Ostensibly, the Club was a social organization, born out of the artists’ frustrated need for a place to meet and talk, to “escape the loneliness of their studios [and] meet their peers to exchange ideas of every sort,” according to Irving Sandler, the Club’s foremost historian. In fact, the camaraderie was more like that of shipwreck survivors adrift in a crowded lifeboat. “It wasn’t a congenial group at all,” recalls Herman Cherry. “Hell, an outsider would have thought they hated each other. But, like marriage, instead of separating, they sort of stuck it out.” As a visitor, Hedda Sterne found Club members “unbelievably hostile.” “Insults flew back and forth, and they called that intellectual discussion,” says Sterne. “But it was really fear.”
Fearing the new art world, the Club clung desperately to the old. Its roots were firmly planted in the cafeteria culture of the Project when artists, flush with WPA money and free time, argued into the early morning at restaurants like Sam Johnson’s, Romany Marie’s, the San Remo, and the Waldorf cafeteria. The Waldorf on Sixth Avenue off Eighth Street had for the previous few years served as the group’s informal clubhouse, a direct link with the past where, among the “Village bums, delinquents and cops,” artists could smoke, drink coffee (the food was better and cheaper elsewhere), and table-hop from argument to argument—just like in the old days. At one table, Landes Lewitin dictated his views on a broad range of topics; at another, Aristodemos Kaldis held forth on the superiority of Greek culture; at another, John Graham held his nose against the smoke. Many of the Club’s founding members had met on the Project, in the halcyon days of the Artists Union and the American Abstract Artists—before the war, before the galleries, before Greenberg. In the decade since, their agenda had hardly changed. Pure abstractionists like Ad Reinhardt, Harry Holtzman, and George McNeil, remnants of the AAA, took up their old feud with the “push-pull” disciples of Hans Hofmann. “Reinhardt would say he couldn’t stand wiggly brushstrokes,” Philip Pavia recalled, while Hofmann’s followers derided the Mondrian lovers as “puritans” or “the hygienic school.” Even the old antagonism toward European modernism, largely mooted by the war, survived at the Club as efforts to defend Matisse were shouted down with angry cries of “Decorative! Decorative!”
Like artists on the Project, Club members fancied themselves “rebels” and “outcasts,” shunned by a reactionary art establishment and an unappreciative public. “We were the salon des refusés,” says Conrad Marca-Relli. But it wasn’t the past that they felt alienated from; it was the future. The hostility to Greenberg and his ideas was palpable, and Club discussions studiously avoided the formal issues that he had pushed to the top of the critical agenda. “Greenberg was a thousand miles away from us,” says Philip Pavia, the Club’s founder and organizer. “We were in a different world entirely.” Instead of addressing current critical questions, evenings at the Club invariably degenerated into ferocious philosophical debates about “why an artist involves himself in painting,” “the function of art,” “the nature of the artist’s moral commitment,” and the artist’s “existential role.” (Out of one such discussion, the term “Abstract Expressionism” emerged.) Even charter members like Milton Resnick found themselves “choking” on the polemics. “Ideas got ritualized and positions got rigidified very early on,” says Resnick. Willem de Kooning fled one interminable late-night argument crying, “They’re a bunch of baboons!”
Talk of dealers, commissions, and money was tacitly forbidden. Group exhibitions were specifically banned because “we didn’t want to introduce that kind of destructive competition,” says Conrad Marca-Relli. With the exception of de Kooning, who kept tactfully quiet on the subject, few members had dealers and none was selling. “People in the Club didn’t give a shit about what the dealers or critics or collectors or anybody was saying,” recalls Herman Cherry, “because nobody was selling shit anyway.” As in the Project days, talk of money was confined to tips on studios and bargains in art materials. Club members frequently exchanged self-congratulatory tales of their economic plight and passed the hat when one of their number was threatened with eviction. In such acts of solidarity, Club members found solace and, even more, dignity. “If anybody sold anything,” recalls Jock Truman, “the rumor went around that the quality of his work was going down.”
