Night Blue

by Angela, O’Keeffe

  You might have met Helen when you were still with Jackson; she visited his studio with Greenberg on several occasions around the time you were painted. She was dark- eyed with a striking smile that had traces of worry in it, and the worry made her more beautiful. At least that’s what I see in the photos. She was a younger member of the group of Abstract Expressionists, and was to become one of the most astounding and innovative artists of her time. Lee of course was painting, and was also part of that circle but was never properly considered a part of it – not as an artist. She was Jackson’s wife: she cooked, she washed his clothes, she kept him from drinking when she could, a battle she increasingly lost as the years went on. She was influential in getting the right people to see and champion his work; he was not good at this himself – drunk or sober, he was notoriously inarticulate. Before she met him, Lee had already had a degree of success with her work, she knew the major figures in the art world in New York, while he was still an outsider. It was Lee who introduced Jackson to Greenberg. Yet by the time they moved to Springs, Long Island, the smallest room in the house, not counting the larder or the loo, was relegated to Lee for her studio, while he had the barn, some twenty-two feet in length. But you know all this, I daresay. Or some of it, at least.

  After Jackson died, Lee painted in the barn for almost thirty years. Far longer than he’d ever painted there. She made large abstract paintings, astonishing works. As an artist, she came into her own in that studio, particularly during the first decade after his death, and her work is well regarded now, and becoming more so. In 1984 she became the first female artist to be given a retrospective at MOMA. In her later years, she described a dream from the time just before Jackson’s death, a dream in which she and Jackson broke free of the earth and floated in space, holding hands. After he died, her paintings seemed to come from the vastness of that space, yet there was a tender, celebratory voluptuousness to her depictions of nature and the female body that seemed to defy it, as if breaking free of Earth had somehow brought her back to it.

  I wished I could ask her about it. She died in 1984, just before the MOMA exhibition opened. In her will, she left the house and the barn to be used as a study centre for artists. I didn’t know this until I visited New York last year. It’s called Pollock-Krasner House and Study Centre, and this story is leading there. It is the very part of the story you want me to jump to now, but I can’t jump to that part any more than I can jump to the moon. Every story has its trajectory; if I give way to impatience, it is a long way down.

  But, meanwhile, Helen Frankenthaler was still alive. I wanted to ask her about her art and her life, and about what she knew of Lee’s. Though Lee was ten years older, they were contemporaries, and though not close friends one particular event drew them together.

  Another thing I must mention about Frankenthaler was that her first husband, the artist Robert Motherwell, once claimed that Helen’s art and her life came from completely separate parts of herself.

  The moment I read this I stopped breathing. Or, rather, I began to breath in a new way. I was sitting at my desk in Canberra, some sulphur-crested cockatoos screeched in the trees outside. It was winter, the light fell harshly; it gave weight to the birds’ noise. I put the book down on my desk, mindful to dog-ear the page, and stood and went to the window where I closed the heavy linen curtains. The room became grey, the birds’ screeches part of a different world now, and in that grey space I examined the thing that had taken my breath, examined it as one might a body in a morgue, with equal parts curiosity and distaste.

  Was it possible to divide what you lived from the act of creating? I asked myself. Something about the question niggled me. It wasn’t so much whether Motherwell was right or wrong, but that he felt equipped to make this judgement about another artist. I looked at the floor of my study, its white carpet turned dark by the absence of light, the books and journals in the bookcase bearing the familiar beauty of stones; they were hard, honed by life.

  I’d read about the event that drew Lee and Helen together in one of those books. When Jackson died in the accident, Lee had been in Paris, as had Helen. When she heard the news, Helen, having no writing paper, went straight to the drawer of her hotel room and taking out the paper lining used a bottle of nail polish, a tube of lipstick and the few paints she had on hand to create Hotel du Quai Voltaire, a killer of a work, simmering with emotion. Then she went to Lee’s apartment and helped her write the necessary telegrams to send to family and friends to convey the news that the one who had given so much to art was gone. If that wasn’t art blurring with life, I didn’t know what was.

  But, I thought, as I sat back down in my chair, taking a tremulous breath – a breath that brought with it some degree of reason – Motherwell had been referring to something deeper, something that pointed to a fine, almost indiscernible separation, like the lining of an amniotic sac, say, between the part of Helen that had painted Hotel du Quai Voltaire and the part of her that, just an hour later, had found the appropriate tone for telegrams that would relay the news of Jackson’s death. Even so, was it actually possible to divide the parts of the self? The cockatoos stopped screeching and the far-off moan of a lawn mower became the only sound to reach me from that outside world now, a world made entirely of sad anger judging from this sound.

  Was it possible to consider the self a kind of map with defined borders? Or was the self too tumultuously mixed to ever be divided? I knew then that the PhD was taking a new shape, that its central question wasn’t only about the acknowledgement of Helen and Lee’s contributions to Abstract Expressionism. It was about the separation of art and life. Whether such a separation worked as a construct and, if it did, to whose advantage did it work?

