Lee Krasner

by Gail Levin

  Pollock was then seeing Dr. Edwin H. Heller, a local general practitioner in East Hampton, who had managed to get him to stop drinking. Heller told Pollock that he had to forgo all alcohol, because even a small amount would provoke him to drink to excess. He also understood the role of alcohol to numb threatening feelings and anxieties. Krasner, perhaps unwilling to accept the idea that Pollock’s psyche was damaged, said she never understood what Heller did that others could not. She only heard from Pollock that Heller was “an honest man; I can believe in him.”31

  While in Heller’s care, Pollock was able to remain “on the wagon.”

  In January 1949, Stella Pollock wrote to Charles Pollock from her son Sande’s house in Deep River, Connecticut: “Jack and Lee were here and we had a very nice Christmas…and there was no drinking. We were all so happy. Jack has been going to a Dr. in Hampton and hadn’t drunk anything for over three weeks at Christmas. Hope he will stay with it. He says he wants to quit and went to the Dr. on his own. The Dr. told him he would have to leave it alone. Everything wine to beer for they were poison to him.”32

  Pollock’s second solo show with Betty Parsons opened on January 24, 1949. Among those present were Grace Hartigan and Harry Jackson, who would marry in March. Lee and Jackson agreed to act as hosts, matron of honor, and best man; they were also the only two witnesses for an intimate ceremony conducted by their neighbor Judge William Schellinger.

  During this time Krasner made a breakthrough in the imagery of her painting. “I have to go with it,” she explained of the change of direction, “so in that sense I find it a little off-beat compared to a great many of my contemporaries.”33 She referred to artists such as Rothko, Motherwell, or Gottlieb, who developed themes or signature images that they continued to explore over and over again. Her new direction employed a thinner paint application, a much larger scale, and, as she described it, “a vertical and horizontal distribution.”34

  In mid-April, Stella Pollock visited Jackson and Lee again. She reported to Charles how happy she had been to find that Jackson was still not drinking and was getting ready to put in a garden. “They have good soil. Lee loves to dig in the dirt and she has green fingers. Jack is going to shingle his studio. Prices have dropped enough that he feels he can he will do it himself.”35

  Pollock renewed his contract with Betty Parsons at the end of June 1949 to run through January 1, 1952. They told Pollock’s mother that the sales from his show had been “very good” and that they wanted to make a trip to the West Coast.36

  That July Krasner and Pollock were both in a show called “17 Eastern Long Island Artists,” held at East Hampton’s Guild Hall. John Little, Lee’s old chum from the Hofmann School, who was now living in Springs, organized the show, and the potter Roseanne Larkin and Enez Whipple, the cultural center’s director, sponsored it against the protests of the conservative coterie of traditional artists who had been patronized by the Maidstone, a posh exclusive country club on the Atlantic Ocean in the village of East Hampton. These artists had dominated the local scene with their timid watercolors of seascapes and still lifes.

  Little put himself in the show alongside a number of Krasner’s and Pollock’s friends, including James Brooks, Wilfrid Zogbaum, and Balcomb Greene, who were working abstractly, as well as more traditional figurative painters such as Alexander Brook and Raphael Soyer37. The New York Times critic Stuart Preston reviewed the show, describing it as a balance “between conservative and advanced art.” He made a special note of “Jackson Pollock’s chromatic explosions, those free of instinct” and wrote that “Lee Krasner’s rigidly patterned abstracts sound a call to order.”38

  Preston’s opinion held little weight for East Hampton’s uptight, “white-gloved hostesses pouring tea and serving punch” who found abstract art in general and Pollock’s work in particular shocking.39

  Unlike the Guild Hall show, which didn’t acknowledge Pollock and Krasner’s marriage, Lee and Jackson showed in the Sidney Janis Gallery’s exhibition “Husband and Wife” that September. The show also included eight other artist-couples, such as the de Koonings, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, and Picasso and Françoise Gilot.40 Stuart Preston covered this show too and wrote, “On the whole the husbands are the more adventurous, giving ideas their heads, whereas the wives are apt to hold them back by the short reins of the particular scheme of design or color on which they are based. This is noticeably true of the Jackson Pollock as opposed to Lee Krasner’s conglomeration of little forms that are both fastened and divided by a honeycomb of white line. In exactly the same relationship are Willem and Elaine de Kooning.”41

