Lee Krasner

by Gail Levin

  Peggy’s uncle’s museum, the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, had hired Pollock as a custodian in May, just months after the WPA ended his employment. He worked on making frames and counting attendance and did other odd jobs. Later on, when an interviewer asked her what she had been doing, Krasner replied that she stayed home and was “very busy keeping house.”2 In fact, she was focused on taking care of Jackson, wanting this relationship to last.

  Pollock would soon come to Peggy Guggenheim’s attention through a series of connections. Previously he had worked on the WPA easel project, where he had met William Baziotes, an artist Krasner knew in the WPA, who hung out with the Chilean painter Matta.3 Krasner recalled that in early 1942, Matta suggested that Baziotes introduce Pollock to Robert Motherwell, a young painter from a relatively well-to-do family, who invited Pollock to show in a group exhibition of Surrealists. He explained the concept of “psychic automatism,” only to find that Jackson already embraced the role of the subconscious in art. Still, Pollock disliked group activities and so declined to join the projected show.

  Despite Krasner’s own previous experiments with Surrealist imagery, she was turned off by the men’s chauvinism. “I was there, too, but that was irrelevant,” she remembered about male artists whom she thought never paid her much respect.4 Krasner liked to rail against the way the Surrealists treated their wives and how this way of treating women influenced the American male artists who looked up to the Surrealists. “There were the artists and then there were the ‘dames,’” she explained. “I was considered a ‘dame’ even if I was a painter too. And they had this terrible custom, the artists we knew. It was something they’d picked up from the Surrealists. I think—they used to dress up their wives to go out to parties. Very elaborate costumes, and hairdos and everything.”5 A much younger Krasner had once liked having Pantuhoff manipulate her style, but after him, though she enjoyed fashion, she had no tolerance for this sort of behavior, which she just saw as men treating women like dolls to be adorned.

  Krasner was not alone in her reaction against the Surrealists’ behavior. Even though her old friend Gorky became close to André Breton, Matta, and a number of the Surrealists in New York, his close friend, the painter Saul Schary, insisted, “Gorky was not a Surrealist. He never was a Surrealist, because the Surrealists believed that by taking reality and putting it together in strange and unusual juxtapositions, they made it sur-real. ‘You know, Schary,’…Gorky said to me, ‘I made a terrible mistake getting in with these Surrealist people. They’re terrible people. The husbands sleep with each other’s wives and they’re terrible people.’”6 Gorky was referring to his own wife’s affair with Matta, one of several torments that contributed to his suicide.7

  Krasner also recalled the “little social engagements” that she and Pollock had with Matta, Baziotes, and Motherwell, during which they played the after-dinner Surrealist game Exquisite Corpse. She described this as: “It was to draw a figure, and you do the head, and then fold the paper and then give it to me, so that I’d start the upper part of the torso, and then I’d fold it up, and so on; it isn’t a literary concept.”8 Jackson and Lee also began to experiment with writing automatic poetry, emphasizing one’s stream of consciousness with Motherwell, Baziotes, and their wives—but merely as an after-dinner game.

  Through Motherwell, Pollock received an invitation to take part in Peggy Guggenheim’s show of collages that was held from April 16 to May 15, 1943. The two men worked together on their collages in Pollock’s studio. Pollock was also invited to submit his work to the jury for the Spring Salon for Young Artists (under the age of thirty-five) at Art of This Century. Krasner, who would not turn thirty-five until October, did not submit anything, though she continued to work on her own art.

  Guggenheim asked the English art and literary critic Herbert Read to help her choose the artists for her salon, and they worked together with her new employee, Howard Putzel, to organize the show. Putzel knew and supported Pollock. He visited Pollock’s studio in advance and told Pollock to send in his painting Stenographic Figure for this juried show.

  Jimmy Ernst, Guggenheim’s assistant and the son of the famous artist Max Ernst, who was then briefly married to Guggenheim, was present when Mondrian and the other members of the jury—the French artist Marcel Duchamp, the critics James Johnson Sweeney and James Soby, Putzel, and Guggenheim—considered Pollock’s painting. Jimmy reported overhearing Mondrian comment that he found Pollock’s work “exciting and unusual,” though not easily understood. There was something new going on there, Mondrian noted, which might mean that Pollock was one of the most original American artists that he had ever seen. Guggenheim, who had not previously paid attention to Pollock’s work, soon made a date to visit his studio.

