Lee Krasner (51 page)

Instead of vying to attract straight men, Krasner was drawn to openly gay men or to one, like Terry Netter, who was a Catholic priest when they first met, which precluded any sexual issues. She cultivated gay male friends. They satisfied her interest in handsome, often younger men, and could be bright, attentive, unthreatening, and loyal, sometimes serving, in Donald McKinney's account of his role, as “her walker.”
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Those to whom she was closest included McKinney, John Bernard Myers, Bill Lieberman, Richard Howard, Sanford Friedman, Bryan Robertson, Alfonso Ossorio, Ted Dragon, and Edward Albee.

William Slattery Lieberman, known as “Bill,” began at the Modern in 1945 as assistant to its founding director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. After a thirty-five-year curatorial career at the Modern, he left to direct twentieth-century art in a new wing at the Metropolitan, where the director, Philippe de Montebello, praised “his absolute professionalism and his ability to attract the best, together with the immense esteem and affection in which he's held here.”
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Lieberman, a self-described workaholic and a gay man identified in public as “single,” admitted that he considered the constant dinner parties he attended to be an important part of his job. Among the substantial donations for the Metropolitan Museum that he
successfully wooed was a gift of forty drawings by Jackson Pollock, given by Krasner.
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It is often written that Krasner did not get along with other women and especially with other women artists, including the painter Grace Hartigan, whose friendship survived decades, back to the time she showed up with Harry Jackson to visit the Pollocks. In the fall of 1979, Hartigan wrote to Krasner, thanking her for writing and asking if she could come down to speak with her graduate students at the Maryland Institute College of Art the following January. She offered to adjust her schedule to suit her old friend. Offered a modest honorarium of $300 plus expenses, Krasner, who never gave formal lectures, accepted the invitation and asked Hartigan to show the film made about her by Barbara Rose and then schedule an informal discussion for her with the students afterward.
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Additionally Krasner often wrote affectionately to “Buddha,” her close friend, the designer Ray Kaiser Eames, whom she continued to see whenever they were both in New York.
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Krasner's other friendships with women artists at this period ranged from her contemporary Perle Fine to the younger Nancy Graves.

On August 30, 1967, Krasner's friend Ad Reinhardt died of a heart attack. She held a wake for him at her home, and he was buried in the same Springs cemetery as Pollock. Krasner had known Reinhardt while on the WPA and as a fellow member of American Abstract Artists. She no doubt appreciated that in 1946 Reinhardt, when illustrating for
P.M.,
included her on a “tree” of artists in one of his cartoons in his now famous “How to Look at Art” series. This was especially important because it took place when so many other men in the art world found it more convenient to ignore her painting and treat her as Pollock's wife.

This problem continued for decades after she became a widow. In a review of a show at the Jewish Museum called “Large Scale American Paintings,” Harold Rosenberg referred to her in terms of Pollock: “At the Jewish Museum, panoramic abstraction is represented by Lee Krasner, Pollock's widow, by Milton Resnick,
and, in a restricted sense, by the pencil-marked canvas of Cy Twombley…. The replacement of action by activity, or process, also manifest in Miss Krasner's ‘Combat,' marks the passage from Action Painting to ‘environmental' art.”
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Nearly two years earlier, writing in
Esquire,
Rosenberg had lambasted the role of the artist's widow in general for controlling prices and sabotaging shows and publications. He noted in particular that “Mrs. Jackson Pollock, besides being a painter in her own right, is often credited with having almost singlehandedly forced up prices for contemporary American abstract art after the death of her husband.”
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Eventually Krasner began to publicly protest her situation. “I was put together with the wives, and when Rosenberg wrote his article [“The Art Establishment” in
Esquire
in January 1965] many years ago…the widow has become the most powerful influence…[or at least the most] powerful something in the art world. To date, a lot of the widows are acting it out. [Rosenberg] never acknowledged me as a painter, but as a widow, I was acknowledged. And, in fact, whenever he mentioned me at all following Pollock's death, he would always say Lee Krasner, widow of Jackson Pollock, as if I needed that handle.”
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As she was facing her sixtieth year, Krasner expressed her continuing openness to the new and unexpected: “Some things in time do clarify themselves. You do have an individual who, you know, appears on the horizon, and opens a door,
wide;
we all live on it, for a long time to come, 'till the next one (individual) arrives, and opens another door. In that sense, with regard to the young painter, whoever she or he may be, it's inevitable that something will come along.”
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Krasner made clear however that no one had yet appeared to displace for her the two greatest influences on her work—Matisse and Pollock.

