner's success prompted her old beau Igor Pantuhoff to write to her in the late spring of 1965: “I want to congratulate you for making a jerk out of Peggy…. Good for you! Igor.”
⁴¹
He alluded to press reports that Krasner had prevailed against Guggenheim's lawsuit claiming that she contractually owned more of the works in the Pollock estate from the years 1946 and 1947. Guggenheim had been forced to drop her claim for damages of more than $122,000, “retract all charges of wrongdoing on the part of the defendant,” and settle for only two small works by Pollock then said to be worth only $400.
⁴²
It has been said that Guggenheim lost her case because of a sentence she wrote in her book
Confessions of an Art Addict,
describing the unsold pictures in the aftermath of Pollock's first show with Parsons: “All the rest were sent to me, according to the contract, at Venice, where I had gone to live.”
⁴³

Krasner had won out over Guggenheim in another sense—here was Krasner's revenge against someone who had asked Pollock, “Who is this L.K.? I didn't come to see work by LK,” at his studio in New York. Now Krasner was having a retrospective in London, where Guggenheim had opened her first art gallery.

By January 1966, Krasner was again thinking about getting an apartment in the city and had taken a room at the Elysée Hotel.
⁴⁴
By the summer, she was back in Springs, where she was the most prominent of six artists featured in a show at East Hampton's Guild Hall called “Artists of the Region.”
⁴⁵
The
East Hampton Star
wrote effusively that her Whitechapel Gallery show had been chosen by the British Arts Council to tour museums of the British Isles, then the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

That same summer, Francis V. O'Connor, a thirty-year-old art historian, visited Krasner after sending her his recently completed doctoral dissertation on Jackson Pollock. She arranged for Alfonso Ossorio to pick up O'Connor at the East Hampton train station. O'Connor learned from Ossorio that Krasner had asked him to read the dissertation aloud to her and that the two of them had wept at learning so much about Pollock's young life.
⁴⁶
The dissertation research became the basis of O'Connor's work in the catalogue of the 1967 Pollock show at the Museum of Modern Art.

In 1967 Krasner moved to 180 East Seventy-ninth Street, a building with a twenty-four-hour doorman. She took a spacious apartment with a large master bedroom that she used as her studio, because, as she said, “the light is magnificent.”
⁴⁷
She slept in the smaller bedroom and used the tiny maid's room off the kitchen for guests. This arrangement was ideal for someone who lived alone and had wanted to have twenty-four-hour access to her studio, enabling her to go in at night if her insomnia returned. She rented secure storage for her paintings just one block away. The apartment studio, though atypical, fit her need to feel safe and complemented her use of the barn studio in Springs for the summers.

In February 1967, a solo show of twenty paintings by Krasner opened as the first show ever at the University of Alabama's new Garland Hall Gallery. Donald McKinney of Marlborough-Gerson Gallery accompanied her to Tuscaloosa for the week.
⁴⁸
Though she did not lecture, she did visit several art classes, spoke informally with students, and was the sole juror of a student art show. She spoke to a reporter there about how she had “succeeded in combining my career with the role of wife. It can certainly be done,” she explained, “if a woman wants to work hard enough.”
⁴⁹
She insisted: “There is absolutely no truth in the rumor that our painting interests clashed; he offered me a lot of encouragement about my paintings.”
⁵⁰

Krasner sounded more like a feminist with a female reporter at the University News Bureau. “It can never be said that painting is a man's field; traditionally women have not produced great art, but this is because of social views rather than any in-born ability. A woman must face prejudice in this field, and must be perhaps one and a half times as good as her male counterpart to gain recognition.”
⁵¹
Theodore Klitze, the head of the university's art department, told Krasner about a new cooperative of African American women who made remarkable patchwork quilts. She insisted that she and McKinney visit these women in Gee's Bend, the small town where they worked. Krasner was deeply moved by the work and arranged to purchase some of the quilts, encouraging the women by her comments and actions.

She later recalled the experience: “Finally, we arrived at someone's house and went in. I shall never forget it. We went into this room where there was a stretcher [quilt frame] the full space of the room. The women were seated against the walls of the room, working on a quilt. It was quite a sight to behold: to have the door opened and to be confronted with I don't know how many women sitting around and working on this quilt…. I was very taken with what I had seen. I asked about this and that and ordered three quilts…. Gee's Bend is very implanted in my mind.”
⁵²

Back in New York, the second Pollock retrospective opened on April 5, 1967, at the Museum of Modern Art, and Krasner was interviewed extensively about it. The show caught the attention of critics, the general public, and many prominent contemporary
artists, among them Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Jasper Johns, and Richard Lindner, who were moved to praise Pollock's work.
⁵³
The art historian William Rubin (who later became the museum's director of painting and sculpture) also began publishing his serial essay on Pollock and European modernism in
Artforum.
Clement Greenberg joined the outpouring with an article in
Vogue,
in which he wrote that Pollock “saw more in art and knew more of it than almost anybody (with the exception of his wife, the painter Lenore Krasner) who talked to him about it.”
⁵⁴

Harold Rosenberg weighed in on the show with an essay, “The Mythic Act,” in
The New Yorker
in which he referred to Krasner, but not by name: “Pollock's wife quotes him as saying in reply to an observation about working from nature, ‘I
am
Nature.'” Rosenberg then conflated Krasner's intellect with Pollock's, claiming that Rimbaud was among his favorite reading and, again without identifying her, noted “a quotation from (if my memory is correct)
A Season in Hell
appeared in large letters on the wall of his wife's studio in the early forties.”
⁵⁵

Despite her irritation at Rosenberg's repeated attempts to obscure her identity as an artist, she was no doubt pleased to see the attention he paid Pollock. Krasner's continuing success in promoting Pollock's work was satisfying to her. Her dedication to taking care of him both in life and after his death was indicative of both the love she felt for him and of the awe and respect that she had for his art. Painful memories of Pollock's affair with a younger woman and Krasner's failed relationship with David Gibbs seem to have convinced her neither to seek nor to accept any more attention from heterosexual men. She must have realized that she had lost her previous asset of a fabulous figure and that her facial features matched nobody's idea of beauty. Despite her abundant humor and her quick wit (which often threatened men of her generation), it seems she decided that she no longer wanted to compete with younger women.

In one sense, Krasner could not focus on another heterosexual
man, for she remained “Mrs. Jackson Pollock.” Her devotion to Pollock in their married life continued, even though he was dead. In fact she could work more efficiently to promote his work because she no longer had to deal with his dysfunctional behavior. When she traveled to the West Coast opening of the Museum of Modern Art's Pollock retrospective, the
Los Angeles Times
featured her as “The Artist Leading a Double Life.” She told the female reporter that she was preparing for a spring show in New York City, “which is why I can't stay in Los Angeles. I have to return home to paint pictures,”
⁵⁶
adding with regard to the constant demands about Pollock's work: “Nonetheless, I've learned to deal with it, even though it means being separated from my own work at times. Being Lee Krasner Pollock is a full-time job.”
⁵⁷