  I was still sitting at my desk, staring now at the carpet and spying in its fine weave a few toast crumbs, despite having vowed never to eat at my desk, for that white carpet was precious to me, and I remembered this: once, on our honeymoon, my husband and I stood together at the northernmost point of New Zealand where the Tasman Sea meets the Pacific Ocean, the waves perpendicular to us; they crashed together and we could see a dividing line.

  ‘The water doesn’t know there is a line,’ my husband said.

  And though I rejoiced at his words, I did not comment for I knew that if we entered into a conversation he would come to a different conclusion; he would move confidently away from the words he’d spoken lightly yet out of some deep knowing, and I would be left standing on that windswept peninsular alone, defeated. For he believed in logic while I believed in something unnameable, unfixed.

  19

  I wrote to Frankenthaler, requesting an interview. I wanted to ask her about Motherwell’s claim. I wanted to know if she felt herself divided in that way. I wanted to ask her about her friendship with Lee, about the claim of many in their circle that Lee was notoriously difficult, defensive, especially where Jackson was concerned. Lee had hosted many large gatherings at Springs over the years; she was good at pulling together groups of artists, critics, gallery owners, ostensibly to help Jackson’s career.

  But what of her own career, which for most of her years with Jackson had been pushed to the background? Were some of those gatherings designed to further her own work? There was a story I’d come across in an article, concerning Lee’s friend Paul Jenkins’ account of Lee receiving the news of Jackson’s death. Lee had been staying with Paul in his apartment in Paris. Clement Greenberg called in the early hours. Jackson was dead. Paul couldn’t bring himself to tell Lee, but she knew just by looking at his face, and she began screaming Jackson’s name over and over, and ran towards the balcony, the street far below. Paul grabbed her and held her; he said he’d thought she was trying to jump.

  I wanted to ask Helen if she believed Lee would have jumped if Paul hadn’t held her. The answer mattered to me. I wasn’t sure exactly why, though I knew it had to do with the glorious long canvasses that came after Jackson’s death; the very possibility of those paintings seemed to hang in the ba
lance. Was it Paul Jenkins who had saved the artist who would make them, or the artist herself?

  20

  Helen Frankenthaler is notoriously wary of questions about feminism. She is on record as saying that she’s never thought of herself as being part of a marginalised group; she sees no use even in the term women artists. So in my letter, I was careful. I stated simply that I was coming to New York and would like to interview her for my PhD about her work, and the work of Lee Krasner. To show my credentials, I included a copy of the two articles I’d had published. One, from The Canberra Times Art pages, was on Malevich’s House under construction, the other, from Art & Australia discussed the astonishing power of Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s twenty-two paneled work, Alhalkere Suite. Perhaps it was the piece on Kngwarreye that did it; I can’t think that anything I had to say about Malevich would be new or interesting enough to sway her. But Kngwarreye, from Alhalkere, Utopia, north- east of Alice Springs, had only recently become known internationally and was possibly an artist Helen hadn’t yet heard much about. Whatever her reason, she wrote back agreeing to the interview.

  I was surprised, thrilled, worried. My initial challenge was practical – how was I going to get the money to go to New York? All our savings had been spent on the IVF. In any case, it wouldn’t have felt right to use our savings, as my husband didn’t see the need for me to travel to New York at all.

  ‘Couldn’t you ask her your questions over the phone?’ he said in his calmly challenging lawyer voice, and I could think of no good reason why I could not.

  Around this time, my grandmother, who had been sick for some years and living in a nursing home, died and left me a small amount of money: five thousand dollars. You might think it a convenient coincidence. But it was more than coincidence. As the novelist Clarice Lispector wrote, ‘You can’t show proof of the truest thing of all, all you can do is believe. Weep and believe.’ I wept for my grandmother, and I believed that the money had come to me just then for a specific reason. I can’t prove it, of course I can’t. This story is not built on proof, but on faith.

  Faith, that tiny glimmer, far off; you have no idea what lies in the darkness between you and it; you step towards it.

  Do you remember my grandmother? I thought of her often when I was in the storage room; perhaps these thoughts were accessible to you? I like to think so. She rescued me from the rock as the tide came in, the rock that I clung to for life yet that I knew could not save me from the rising water. The rock that ever since then I’ve wanted to keep for my own, wanted to keep like a talisman, for once you’ve had the feeling of almost-death you know that almost-death is necessary to life. This was how I felt about the interview with Frankenthaler: it scared me half to death, yet it was a great, solid thing I could cling to just then.

  I will tell you a little more about my grandmother. I have been trying to tell you one central thing, but there is a confused manner to how it has come out; I keep finding my way, then losing it. I amble like a lost child; I want to get to the centre now before I go any further: it starts with my grandmother. Whatever I bring to you is through her.

