Lee Krasner (40 page)

Krasner later recalled the impact of seeing Chartres Cathedral and the old masters in the Louvre, which interested her much more than the contemporary art scene in Paris: “three paintings that stopped me dead in my tracks, and that startled me more than anything else because I didn't expect these would be the
paintings that would knock me off my track, so to speak. They were not what I expected them to be.”
⁹³
She recalled that the paintings were Uccello's
The Battle of San Romano
(c. 1435–40), Andrea Mantegna's
St. Sebastian
(c. 1480), and Goya's
La comtesse del Carpio, marquise de La Solana
(1794–95).
⁹⁴
She was in awe over the latter. “The Goya is all spirit; you know, it simply leaves the earth.”
⁹⁵
Krasner also told how much she was interested by Ingres, whose style had captivated Browne, Gorky, Graham, and de Kooning during the 1930s.

From the old masters in the Louvre, she traveled to the narrow streets and medieval houses of Ménerbes, a lovely village in the Vaucluse. At the home of Charles and Kay Gimpel, Krasner found the artist Helen Frankenthaler.
⁹⁶
Krasner also visited the art historian Douglas Cooper in Menton on the Côte d'Azur, near the Italian border.

On July 26, Kay Gimpel wrote to Peggy Guggenheim, telling her that Lee was staying with her and that she wanted to go to Venice at the end of July or the beginning of August, before she sailed home on the twenty-third of August. Lee wanted to see Peggy in Venice and she was requesting Peggy's help in booking a hotel.
⁹⁷

Krasner sent a postcard from Ménerbes back to Paul and Esther Jenkins in Paris: “The house is unbelievably 11th century perched on the top of a hill with views quite out of this world—Taking motor trips out to Arles, Aix, Marseilles, St. Remy etc. We'll be here until about the 6th and then on to see Peggy—and back to you. Hope your time is moving pleasantly. Love, Lee.”
⁹⁸

When Krasner followed up on Kay's letter, and called Peggy from the south of France to ask about reserving a hotel room, Peggy replied that she was too busy to see Lee and could not recommend a place for her to stay.
⁹⁹
This confirmed Krasner's feeling that Peggy disliked women. Krasner thus decided to return to Paris. Her hotel was no longer available, so she decided to stay
with Paul and Esther Jenkins at their place on the rue Decrès on the Left Bank.

Just after Lee returned to Paris, on Sunday, August 12, Paul Jenkins received a frantic phone call from Clement Greenberg in New York, who was trying to locate Lee. The news was bad. On August 11, at 10:15
P.M.
, while speeding north on Fireplace Road toward home, Pollock crashed his car into a clump of trees and flipped over. Of the car's three occupants Ruth Kligman was injured, but a friend of hers, Edith Metzger, and Pollock were killed. Pollock suffered a compound fracture of the skull, laceration of the brain and both lungs, hemothorax, and shock. He was forty-four years old. Krasner was now, at forty-seven, a widow.

Krasner processed the news for a moment and then “she got up from the couch and screamed, ‘Jackson's dead!'” recalled Jenkins.
¹⁰⁰
“We were living on the sixth floor, and she headed toward an open balcony; I reached out and grasped her. I placed her to the wall and didn't let her go until she calmed down.” Jenkins contacted Darthea Speyer, the U.S. cultural attaché, who arranged for Lee to fly to New York that same night, where she would be met at the airport by the artist Barnett Newman and his wife, Annalee.

Before flight time, Esther Jenkins packed Krasner's bags, and Paul drove Lee around Paris, even recruiting the assistance of Helen Frankenthaler, who also had come back to Paris.
¹⁰¹
They stopped at the Bois de Boulogne and the Luxembourg Gardens to help pass the time.

The front page of the
New York Times
reported: “Mr. Pollock's convertible turned over three miles north of East Hampton, according to witnesses. The accident occurred shortly after 10
P.M.
on Fireplace Road. A woman riding in the car was killed and another woman, identified by Southampton hospital authorities as Ruth Kligman, was injured. The police were unable to determine the cause of the accident, but said the automobile had smashed
into an embankment.”
¹⁰²
This article continued with a discussion of who Pollock was and what he was known for, before explaining, “Mr. Pollock was married to Lee Krasner, an established painter in her own right. Acquaintances here said that she was now in Europe.”
¹⁰³

The funeral took place on Wednesday, August 15, at the Springs Chapel, down the road from their house. Barnett and Annalee Newman paid for Pollock's funeral, since Krasner had only $200 in the bank at that moment.
¹⁰⁴
Peter Matthiessen said that Lee asked him to take care of their dogs at the funeral. Pollock was then buried in Green River Cemetery, nearby in Springs. Jackson's mother and brothers attended the funeral. Lee's nephew and her sister also came, as did friends such as John Little, Reuben Kadish, Gina Knee, and Jim Brooks.