At times, it was as if the forties had never happened; as if Peggy Guggenheim had never opened Art of This Century; as if the new galleries with their opportunist dealers had never opened; as if Greenberg had never written a review; as if Jackson Pollock had never sold a painting.
From the beginning, Jackson felt the hostility. On his first visit to the Club on New Year’s Eve 1949, the sculptor Peter Grippe, drunk and belligerent, confronted him. After a few angry words, Grippe threw a punch. “It was basically jealousy,” recalls Ibram Lassaw, who witnessed the fight, “because Jackson’s name was everywhere.” In less dramatic ways, the same animosity permeated every aspect of the Club: from the clannish admission policy (nonmembers had to be accompanied by a member or have a note from a member) enforced at the door by the mean-spirited Lewitin, to the blackball system for electing new members. “No institution could have been less suited to Jackson,” says Conrad Marca-Relli. “He never felt welcome there.” The combative debates only underscored his inarticulateness; the crowd only reinforced his reticence. The pedantic dialogues only threatened to expose the vast gaps in his artistic education.
Robert Motherwell’s arrival made a bad situation worse. Since the collapse of his plot with Matta to wrest control of the American Surrealist movement away from Breton, Motherwell had led a series of similar unsuccessful efforts to create the elusive “manifestation” that would catapult him to preeminence in American art. In 1948, with William Baziotes, Mark Rothko, David Hare, and Barnett Newman, he had established a school for young artists, called the Subjects of the Artist. The awkward name betrayed the school’s anti-Greenberg (and anti-Pollock) agenda: “It was meant to emphasize that our painting was not abstract,” said Motherwell, “that it was full of subject matter.” When the school folded, a group of artists organized by Tony Smith continued the Friday night seminars under the name Studio 35 (the meetings were held in a studio at 35 East Eighth Street). Motherwell acted as “Master of Ceremonies,” leading discussions on such topics as subject matter, finish, titles, self-expression, community relations, museum patronage, and public awareness. In 1950, he brought his intellectual bent, his scholarly pretensions, his frustrated ambitions, and his envious disdain for Jackson to the Club. “Motherwell was the first of another kind of artist,” says Conrad Marca-Relli. “They were the uptown boys, people who had already made a name, already had a gallery uptown before they joined. With their arrival came panel discussions and guest speakers, and everything became more public, more formal.” And, for Jackson, more intimidating.
Even at weekend dances—when the wooden chairs were cleared away, the philosophical wrangling was suspended temporarily, and Philip Pavia played his records of Italian folk music and jazz—the Club was still, for Jackson, an alien, hostile world. An awkward dancer, he could never master the two-step, not to mention the tarantella introduced by Pavia, and, sober, was too embarrassed to try. Nor could he enjoy the “crackling sexuality” that ran through the old building on dance nights—another throwback to the Artists Union days of the thirties. “If you were a pretty girl, you could write your ticket,” recalls Phyllis Fleiss. “You could reign supreme at those events.” Mercedes Matter, the only woman among the Club’s early members, was one of those who gave the dances a sharp edge of sexuality. May Rosenberg compared the Club’s sexual underlife to a country square dance in which “partners were passed to and fro” in everchanging combinations. Fifteen years earlier, with liquor to embolden him and Sande to rescue him, Jackson would have tried, however unsuccessfully, to join in the misogynist game. But now, sober and alone, it only frightened him. The teeming sexuality, the sideline bragging of other artists about “all the women they had ‘stuck,’�
�� and the flirtatious attentions of Mercedes Matter and others only pushed him further into his shell. Conrad Marca-Relli remembers seeing him leaning against the wall at a Club dance, arms folded, eyes averted. “He looked like a big rough boy in the barn,” recalls Marca-Relli. “The women were like strange creatures to him. He never fit in.” Hedda Sterne saw him there, too, “gentle and quiet, but on the outside looking in.”