  On June 23, Peggy arrived, but Lee and Jackson were a bit late, and when they arrived, they ran into her exiting their building. “Anticipating that we might be late we left the doors open for her,” Krasner recounted. “My paintings were up as well as Jackson’s…. [Peggy] started to bawl Jackson out for not being there on time, saying, ‘I came into the place, the doors were open, and I see a lot of paintings, L.K., L.K. I didn’t come to look at L.K.’s paintings. Who is L.K.?’ And she damn well knew at that point who L.K. was.”9 Eventually, they prevailed upon the irate Peggy to climb back up the stairs for a proper studio visit in Jackson’s presence. There, as they continued to mollify her, she warmed to his work.

  It was Peggy’s friend Jean Connolly who wrote the review of the spring salon for The Nation, which Krasner liked to quote, for it said that Pollock’s canvas left the exhibition jury “starry-eyed.”10

  This really made an impression on Krasner because Mondrian was one of the jurors. She might have been aware that at the time, Connolly was the lover of her old friend, the critic Clement Greenberg, who was then serving in the U.S. Army Air Force.11 Krasner must have also liked what Robert M. Coates in The New Yorker had to say about Pollock’s work—“a real discovery.”12 Others were now seeing what she had seen in Pollock a few years earlier. The future, for once, looked rosy.

  By July 15, Pollock proudly wrote to Lee on Long Island, where she was visiting her aging and ailing parents, that he had signed a contract from Peggy Guggenheim. Like Krasner, Guggenheim seemed fortunate to have found in Pollock a talented young male American artist who wasn’t in military service. Guggenheim scheduled a solo show for him in November, commissioned a mural-size painting for the entrance hall of her town house at 155 East Sixty-first Street, and agreed to pay him $150 a month for a year with a settlement at the end of the year. If more than $2,700 worth of art were sold (less one-third commission for the gallery), he would receive further payment, and if less, he would make up the difference in paintings turned over to Guggenheim.13 Her patronage seemed fantastic. It immediately enabled him to quit the custodial job that he held at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, where, like many of the artists-employees, he felt threatened by the dogmatic director, the Baroness Hilla Rebay.

  That same summer, Krasner wrote to Jackson’s mother, Stella Pollock: “I’m really ashamed for not having written sooner but life in N.Y. is complicated and in spite of the fact that I’m not working (except for the posing I do for Sara) and I seem to be kept busy every minute. It was nice seeing Frank and in uniform, much to everyone’s surprise and Sande (who’s getting fatter every day).”14

  She exulted about the wonderful things that were beginning to happen to Jackson: Peggy Guggenheim’s visit to his studio, her purchase of a drawing, and her promise of a solo show for him in November. “She is really very excited about his work; in fact she said one of the large canvases was the most beautiful painting done in America. She wants to handle his work and can do a lot for him,” she enthused.15 She also told how James Johnson Sweeney had offered Jackson a teaching job in Buffalo, New York. It was not tempting, but it was flattering, and it suggested that he was destined for success.16 And there was more: “some woman who came in from the coast to arr
ange some shows for the San Francisco Museum offered him an exhibition of his drawings and I can’t remember what else is happening but it’s all very wonderful.”17

  Lee also wrote to Stella: “Please be sure and send me the information about your shoes so I can get them quickly—are you thinking about coming East soon? I’ll write soon.” She signed her letter to Jackson’s mother “Love, Lee.”18 Though not yet married, she was clearly behaving like an ingratiating daughter-in-law.

  On April 6, 1943, Krasner applied to the City of New York to correct her birth certificate, which had been issued incorrectly as “Lena Kreisner.” She petitioned to have it changed to “Lenore Krasner,” not using the “Lee” from either Cooper Union days or the 1930 U.S. census. She reported that her parents Anna (not Annie, as had been recorded on the original certificate) and Joseph were aged seventy and eighty and were living at Delaware Avenue and Winfield Place in Huntington Station, Long Island, New York. She also noted that Joseph had “operated a fish store,” not worked as a “Fisher.”19 The reason Krasner elected to file this official paper could be related to her desire to marry. Though Jackson had problems, things seemed to be falling into place.

