by Gail Levin
Krasner also introduced Pollock to Hans Hofmann by taking him to Pollock’s messy studio, even though she knew that Hofmann, like Mondrian, favored cleanliness and order. Because he saw no evidence of still lifes or models in Pollock’s studio, Hofmann asked Pollock, “Do you work from nature?” Pollock responded: “I am nature.” Hofmann then warned, “You don’t work from nature, you work by heart. That’s no good. You will repeat yourself.”65 Pollock then bellowed at Hofmann that his theories did not interest him, telling him to “put up or shut up! Where’s your work?”66
“Hans had a marvelous way of being deaf to Jackson’s aggressive/defensive manner,” recalled Bultman. “Hans was quite aware of the hostility. Later when the Pollocks were in their worst financial straits, he bought a couple of pictures.”67 Lee’s friends Mercedes Carles and Herbert Matter were also very supportive of Pollock. Herbert tried to bring Alexander Calder over to see Jackson’s work. However, the sculptor, some of whose work can be described as drawing with wire in real space, found Pollock’s work too “dense.” Herbert Matter then encouraged James Johnson Sweeney of the Museum of Modern Art to become an enthusiastic supporter of Pollock’s.68
In May 1942, Krasner and Pollock both signed a petition to President Franklin Roosevelt in protest of the deterioration of creative activity on the WPA easel project in New York. At that same time, Krasner was working for the United States government on the War Services Project, the last hurrah of the WPA. She served as supervisor for the production of nineteen store window displays meant to publicize courses offered in New York–area schools to help the war effort. These courses were offered in the municipal colleges to prepare students for “service in the armed forces and in strategic war industries.”69 Krasner recalled that some of the displays were for the windows of Gimbels department store in Herald Square.70
In May Krasner went to observe a number of classes from various schools, “looking for the one spot that could be dramatized.”71
These visits included a class on explosives with Professor Burtell of City College, who showed her “interesting and displayable items,” which she recorded and described. She focused on “a weird looking device like some alchemist’s dream based on a series of glass jars and retorts connected by rubber tubes, which is used to test the amount of hydrogen in an explosive.”72 She made more “Notes on Ideas and Materials Available for Window Displays in Stores of the War Courses Given in the Colleges.” Additional course topics included cryptography, chemistry, civil defense, mechanical drawing, metallurgy, optics, military topography, radio, and spherical trigonometry.73
The montages that Krasner’s team produced were accompanied by one designed by Herbert Bayer. This montage was supposed to be at Pennsylvania Station and in the store windows as “a unifying key or symbol.”74 The Austrian-born Bayer was already a famous Bauhaus-trained graphic designer whose montage displayed marching soldiers and students at courses in four different colleges. The caption for his montage read “50,000 Young People Prepare to Serve Their County.”
But the designs from Krasner’s workshop were even more adventuresome than Bayer’s. Documentary photographs survive from Krasner’s group effort, although it is not possible to know who produced what part of most of the displays.75 There were strange juxtapositions of objects and scale, floating letters, lots of diagonal axes, and bold tonal contrasts. These works were all spatially complex and implied several levels of reality.
Krasner managed to get Pollock assigned to her team that summer. By the spring, he often stayed at Krasner’s place on Ninth Street. In describing their “courting period,” Krasner said, “I resisted at first, but I must admit, I didn’t resist very long. I was terribly drawn to Jackson, and I fell in love with him—physically, mentally—in every sense of the word. I had a conviction when I met Jackson that he had something important to say. When we began going together, my own work became irrelevant. He was the important thing. I couldn’t do enough for him. He was not easy. But at the very beginning he was accepting of my encouragement, attention, and love.”76 Perhaps the self-sufficient Krasner was not so much drawn to weak, dependent, alcoholic men but was just capable, after a decade of living with Igor, of dealing with one.
