Finally, sometime in 1939, Igor disappeared. “Lee was so frightened,” says May, “she called the police and checked the listings. It never occurred to her that it was over.” But it was. A week later, she received a letter from Florida, where Igor had joined his family, asking her to return the portrait he had made of her. “Until the letter arrived,” May recalls, “she refused to believe that he had really left her.” It would be at least a year before she saw him again.
Despite the long denouement of rivalry and alienation, Lee was devastated. A confrontation, no matter how rancorous, she could have survived; abandonment was worse than death. “When she lost Igor, when he walked out without a word,” May remembers, “that was nearly a fatal blow.”
For the next two years, Lee immersed herself in art and politics. She organized demonstrations for the Artists Union to protest dwindling government subsidies. Splitting with the mainstream of Hofmann students, she joined the American Abstract Artists (AAA), a group that followed Mondrian’s lead in rejecting all subject matter, although she continued to mix with friends from the Hofmann school. As always, she preferred the company of men, and while many of the males from the old circle were homosexual, they at least provided social diversion. George Mercer, a slender, handsome, Boston-born and Harvard-educated painter, became a regular companion. Like Igor, the patrician Mercer inhabited a different world entirely from that of Lena Krassner (among his friends at Harvard were David Rockefeller and Joseph Pulitzer)—although Lee had little patience for his workmanlike paintings or his WASP social reticence, and the liaison generated little heat.
But trips to galleries, all-day movie binges, political debates, and endless Jumble Shop chatter couldn’t begin to fill the void left by Igor’s departure. Lee was looking for something more, something special.
She glimpsed it briefly one night at the Café Society Uptown on East Fifty-eighth Street, where Harry Holtzman had arranged a party for Piet Mondrian, who had recently recovered from an illness. While Hazel Scott sang, Lee and the stately Mondrian, whom she adored, walked to the edge of the dancers and waited for just the right number. When the music changed to a boogie-woogie, Mondrian whispered, “Now!” in her ear and together they swung onto the floor. Even at sixty-eight, Mondrian “had a wonderful sense of rhythm [and] liked very complicated dance steps.” Lee was a stylish, flattering partner—another legacy of the gay years with Igor. Heads everywhere turned and seemed to follow them. “I thought, ‘Of course, they’re looking at us,’” Lee remembered. “‘Of course, they’re looking at us because I’m dancing with Mondrian.’” But when she swung around, she saw that they weren’t looking at her after all, but at “some movie actor and a divine-looking woman” behind them.
To Lee, these years of emptiness and incompletion must have seemed a kind of punishment. Like Igor’s departure, they carried a warning. She had confronted him too directly, pushed too hard, attracted too much attention, demanded too much, collided too often. The early years, the years of submission and self-denial, had been relatively happy; the years of competition had been unmitigated hell. She would know better next time.
Just to remind herself, she scrawled on the wall of her studio some lines from her favorite poem: Rimbaud’s “A Season in Hell”:
To whom shall I hire myself out?
What beast must I adore?
What holy image is attacked: What hearts shall I break?
What lie must I maintain? In what blood tread?
George Mercer was among the hundreds of thousands of men drafted in the last weeks of 1941. Within days of hearing the news, Lee Krasner climbed the long stairs to Jackson Pollock’s studio.
26
LEGENDS
Lee Krasner loved to tell the story. At seventy-five, she would sit in her stiff-backed chair in the front room of the house on Long Island and repeat it to curators, dealers, scholars, students, friends, anyone of the endless train of visitors who came to pay homage to “the widow Pollock.” Normally, she had little patience for any of them. Normally, their questions about Jackson annoyed her. In the twenty-five years since his death, she had answered every question about him a hundred times, often in print, and that was enough, she thought. But she was never too tired or bored or annoyed to tell the story about the day they met.
