Lee Krasner (53 page)

For Krasner's next show at Marlborough, she showed twelve paintings from the last two years, all monumental in size, including
Palingenesis
(1971),
Majuscule
(1971), and
Rising Green
(1972). The show opened on April 21 to rave reviews. In the
New York Times,
Hilton Kramer pronounced that the show was “by far the finest exhibition of Miss Krasner's work I have seen. Something of the sweep and the rhythm of her former expressionist style has been retained—in the bolder, flatter, hard-edged forms of the new paintings, which are lyrical celebrations of color. There is a good deal of late Matisse in these new paintings, and a happy influence it proves to be, prompting the artist to a great boldness of design and a more eloquent simplicity of form.”
²⁶

Barbara Rose also applauded Krasner, writing, “In her newest paintings, however, she seems to have come to what used to be termed a ‘breakthrough' in terms of arriving at uniquely personal statements. And significantly enough this departure from her past works has been in the direction of pure color…. It took nearly twenty years to realize the direction the collage paintings pointed to.”
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At Guild Hall again in the summer of 1973, Krasner took part in a show called “Twenty-One Over Sixty.” She was sixty-four. She had suggested the idea, but by the time the show took place, she was regretful: “Now I wish I never got the idea to begin with. It's just that one gets a little bored with the American youth image. It's suburbia and Hollywood all in one. It started in the '60s, which I call the Sterile '60s. If you haven't had a major show by the time you're thirty-five, you're nothing.”
²⁸
Other artists in the show included current and past friends: Perle Fine, Ilya Bolotowsky,
James Brooks, Costantino Nivola, Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Ibram Lassaw, and Esteban Vicente.

Krasner refused to allow her age to be printed in catalogues, and she once told a journalist, “Call me sixty plus.” Age was very important for an artist's success in America. “If you're an artist, you have to have a lot of mileage. You have to do a lot of painting. You can't get by with a youth image. In Europe, artists live to be eighty or ninety. In this country, we kill them off younger.”
²⁹

Krasner, a heavy smoker and a drinker, as was common in her generation, took no responsibility for her own health.

That summer the artist Hermine Freed videotaped Krasner in the Springs house for her “Herstory” project, which raised a number of topics, including stereotypes and inequity that women artists still had to endure. Krasner fiercely attacked her old friend and patron B. H. Friedman—she said she disliked his biography of Pollock because of “his Gucci-Pucci attitude towards life,” “his warped idea” of masculinity, and asked, “What chance do I have to get an objective view?” Angry at Friedman's depictions of both herself and Pollock, Krasner rails on the video at Friedman's inherited wealth. Her remark about his idea of masculinity probably referred to his account of Pollock's affair with Ruth Kligman. He wrote, “how dead Pollock felt at the time, how much he needed to be told he was alive…. Perhaps Ruth Kligman told him physically—and verbally.”
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At the same time, Krasner probably felt he had not paid enough attention to her as an artist. Krasner explained that in the beginning, she was less conscious of prejudice against women, but that she was annoyed with “the prejudice today, the intolerance today.”
³¹

Krasner pointed Freed toward Barbara Rose's review of the biography. Rose had branded the book as “closer to a fantasy re-creation of the artist's personality, motivations, psychology and behavior…. The feat of transforming Pollock's life into a novel that begs for a Hollywood translation is considerable.”
³²
Rose took
Friedman to task for viewing Krasner as “simply the great man's wife” and treating her that way, making her into a stereotype throughout the book, seeing her as “anything but being a creative equal as complicated and tormented as Pollock himself.”

On November 13, 1973, “Lee Krasner: Large Paintings” opened in New York at the Whitney Museum but did not go on tour. While the Whitney had continued to support the realism of artists such as Edward Hopper or Andrew Wyeth during the 1950s and 1960s, it also gave shows to vanguard abstract artists, though most of them were male. Krasner's solo show, organized by Marcia Tucker, a dynamic thirty-three-year-old curator who had been working there since 1969, included eighteen large-scale canvases dating from 1953 to 1973. It was her first one-person show in a New York museum. Most of the work was still in Krasner's possession and was lent courtesy of Marlborough Gallery.

One major canvas in her show,
Pollination,
was lent by the Dallas Museum of Art. According to Donald McKinney, then president of Marlborough, Krasner did not want to sell major works by Pollock to anyone but museums, and then only reluctantly. She did so more readily when museums also acquired her work.
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In the case of the Dallas Museum, however, the museum purchased her
Pollination
the year after it bought
Portrait and a Dream,
Pollock's major canvas of 1953.
³⁴
If this was her strategy, it seems to have worked and benefited both the museum and the artist.

Even
Time
magazine covered her show, and the writer A. T. Baker defended Krasner against an earlier attack from Harold Rosenberg. “Critic Harold Rosenberg once credited her with ‘almost singlehandedly forcing up the prices for contemporary American Art.' She lives comfortably now on Manhattan's East Side, but beyond a weakness for fur coats, she takes little interest in her latter-day wealth. What occupies her is the determination to reassert her artistic individuality.”
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Such a relic of the old
journalist vice of setting woman artists apart by discussing them in the context of fashion would never have been inflicted on a male.

