by Gail Levin
Anyone writing an artist’s biography is fortunate if there is a catalogue raisonné to consult, so I thank Ellen G. Landau and Jeffrey Grove, who served as her assistant, for having had the dedication to complete Krasner’s. When my findings have clearly contradicted theirs, I have sometimes reported this, usually in the endnotes. When my chronology disagrees with theirs or that of other authors, however, it does not reflect any oversight on their part, but reflects new evidence previously overlooked or undiscovered. I also wish to acknowledge writing on Krasner: by B. H. Friedman, including his catalogue essay for Krasner’s 1965 retrospective; extensive work by Barbara Rose, including the catalogue for Krasner’s 1983 retrospective and her 1978 film, Lee Krasner: The Long View; and work by Robert Hobbs, particularly the retrospective that he organized in 1999, making much of Krasner’s art accessible once again. Many other writers on Krasner too numerous to name here are listed in the selected bibliography. Limitations of space in this volume do not permit a discussion of how my conclusions differ from those of other scholars. However, the conclusions of this book represent my own point of view.
I am grateful to all those who had conversations with me about Krasner, especially to her extended family members: Diana Burroughs, Jack Dressler, Leslie Dressler, Muriel Dressler, James S. Gersing, Charles Glickman, Rusty (Rena Glickman) Kanokogi, Jason McCoy, Cindy Shapiro Munson, Sylvia Pollock, and Frances Patiky Stein; and to her closest friends: Edward Albee, Cile Downs, Sanford Friedman, Eda Mirsky Mann, Terence Netter, Therese Netter, Barbara Rose, Eugene Victor Thaw, and Clare Thaw.
I also learned from speaking about Krasner to Pamela Adler, Ruth Appelhof, Dore Ashton, Helene Aylon, Will Barnet, Nancy Miller Batty, Dyne Benner, Patricia Bowden, Paul Brach, Phyllis Braff, Rachel Brownstein, Arlene Bujese, Jeanne Bultman, Darby Cardonsky, John Cheim, Ann Chwatsky, Christopher Crosman, Laurel Daunis-Allen, Barbaralee Diamonstein, Ruth Dickler, Elizabeth Epstein DuBoff, Tejas Englesmith, Dallas Ernst, Audrey Flack, B. H. Friedman, Arnold Glimcher, Grace Glueck, Edward Goldman, Elaine Goldman, Bernard Gotfryd, Janice Van Horne (Jenny Greenberg), Helen Gribetz, Raphael Gribetz, John Gruen, Grace Hartigan, Ben Heller, Robert C. Hobbs, Richard Howard, Robert Hughes, Jill Jakes, Lana Jankel, Carroll Janis, Paul Jenkins, Luise Kaish, Morton Kaish, Howard Kanowitz, Deborah Kass, Diane Kelder, Nathan Kernan, Bill King, Joyce Kozloff, Max Kozloff, Ellen G. Landau, Elizabeth Langhorne, Denise Lassaw, Ernestine Lassaw, John Post Lee, Donald McKinney, Peter Matthiessen, Betsy Wittenborn Miller, Gerald Monroe, Eleanor Munro, Cynthia Navaretta, Cindy Nemser, Ruth Nivola, Francis V. O’Connor, Mark Patiky, Vita Petersen, Norman Podhoretz, Jeffrey Potter, Harry Rand, Virginia Pitts Rembert, Alex Rosenberg, Patia Rosenberg, Joop Sanders, Irving Sandler, Martica Sawin, Miriam Schapiro, Grace Schulman, Constance Schwartz, Joyce Pomeroy Schwartz, Nancy Schwartz, Charles Seliger, Joan Semmel, David Slivka, Kiki Smith, Harry Striebel, Elizabeth Strong-Cuevas, Jerry Tallmer, Arlene Talmadge, Abigail Little Tooker, Marcia Tucker, Helen Weinberg, Tony Vaccaro, Judith Wolfe, Virginia Zabriskie, Athos Zacharias, and Barbara Zucker.