In a deep, rutted voice, she would begin with John Graham’s visit to her studio on a cold morning in early November 1941. The artist Aristodemos Kaldis had brought him by to see Lee’s work. The two men caught her at the front stoop on Ninth Street. “[Graham] looked at me and said, ‘You’re a painter,’” Lee recalled. “I thought, ‘My God, that man has magical insight,’ and I said, ‘How do you know?’ He pointed to my leg and I had splatters of paint on it.” Next came the part about the penny postcard. Graham sent it to her soon after his visit. She had kept it for forty years, and if it was in the house, she would pull it out. “I am arranging at an uptown gallery a show of French and American paintings with excellent publicity, etc.,” Graham had written. “I have Braque, Picasso, Derain, Segonzac, S. Davis, and others! I want to have your last large painting.”
Lee was overwhelmed. Even at the hundredth telling, her voice filled with excitement and surprise. “This is big-time stuff,” she would say, slipping into the present tense. “Graham is arranging a show of European greats and just a few Americans, maybe three or four, and he wants to include me.” Immediately, she wanted to know what other American artists would be included in the show. When Graham gave her the list, only one name was unfamiliar: Jackson Pollock. “I was astonished because I thought I knew all the abstract artists in New York.” Reluctant to ask Graham who he was—“that might have broken the spell”—she canvassed her friends at the Artists Union and the AAA, demanding “Who the hell is Jackson Pollock?” But no one seemed to know. She asked Willem de Kooning, who was also on Graham’s list, but he shrugged his shoulders. Finally, at an opening at Edith Gregor Halpert’s Downtown Gallery, she collided with Louis Bunce, a friend from the WPA. “By the way, do you know this painter, Pollock?” she asked offhandedly. “Sure,” said Bunce, “he lives just around the corner from you.”
Lee and Jackson in Springs, c. 1946
“I was in a rage at myself,” she later said, “simply furious because here was a name that I hadn’t heard of [and] all the more furious because he was living on Eighth Street and I was on Ninth.” She wasted no time in correcting the oversight. “Something got into me and I just hoofed it over to Pollock’s studio and introduced myself.”
She “bounded” up the five flights of stairs and knocked at Jackson’s door. “I found out later that this wasn’t everyday traffic,” she would add parenthetically, “Jackson didn’t usually answer the door.” But this time he did. “I knocked, he opened,” she would continue in her tersest Dashiell Hammett style. “I introduced myself and said we were both showing in the same show. He said ‘Come in.’” At this point in the story, she sometimes felt obliged to mention their previous encounter at the Artists Union dance in 1936. “Actually, we had met once years before,” she would add quickly, “but I had forgotten about that first meeting and so had he.”
Over the years, Lee used a variety of words and phrases to describe her reaction when she stepped inside Jackson’s studio and saw his paintings for the first time. The sight “impressed” her, “moved” her, “overwhelmed” her, “blasted” her, “stunned” her, and “bowled [her] over.” She “felt the presence of a living force that [she] hadn’t witnessed before.” She “felt as if the floor was sinking.” She “fully understood the enormity of what Pollock had done.” She “almost died.” In one interview, she quoted herself saying simply: “My God, there it is!”
In all her tellings, Lee rarely offered further details. She rarely spoke about Jackson—what he looked like, how he acted, what he said—or about her reaction to him. It was almost as if he hadn’t been there. She rarely talked about what happened after those first few minutes when the floor sank. She did tell one intervi
ewer that when she commented favorably on a painting, Jackson said, “Oh, I’m not sure I’m finished with that one.” To which Lee replied, “Don’t touch it!” In another interview, she indicated that before she left, they made arrangements for him to visit her studio. But tidbits like these were offered grudgingly. To Lee, the story of their first encounter had only one message: Lee Krasner had fallen in love, instantly and irrevocably, not with Jackson Pollock, but with Jackson Pollock’s art.
It was a dramatic and satisfying story and Lee repeated it often. But neither conviction nor repetition could make it true.