Occasionally, in halting conversation, Jackson would try to distance himself from Greenberg, vehemently denying that Greenberg knew “what his pictures were about,” and joining Franz Kline in “shrug[ging] at the big abstractions about historical necessity.” He insisted to Barnett Newman, “I don’t discuss paintings with critics,” and on one of Greenberg’s rare visits to the Club, purposefully incited a confrontation. “They called each other all sorts of names,” recalls Conrad Marca-Relli. “Then they let it go and went on to something else.” Such halfhearted efforts to win his way back into favor were to no avail, however. By 1950, it must have seemed to Jackson that his fellow artists had closed ranks against him—pushed him to the edge of the cliff where, for the first time in years, he could feel himself beginning to fall.
No artist had more reason to resent Jackson’s success than Lee Krasner.
Where other artists’ careers had been eclipsed by Jackson’s, hers had been virtually extinguished. The brief flare of productivity in the summer of 1948 that produced the “Little Image” paintings had been brought to an abrupt end by the debacle at Bertha Schaefer’s apartment. In a single outburst, Jackson had reasserted the primacy of his emotional needs and alienated the first outsider in years who showed an interest in Lee’s work. Then came the long struggle back to sobriety, then the fragile truce of tranquilizers and weekly “therapy” with Dr. Heller. At some point, Lee apparently accepted the ominous logic: Jackson’s drinking and her artistic ambitions were inextricably linked. “During the time Jackson was on the wagon,” says Ted Dragon, “Lee didn’t want to do anything to unbalance that.” “Lee gave up painting altogether at that point for his sake,” recalls Vita Peterson, “to avoid the possible competition.” Grace Hartigan remembers Lee telling her, “He doesn’t want anyone painting around him.”
After the Life article appeared in the fall of 1949, Lee had a new excuse for not painting. “Pollock was breaking through,” she said. “We had our hands full.” Between preparations for the November show and the extended stay at MacDougal Alley, the upstairs studio in Springs sat idle for weeks, then months, at a time. According to friends, it was “the best period of their relationship”—which meant it was the worst period for Lee’s art. Only in the mornings, when Jackson was asleep and the phone was off the hook, did she feel it was “safe” to work. The rest of the day was consumed by his needs, from canning fruit to courting collectors. Ted Dragon saw Lee as “Jackson’s Clara Schumann. She was a great artist in her own right, but she was determined to take that husband and make him. It was her obsession. Then, when he made it, living through him wasn’t enough. She wanted it for herself.”
Publicly, Lee would always deny envying Jackson’s success. “I wasn’t saying, ‘Why are you getting ahead and I’m not?’” she later told an interviewer. Although she admitted “resenting being in the shadow of Jackson Pollock,” she insisted that “it was never so sharp a thing to deal with that it interfered with my work.” Privately, however, the inequity rankled. “That bastard Pollock,” she complained to Lawrence Alloway after Jackson’s death, “he had that big studio out there and I had the bedroom.” “She felt put upon, put down,” says Alloway. And not just by Jackson. When Barnett Newman called to enlist Jackson in the protest group that eventually became known as “the Irascibles,” it was Lee who answered the phone. “Lee, get Jackson, it’s very important,” Newman said. “I must speak to him.” “I was never asked to sign,” she recalled bitterly. “Barney didn’t even bother to tell me what it was about.” By 1950, such slights had become commonplace. “There were,” she complained, “very few painters in that so-called circle who acknowledged that I painted at all.”
Paul Brach recalls a scene that was replayed often when fellow artists came to visit:
They’re all in the living room. Greenberg’s there and there’s a lively discussion going on. They like Lee. She’s smart. They say Lee has a real eye. … Everyone is listening to her. But mainly her role is backup to Jackson. It’s hard for him to take the floor with these guys. He’s not articulate, he’s very shy, he doesn’t have it. But she does. She’s his mouthpiece, and she can handle it beautifully. But nobody looks at her pictures. Nobody is giving her any kind of obeisance in terms of her own work. And the years go on that way, and a certain kind of inner sadness accumulates.