The anticipation of a visit from his mother that May propelled Pollock into a binge of drinking that ended with his admittance to Bellevue Hospital, a New York City public hospital well known for its psychiatric facilities—the hospital had established a dedicated unit for alcoholics as early as 1892. (In fact, by 1936, 40 percent of Bellevue’s 25,000 annual admissions were alcoholics.)77
Krasner recalled the spring morning when Pollock’s brother Sande knocked on her door, asking, “Did Jackson spend the night here last night?” When she asked why, he replied, “Because he is in Bellevue Hospital and our mother has arrived in New York. Will you go with me and get him?” Krasner later told how she had gone with Sande to the Bellevue ward: “He looked awful. He had been drinking for days. I said to him, ‘Is this the best hotel you can find?’ At Sande’s suggestion I took him back to my place and fed him milk and eggs to be in shape for dinner that night with Mother. We went together. It was my first meeting with Mother. I was overpowered by her cooking.”78 Krasner was caught off guard: “I had never seen such a spread as she put on.” Seeing that Stella Pollock had prepared the abundant home-cooked dinner and even baked the bread, Krasner’s first response was to be impressed. She told Jackson, “You’re off your rocker, she’s sweet, nice.” It took Krasner time to appreciate why there was a problem between Jackson and his mother, how she dominated her youngest son.79
To understand how Krasner dealt with Pollock’s drinking problem at the time, it is necessary to consider how the interpretation of alcoholism was then evolving. At the time of Pollock’s hospitalization, alcoholism was generally regarded as “a self-induced condition that was more a reflection of moral weakness than medical illness.”80
By 1943, when Pollock was admitted to Bellevue, the old cultural paradigm saw alcohol and drunkenness as “sin and moral degeneracy.” However, this interpretation was giving way to the new “metaphor of alcoholism as a disease.”81 Krasner never would have subscribed to the old notion of alcohol as “sinful”—after all, she was too hip, too rebellious, too much a part of a social milieu that accepted drinking. Instead, she accepted medical authority that invoked the problem of alcoholism as a disease, as it had been viewed in the nineteenth century, well before Prohibition.82
If alcoholism was a disease, then treatment was possible if one could only find the right cure. Awestruck by Pollock’s extraordinary talent and other redeeming qualities, Krasner was determined to try to help him. Her experience dealing with Igor’s problems with alcohol made Pollock’s more severe problems seem at once familiar and more manageable. But as Krasner searched for treatments not only for Pollock’s alcoholism but also for other maladies of her own, she was exposed to a great deal of medical quackery.
Early twentieth-century addiction specialists had argued that putting alcoholics in medically supervised settings was necessary to treat them effectively. Of course, neither Pollock nor other alcoholics could easily be persuaded to remain in a mental hospital such as Bellevue long enough for treatment to succeed. During the postwar years, drinking was heavy in the art community, and that made Krasner’s efforts more difficult. Bars were the hangouts of choice, where one went to make the necessary connections, while entertaining at home also included copious amounts of alcohol.
Thus Krasner became a part of Sande’s efforts to conceal Jackson’s drinking from their mother and get him into a better state to welcome her.83 In doing so, Krasner gradually became aware of the depth of Pollock’s problems, which began to take up more and more of her time.
During Stella Pollock’s visit that May, she stayed with Sande and his wife, Arloie, whom he had known since high school, in the fourth-floor walk-up apartment on Eighth Street that they shared with Jackson. Stella wrote to their brother Charles that it was “almo
st ten o’clock” and Jack “has just left for his girls [sic] home.”84 She appears to have been pleased.
