by Gail Levin
Graham’s immense influence on American artists derived from the sophisticated perspective he conveyed in his articles and his book, System and Dialectics of Art (1937), which many read with intense interest and respect. “He was in touch with artists,” Krasner recalled. “He knew European painters. He had an awareness of what was happening. He moved around. And in that sense one knew that John Graham was one of the people—there were so few then—who was interested in the painting that interested us.”93 Krasner also said that she responded to Graham because of his “fascinating personality. He had this marvelous little museum where he lived…. It opened up a whole new world in that sense.”94
On November 12, 1941, following his impromptu visit to her studio, Graham sent Krasner a postcard: “Dear Lenore—I am arranging at an uptown gallery a show of French and American paintings with excellent publicity etc. I have Braque, Picasso, Derain, Segonzac, S. [Stuart] Davis, and others. I want to have your last large painting. I will drop at your place Friday afternoon with the manager of the gallery. Telephone me if you can. Ever GRAHAM.”95
Graham’s invitation gave Krasner an unimagined opportunity: “I was delighted to be in the exhibition because the French names were Matisse, Braque, Picasso.”96 The Americans in the show, besides her, were Stuart Davis, Walt Kuhn, Virginia Diaz, H. Levitt Purdy, Pat Collins, Willem de Kooning, David Burliuk, and Jackson Pollock. The Europeans, beyond Graham and those named by her and on his postcard to Krasner, were Bonnard, Modigliani, Rouault, and de Chirico.
Later Krasner often told the story about how she wondered who the “unknown Americans” in Graham’s show would be and that she was surprised to find only one who was unknown to her—Jackson Pollock. By the time Graham’s show was announced, she knew de Kooning well, and he had known Graham since the spring of 1929, when he had seen Graham’s solo show at Valentine Dudensing Gallery in Manhattan, a gallery frequented by Krasner as well.
Through her friendship with de Kooning, Krasner also knew Virginia Diaz, and perhaps through her had met Pat Collins, an Irish-born former circus performer and boxer. Collins had also studied in New York at both the National Academy and the Art Students League, so Krasner could have run into him at the academy or when he worked on the WPA.97 Kuhn, famous for his role in organizing the Armory Show in 1913, made many portraits of circus and vaudeville performers, so he might also be a link among Graham, Collins, and Diaz. Krasner knew Stuart Davis from both the Artists Union and Art Front magazine. She either knew David Burliuk, or could have considered him European, since he arrived in the United States in 1922 and was already a fully trained artist. If, however, H. Levitt Purdy was ever known to Krasner, his or her identity has been erased from history.
Krasner’s story that she failed to recognize only Pollock’s name does not fully convince; after all, she thought she knew most of the art world. She explained that she began asking around before the show but found no one who knew him. Then she attended an opening at Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery.98 She surely knew the exhibiting cartoonist William Steig from the academy, but even so, there is a good chance she wasn’t even going to see the artwork so much as to hang out, make connections, and trade art talk. Steig’s “amusing drawings of metropolitan types” were hanging in the Downtown Gallery’s group show. For a few years, he had been making “symbolic drawings,” pen-and-ink works that tried to convey states of mind. Most of the others on view were rather established American artists and gallery regulars, all much older than Krasner.
At the gallery, Krasner ran into Lou Bunce (Louis Demott Bunce), whom she knew from the WPA mural project. As they chatted, he asked, “By the way, do you know this painter Pollock? He’s a good painter; he’s going to be in a show that John Graham is doing.”99 “Good painter” then meant to them a modernist who was painting abstractly. Bunce had met Pollock in his third year at the Art Students League in 1930.100
Bunce was making abstract paintings at the time, and he later recalled hearing Léger speak one evening at the Artists Union.101 Bunce recalled too that he “was running around a little bit with Jack [Pollock] then. And he was excited as well as I was about the Surrealists. And I remember we went to see a big, beautiful Miró show at the modern museum in ’41. It was a dinger, I’ll tell you. And a lot of those people were in New York at that time. Seligman, and Ernst came, and Tanguy.”102
Krasner learned from Bunce that Pollock lived just around the corner from her on Eighth Street between Broadway and University Place, so she soon dropped by to “make his acquaintance.” Uncertain of his apartment, she climbed to the top floor and ran into Pollock’s brother Sande McCoy, who, when asked, directed her to Pollock’s door.103 A balding fellow a few years her junior answered the knock. She recognized him as someone she had danced with some years earlier at an Artists Union party. His studio seemed strange because there were no books anywhere.104
When she got to know Pollock a little better, she once asked him, “Don’t you ever read anything?”