Krasner asked Clement Greenberg to speak at the funeral, but he refused, because of Pollock's role in the death of Edith Metzger, though he did go to the funeral. Years later, Greenberg commented about the impact of Pollock's death on him personally, saying that he thought more of him “as a man at the end and as a friend, even more than as an artist. I minded that girl getting killed with him and I wasn't going to get up and speak about Jackson. Lee had hysterics over the phone. I wasn't going to get up there and lie. I thought Jackson went out in a shabby way.”
¹⁰⁵

Another time, Greenberg said: “Lee was the one who really got to him and she was right. He could talk about art only with her—well, he could with me
mostly when Lee was there to join in….
Art was his justification as a human being, because he felt inadequate in other respects. But Lee was his victim in the end,
and
a better painter than before.”
¹⁰⁶

A few nights after the funeral, the Sullivanian therapist Saul Newton, who spent summers with his disciples at nearby Barnes Landing, called on Krasner in Springs and recounted that “Lee was carrying on like an old-fashioned mourner. Franz Kline was there and she was blubbering ‘Help, help' at him. About midnight
she
had
to visit the cemetery, so I took her and Patsy [Southgate] there. It was a dark night and I told Lee she would have just one minute. Then I told her when her time was up, got them back, and left her in Patsy's hands as a nightwatch. She slept off her grief and in the morning was in okay shape.”
¹⁰⁷

Lee Krasner with their dog, Gyp, in Jackson Pollock's studio, two days after his burial, August 1956, photographed by Maurice Berezov. One of Krasner's first preoccupations as a widow was supporting Pollock's scheduled exhibition at MoMA, which turned into a memorial retrospective. Having lost him, she was determined not to let his legacy get away from her.

It was an ironic and tragic twist of fate that Greenberg—Pollock's most important critical supporter—introduced Pollock and Krasner to people like Newton, Klein, and Pearce. Though these practitioners aimed to heal their patients, sometimes, instead of cures for conditions like alcoholism, which they did not understand, they offered misguided therapy, coercive and destructive advice that ended up doing harm. It was Klein, after all, who
postponed trying to stop Pollock from drinking and who encouraged his relationship with Kligman. When Judy Collins began therapy with Klein in 1963, she recalls, he told her that he had treated Jackson Pollock. He was angry that Pollock had killed himself in the accident, which he considered a suicide.
¹⁰⁸

Lee Krasner in her studio, August 30, 1956, two weeks after Jackson Pollock's death. Visible are her
Prophecy
(CR 302, right) and
Cauldron
(CR 300, unfinished, behind), photographed by Waintrob-Budd.

Y
OU FELT THAT IT WAS PART OF HER DESTINY TO BE SUPPORTIVE
of this person with a recognizable continuity. But then his death gave her freedom to become a creative being,” wrote John Cole, a journalist who knew Jackson and Lee in East Hampton.
¹
“The marriage couldn't have been more rough,” Krasner admitted. “Sure it was rough. Big deal. I was in love with Pollock and he was in love with me. He gave an enormous amount, Pollock. Of course, he took too.”
²
Stanley William Hayter, who had worked with Pollock in his printmaking studio on Eighth Street,
and who, together with his artist wife, Helen Phillips, had partied with Pollock, Krasner, and the Kadishes in East Hampton in the summer of 1945, understood Krasner's role well: “Most men are dependent on some women to support them, one way or another. This idea of being hairy-chested men and superior to women—bugger! I don't think we would have had much production out of Jack if it hadn't been for Lee, or even survival.”
³

One of Krasner's first preoccupations as a widow was supporting Pollock's projected 1956 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Once planned as the inaugural show in a series on midcareer artists, it was now a memorial retrospective. It opened on December 19, 1956, and closed on February 3, 1957. The show and its reviews kept Krasner focused on her late husband and his legacy. Having lost him, she was determined not to let the legacy get away from her.

Krasner remained in Springs for the autumn after the funeral. In October, Charlotte Park and Jim Brooks were in the process of moving their Montauk house by barge to Springs, and they stayed with a grieving Krasner in the house she had shared with Pollock.
⁴
But after they left, the house was too empty, so Lee spent several months with Fritz and Jeanne Bultman in their town house on East Ninty-fifth Street and several more months living with Bob (B. H.) and Abby Friedman.
⁵
Lee stayed there through New Year's, shared with Helen Frankenthaler, Betty and Bob Motherwell, and Musa and Philip Guston. “Jackson's ghost was more real,”
⁶
Bob Friedman wrote in his journal on New Year's Day 1957. They had all been at a party where two of Krasner's least favorite people, Motherwell and Frankenthaler, met, evidently for the first time.
⁷
Later that year, Motherwell divorced Betty Little, with whom he had two daughters, and in 1958 married Frankenthaler.