  She was everything a grandmother should be. She was not wise or sensible. She cooked badly, she smoked in bed. She spent her days reading. From the time she woke to the time she slept, reading was only interspersed with the bare minimum for bodily cleanliness and sustenance. When she was younger, she’d worked in a library. It gave her the direction of her life. Her house smelled of paper and words. Words have their own smell; did you know? How different a blank book smells to one containing words. It is said that the human body is lighter immediately after we die, that our soul has weight. Well, words are the same. Her rooms were filled with little twisted piles of books, the configuration of which had altered each time I visited. She spoke rarely and only about the weather, or about her meagre meals, or about who she’d seen at the grocery store. She never spoke of the words she read, and this not- speaking them made me revere them, in the same way I revered clouds, an evolving mystery.

  When I was a child she would break off from reading to take me in her arms, which were ample. I felt the beat of her heart against my chest, so warm it made me shiver, and alongside it the beat of the words she’d just read, words I would read myself one day, for when she moved into the nursing home when I was in my twenties the books she couldn’t take with her became mine.

  You see, words are the centre. This is what you must know.

  I was alone with my grandmother in the hospital when she died. My mother had gone up the corridor to the visitors’ kitchen to make tea. My grandmother’s room comprised of crisp sheets and a rubber-wheeled bed, a tube going into her stomach and one into her arm, a monitor blinking the beat of her heart. But none of these seemed as odd as the absence of books. I held her mottled hand.

  ‘Sometimes they give you an iced vo-vo,’ she said, and her eyes closed, the machine stopped its beat. Hers was not a death from her books, the drawn-out agony of Madame Bovary, say, or the old woman in Crime and Punishment who managed to raise her arms even as her skull was smashed with an axe.

  She lay there, her mouth agape. I watched with a certain ruthlessness. Her skin already sinking against her bones. I saw that death, to itself, is not a tragedy but a cool-eyed wonder. My mother came back with the tea, which clattered against the bedside table; she flung her arms around me, her heart heaving against mine and mine against hers; we were waves in the same sea. I cried for days, lost in those waves, in their crash and undertow, but beneath them was the ruthlessness. A deep calm, a way to see.

  That same ruthlessness is in me as I sit watching you, week after week, month after month, as I write in my notebook, or lay it aside; as I stand and stretch, or pace back and forth. Words come and go, come and go. I do not eat; I grow feeble, yet more resplendent. I live by some other means.

  I travelled to New York not long before I came to see you to begin this marathon of sitting and writing and pacing, a marathon that you must, quite rightly, wonder about. I expect the guard wonders too. I’m surprised he hasn’t thought about having me booted out. Maybe he has.

  But before I tell you about the trip to New York, to that room twenty-two feet long where you began, which is all you really want to know about. This.

  Regarding my husband, you may have picked up a certain tone when I speak of him. I do not love him anymore.

  Or I love only aspects of him. For instance, I love his hair. He has a double crown and it always looks a little messy; no matter how smooth he combs it tufts stick up. I love the way he looks up from a book and smiles, vaguely, his mind, you can tell, still in the book, pulled to a different world, a world small and vast at once. I love how he makes love – I love this most of all, or at least when it is happening I love it most of all, his breath short and his eyes shining into mine. But all these pieces of love in a marriage are not quite enough; they are loves that exist around the edges, like an embroidery.

  And in the centre, where there should be some solid thing, is an absence, a sense of absence, not like the absence of the child, which is still a kind of presence, but a real absence, a strange thing. It’s like falling. Think of the part in Alice in Wonderland where Alice is falling down the rabbit hole. Those magical, unsettling seconds. As a child it wasn’t the fall itself I found unsettling – in fact, I loved its mesmerising slowness – but the passing of familiar objects on the way down, a bookcase, a jar of jam, objects that seemed imbued with their own yearnings, yet that were far from experiencing those yearnings fulfilled – books can’t be read and jam can’t be eaten by one who is falling. Somehow marriage is like this.

  I can’t tell my husband, even though I know I must. I can’t tell him I do not love him. Because I do love him. And he knows I do. I am a difficult person to be with; have you gathered this?

  21

  I walked from my hotel to Frankenthaler’s house on the Upper West Side on a dusky August morning, nervous and excited, the street alive with beautifully crafted shoes a
nd tiny coiffured dogs. Frankenthaler is wealthy, her father was a prominent New York judge, and when her parents died she inherited a fortune. That aside, she has made a lot of money from her art. She always knew she would be an artist; hers is an enviable trajectory, a trajectory dotted with portents.

  For example, this: as a small child, she insisted on drawing a line in chalk from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to her family home, which was miles away; a line that she did not once break, not even while crossing streets, all the way her nanny holding her hand. In Helen’s telling of this story, which I’d read about in an art magazine, she stressed that the line was more a proof of her perseverance than of any artistic talent.

  As I walked, I imagined I was following that line of chalk, the path strung with the questions I planned to ask her about the painting method she’d devised after seeing Jackson’s works and feeling stunned, her world turned upside down. (Later, the color field artist Morris Louie would claim that Frankenthaler had formed “the bridge between Pollock and what was possible.”) The method had been thinning the paint with turpentine and applying it to the canvas spread on the floor, letting the paint soak in rather than it building up layers, as it had in Jackson’s works. No other artist had ever done this.