Krasner finally arranged to have Lloyd's New York gallery represent her. In March 1968, her first solo show at Marlborough-Gerson Gallery garnered significant articles.
Artforum
published
Emily Wasserman's “Lee Krasner in Mid-Career”
Art News
brought out Lawrence Campbell's “Of Lilith and Lettuce” and Grace Glueck wrote a feature for the
New York Times.
The cover of
Artforum
for March 1968 featured Krasner's canvas
Pollination,
about which she once commented, “I can remember walking across vacant lots, on my way to school and my enchantment at seeing and picking clover, buttercups, and dandelions. I'm sure that this memory among other things is in
Pollination….
Yellow has always been a difficult color for me.”
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Emily Wasserman insightfully acknowledged the albatross in Krasner's connection to Pollock. “That Lee Krasner was the wife of Jackson Pollock has been at once the greatest single advantage and the greatest handicap to her career as an independent painter: an advantage, because the experience of living and working intimately with Pollock served as a crucial catalyst to her own work—a disadvantage, especially since his death in 1956, because in one sense, she has had to labor against her relationship to Pollock.”
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Campbell took the title for his article in part from Krasner's statement in the catalogue of her Whitechapel retrospective: “Painting, for me, when it really ‘happens' is as miraculous as, say, a lettuce leaf. By ‘happens,' I mean the painting in which the inner aspect of man and his outer aspect interlock.”
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Evidently mindful that Lee Krasner was Jewish, Campbell added the reference to Lilith, a night demon in Jewish lore, appearing in the Bible as a screech owl or “night monster” (Isaiah 34:14). Campbell wrote, “The daimons are there, and also Lilith who, it will be recalled, chose to leave Eden of her own free will.”
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Around the time of Campbell's article, feminists had taken up an interest in Lilith, as she appeared in an anonymous medieval text, “The Alphabet of Ben Sira,” which describes her as Adam's first wife. After Adam rejected her demand for equality in sexual positions, she deserted him and went on to mate and procreate with demons.
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The parallels between this fable and Krasner's life
are uncanny—Campbell could have very well been referencing Krasner's intimate relationship with Pollock before he left her to have sex with “demons.”

Campbell was clearly on Krasner's side when he concluded: “It is not always realized by those who see her work today that she was already a formed painter when she met Pollock and that her work remained quite independent of his through much of their married life. Her influence on him, however, seems to have been important…. Lee Krasner is a strong woman. She sails bravely into the teeth of whatever gale is blowing, and the handsome paintings in this current show demonstrate her continued strength and vitality.”
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For the
New York Times,
the caption to Grace Glueck's piece read “And Mr. Kenneth Does Her Hair,” in the slightly condescending manner that too often characterized Glueck's observations about women artists in the early years of the second wave of the feminist movement.
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Glueck quoted Krasner as saying, “I'm bad fashion, but I think there are signs that the tastemakers' rule in the art world is breaking up. Maybe my work will be visible again.”

When Glueck interviewed Krasner for the article, it's clear she asked her about Campbell's interpretation of the Lilith myth in relation to Krasner. “‘Lilith!' [Krasner] snorts, objecting to a current characterization of her by a leading art magazine. ‘I want you to know that
this
Lilith's furs are by Ritter Brothers and Mr. Kenneth does her hair.'” Lee's hairstyle, cut with Mamie Eisenhower bangs, was visible in an accompanying photograph. The caption and the article's placement typified a long tradition at the
Times
of reducing women artists to fashion.