Baker was not wrong in asserting that Krasner wanted individuality. In
Newsday
art critic Amei Wallach captioned her article: “Lee Krasner, Angry Artist.” She quoted Krasner saying, “I happen to be Mrs. Jackson Pollock, and that's a mouthful. The only thing I haven't had against me was being black. I was a woman, Jewish, a widow, a damn good painter, thank you, and a little too independent.”
³⁶

In his review for the
New York Times,
Hilton Kramer acknowledged that Krasner brought her own power to the abstract expressionist style that Pollock had pioneered. Kramer noted that Krasner's work was “a less desperate and more lyrical affirmation, and there is no suggestion of anything secondhand or merely appropriated in these pictures.”
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He did question why this show was such “a fragmentary view” of a career that “has remained far too obscure.” Barbara Rose reiterated Kramer's point about Krasner's career in
New York,
writing that Lee Krasner's “show is impressive and coherent, but overlooks her historic importance as one of the seminal forces among the Abstract Expressionists.”
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The curator, Marcia Tucker, wrote the show's catalogue essay, and Pamela Adler compiled the chronology, which reflected Krasner's direct confrontational style. For 1959, we find: “November, Clement Greenberg schedules a solo exhibition for her at French & Company. Krasner cancels show because of Greenberg's attitude.”
³⁹
The chronology also featured, for the first time, Krasner's real birth date, a notable change from “all the other ones I've given in the past, on licenses and things.” Krasner reflected that she “was in analysis a long time and couldn't handle [aging].”
⁴⁰

Tucker pronounced that Krasner's paintings were “rich, authoritative, impetuous and vibrant,” and declared, “The artist's role as participant and contributor to what is the major, seminal
art movement in the country has yet to be fully documented.” She explained that “Krasner matured in an artistic milieu to which women were admitted reluctantly, if at all. Many were the wives of other artists and played a secondary role in relation to their husbands.”
⁴¹

As Tucker worked with Krasner on the exhibit, she got a feeling for Krasner's stubbornness about art. “Even though Lee Krasner had a reputation as a tough old bird, we got along well…. When I told her she couldn't watch while I installed the work, she reacted as though I'd stabbed her with a pitchfork.”
⁴²

Tucker complained about “spending weekends alone with Lee in East Hampton, never leaving the house, while she reviewed every single aspect of her life, obsessively cataloguing the ideas that she said her husband, Jackson Pollock, had borrowed from her…. I was always hungry when we worked: either Lee couldn't cook or she didn't like to eat.”
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Krasner may have sensed that Tucker arrived with a bias based on having heard tales about her “reputation as a tough old bird,” for Krasner seems to have offered less hospitality to her than to others. Many friends and visitors recall eating well and even some delicious home-cooked food, like her famous clam chowder or fresh local fish. Krasner's close friend Eugene V. Thaw, who coauthored the Pollock catalogue raisonné, recalled having lavish food and drinks at her home.
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The young photographer Mark Patiky recalled her delicious cooking. Tucker must have confused Krasner's comments about Pollock borrowing ideas from her with statements made by another woman artist, since through her many documented interviews and encounters Krasner barely claimed to have influenced Pollock at all.

In March 1974, Miriam Schapiro's students in the Feminist Art Program at California Institute of the Arts reached out to Krasner, requesting that she write a “Letter to a Young Woman Artist.” The letter could have been “about your experiences, or advice, or whatever feelings you might wish to express.” She responded by
having Donald McKinney, Marlborough's president, send in a quotation by her for the students' publication:

For her statement, Krasner adapted her own response to a question Cindy Nemser had posed in an interview. Her long-standing preoccupation with time, past, present, and future would become a theme of a show of her work held in 1977.

With the help of feminists, more attention was focused on Krasner's work. Cindy Nemser interviewed Krasner and wrote several articles about her work, including one for
Artforum
focused on paintings from the late 1940s. The Alumni Association of Cooper Union took notice and awarded Krasner its Augustus Saint-Gaudens Medal (named for the sculptor who studied there in 1861) for “her accomplishments as a painter and her influence on the art world.” Unfortunately that influence was a thinly veiled reference to her having been Jackson Pollock's wife. No other women from her time as a student at Cooper Union made names for themselves.

At this time, Krasner accepted shows in obscure places in order to build her reputation. In March 1974, she sent a small show
of work from the years 1946 to 1972 to the Teaching Gallery of Miami-Dade Community College. The art critic of the
Miami Herald,
Griffin Smith, wrote that the show offered evidence that “not only is a re-evaluation of her painting in terms of its impact on other pioneer first-generation New York abstract expressionists long over due, but that Krasner herself, far from being merely ‘Jackson Pollock's widow who paints,' is a major artist in her own right.”
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In May, Smith's review was reprinted in
Art News
magazine. The exposure was paying off.

The
Miami Herald
also sent a staff writer to interview Krasner for a feature story about the show. The writer asked Krasner about Ruth Kligman's memoir, which was about to be published. “Pollock had many affairs that I knew about,” Krasner replied. It was a rare moment of candor. “That this pathetic and petty person should exploit him like this is…. Well, the exploitation of him has been indescribable, painful for me…. The affairs irritated the hell out of me, of course they did,” she added. “This Ruth Kligman…All right, she may have slept with him, and if she wants to make a mountain out of a molehill, that's her problem not mine.”
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The next month, Krasner was on the road again—this time in the Atwood Gallery at Beaver College in suburban Philadelphia. A show in a one-room gallery at a small college was a far cry from her dream—a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Yet she went. Her appearance, at the age of sixty-five, before undergraduate students prompted the following: “Lee Krasner is just herself: Dull gray hair in a Dutch-boy style, pale—if any—color on her full lips, unstylish brown plastic glasses, shapeless black and white polka-dot dress, flat shoes.”
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A photograph of Krasner talking to a student in front of her 1972 painting
Sundial
was staged in the gallery. Laurel Daunis, a freshman who just happened to pass through the gallery, remembered Krasner seeming “very sweet, personable.”
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