Lee Krasner

by Gail Levin

  Not enough is known about how long Siegel stayed affiliated with the Sullivanians; however, his widow confirms that he was affiliated with both the Sullivanians and, earlier, with the William Alanson White Institute in New York.23 Without knowing the extent of Siegel’s involvement with the Sullivanians, it is impossible to reconstruct his therapy for Krasner and its effect. What is known is that Siegel’s own analyst was Clara M. Thompson, who was a cofounder of the William Alanson White Institute and a close friend of Harry Stack Sullivan. Thompson wrote papers on the role of women, including “Some Effects of the Derogatory Attitude toward Female Sexuality” (1950), the latter around the time that Siegel was training with her.

  Siegel developed a deep interest in the arts “as a vehicle to the unconscious and encouraged his patients to paint, draw, compose, etc.” He also got some of his patients to paint with him. It is not certain how long Krasner stayed in therapy, since Bob Friedman says her therapy with Siegel ended in July 1958.24 Yet her nephew’s ex-wife, Frances Patiky Stein, recalled that Lee was still seeing “that maniac doctor” Siegel in the early 1960s.25 Stein said that Siegel was “insane, off the wall.”26

  Krasner’s friend Cile Downs remembered going over to Len Siegel’s place at Barnes Landing with Krasner for a cookout. She observed that “Siegel, like Jackson, wanted Lee to coddle him.” She also remarked that he was one of the Sullivanians who “believed that therapists slept with their patients.”27 Clement Greenberg commented that Siegel became so dependent on Krasner that he came to see her to be comforted, a fact that caused her to give up on him as her therapist.28 Greenberg asserted that the Sullivanians, the followers of Saul Newton, also gave up on Siegel as a result, but added that he understood how someone could “succumb” to Krasner’s strength.29

  Krasner was at least partially aware that what she got was not just the orthodox teachings of Harry Stack Sullivan: “I had one year of analysis at the time I painted Prophecy. It was a splinter group from the Sullivan school and if one must separate Jung and Freud, this would be in the direction of Freud.”30

  Not to be left out, Pollock entered weekly analysis with Ralph Klein in New York City in the fall. He tried to get three sessions into two days, and while in the city, he stopped regularly by the Cedar Bar.31 He was stuck in a period of heavy drinking and artistic inactivity. Klein later spoke about having Pollock as his patient, telling how the artist came blustering in and said that therapy was all “a bunch of shit,” and how he had to tell Pollock to shut up and be seated. He admitted that he usually found Pollock drunk, and, although he was unable to stop Pollock’s destructive behavior, he did not seek other help for him.32

  Ben Heller, a young businessman and art collector who had befriended Pollock, recalls that Pollock would often telephone him on Tuesdays, when he was recovering from a binge the night before, after his appointment with Klein. Heller became so concerned that Pollock was not getting enough nutrition that he telephoned Klein, who reassured him that beer was very nutritious.33

  Klein’s treatment of Pollock’s problems ignored his alcoholism and was otherwise quite unorthodox. Klein left the William Alanson White Institute at the time the American Psychiatric Association refused to sanction training of nonmedical psychoanalysts, joining Newton in the Sullivanian Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis, which was founded in 1957. As a follower of Pearce and Newton, Klein became one of four leaders in their new radical therapeutic community on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. They moved on from Sullivan’s idea about the critical significance of interpersonal relationships to declare them harmful, even encouraging patients to break all close ties. The founders of the new group believed that they were the germ of a new society that would permit freedom from repression and obligation that kept people from personal fulfillment and creativity. The group eventually turned coercive and totalitarian, with the therapists wielding enormous power over the lives of patients and group members.34

  Klein’s circle did not consider monogamy acceptable—anyone could choose to have a child and might get permission to do so with anyone, not necessarily a spouse. Klein encouraged Pollock to have an extramarital affair. This would at least allow him to fulfill his desire to have a child. Pollock was completely under Klein’s spell. Patsy Southgate often took the train with Pollock to or from New York when he was going to his appointments.