Among the other large canvases in the Marlborough show were
Kufic
(1965),
Siren
(1966),
Gaea
(1966),
Jungle Lattice
(1967),
Uncial
(1967),
The Green Fuse
(1968),
Towards One
(1967). As a result, the installation was quite colorful. Yet Glueck dismissed the work as “very superficial,” with the exception of
Kufic,
described
as the “one notable painting” with its “improvised shapes (with a distinct echo of Matisse)…drawn in ocher against the brownish raw canvas surface. No other color obtrudes; no forms are filled in; the close-valued resonance of the ocher drawing and the brown canvas carries the entire picture.”
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Other reviews were more positive. In
The Nation,
Max Kozloff quibbled and criticized Krasner's earlier work from 1962 but concluded that “the burgeoning of a mature artist has resulted in an incredibly bright and calamitous vision as well.”
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Cindy Nemser wrote for
Arts Magazine,
“Between 1963 and 1968, the basic elements of Lee Krasner's paintings have burst their original tight bounds, and they are now boldly headed beyond the confines of the canvas.”
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While she commanded attention in the city, Krasner continued to show in East Hampton. She participated with a large group of artists who joined in a group show at Ashawagh Hall in Springs in August 1968, along with such friends as Perle Fine, Esteban Vicente, Ibram Lassaw, John Little, James Brooks, Tino Nivola, Alfonso Ossorio, and her nephew Ronald Stein. This was the first annual exhibition of what would become a series called “Artists of the Springs.”

A year later Krasner participated in a panel discussion on the topic “Is American Art Chauvinistic?” at Guild Hall on August 24, 1969, along with Adolph Gottlieb, Jimmy Ernst, John Little, Warren Brandt, and Hedda Sterne. Harold Rosenberg was the moderator. Krasner had never even approved of the category “American art”—she found it too nationalistic—so it is not surprising that she applauded the efforts of those who playfully demonstrated outside Guild Hall as the speakers and the audience arrived. As for the demonstrators, they questioned whether a discussion of the supposed superior attitude of American art was even worth having in a time when they opposed the Vietnam War. By demonstrating, they emulated the student radicals of the era.

One of the ringleaders, the sculptor Bill King, poked fun at the panel. “It was such an idiotic subject and panels are a blight! [The pacifist writer] Dwight and Gloria [Mcdonald], my wife, Annie, and I got all dressed up. I wore my Greek silk suit and the girls wore evening gowns. I went to Dreesen's and got a whole bologna and a knife. Then I printed up paper napkins in red that said, ‘This is the real boloney.' So we stood outside Guild Hall and, as the people were filing in, we'd put the bologna on a napkin and hand it to them, saying ‘This is just a sample of what you're gonna get inside, folks.'”
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As expected, people laughed at their protest, but King noted with surprise, “Lee Krasner ate hers like a real [trouper].”
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King was unaware either that Krasner had a history of demonstrating during her formative years or that she bristled at the notion of “American art.” To him, she seemed like a forbidding widow of a powerful artist.
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That same summer of 1969, Krasner needed a poster for an upcoming show in San Francisco. She asked Mark Patiky, the younger brother of Frances Stein, to come out to Springs and take her photograph. Already experienced in the world of fashion and advertising, Patiky, then just twenty-five, looked around for places for take the photograph. When Krasner took him out to the studio, he photographed her. Then she commented that she felt like painting, and he asked to photograph her as she worked. She readily agreed, and he captured her painting what became
Portrait in Green.
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Patiky watched as Krasner became very focused, standing back some fifteen feet with her arms folded, then running up and making “these slashing strokes,” a very active process. She worked on unstretched canvas tacked to the studio wall. As he watched her attack the canvas, he kept shooting until she said, “It's finished.”

“How can you tell?” he asked.

“I know,” she said, though he says that she reworked it a couple of years later.
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