He said, “Of course I do.”
“Why don’t I ever see a book?”
He then showed her his back closet and various drawers which he kept “packed with books.” She exclaimed, “Well Jackson, this is mad! Why have you got these books pushed away, locked up?”
He said, “Look, when someone comes into my place, I don’t want them to just take a look and know what I’m all about.”105
Yet his work impressed her enormously. She later described it as “wild enthusiasm.”106 Another time she said that her reaction was “the same sort of thing that I responded to in Matisse, in Picasso, in Mondrian.”107 She recalled that one particular canvas “just about stunned me. I saw a whole batch of early work there, finished paintings, not drawings. He had already moved to that point. I was confronted with something ahead of me. I felt elation. My God, there it is.”108 In the account Krasner gave to Time in 1958, she said, “I lunged right over and when I saw his paintings I almost died. They bowled me over. Then I met him, and that was it.”109
The writer B. H. Friedman, who was a young collector still in his twenties when he first encountered Pollock and befriended the couple in the spring of 1955, described what Krasner first found artistically significant in the new man: “Jackson had cubism. He had already assimilated the two-dimensionality of the canvas. What interested him most, in addition to Picasso’s early masterpiece, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, was the emotional content of that artist’s later work in such paintings as Guernica and the studies for it.”110 Friedman also recognized that though Pollock was not a big fan of Surrealist painting, he believed in many of the “Surrealist intuitions,” especially the subconscious as a basis for art and the use of accident. He understood that Krasner saw Pollock as attacking the “holy images” of cubism and Surrealism through his ability to assimilate both styles.
Krasner was particularly impressed with Pollock’s canvas The Magic Mirror of 1941. She saw beyond the influence of Picasso and felt that Pollock was destined to make a place in art history.111 “When I saw his work,” she later recalled, “I felt an immediate response. I was completely moved. It took me about three years to digest it for myself.”112
Krasner later told Lawrence Campbell that Pollock had said at the time that he did not know if The Magic Mirror was finished, provoking her to “consternation” and eventually close association.113 Mercedes Carles Matter, Betsy Zogbaum (wife of sculptor Wilfrid Zogbaum), and others later liked to claim that they had first recognized Pollock’s talent, while Lee was simply taken with him as a man; but it seems clear that Lee was really attracted to the entire package.114
Moreover, her belief in Pollock’s genius never wavered. This kind of conviction evidently irked the art critic Clement Greenberg, who recalled, “Lee was a master of self-centeredness, a prodigy of self-centeredness. She introduced me to Jackson on the street, saying in her uncouth way, ‘This guy is a great painter.’ He looked bourgeois in a gray felt hat—the only time I ever saw Jackson in a hat—and affa
ble but silent, with a reluctant smile. It was a hard face, having to do with alcoholism and with his needing help—with his always being in danger because he felt helpless.”115
Krasner may have been interested in Pollock’s obvious artistic talent, but she was also attracted to the shy, introverted man himself. Born January 28, 1912, Jackson was just over three years younger than Lee, a near contemporary, and unattached. Though not nearly as handsome as Igor, Jackson was rugged and available—that is, he was neither in the army nor in the bed of some southern belle. The previous April, Pollock had been in treatment for alcoholism and other mental problems with the Jungian analyst Violet Staub de Laszlo, who had classified him as 4-F, meaning that he was unqualified to be drafted for military service.116
Krasner probably did not yet know it, but Pollock was similar to Pantuhoff in that his childhood had been marked by his family’s hardships and frequent dislocation. In Pollock’s case, the cause was not war but economic misfortune. Also, his parents’ failed marriage affected his emotional development.