After staying with friends through the winter, Krasner then tried living on in Springs, but she disliked being alone in the
house. “It was hard at first, damned hard. I'm not the country type. And the loneliness,” she complained.
⁸
“After Pollock's death I came back to New York, rented an apartment and then abandoned it after two years. I couldn't stand it. So I went back out to Springs. The second attempt was very beautiful. I wasn't depressed at all. Then, at a point during that time [the two years], I took over the barn. There was no point in letting it stand empty. I had difficulty trying to reestablish myself in New York.”
⁹

But Krasner soon realized that she couldn't spend all her time in Springs alone, so she also tried to get back into New York. She rented an apartment in 1957 at 147 East Seventy-second Street in Manhattan, signing a two-year lease. That summer she had tried out painting in the barn that had been Pollock's studio. She had been able to tolerate staying in the old Springs house, however, only when she had been able to get someone to stay there with her. She depended on hired assistants, friends, and, if they lived nearby, even their teenaged children.
¹⁰

As a widow, Krasner was not just moving into her late husband's studio to paint, but rather she was also focused on how best to place Pollock's work in museums and important private collections. At first she kept Pollock's work with his last dealer, Sidney Janis, but she did need to raise a certain amount of money to pay estate taxes. In the year before Pollock's death, Janis had offered Pollock's
Autumn Rhythm
to the Museum of Modern Art for $8,000, but the museum rejected the price as too high. Now Alfred Barr, on behalf of the museum, made another inquiry about the painting. This time Janis, after speaking with Krasner, asked for $30,000.
¹¹
Evidently Barr was so stunned by the increase that he never even responded. Janis sold the picture to the Metropolitan Museum instead—a success for Krasner, even though the deal for $20,000 included an agreement that she would buy back another one of Pollock's canvases (
Number 17,
1951) for $10,000.
¹²
Nonetheless, she had now set a new record for Pollock's prices. Her
skill in marketing Pollock's work slowly and judiciously would also help to set much higher prices for other abstract expressionist works.

Janis later commented: “After the second [Pollock] exhibition following his death [in 1958], Lee was a little discouraged by our selling quite a few at low prices and decided not to deal here. He died a little too soon, but other artists were immediately affected—began selling and raising their prices after that romantic death—like Van Gogh's.”
¹³

Krasner's marketing strategy was bound to affect the way her own paintings were seen and shown and how she was perceived. “After Jackson died the load was far heavier on me than when he was alive,” she maintained. “He was painter number one and the whole art world turned on me. It was like I wasn't there. It was very rocky.”
¹⁴

“She didn't get anywhere, until her husband died,” the painter Buffie Johnson told an interviewer. “We were good friends for a while, and then I showed one of my old realistic paintings in the East Hampton Guild Hall, because they'd asked me to put something in a realistic show. She stopped on the street in front of the post office and harangued at me for doing this. I said, ‘Well, I don't deny my early work. If Picasso shows his realistic things and his abstract things side by side, I don't know why [I shouldn't].' [Lee] said, ‘We've spent years trying to get the Guild Hall to accept abstract work, and you come along and undo all our work.' She's a very emphatic woman…. I felt very injured.”
¹⁵

 

W
ITH
P
OLLOCK'S DEATH
, K
RASNER HAD TO PICK UP THE PIECES AND
put her life back together. What she had left was her art, and she soon returned to it. When she was asked how she managed to do this so quickly, she responded, “I don't think I thought about it. And I don't feel I had a choice. It was just extremely difficult to get to do it. ‘I had to' is the only way I can put it, and it was not
easy…. I was not in a position to say I will not continue painting or I will continue painting.”
¹⁶
She explained her motivation this way: “I am preoccupied with trying to know myself in order to communicate with others. Painting is not separate from life. It is one. It is like asking—do I want to live? My answer is yes—and I paint.”
¹⁷

Though Krasner's abstract paintings were not usually very representational, a canvas such as
Three in Two
painted in 1956 begs a biographical reading. The catalogue raisonné refers to
Three in Two
as having a “cryptic title,” which “probably relates in some way to Pollock's equally ambiguous
There Were Seven in Eight
of c. 1945.” Yet Krasner's enigmatic canvas might be read as three vertical panels of fragments of figures inspired by her favorite painter, Matisse. His
Bathers by a River
of 1909–1910 was well known to her from the 1951 Matisse retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art as well as from Greenberg's 1953 book on Matisse.
¹⁸

Taking a hint from Matisse, Krasner could have painted
Three in Two
in order to reference Pollock's earlier canvas,
Two,
of 1945, a painting that had already been compared to
Bathers.
¹⁹
Following this, Krasner may have inserted a third figure between the male and female figures that critics have identified in Pollock's
Two.
Chances are this third figure represents Ruth Kligman, who had intervened and split up Pollock and Krasner's relationship in the same year that Krasner produced this painting. In a very literal sense, Kligman inserted herself between the pair—a third figure wedged into two.
²⁰