  While Krasner’s relationship with Pollock was developing, Hans Hofmann was helping to promote her work. Eventually Sidney Janis, who had helped arrange the New York showing of Picasso’s Guernica, noticed her. Janis even selected work by Lee, Mercedes Carles, and their pal Ray Eames, all former Hofmann students, to include in his book, Abstract & Surrealist Art in America, which would be published in November 1944. The three women were featured along with Hofmann as well as Stuart Davis, John D. Graham, Byron Browne, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and others who worked under the rubric “American Abstract Painters.” Krasner’s unsigned contribution, which Herbert Matter photographed, was called Composition (1943) and reproduced across the gutter from John Graham’s Studio. Though Krasner employed various colors, her palette, emphasizing red, yellow, and blue, still attests to her adulation of Mondrian at the time. She listed her date of birth as 1911, intentionally shaving three years off her age, as so many women did in those days of intense gender discrimination.20 It is not clear if she lied about her age to Pollock, but in retrospect, it seems unlikely that he would have paid much attention to such a detail at the time they were first attracted to each other.

  Ray Eames’s For C in Limited Palette (1943), a small oil, just ten by thirteen and a half inches, was even more hard-edged than Krasner’s larger Composition, measuring thirty by twenty-four inches. Eames delved into “the recovery of form through movement and balance and depth and light.”21 Whereas Krasner employed heavy black outlines and mainly geometric shapes, Eames’s shapes included several that were clearly biomorphic, closer to de Kooning’s The Wave (1942–43), which was much more ambitious in scale at forty-eight inches square. Mercedes Carles’s Still Life in Red and Green (1935) reveals a thick application of paint, but forms that depend upon color do not read well in a small black-and-white reproduction of an original only sixteen by twenty inches.

  It was Krasner who got Janis to look at Pollock’s work, which he had never seen.22 Janis recalled, “While I was working on the book, I was interested in meeting some of Hans Hofmann’s pupils. One of them was Lee Krasner. During the course of my visit, she asked me if I knew an artist by the name of Jackson Pollock. I said no. She then said that he was completely unknown and would I like to see his work? I said, by all means—especially if you recommend him. I did not know at the time that she was interested in Pollock in any way except artistically.” Janis told how Krasner took him to Pollock’s Eighth Street studio, where he saw the artist, whom he recalled as “a dour-looking fellow, who didn’t say one word during my entire visit. He was quiet and stood in a corner of his studio. He let Lee do all of the talking. Jackson just listened. He was that way, until he got to know you. A very reticent man, he was. And of course, he was cold sober. When not so sober, he did quite a lot of talking.”23

  In his book, Janis categorized Pollock as one of the “American Surrealist Painters,” along with artists such as Arshile Gorky, Mark Tobey, William Baziotes, Jimmy Ernst, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, among others. Janis featured Pollock’s forty-two-and-a-half-by-sixty-seven-inch painting The She-Wolf (1943) with a color plate, an honor Janis had also bestowed upon Hans Hofmann’s Painting (1944) in an earlier section of the book. Pollock, unlike Krasner, who was uncharacteristically silent, offered the following statement to Janis for his book: “[The] She-Wolf came into existence because I had to paint it. Any attempt on my part to say something about it, to attempt explanation of the inexplicable, could only destroy it.”24

  Janis was so impressed by Pollock’s work that he recommended The She-Wolf for purchase by the Museum of Modern Art, where he served on the Advisory Committee, which bought the painting for $600. He wrote to Pollock about how impressed he was and told Pollock that “L.K. is to phone when you feel like visiting me. Best to you both.”25

  But with Pollock’s success came frustration for Krasner. Mercedes had just moved to Santa Monica, California, and Krasner wrote to her to say, “I’m painting and nothing happens its [sic] maddening.”26 She complained, “I showed Janis my last three paintings—He said they were to [sic] much Pollocks. It’s completely idiotic but I have a feeling from now on that’s going to be the story.”27