When Lee climbed the steps to Jackson’s studio in November 1941, she already knew the man she was going to see. According to several acquaintances, she not only remembered her embarrassing encounter with Jackson at the Artists Union party (“He was the one who stepped all over my feet”), she had been following his career from a distance ever since. In fact, she had probably marked Jackson as a possible lover long before she came to his door. Certainly the prospect was on her mind. Colleagues at the Artists Union remember that she had been trying unsuccessfully for some time to fill the void left by Igor Pantuhoff’s departure. “She was having plenty of problems finding a man,” says Axel Horn, “and that’s how she gravitated to Jack. She was not a handsome woman, but she had a great deal of aggressiveness and she came on strong with men. My impression was that most men, like me, were rather repelled by her.” Lee, who had turned thirty-three just weeks before the visit to Jackson’s apartment, was beginning to worry that “no guy was ever going to marry me.” According to one friend, she described herself on the eve of their meeting as “an old maid. A fucking old maid.” She had picked Jackson out of the crowd once and had kept an eye on him ever since. The McMillen show provided the perfect opportunity for a second try.
When she arrived, Jackson wasn’t in his studio, he was sitting in his small bedroom at the front of the building, head in hands, recovering from a binge the night before. When he opened the door, she saw no paintings, only a tiny, cluttered, malodorous cubbyhole. Eventually, he took her next door to his studio where, among hundreds of Martinson coffee cans, the paintings were stacked haphazardly against the walls, hidden behind dilapidated wicker chairs. Some were based on Picasso, some on Orozco; a few dated back to Benton days—those that had survived the rampage after Helen Marot’s death. Masqued Image, The Magic Mirror, and Bird were there, obscure and unprepossessing, scattered among the dross, none much larger than three by four feet. All in all, it was not an impressive showing. Promising, undoubtedly, or Graham would never have added Jackson’s name to his list, but hardly the stuff of serendipity. “It’s impossible that [Lee] or anybody else was ‘bowled over’ by his work at that point,” says Axel Horn, who still visited the apartment occasionally. “That was 1941, which was too early to be that spellbound by the quality of his art. He was still very unformed as a painter.”
The Magic Mirror, 1941, oil and mixed media on canvas, 46” × 32”
Whatever her later accounts, at the time Lee apparently agreed. Close friends remember her coming away from that first encounter madly in love with Jackson (“She found him the most beautiful thing that ever walked on two feet”) but unconvinced of his artistic ability. While she confided to friends like Mercedes Matter and May Rosenberg that she had “met someone she liked very much,” she didn’t at first even mention that he was an artist, much less a great artist. In letters to George Mercer, she never referred to Jackson’s paintings, but was “just full of him,” Mercer recalls: “‘He was indescribable, he was magnificent, he was tremendous.’” Later, Lee admitted that one of her strongest impressions from that first day was not of the paintings, but of his “fantastic, powerful hands.” A month passed before she worked up the courage to ask Mercedes Matter to come to Jackson’s studio and honestly assess his work.
Mercedes didn’t share Lee’s reservations. “Mercedes spotted his work right off as being terrific,” recalls Betsy Zogbaum. “She was the first one. Lee followed Mercedes’s lead.” But not until Mercedes’s husband Herbert also visited the studio and added his approval. Then, finally, Lee joined the small but growing chorus of praise that Graham had started. By that time, she was already “terribly in love.” “When they first came together, it was not because she recognized any innate ability in him,” says a friend who knew both Lee and Jackson before they met, “it was because he was there and available.”
Not without some effort, however. If Lee’s aesthetic response to their first meeting was hesitant, Jackson’s emotional response was nearly comatose. In her subsequent revisions of the story, Lee liked to skip directly from her first sight of the paintings to “living together”—so inevitable was their union. In reality, the process was far slower and considerably less romantic. Even after Lee wrung from him a commitment to visit her studio, weeks passed before Jackson showed up. When he did, he quickly discovered that Lee wasn’t exactly cut from the mold of Stella Pollock. “I asked him if he wanted coffee,” she remembers, “and he said yes, so I turned around and headed back to the hall to get my coat and said, ‘Let’s go.’ He looked confused and I said, ‘Well, if you want coffee, we’ll have to go down to the drugstore to get it. You don’t think I make it here?’ I’ve never seen anyone so shocked.” In fact, she had never turned on the gas in the kitchen; she had no idea if the stove even worked; and her cupboards were completely bare.