Another blow to Krasner came on May 1957, when
Life
magazine ran an article called “Women Artists in Ascendancy” featuring five women artists—“none over 35.” Naturally it omitted Krasner, who was nearly fifty. The article featured Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, Jane Wilson, Helen Frankenthaler, and Nell Blaine, touted as a “Young Group [that] Reflects Lively Virtues of U.S. Painting.” With glamour in mind,
Life
stressed both the youth
and the physical attractiveness of these younger women artists and even exulted that Jane Wilson “works as a New York fashion model.”
²¹
It made good copy, but it already relegated to the dustbin of history the older women who had labored among the male abstract expressionists of the first generation, such as Krasner, Perle Fine, and even the somewhat younger Elaine de Kooning.

The critical dismissal was premature. Krasner was now painting in Pollock's barn studio, enjoying for the first time its excellent light and ample space. Her work's scale soon expanded. Though her paintings appear to mirror her emotions, sometimes they are the opposite of this. For example, after Pollock's sudden death, she painted bold and upbeat works in a series she called
Earth Green.
Her impulse was to reach out and boldly embrace life, which had so swiftly left Pollock. Her frequent preoccupations include an emphasis on nature, and she sometimes hints of birth, destruction, and regeneration.

At the same time, one must take into account the possibility that Krasner was actually relieved to be free of Pollock's debilitating behavior and the constant anxiety it created not only in her but also in many others who came into contact with him. Years later, she reflected: “Look, it was a mixed blessing—our relationship. It had many, many pluses and several minuses. His drinking, for instance, was very rough on me, to put it mildly.”
²²

Krasner perhaps expressed the burden Pollock represented in a memorable dream: “Jackson and I were standing on top of the world. The earth was a sphere with a pole going through the center. I was holding the pole with my left hand. Suddenly, I let go of the pole, but I kept holding on to Jackson, and we both went floating off into outer space. We were not earthbound.”
²³
She had supported Pollock as long as she could, but eventually his drinking and the emotional pain that caused him to drink produced a situation that was too difficult to endure. Krasner had never, however, intended to let go of Pollock.

Though Krasner was still working, she needed to be able to
show her paintings—being able to do so meant continuing to exist in the world. But she, and many of her contemporaries, were concerned about the lack of opportunity to show their work. The artists John Little and Elizabeth Parker, both of whom had also studied with Hofmann, joined with Alfonso Ossorio to open the Signa Gallery in 1957 at 53 Main Street in East Hampton in a space that was formerly a small market. Financed by Ossorio, this was the first commercial gallery in the area devoted to contemporary vanguard work. The gallery's profile was high, and its openings became popular social events, often attracting up to five hundred people.
²⁴

Signa Gallery lasted for four years. Krasner showed her painting
Spring Beat
(1957) in a group show from August 11 to 24, 1957, along with Paul Brach, David Hare, Franz Kline, Costantino Nivola, Charlotte Park, Elizabeth Parker, and Theodoros Stamos.
²⁵
She showed fewer works than the others, but her canvas (at 98 by 124 inches) was the largest object on view. Krasner also participated in “A Review of the Season,” Signa's September show that same year.

August 1957 marked a year since Pollock's death. Krasner's friends Giorgio Cavallon and Linda Lindeberg wrote, telling her that she was in their thoughts and how wonderful she had been in the past year, “always making something positive and clear out of the tragedy of Jackson's death.” They said how they admired her positive attitude, her courage, and her new paintings.
²⁶
Krasner spent Thanksgiving that year with Bob and Abby Friedman, Barnett and Annalee Newman, and Sheridan and Cile Lord, recorded in a snapshot probably taken by Cile.

In 1949, U.S. Representative George Dondero had denounced “the link between the Communist art of the ‘isms' and the so-called modern art of America.”
²⁷
Now, at the height of the cold war, the Federal Bureau of Investigation investigated Krasner under the names “Mrs. Jackson Pollock” and “Lee Pollock” for espionage.
²⁸
Most of her FBI file, which is only two pages long,
has been blacked out, but the following is visible: “Mrs. Pollock is an artist of the modern school.” The FBI continued looking into her case until December 16, 1957. It appears that someone had reported her. One explanation is that the person did it out of anger. Another possibility is that Krasner, when she was in Europe at the time of Pollock's death, had some innocent contact with someone who had political connections that raised suspicion about her activities. One must note that the FBI also investigated a number of her contemporaries, for example, Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, to name just two. Like Krasner, both were Jewish. It has been suggested that at this time “sectors of the U.S. government were openly racist” and anti-Semitic.
²⁹