  “He never wept on the train going in—he was always frightened then—but coming out there would be tears, and I felt it was genuine when he wasn’t drunk,” Southgate recalled. “The therapy situation was very frustrating for him, the not being understood or thinking he wasn’t. He had a complete transference with Klein and as with all transferences, a sort of godlike quality was attributed to him. I would think, ‘Lord I hope this guy realizes what he’s doing and what’s brewing inside Jackson’s head.’”35

  Another one of Klein’s patients, the singer Judy Collins, wrote about her therapy with Klein several years later: “I told Ralph that I thought I had a problem with alcohol. Ralph, to my relief at the time and horror later on, did not agree. He said that we would work on the underlying trouble and not to worry about my drinking…. Ralph was quite comfortable recommending alcohol for anxiety.”36 The Sullivanians were not up-to-date in their treatment of alcoholism, which required abstinence. Instead they focused on interpersonal relationships. Along with the other Sullivanians, Klein “did not think people should be in monogamous relationships or live with anyone exclusively,” recalled Collins, who explained their interest in encouraging creative individuals “to break down the isolation they thought people acquire in a oneon-one relationship in which each partner becomes dependent on the other for everything.”37

  Klein was clearly not up to the task of treating Pollock, who was already struggling with so much pain, and must have only confused him. “Dr. Klein had said it was all right for Jackson to drink and drive,” Krasner later told a stunned Jeffrey Potter.38 It was a treatment that proved fatal—as Patsy Southgate later said, “I think Ralph Klein killed Jackson.”39 What Krasner probably failed to grasp was that Klein pushed Pollock to break his bond with her.

  Decades later, the New York State Board of Regents forced Klein to surrender his license. Many considered the Sullivanian Institute to be a cult because it was said to permit sexual relationships between licensed psychologists and their patients, to foster the use of controlled substances, to promote the destruction of family relationships, and to commit other violations of professional standards.40 It may be that Siegel, Krasner’s therapist, wanted to escape this coterie, since he eventually moved all the way to Australia.

  Krasner kept papers on which she wrote down one of her dreams for her therapist. She noted, “J. [Jackson] better but still very disturbed—went to bed and he tried to talk to me about getting closer—said he appreciated my staying with him.”41 The next day she notes, “Friday. J. almost out of state.” Clearly she was struggling to deal with her deeply troubled spouse and it was taking its toll. Later she spoke of being in a perpetual state of crisis with Pollock.42

  Their friends were also concerned. Sheridan Lord, the painter, and his wife, Cile (Downs), had met Krasner and Pollock at the home of Peter Matthiessen and Patsy Southgate, when Pollock’s alcoholism was acute. Although Krasner had begun to rely on the Lords to help keep track of Pollock, they were not able to prevent him from drinking or to prevail upon him to go home with them.43 Cile recalled that if tea was given to Pollock, he would pour whiskey into it. She said that Krasner was always calm and permissive, and that “she hadn’t had any therapy about drawing the line yet.”44 At the time, she said Lee was “cute and lively” with a “poodle haircut.”45

  But according to Cile, once Krasner entered therapy, her behavior toward Pollock changed. She no longer functioned as his enabler, having learned about what we would now call “tough love”—and that put Pollock in a rage. Once Pollock bought roses, Cile remembered, and gave each one of them to various women in East Hampton, including Cile. Lee�
��s nephew Ronnie Stein, who saw a lot of his aunt and uncle, commented, “Lee had loved Jackson intensely, the way a young girl would love a hero: as a man, as an artist, as an image. The difficulty began when her physical and mental strength began to break down, and she became less and less capable. Then deadly alcohol changed love to drudgery: Jackson left boyish pranks and carryings-on—that polarity from being mystical to being boyish—for going down. There was an unholy alliance! He might have been a genius, but he was also a common drunk.”46

  BY 1955, KRASNER HAD TO LOOK TO HER OWN WORK FOR SOLACE. She must have determined not to let Pollock pull her down with him into the abyss. The critic Eleanor Munro has characterized some of her collages of 1955 as “fiercely vertical compositions with titles expressive of a will not to lie down: Milkweed…Burning Candles.”47 Krasner remarked, “The fact that he drank and was extraordinarily difficult to live with was another side…. But the thing that made it possible for me to hold my equilibrium were these intervals when we had so much.”48 That her love for Pollock had become self-destructive was difficult for her to accept.