  Krasner reflected later that she thought the “title of the show is rather gimmicky, but for some reason Mr. Janis wanted to put on a show of husbands and wives who painted. And as a matter of fact, he had a curious accumulation there. I don’t know whatever motive there was. It was sort of a catchy thing, I think.”42 She later told a reporter for Time, “I respected and understood his [Pollock’s] painting as he did mine. There was never any cause for rivalry.”43

  A third solo show for Pollock opened at Betty Parsons on November 21, 1949. Afterward Lee and Jackson again spent Christmas in Deep River, Connecticut, with Stella, who reported to Frank that the couple was “so tired from being in the City just worn out. Had the best show he has ever had and sold well eighteen paintings and prospects of others. They both are fine and he is still on the wagon.”44

  During the winter of 1950, Lee and Jackson went to stay in Alfonso Ossorio’s house at 9 MacDougal Alley while he and Dragon were abroad. As Lee wrote them, the couple took advantage of their time in the city to visit lots of artists’ exhibitions. She liked the ones of Gorky and Buffie Johnson, found acceptable those of Pousette-Dart and Jim Brooks, and rejected those of Herbert Ferber and Mary Callery.45

  That winter a group of artists, including de Kooning, Franz Kline, and the sculptor Philip Pavia, rented a loft and held meetings at 39 East Eighth Street. They called themselves the Club and later the Artists Club. Pavia recalled that Pollock “would come and stand in the back—later sometimes drunk—then Bill and Franz would take care of him.” Pavia’s comments about women artists, however, are especially revealing: “The women’s movement was born in the Club. They would get up there and tell us off—aggressive, and the joke was that we’d make monsters out of these women and got even the wives to talk. They did, too—like Lee, wanting to compete against Jackson.”46

  Clearly the level of sexism at the Club had grown since the more egalitarian days of the WPA and the Artists Union, where Lee was able to speak out and be respected. Hedda Sterne recalled: “I went to the Club only once or twice. People were incredibly hostile to each other. Insults would fly…. But the Club changed my image of Pollock. I was influenced by those stories of his violence at parties, etc., and to see this gentle, quiet, moving person was such a contrast. He was even proud of being inarticulate…. Jackson was a social outsider and his gestures were that, defending himself against people. He needed affection—who doesn’t?—but didn’t know how to find it.”47

  The Pollocks returned to East Hampton in the early spring. As the weather warmed, their friends began appearing. It was clearly a time when they enjoyed socializing in the local community.

  Krasner was one of the thirty-three artists, along with Pollock and Bradley Walker Tomlin, whom Betty Parsons included in her review show of painters and sculptors in June 1950. In the New York Times, Stuart Preston reviewed the show, asking, “What meaning or value beyond themselves do these contrivances possess?” He also referred to the “impetuously handled, rather turgid colored forms of the painting of Lee Krasner,” noting that “of course Jackson Pollock’s seething canvas, the furious shaking of a lion’s mane of color, is the climax of this direction.”48

  Around this time Krasner’s work began to evolve away from the Little Image series. “I cannot make any connection why this happens,” she insisted over and over again.49 Krasner and Pollock both appeared in an
other show at Guild Hall of “Ten East Hampton Abstractionists” that opened on July 1. Among the other artists were friends and local acquaintances, including Motherwell, Linda Lindeberg, John Little, Wilfrid Zogbaum, James Brooks, and Buffie Johnson.50 The local newspaper reported that “Pollock, a prominent figure in American modern art, was one of the seven American painters chosen to represent this country in the world-renowned Biennale, which opened recently in Venice.”51

  Like Buffie Johnson, who was identified as “Mrs. George [actually Gerald] Sykes,” Lee Krasner was identified as “Mrs. Jackson Pollock.” The practice of linking women’s identities to their husbands’ was common at this time in East Hampton society. Again Preston praised Pollock’s big canvas, writing that it “dominates the North Gallery.” He was less harsh about Krasner’s work than previously, noting that she drew from Pollock’s influence.