  The Matters had gone to California so that Herbert, still a Swiss citizen, could remain in the United States during World War II. He was allowed to work in the office of the designers Charles and Ray “Buddha” Eames, who had married in 1941 and were designing furniture and doing government work as part of the war effort.28 Krasner assured her chum how much she missed them and how it seemed like they were just on a long vacation. “Your shack sounds wonderful and I really wish I was there. However don’t start getting ideas—I just don’t like the sound of California—but the waves and the aloneness that kind of aloneness seems wonderful—the fact that you can think about painting again and be away from the hysteria of the city—all that I envy.”29

  “I’m posing for Sara [Johns] now—They’ve asked her to try some covers and of course she gets more vague every day—But I’m sure she’ll get it done in her own strange way,” Lee wrote to Mercedes about their mutual friend and classmate, Buddha.

  Ray Eames was born as Bernice Alexandra Kaiser in Sacramento, California, where she developed an interest in new forms of art, design, dance, and film. Later, short and squat, she seemed to have earned her nickname, though it probably reflected her serene personality. She studied at Sacramento Junior College before moving with her widowed mother to New York in 1932, in order to be closer to her brother, who was at West Point. She landed in the German emigré Hans Hofmann’s class at the Art Students League and followed him when he set up his own school later that year. She attended the Hofmann School in both New York and Provincetown, joined and exhibited with the American Abstract Artists, and also studied modern dance with Martha Graham and Hanya Holm. In the autumn of 1940, Kaiser left the Hofmann School to study modern design at the Cranbrook Academy in Michigan, where she met the designer Charles Eames, whom she married and with whom she would successfully collaborate. Buddha’s productive work relationship with Charles was in great contrast to Lee’s struggle to support Jackson’s career in the face of his alcoholism, while sometimes neglecting her own.

  Lee probably first met Buddha Eames through Mercedes—in the early 1930s, both had attended the May Friend Bennett School in Millbrook, New York, where they studied art with the sculptor Lu Duble.30 Also Buddha, Mercedes, and Lee then studied together at the Hofmann School. Lee also noted that she was amazed “you still speak to each other at all. I warned you not to break up a life long friendship.”31

  Lee told Mercedes about a dinner party she gave a week earlier, where the guests included Hans and Miz Hofmann, Janet Hauke (a fellow student from the Hofmann School) and her husband, the artist Frederick Hauke (who had been on Krasner’s War Services
Project), Peggy Guggenheim, and Howard Putzel. She pronounced the dinner “a complete success—food superb (Quote a line from Mr. Putzel to Mr. Pollock the following day ‘My Very Best regards to your Cordon Bleu chef”) Yes I’m cooking these days—seriously. As I was saying after a most charming dinner we all went up [to] Hans’ place to show Peggy his work—now mind—this business of casually walking down four flights at 46 E. 8th & walking up 3 flights at 44 E. 8th took all winter to plot—nothing must go wrong.”32 Cooking “seriously” meant that she was using her “womanly” skills to promote the art of Pollock and her former teacher—even as she struggled with her own painting.

  Krasner complained that Janet Hauke “didn’t shut her mouth for one second & we were there for hours…. How ever the gods had destined a successful evening and Peggy was terribly excited about the work & asked if she couldn’t come up & see them quitely [sic] & to sum up she’s giving Hans a show this March—I think that [Sidney] Janis is in Calif. now & if you see him be sure to tell him about it. I think he’ll be quite surprised.”33

  Sometime in July 1943, on their Eighth Street rooftop, Krasner took a snapshot of Pollock, Morris Kadish, an unidentified friend (who appears to be George Mercer), and the artist Reuben Kadish, who, having headed the mural division for the Federal Art Project in San Francisco, was then serving in the army’s Artist Unit to document wartime life.34 Krasner was probably using Kadish’s camera because he also photographed Pollock in the Eighth Street studio he shared with Krasner in front of his unfinished painting Guardians of the Secret, with her painting visible in the distance.35