Unlike Pantuhoff, Pollock was born in America—in Cody, Wyoming—to American-born parents of Scotch-Irish extraction. Both his mother, Stella May McClure, and his father, LeRoy McCoy Pollock, were born and raised in Tingley, Iowa. Jackson was not even a year old when the entire family, including his four older brothers, moved to California. His childhood was marred by the family’s frequent moves from town to town in search of better fortune, which ultimately proved elusive. Jackson suffered from his parents’ dysfunctional marriage and his father’s depression and failure to provide adequately for the family.
Already troubled in high school, Jackson was expelled. Finally he attended Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, where an art teacher, Frederick John de St. Vrain Schwankovsky, introduced Jackson to Theosophy and the teachings of Krishnamurti. Theosophy is a system of beliefs of religious philosophy and mysticism holding that all religions are attempts by the “Spiritual Hierarchy” to help humanity and that each religion therefore has a portion of the truth. Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky cofounded the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875 and then moved it to India in 1882. There in a small town in the south of India in 1895, Krishnamurti was born. He was adopted in his youth by Dr. Annie Besant, then president of the Theosophical Society, who announced that he was to be a world teacher whose arrival the Theosophists had predicted. In 1929, however, Krishnamurti renounced the role that he was chosen to play, rejected the organization that had formed to support him, and gave back all the money and property that had been raised for this work. Instead he became an independent itinerant voice urging meditation and changing the world for the better.
Krishnamurti may well have appealed to Pollock after growing up in a family that did not attend church and with parents who professed no spiritual beliefs. In contrast, Krasner had grown up in a religious family and rejected most of the ritual of Orthodox Judaism along with the patriarchy that she felt oppressed women. But she remained intellectually curious about religious practices and retained some of the fears associated with folk beliefs imported by her mother from the shtetl.
In 1930 Jackson followed the example of his eldest brother, Charles, who had chosen to study art. Like Charles, who moved to New York in 1926 and enrolled in the Art Students League in the class of the muralist Thomas Hart Benton, Jackson too joined Benton’s class. Though Pollock studied with Benton, who painted representational images that came to be called “regionalist,” and Krasner studied with Hofmann and painted modernist abstractions, the two had had some similar aesthetic experiences. Like Krasner, Pollock had worked on WPA murals, though he soon transferred to the easel division. Pollock had worked on a mural for Grover Cleveland High School under Job Goodman, the same former Benton student with whom Krasner had studied drawing.117 So it must have seemed to Krasner as if they had much in common despite their divergent ethnic backgrounds.
The summer that Krasner met Pollock, his brother Sande (Sanford), with whom he had been living in New York, had written to their oldest brother, Charles, then in Michigan working on murals and graphic art for the WPA, and said that Jackson’s maladjustment had proven to be much more than “the usual stress and strain of a sensitive persons [sic] transition from adolescence to manhood, a thing he would out-grow…. One requiring the help of Doctors. In the summer of 39 [1938] he was hospitalized for six months in a psychiatric institution. This was done at his own request for help and upon the advice of Doctors.”118
Sande lamented that though Jackson had shown improvement upon release, it did not last, and they had had to seek medical attention again. He worried about Pollock’s alcoholism and his self-destructive nature and warned that “part of his trouble (perhaps a large part) lies in his childhood relationships with his Mother in particular and family in general.” Sande reported to Charles on Jackson’s condition, referring to one of his symptoms as “depressive mania (Dad).”119
Despite his brother’s psychiatric problems, Sande had also studied art, and he asserted that Jackson’s art “if he allows [it] to grow, will…come to great importance.” Sande believed Pollock was “doing work which is creative in the most genuine sense of the word. Here again, although I ‘feel’ its meaning and implication, I am not qualified to present it in terms of words. His thinking is, I think, related to that of men like Beckmann, Orozco, and Picasso. We are sure that if he is able to hold himself together his work will become of real significance.”120
But Krasner was still unaware of most of Pollock’s problematic history. Only later did she learn that Pollock was in analysis, which she recalled, “I was very shocked to learn, because I was very prejudiced, couldn’t have been more against it, so that I had a conflict in response, that is, there was full response to the painting, later learning he is in analysis I was very unsympathetic to that.”121
But for now, she needed a man in her life again; it was wartime, and Pollock seemed to fit the bill. She immediately began to consider the possibilities.