I sometimes wished that I had started this book sooner, since I was fortunate enough to meet and (in some cases interview) numerous others who figure in this biography but who were already deceased by the time I envisioned this writing, among them: Krasner’s teacher Leon Kroll, her nephew Ronald Stein, her friends and acquaintances including Fritz Bultman, Ray Kaiser Eames, Jimmy Ernst, Clement Greenberg, Peggy Guggenheim, Harry Holtzman, Sidney Janis, Buffie Johnson, Lillian Olinsey Kiesler, Ibram Lassaw, William Lieberman, John Little, Josephine Little, Howard Moss, Robert Motherwell, John Bernard Myers, Annalee Newman, Betty Parsons, David Porter, Richard Pousette-Dart, Bryan Robertson, Harold Rosenberg, William S. Rubin, Rose Slivka, and Sidney Waintrob. Likewise, I was fortunate to discuss Krasner, contemporary art, and women artists with the late critics David Bourdon, Emily Genauer, Hilton Kramer, and John Russell, as well as with the artist Hermine Freed, who made a video of Krasner as a part of her series on “Herstory.” Though I also met Robert Miller and Helen Frankenthaler, neither was able to be interviewed for this book.
I benefited from communications with the following, who, though they did not know Krasner, helped to illuminate other figures and events in her life story: Bonnie Bernstein, Diane Harris Brown, Judy Collins, Judy Chicago, Jack Drescher, Angela Gibbs, Emilie S. Kilgore, Patrick Michael, Celia Siegel Newman, Leigh Olshan, Mimi Pantuhova, Irene Pappas, Val Schaffner, Joan Ulman Schwartz, Melissa Michael Sheldon, Christina Strassfield, and Karole Vail.
Especially helpful to me in my research were Charles Duncan and Darcy Tell at the Archives of American Art; the Archives at the Armenian Church of North America Eastern Diocese; Joy Holland, Brooklyn Collection, Brooklyn Public Library; the Brooklyn Museum Archives; Carol Salomon, archivist, Cooper Union; Hillary Bober, archivist, and Jeffrey Grove, curator, at the Dallas Museum of Art; Tom Branigar, archivist at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library; the Long Island Collection at the East Hampton Library; Jeannette Clough, Sally McKay, and Sarah Sherman of the Getty Research Institute Library; Philip Rylands of the Guggenheim Museum in Venice; Julie Greene and Marcia Mitrowski of the Hampton Library, Bridgehampton; Gwen David and Daniel Starr of the Thomas J. Watson Library, curators Lisa Messinger and Samantha Rippner, and Image Licensing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Jenny Tobias at the Museum of Modern Art Library and Archives; Marshall Price, curator at the National Academy of Design; Quinn Marshall at New Directions Press; Sipora Matatov, New York City archivist; Dan Sharon of the Spertus Institute Library in Chicago; Nina Yiakoumaki, archivist at Whitechapel Gallery, London; and the staff at YIVO Institute in New York.
I wish to thank the following who contributed in diverse ways to my research for this book: James Atlas, Debra Bricker Balken, Greta Berman, Judy Brodsky, Michele Cohen, Blanche Wiesen Cook, Cezar Del Valle, Tina Dickey, Jack Drescher, MD, Ann E. Gibson, Jeff Kisseloff, Brad Gooch, Kathleen L. Housley, Suzanne Jenkins, Erica Jong, Connie Kaplan, Pepe Karmel, Sandra Kraskin, Tom McCormick, Joan Marter, Irene Pappas, Claudia Oberweger, Elizabeth A. Sackler, Hope Sandrow, Martica Sawin, Amy B. Siskind, David W. Stowe, Vita Susak, Jacquelin Bograd Weld, and Barbara Wolanin.