As long as she hid Pollock’s problems from his mother, from herself, and from others, Krasner was not alone in her positive assessment of Pollock and his talent. Finally, George Mercer met Pollock while visiting Krasner in New York in August 1942. After he returned to North Carolina, he wrote, “I have been meaning to write and tell you what a good time I had in New York with you and Pollack [sic]. What a change it was from the life here. I was a little disappointed that New York wasn’t all lighted up for my arrival but then one must put up with the war, you know.”85 Mercer was supportive of his friend’s new companion, telling her, “I not only liked Pollack [sic] but approved of him as well. You may tell him so if you wish. His quiet intelligence is particularly admirable. Few people are able to give the impression of intelligence without noisy reminder. He is one of the few.”86
Mercer also liked Krasner’s canvas in progress. “The painting was and is very beautiful. Don’t change it. Or have you done so already? Next time I will have to see it in the daytime. I too would like to delve into the matter of color. I am about on the verge of buying some colored pencils. What a splurge. I’d sort of like to sneak off and put some colors on paper.”87
That fall, Jackson’s brother Sande left New York City to take a defense industry job in Connecticut, which allowed him to avoid military service. He must have felt relieved to be able to leave Jackson in Lee’s hands. Only at that point did Krasner give up her own place.88 Charles Pollock, their elder brother, later reflected, “Lee and I never had much to say to each other and I had no real impression of her work. Lee had strength, which Jack needed, and ways of opening up avenues for him. If he hadn’t met her, he might have gotten tied up with a lethal woman.”89
Charles’s wife, Elizabeth Pollock, added, “Jackson was narcissistic, totally in love with Jackson; that’s why he had to be mothered. Lee struck me as extremely capable and domineering; I knew immediately why Jackson was with her. He had found a ‘mummy.’”90
With Pollock’s family gone, Krasner moved in with him at 46 East Eighth Street, around the corner from her previous apartment, taking the place of his brother Sande and Sande’s wife, Arloie, who had looked after Jackson. Krasner was able to paint, working at the other end of Pollock’s studio. But still their relationship was not an easy one.
“I was out one afternoon and I came in,” she recalled, “and I found that the painting I had on the easel, that I was working, you know, and I said, ‘That’s not my painting,’ and then the second reaction was, he had worked on it. And in a total rage, I slashed the canvas…. I wished to hell I had never done it, but…And I guess I didn’t speak to him for some two months, and then we got through that.”91
It was bad enough that Hofmann had made corrections on her drawings, but this intrusion and interference by Pollock was totally unbearable. Those who claim that Krasner did not continue to show her own work because she did not want to appear competitive should take into account her anger at his attempt to improve upon her painting.
By October 1, 1942, Krasner had taken charge of the City War Services Project and had eight artists under her supervision, including Pollock.92 Of Krasner’s group, the artists John [later, Jean] Xceron and Serge Trubach were fellow members of the American Abstract Artists. In a letter to Audrey McMahon, who was the general supervisor of the City War Services Project, Pearl Bernstein wrote of “the difficulties” Krasner “encountered in coordinating all of the work in spite of academic and other temperaments. The fact that all those who worked on the displays still seem happy about them, is not the least of the things to Miss Krasner’s credit.”93 It is notable that Krasner reported to McMahon, because in December 1936, it was McMahon who had called the police in against the Artists Union demonstrators, some of whom they brutalized; both Trubach and Krasner were among them.94
Several of the artists who worked with Krasner on this project were deeply engaged with modernism. Ben Benn, who had studied at the National Academy of Design from 1904 to 1908, had participated in “The Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters” held in 1916 at the Anderson Galleries in New York, along with Thomas Hart Benton, who had been Pollock’s teacher. Early on, Benn felt the influence of Matisse, Picasso, and Kandinsky.
Xceron, who had first gone to Paris in 1927, was another enthusiastic advocate of modernism in the group. He had worked in Paris as a syndicated art columnist for the European editions of the Chicago Herald Tribune, the Boston Evening Transcript, and the New York Herald Tribune, newspapers with high circulations. Imbued with modern sensibilities, he was a strong advocate for non-objective painting.
In October 1942, Igor returned to New York for a short time. Jeanne Lawson Bultman, who was involved with Igor after Lee and before her marriage to Fritz, recalled Igor telling her that he had wanted to see Lee but that he upset Jackson so much that Jackson began throwing things at him to hasten his departure.95 Apparently Krasner no longer wanted Igor back and had to force him to leave her in peace. Now that he had had a change of heart, he was the rejected one.