  At the opening of the East Hampton show, Pollock met Hans Namuth, a young German-born photographer whose teacher Alexey Brodovitch had told him that Pollock was preeminent among contemporary artists. Namuth was spending the summer in Water Mill, not far from East Hampton, and asked Pollock if he could photograph him while he was painting. Pollock agreed, offering to start a new picture for the session. Namuth spent many hours taking photographs of Pollock that summer, a project Krasner thought would benefit Pollock’s stature.

  While at their house Namuth also photographed Krasner in her studio. She posed with two large paintings (now destroyed) that depicted large stick figures, painted light on dark grounds. These presumably were in her studio when Betty Parsons visited and agreed to give her a show. These canvases are a far cry from Krasner’s Little Image paintings, but they also appear to be unrelated to the geometric pictures she eventually put in her show at Parsons. Instead Krasner’s stick figures recall those in Miró’s work as well as in Pollock’s mural for Peggy Guggenheim and his Guardians of the Secret, both of 1943. Krasner appeared to be playing catch-up to Pollock’s invention, and when she realized this, she destroyed the new work and went off in a geometric direction that veered sharply away from her husband’s work.52

  Many factors suggest that Pollock’s star was on the rise, though he lacked the confidence to comprehend that. Pollock got a taste of widespread fame in August 1949 when Life magazine featured an article titled “Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?”53 The newfound celebrity, however, soon became difficult for Jackson to digest. His friend Jim Brooks recalled how the Life issue made Jackson “self-conscious.” Brooks continued to observe: “You know you’re expected to do a hell of a lot, being famous, and it made him self-conscious…. I think right then Jackson saw what was coming and was scared to death.”54

  In May 1950, Barnett Newman phoned to invite Pollock to sign an open letter of protest to the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art alongside other vanguard painters. The protest was over the museum’s director, Francis Henry Taylor, publicly declaring “his contempt for modern painting.” The letter, published in both the New York Times and the Herald Tribune, said that the protestors refused to participate in the museum’s national juried exhibition of contemporary American painting because the “choice of jurors…does not warrant any hope that a just proportion of advanced art will be included.”55

  Lee had answered Newman’s phone call, only to have him ignore her and ask to speak to Jackson, who agreed to lend his name. Hedda Sterne became the only woman to participate in the protest and in the now-notorious publicity photograph of the group, which was published in Life magazine on January 15, 1951, as “The Irascibles.”56 Krasner believed that the only reason one woman—Hedda Sterne—made the list is that Betty Parsons saw to it that she was. “She was [showing] in Betty’s gallery and Betty said, ‘you’ve got to put Hedda Sterne in,’ and so they put Hedda Sterne in.”57 The photograph was shot for Life by Nina Leen on November 24, 1950, in a room rented for the occasion.

  On August 5, 1950, The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” featured an interview with Jackson and Lee that some critics have interpreted as pushing a sexist stereotype.58 Pollock is described as “watching his wife, the former Lee Krasner, a slim auburn-haired young woman who also is an artist, as she bent over a hot stove, making currant jelly.” In all likelihood, however, Krasner was putting on a show of domestic creative activity for the New Yorker writer. Perhaps she wanted to make their home life seem idyllic and justify their residence far from the center of New York’s art world. In fact she had already bragged to Mercedes of having developed cooking skills worthy of “Cordon Bleu,” which she had been using to promote Pollock.59

  Pollock told the writer that “I’ve got the old Eighth Street habit of sleeping all day and working all night pretty well licked. So has Lee. We had to, or lose the respect of the neighbors. I can’t deny, though, that it’s taken a little while…. It’s marvelous the way Lee’s adjusted herself…. She’s a native New Yorker, but she’s turned into a hell of a good gardener, and she’s always up by nine. Ten at the latest. I’m way behind her in orientation.”60

  Jackson spoke of his childhood on his father’s farm near Cody, Wyoming, to which Krasner added, “Jackson’s work is full of the West. That’s what gives it that feeling of spaciousness. It’s what makes it so American.” From someone like Krasner, who repeatedly decried nationalism, this was a ploy at creating a niche for Pollock and eliciting good press.