Among the legions of admirers who made the pilgrimage to Jackson’s barn, almost none ventured upstairs to see Lee’s little studio. Even old friends like George Mercer “showed no interest in what she was doing.” Only Jackson’s pictures hung on the long walls downstairs; hers were relegated to dark corners and leftover spaces. After dinner, when Jackson hauled his latest paintings from the studio to show guests, no one, including Jackson, asked Lee to fetch hers from upstairs. No dealers called about her next show, no interviewers asked questions about her past, no photographers lingered about her studio to catch the blurred movement of her brush or the shifting moods of her face.
It was a subordinate role that stirred old resentments. Once again, Lee was back in the house on Jerome Street, watching her brother Irving go off to the library to study Pushkin and Tolstoy. She could share Jackson’s celebrity, she could share his money (unlike most artists’ wives, she didn’t have to support him), she could even have the power, as his mouthpiece and manager, over Jackson’s art, but, she would later complain bitterly, “What I couldn’t have was a career.”
As always, her envy first took the form of emulation. After years of what Miriam Schapiro describes as “small, copable works—things that could be done in your lap,” she began to paint like Jackson, to work more boldly, to “take chances,” according to her biographer Barbara Rose, “and break new ground, pushing herself to become more spontaneous and free, both in subject matter as well as form.” Although no one knows the exact chronology of Lee’s paintings, even the few that survive betray her childlike yearning to follow in Jackson’s footsteps. (To close friends, she later talked about her need to “work through Pollock.”) In Continuum and other Little Image paintings, she borrowed both his pouring technique and the allover format of Eyes in the Heat and Shimmering Substance, paintings she had often heard Greenberg praise. In Lava, she forsook the lucid colors of Matisse and Hofmann for the dark palette of Jackson’s Sea Change and Alchemy. In Gothic Frieze—a title that echoed through Jackson’s oeuvre as well as Greenberg’s criticism—she abandoned the cloisonnist curves of Picasso for the threatening Orozcoesque angularity of Night Ceremony and Night Mist. In Promenade, she painted a procession of “personages” closely resembling in mood and surface Jackson’s Guggenheim mural, another painting Greenberg admired. She worked on the rough side of Masonite, as she had seen Jackson do so often. In Ochre Rhythm, after years of “gray slabs” and heavy impasto, she applied paint thinly to the canvas for the first time, long after Jackson’s Tea Cup. After years of resisting Surrealist theories, she began to experiment with automatism, finding in Jackson’s example a sudden respect for “the unconscious as a source of psychological content,” according to Rose, even if “she was not yet prepared to expose the contents of her psyche to public scrutiny.” After years of constructing her paintings according to Mondrian’s grid or Hofmann’s rhetoric, she attempted for the first time fully automatic drawing directly in paint—the technique that had first brought Jackson notoriety in She-Wolf and Guardians of the Secret. She even abandoned her decade-old allegiance to abstraction, painting quasi-figurative stick figures like those in Jackson’s Male and Female and Stenographic Figure.
Lee with one of her “Little Image” paintings
But Lee’s new assertiveness soon spilled over from art into life. No longer content to be ignored, she openly pressed herself on Jackson’s visitors, cajoling them up the stairs to visit her studio. “She wanted me to see her work, even though she didn’t care for me very much,” Harry Jackson remembers of a visit in the summer of 1950. “She had always been a little jealous that I was out in his studio and never went to see hers, even though I slept right next to it.” Harry kept his opinion of Lee’s work—“a pastiche, devoid of artistic conviction”—tactfully to himself, but the polite, admiring reactions of friends like Ted Dragon, John Myers, John Little, Linda Lindeberg, and Bradley Tomlin gave her conviction of another sort. Greenberg, resorting to his favorite culinary metaphors, commented, “That’s hot. It’s cooking,” which Lee took as a compliment. In July, one of her paintings won second prize in the “10 East Hampton Abstractionists” show at Guild Hall. Jackson’s placed third.
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