  Krasner had a solo show at Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery from September 26 through October 15, 1955. The gallery took its name from its first home, a former livery stable on Seventh Avenue at West Fifty-eighth Street in Manhattan. On view were a group of collages of paper and cloth attached to painted supports of pressed wood, stretched linen, or cotton duck, at least some of which were unsold works from her 1951 show at Parsons.

  STUART PRESTON FINALLY WROTE A FAVORABLE REVIEW FOR THE New York Times: “In Lee Krasner’s collages at The Stable Gallery, we find ourselves in the midst of a dense jungle of exotic shape and color. The eye is fenced in by the myriad scraps of paper, burlap and canvas swabbed with color that she pastes up so energetically. She is a good noisy colorist, and some of the larger pictures would agreeably animate many an antiseptic modern interior. For their principle is verticality which they both exemplify and communicate.”49

  The painter and art critic Fairfield Porter wrote in Art News that some of her largest collages “with titles like Stretched Yellow, Milkweed and Blue Level, are like nature photographs magnified…. Krasner’s art, which seems to be about nature, instead of making the spectator aware of a grand design, makes him aware of a subtle disorder greater than he might otherwise have thought possible.”50

  In Arts, the critic and art historian Martica Sawin worried that “the assets of making paintings with paper and cloth instead of, or in combination with pigment, are not clear since the immediacy of touch and stroke are lacking and only the decorative effects remain.”51

  The gallerist Eleanor Ward was the same age as Pollock and was a person of “taste and flair.” She had come to art from the world of fashion, having worked for the designer Christian Dior in Paris. She came from an “Episcopalian social-register background,” recalled Alan Groh, who worked as her gallery assistant from 1956 to 1970—she once told him, “I would not have hired you if I’d known you were a Jew.”52

  Thus she probably considered Krasner provincial, ill mannered, and downright pushy. “This very strong woman was not easy to work with,” Ward said of Krasner. “I told her that I thought it was a good time for me to select her show. She said ‘You select my show? I am selecting my show and I am hanging it on both floors.’ So I answered, ‘Lee, then there will be no show, unless it is on one floor and I select it.’ That’s the way it ended because she wanted a show. And I realized that if I once let her gain control over me, I would just be putty.”53 But Ward, who was said to be proud of her “eye,” never allowed artists to be present while she installed their work on her gallery walls.54

  Ward later wrote to the sculptor Wilfrid Zogbaum, whom she also represented, to complain about Krasner’s “high temperament” and that she had left the Stable Gallery for Martha Jackson’s.55 Krasner can hardly be blamed for rejecting Ward’s controlling nature and limited enthusiasm to find a better dealer. Yet Zogbaum replied bluntly and sympathetically toward Ward: “Was sorry to hear about your difficulties with Lee Krasner but it did not come as a great surprise. Although she has been a friend of mine for twenty years there is that extreme ambition in her that is at times a bit frightening. One doesn’t know whether to admire or despise it.”56 Zogbaum was certainly not the first man to react against Krasner’s remarkable enterprise, but one can hardly imagine that Zogbaum would have been so frightened if Krasner had been a man.

  One night Krasner had invited Ward to dinner at her house. Ward recalled, “The relationship [between Jackson and Lee] was very, very curious. Once at dinner there was a bowl of peaches Lee had made, which Jackson wouldn’t touch. She said, ‘Now Jackson, they’re good for you. Eat them.’ He picked up a spoon like a child being told what to do.”57 Ossorio also commented about the “maternal aspect” in their relationship, “the way she treated him like a child and he hating it.”58

  The younger artist Nicolas Carone, who shared with Krasner the experience of having studied with both Leon Kroll and Hans Hofmann, felt he understood what their relationship was about: “She took care of him; you don’t let go of a Jackson. You have to watch him every minute, and more; a woman taking care of such a man is not just feeding him and darning his socks; she’s living with a man who might flip any minute. Think of the tensions she lived under! Lee knew she was dealing with a powder keg.”59