I wish to thank Anne Abeles, who wrote her dissertation on James Brooks, and Tetsuya Oshima, who wrote his dissertation on Jackson Pollock, both under my supervision at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Both encouraged me to resume my studies in this field.
For helping with photographs of Krasner, her friends, and her art, I wish to thank George R. Allen, Dyne Benner, David and Maddy Berezov, Ann Chwatsky, Rameshwar Das, Leslie Dressler, Tracy Fitzpatrick and the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, New York, B. H. Friedman, James S. Gersing, Bernard Gotfryd, Ripley Golovin Hathaway, Rusty Kanokogi, Whitman E. Knapp, Laura Kruger, Donald McKinney, George T. Mercer, Barbara B. Millhouse, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Stephan Paley, Mark Patiky, Helen Rattray at the East Hampton Star, the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, Miriam Schapiro, David Stekert, and Tony Vaccaro. For helping me locate reproductions of Krasner’s art, I thank the Robert Miller Gallery, as well as Jason McCoy Inc. and Pace Gallery, all in New York. I have tried to locate, request permission of, and credit each of the photographers whose work I have included. I hope that anyone whom I have failed to find will forgive my unintentional oversight and accept my sincere thanks.
I thank my editor Henry Ferris for his unflagging support of this project from its inception and for his insight in posing the kind of questions that led me to make further discoveries. I also appreciate the careful attention to this book paid by his assistant, Danny Goldstein. I feel fortunate to have as my friend and literary agent Loretta Barrett, whose enthusiasm for books and interest in her authors make her exceptional.
I was able to visit Shpikov, Krasner’s parents’ remote shtetl in Ukraine, with the help of my friend Liya Chechik, a graduate student in art history in Moscow, and my husband, John B. Van Sickle, who shared the driving and the memorable adventure. I ded
icate this book to John, who once again has accompanied me on my journeys, supported my work with his insights, and even documented some of it with his photographs. When needed, he has been there with sustenance and love.
About the Author
GAIL LEVIN is the author of Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography, Becoming Judy Chicago, and many other books on twentieth-century and contemporary art. She is Distinguished Professor of Art History, American Studies, and Women’s Studies at the Graduate Center and Baruch College of the City University of New York.
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OTHER BOOKS BY GAIL LEVIN
Becoming Judy Chicago: A Biography of the Artist
Ethics and Visual Arts (coeditor and contributor)
Aaron Copland’s America (coauthor)
Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography
Edward Hopper: A Catalogue Raisonné
Silent Places: A Tribute to Edward Hopper (editor)
The Poetry of Solitude: A Tribute to Edward Hopper (editor)
Theme and Improvisation: Kandinsky and the American Avant-Garde, 1912–1950 (principal coauthor)
Marsden Hartley in Bavaria
Twentieth-Century American Painting: The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection
Hopper’s Places
Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper: The Art and the Artist
Edward Hopper as Illustrator
Edward Hopper: The Complete Prints
Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years (coauthor)
Synchromism and American Color Abstraction, 1910–1925
Credits
Jacket design by Mumtaz Mustafa
Jacket photographs: portrait of Lee Krasner, 1962, by Hans Namuth
Copyright
Various family photographs throughout the text and in the photograph insert are courtesy of members of Lee Krasner’s family.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Mark Patiky for the photograph on the title-page spread.
LEE KRASNER. Copyright © 2011 by Gail Levin. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Levin, Gail
Lee Krasner: A biography / Gail Levin.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-06-184525-3
1. Krasner, Lee, 1908–1984. 2. Painters—United States—Biography. 3. Painters’ spouses—United States—Biography. I. Title.
ND237.K677L48 2011
759.13—dc22
[B]
2010046347
EPub Edition © FEBRUARY 2011 ISBN: 978-0-06-207462-1
11 12 13 14 15
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* To avoid confusion, the author has decided to spell the artist’s surname consistently as Krasner and to merely signal when she changed the spelling, dropping the second s.