  Pollock recounted his journey from study with Benton to patronage from Peggy Guggenheim to the move out to Springs. “Somebody had bought one of my pictures. We lived for a year on that picture and a few clams I dug out of the bay with my toes. Since then things have been a little easier.” The writer noted that “Mrs. Pollock smiled. ‘Quite a little,’ she said. ‘Jackson showed thirty pictures last fall and sold all but five. And his collectors are nibbling at those.’ Pollock grunted. ‘Be nice if it lasts,’ he said.”61

  The writer then asked to see Pollock’s work. On the wall of the living room was Number Two, 1949. The writer noted that he had forgotten the title and Krasner piped up, “Jackson used to give his pictures conventional titles—‘Eyes in the Heat’ and ‘The Blue Unconscious’ and so on—but now he simply numbers them. Numbers are neutral. They make people look at a picture for what it is—pure painting.” Pollock averred, “I decided to stop adding to the confusion. Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was. Only he didn’t know it.” Looking for another public relations angle, Krasner redoubled, “That’s exactly what Jackson’s work is…sort of unframed space.”62

  Even though Krasner did enjoy cooking, she understood that by presenting herself to the New Yorker reporter in the stereotypical role of homemaker, she would appear less threatening and Pollock would appear more conventional. The low status of women at this time is also behind Barnett Newman’s failure to invite Krasner to join the men in making their protest to the Metropolitan Museum and to be in the photograph known as “The Irascibles.” Naturally, male artists were reluctant to share their privileged status with women in a profession where success was already so elusive.

  It was Krasner’s threat that Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, the well-known architect and painter known as Le Corbusier, saw that summer when he paid a visit to the Pollocks with their friend and Springs neighbor, the sculptor Costantino Nivola. “I took Le Corbusier to see Jackson—he was suspicious of Abstract Expressionists, calling them noisy and trying to get away from discipline—but he was pleased Jackson had his book,” recalled Nivola. Le Corbusier, he reported, said of Jackson’s work, “This man is like a hunter who shoots without aiming. But his wife, she has talent—women always have too much talent.”63

  In the fall, Pollock’s works were on view in Venice in both the XXV Biennale and as part of Peggy Guggenheim’s collection at the Museo Correr. On November 20, Time published an article, “Chaos, Damn It!,�
� which claimed that Pollock had “followed his canvases to Italy.” Yet Time took remarks made by the Italian critic Bruno Alfieri in L’Arte Moderna (and reprinted in Guggenheim’s catalogue) out of context, and Pollock became distressed over the emphasis on “chaos” in the Time article. In response, Krasner helped Pollock draft a telegram to Time: “NO CHAOS DAMN IT. DAMNED BUSY PAINTING AS YOU CAN SEE BY MY SHOW COMING UP NOV. 28 I’VE NEVER BEEN TO EUROPE. THINK YOU LEFT OUT MOST EXCITING PART OF MR. ALFIERI’S PIECE.”64

  “What they want is to stop modern art,” Pollock exclaimed to his friend Jeffrey Potter. “It’s not just me they’re after, but taking me as a symbol sure works.”65 When the painter Gina Knee ran into Pollock on the street in Amagansett, she sensed that he was “very upset” about the piece in Time: “I didn’t try to console him but reasoned with him; how good he was and how wonderful that he was in that show. He brightened a bit but I thought, ‘Oh—there’s more than that churning inside of him.’”66 Sensing a storm brewing in Jackson, she decided to decline the Pollocks’ invitation to a dinner the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Years later, she claimed that her husband, Alexander Brook, the academic portraitist, was not fond of Lee, implying that he preferred prettier women, since he was always looking for new subjects to paint.

  Soon after Knee’s encounter with Pollock, Hans Namuth filmed him painting on glass. He shot from below, catching the action through the glass surface of Jackson laying down the paint. What was usually the act of painting privately in one’s studio suddenly was recorded for all to see. In a sense this was a psychic violation. Yet Pollock had not only acceded in advance, but also actually performed by painting while being filmed for the first time. The film was finished late on the cold and windy Saturday following Thanksgiving. Pollock and Namuth came into the house just as Lee had finished preparing an elaborate dinner party. The other guests included the photographer’s wife, Carmen, Alfonso Ossorio and Ted Dragon, Josephine and John Little, Penny and Jeffrey Potter, Betsy and Wilfrid Zogbaum, and the architect and critic, Peter Blake.67