Had Krasner known all of what the family knew, perhaps she would have backed away from Pollock. B. H. Friedman wrote in 1965, “The answers to some of Rimbaud’s questions were there in this rangy handsome tough-tender rebellious Westerner. Lee had met someone to whom she could ‘hire herself out,’ a beast whom she could adore.”122 Had she asked her friend George McNeil, she might have gotten a more realistic impression. “Jackson was very macho from the beginning, drinking being the big thing,” McNeil reported. “Behavior at the [Art Students] League could be pretty far out; you could be drunk in the lunchroom, loud, all kinds of things; and there were Saturday night bouts at 125th Street in Harlem. I remember the folds in his face and the way he felt big—strong and tough. He came on like a big guy, and his walk seemed a kind of shuffle—a wobbling walk, not direct.”123 But Krasner did not ask her friends what they thought of him. Nor would she have been dissuaded by knowing that, according to McNeil, Pollock was “shy, hated crowds, would go to the rooms with no one in them at shows and didn’t like openings.”124
Pollock soon visited Krasner’s Ninth Street studio, and she felt that his initial response was “very sympathetic.”125 What he saw were the paintings inspired by Picasso, work of the late 1920s, forms with heavy black outlines derived from still life setups and intense primary colors that recalled the work of Mondrian. Her paintings were also reminiscent of Gorky’s adaptations of Picasso’s work. Since by then Pollock too was also deeply engaged with Picasso, the two found common ground.
Mercedes Carles Matter recalled, “Lee dropped in one day to tell me she had met someone she liked very much. They were to have their first date that afternoon, to go to the Frick Collection together.”126 Krasner was smitten. She soon brought Pollock to meet Mercedes and Herbert, who later recalled: “From the first time I met him—in 1941…from that very first evening Jackson and I felt a deep rapport.”127 Both introverts, Matter and Pollock seemed to have hit if off without much conversation; they felt no need for small talk. De K
ooning recalled that Matter and Pollock “were taken with each other—they had a nice feeling between them. They didn’t have to talk.”128
Krasner was also the one who introduced Pollock to de Kooning. She told Pollock about another artist who would also be in the show with them and took him over to meet de Kooning at his loft. She later recalled: “De Kooning had a loft at that time because he was something.”129 The fact that Krasner chose to take Pollock to meet de Kooning suggests that she believed that the Dutch painter respected her and her work. She was part of “the gang” during the 1930s. According to Emilie Kilgore, who was close to de Kooning in the 1970s, he remarked that Krasner “was no slouch as a painter.”130
Krasner had already lived with Pantuhoff’s excessive drinking, which may have misled her to suppose she could handle Pollock’s. But she could hardly have foreseen Pollock’s tendency to “be violent when he was drunk,” as his sister-in-law Arloie McCoy would later describe it. The artist Mervin Jules concurred that Pollock “got mean when he was drunk,” but no one warned Krasner.131 Alma, the wife of Pollock’s brother Jay, saw that Pollock “wanted his life to be free to paint. In order to do that, others had to do everything else. And he didn’t want to be helped; he wanted to be taken care of.”132 Taking care of a man, especially one she viewed as destined to make art history, did not strike Krasner as too steep a price.
Regardless, some of Krasner’s contemporaries believed the price was too steep, and that it affected Krasner. For example, Fritz Bultman incorrectly claimed that Rimbaud’s words first appeared on Krasner’s wall only after she met Pollock. “Lee was quite excited about Jackson, having written in great big blue script on her wall as a way of anticipating their life together, a part of Rimbaud’s Season in Hell about worshipping the beast and so forth, and Jackson was certainly an ‘infernal bridegroom.’ But he was very lonesome and warm underneath his not knowing how to make contact with people. The alcoholic macho thing was a mask; he needed a breakout from time to time.”133