  Dan T. Miller, the proprietor of the General Store in Springs, not far from the Pollocks’ home, recalled: “I’ve seen him drive up here to these gas pumps for gas and get in and drive away with Mrs. Pollock sitting beside him, and I wouldn’t have sat beside him in that condition he was in but she did. There was a quality of love or however you want to put it. But the point I wanted to make is that she didn’t just get up and run when things got a little bit rugged. She sure didn’t. I thought to myself more than once ‘Well Lee I wouldn’t drive with that son-of-a-gun—I’d get up and walk off’ but she didn’t.”60

  Pollock’s mother, Stella, suffered a series of heart attacks in late November 1954. Soon after, Lee went with Jackson to see Stella at Sande and Arloie’s home in Deep River, Connecticut. At Christmas they returned. Lee offered to have Stella come and live with them in Springs, thinking that Stella might help save Jackson, but Arloie refused, citing Stella’s age and condition: “Jack didn’t have anything to help her with. He and Lee were not in a very happy situation and she [Stella] didn’t need that aggravation; the strain would have been huge.”61

  Pollock became more and more desperate as he became less able to paint. In 1955 he told his homeopath, Dr. Hubbard, that he had not painted for a year and a half because he wondered if he was saying anything.62 In the middle of February, he broke his ankle again, this time wrestling with Sheridan Lord. Jackson had challenged Sheridan on his own living room floor. Sheridan’s wife, Cile, recalled that “Lee had been trying to get him not to, and he knew his bones were brittle…. It was such a dumb thing to do, I wasn’t even sorry for him.”63 But Cile was sorry for Lee. “It was hell. I thought that we were going to lose Lee. She got thinner and thinner.”64

  Things got slightly better in 1956. Pollock told Dr. Hubbard that he felt better even though he couldn’t “stand reality.”65 In the early spring of 1956, the painter Paul Jenkins saw Pollock at Clement Greenberg’s on Bank Street and encouraged him to come to Paris. Pollock protested, saying, “It’s too late for that.”66 He was just forty-four.

  In April Greenberg arranged for Jenkins and two other abstract painters, the German-born Friedel Dzubas and Alan Davie (then visiting from Scotland for his show in New York), to stay in The Creeks and meet Pollock. Krasner cooked lunch for them. Jenkins said her cooking was “extraordinary.” He recalled that Pollock was sober, and that he drove the two of them out to Montauk Point, the scenic spot at the end of Long Island.67 Jenkins knew that Pollock’s work was admired in Paris, and he invited Pollock and Krasner to come there and see him and his wife. Jenkins had no trouble interesting Krasner, but he had
trouble with Pollock. Nevertheless he applied for a passport, and then never used it. Perhaps he only got the passport to appease Lee.

  One day Krasner recounted to Jenkins how she had gone to her therapist to talk about “one of the most terrifying nightmares anyone has ever told.” After the session, when she returned to Jackson, “he turned white when he saw her. He walked up to her and clasped both of her hands and they sat down together. ‘What happened Lee?’ ‘Jackson, please, I am all right.’ ‘Please tell me. You are completely different!’ Lee went on to explain Jackson’s astonishment, and how she could not get over it.”68 Jenkins explained that what took place in Krasner’s therapy session could be “compared to a kind of exorcism. A kind of monster that had dwelt in her childhood had dissolved, vanished—and Jackson knew it, he did not just sense it. In Lee’s dream, a frightening total monster lived in her cellar when she was a child, and it was real in her psyche, not her imagination.”69

  At one point during his stay Jenkins witnessed Jackson shoot an arrow into the wall of the kitchen in his Springs house. After leaving the house, Jenkins sent Jackson and Lee a gift of Zen in the Art of Archery, a book written by the philosopher Eugen Herrigel in German and first translated into English in 1953. Jenkins wrote, “Again many good thoughts for the weekend spent with you both. Here is the archery book and Esther & I hope you enjoy reading it. Before returning to Paris I hope we will [have] another chance to talk—if we don’t however it has been a real joy to have visited and will remember always your generosity.”70