During this second encounter, Jackson remembered, or Lee gingerly reminded him of, the Artists Union loft party where they first met. Lee may have thought this represented progress—especially if their previous encounter consisted of more than just a clumsy dance—but it was far from the whirlwind courtship she later described. Another month went by before Jackson took her on their first official “date”—to the opening of the McMillen show. In between, she visited his studio several more times and they went out occasionally for beer or coffee, but nothing more. One friend remembers seeing them together before the McMillen show, “but he wasn’t really serious about her.” It was an embarrassingly slow start for a woman who, at the National Academy of Design, “never went anywhere without a diaphram.” “If a guy interested me, really interested me,” Lee once said of her student days, “I slept with him because I wanted to know him better and wanted him to know me better. That was my morality.”
Eventually, Jackson came around. He began to see in Lee’s persistent attentions the potential for the exclusive maternal relationship that Stella had never provided. “He had found a ‘mommy,’” says Elizabeth Pollock. Like Rita Benton, Lee exuded confidence and control. “She barely touched the floor,” according to Ethel Baziotes, “and that effortlessness in her attracted Jackson. He did not have that fluidity in his temperament with people.” What Lee lacked in traditional attractiveness (one of Jackson’s friends said she looked “like a goat”) she more than made up for with a lithe, sensual body and eager sexuality. “Jackson was by far the more dramatic-looking of the two,” recalls Gerome Karnrowski. “He was almost like Brando. But Lee was very dramatic when she talked and argued.” Besides, she had big, firm, pneumatic breasts that would create a sensation among his brothers. Like Berthe Pacifico, she was also talented, a quality that had always attracted Jackson. Arloie recalls that on the rare occasions when he talked about Lee around the apartment, he usually referred to her painting: “He thought she was a very good painter for a woman.”
Lee was drawn both to Jackson (presumably as early as 1936), and to the alien world from which he came. “I thought of Jackson as 100 percent American,” she later admitted. “He was American—at least five generations back. Other artists I knew were born elsewhere or were born here just after their parents arrived.” To a Jewish girl born nine months after her mother stepped off a boat from the Ukraine, Jackson was, in fact, more exotic than the mysterious White Russian, Igor Pantuhoff: a native of that most foreign of all lands, the one west of the Hudson.
Finally, Graham’s imprimatur gave Jackson the
requisite aura: the special something like Mondrian’s reputation or Igor’s flamboyance or Hofmann’s charisma, that was, for Lee, the most powerful of aphrodesiacs. (She had already tried unsuccessfully to seduce at least one of the other artists on Graham’s McMillen show roster, Willem de Kooning.) One night that January, she was walking back from Graham’s apartment with Graham and Jackson when a short, “funny man with an overcoat down to his ankles and wearing a homburg” approached them and embraced Graham “very warmly.” Graham introduced him—“This is Frederick Kiesler”—then turned to introduce Jackson. “And this,” he said, searching for the right words, “is Jackson Pollock”—his deep voice expanded to fill the empty square—“the greatest painter in America.” The sound of the phrase combined with the frigid air to take Lee’s breath away. After a long pause, Kiesler, another of the early modernist missionaries, slowly lifted his homburg and bowed “almost to the sidewalk,” Lee remembers. When he straightened up, he turned to Graham and asked in a stage whisper, “North or South America?”
That was all the confirmation Lee needed. By the time the McMillen show opened, two months after her visit to the studio, both she and Jackson had found what they were looking for. As Lee expressed it, they had “meshed.” “We knew that we had something to give each other, some answer to each of our particular kinds of loneliness.” Clement Greenberg, who knew Lee already and would soon meet Jackson, had a somewhat less sympathetic view. “They took to each other because no one else would have them,” he said. In the end, the story that Lee loved to tell was accurate in at least one regard: there was a certain inevitability to their union. They were, Ethel Baziotes remarked, “psychologically embedded in each other.”
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