Krasner wrote to Mercer about it; he responded, “I think that I would like to have witnessed the splash of plates. At any rate it amused me. It sounds as tho Igor is gone for good now. The last shower of crockery symbolizes something. I like the way you were forced to stop to be honest by the way.”96
Krasner’s catalogue raisonné dated a canvas called Igor to circa 1943, but it probably was completed in late 1942 in response to the unexpected return of the man who had deserted her. The central motif of Igor (which has too often been reproduced upside down) looks like an abstract head of a rooster. Though it is not clear that Esphyr Slobodkina had shown Krasner the 1934 caricature that she had made of her friend astride a cock, the sexual metaphor of the cock was well known to their generation.
Yet the catalogue raisonné suggests the impetus for this picture rests in the princes that Krasner would have known from the Russian fairy tales that her father read to her. It is much more likely that Krasner’s Igor refers not to literary lore or to Borodin’s opera Prince Igor but to her own experience, first growing up in rural East New York with its farms, where she recalled going to fetch buckets of fresh milk for her family, and then at her parents’ farm in Greenlawn, where they raised chickens. Like any farm girl, she would have known that though the cock was not monogamous, he would attack other roosters who entered his territory, where his hens were nesting. Likewise, Krasner knew that Igor had wandered into the arms of other women, often the society women he depicted in commissioned portraits, but that he had returned to her, wanting to reclaim his territory. Thus, this canvas is a self-declaration that she had moved on.
As Pantuhoff’s fortunes diminished, Krasner saw Pollock’s potential. Unlike Igor, whose work had become increasingly conservative and out of step with their contemporaries, Jackson was moving in avant-garde directions, challenging tradition, even contemporary leaders like Matisse and Picasso, whose influence can be seen in her canvas Igor. While the suave Igor charmed society women, Jackson maintained a bad-boy persona, but that could be regarded as linked to the antics of Dada artists like Duchamp and the Surrealists, who were then making their mark in New York.
NINE
Coping with Peggy Guggenheim, 1943–45
Jackson Pollock with Peggy Guggenheim in front of Mural, a 1943 painting that she commissioned from him for the entrance hall of her town house at 155 East 61st Street. Lee recalled that Guggenheim had sent a copy of her book inscribed, “‘To Jackson.’…She had not included me in the inscription…. I must not have realized that she probably resented my attachment to Jackson.” Photographed by George Karger.
THE SURREALISTS TRULY BEGAN TO MAKE HEADWAY IN NEW York when the heiress Peggy Guggenheim opened her gallery, Art of This Century, at 30 West Fifty-Seventh Street on October 20, 1942. She was the niece of Solomon Guggenheim, the founder of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, the
n at 24 East Fifty-Fourth Street. She had previously run her own commercial gallery in London, which she named Guggenheim Jeune, at once hitching her star to her uncle’s fame and giving the appearance that she was his daughter, instead of his niece.
Peggy’s wealthy parents, Benjamin Guggenheim and Florette Seligman, were one of the most socially influential Jewish families in New York, but in 1912, when Peggy was only fourteen years old, her father perished in the sinking of Titanic. As a young woman, she discovered the avant-garde while working at the Sunwise Turn, a radical bookstore in Greenwich Village run by her cousin Harold Loeb. She forged friendships not only with artists but also with others on the cutting edge of change.
In connection with the opening of her gallery in New York, Guggenheim published a catalogue, Art of This Century, which included prefaces by Mondrian, André Breton, and Jean Arp, demonstrating her connections with those in both abstract and Surrealist art. She wanted her gallery to be noticed, so she commissioned an unusual interior design by Frederick J. Kiesler, a European-born and-trained experimental artist, theoretician, and architect.
Guggenheim opened with a show of her collection of modern paintings and sculpture. Many of the paintings were shown without frames to avoid the look of tradition; sculpture was suspended in the air, walls were curved, and special biomorphically shaped chairs were flipped over to become sculpture pedestals. “We, the inheritors of chaos,” said Kiesler, “must be the architects of a new unity. These galleries are a demonstration of a changing world, in which the artist’s work stands forth as a vital entity in a spatial whole and art stands forth as a vital link in the structure of a new myth.”1