by Gail Levin
The couple mainly struggled not with each other, but rather with Pollock’s drinking bouts and the torments that drove him to drink. Krasner’s hope that moving to East Hampton would stop Pollock from drinking had not panned out. He still drank to excess from time to time. She became preoccupied with keeping him from drinking, using distractions such as working on the house and in the garden.
After June 1946, the Pollocks had the small barn that came with the property moved from behind the house to the north side of the property. Not only could they now clearly see Accabonac Creek, but Jackson was able to use the barn as his studio, which in turn allowed him to enlarge the size of his paintings. Lee took a little upstairs bedroom as her work space, keeping another larger one free to accommodate guests. They began inviting more friends out to visit.37 “Exhibitions would bring us into the city and there were visits from people connected with the art world,” Lee remembered. “We were away from the city but we felt in touch.”38 “The people we wanted to see we invited out,” she explained.39
Krasner’s primary purpose was to make sure Pollock could focus on painting. She insisted, “Even if I hadn’t been married to him, I would have been influenced by his work as would any painter who is interested in the development of painting. Pollock and I had a mutual respect for each others’ work. He worked in his studio and I had mine. He didn’t verbalize and we didn’t exchange ideas on art. The whole exchange existed in the painting[s], which spoke for themselves.”40
Clearly at this moment Krasner deferred her pride to Pollock. His work represented their best chance at sales. Though she admitted that her “‘mud’ period had abated,” and that “an image began to come through those gray slabs,”41 her work went nowhere. Yet “I wasn’t saying ‘Why are you getting ahead and I’m not?’” she reflected years later. “For me, it was quite enough to continue working, and his success, once he began to sell, gave us an income of sorts and made me ever so grateful because, unlike wives of other artists who had to go out and support them, I could continue painting myself.”42 She insisted, “Jackson was totally determined to live from the sale of his paintings. He made a real issue of it. Other painters in his circle—Tony Smith, Barney Newman, Adolph Gottlieb—were all supported by their wives, but he couldn’t take that. His attitude was macho; he didn’t want me to go out and work and support him. When his work began to sell a tiny little bit, we lived off that. I was able to keep painting that way, so I tried very hard to help him sell.”43 Though Krasner admitted that she suffered from being reliant on Pollock, she “wasn’t conscious of it. And to the degree that I became aware of it, I felt the problem in a very large sense and that it wasn’t localized. It wasn’t Pollock and me.”44
Krasner explained that after meeting Pollock, she had been trying “to undo my Cubist orientation and produced very little work in a rather anxious situation.”45 Before the move, she had scraped down many of her thickly painted canvases to salvage material for future work.46 Yet despite her private struggle, as she worked through a major change in her art, she had already achieved a measure of recognition among her peers. This is evident by her inclusion in fellow Abstract American Artists member Ad Reinhardt’s cartoon, How to Look at Modern Art in America, published in P.M. on June 2, 1946. It was captioned: “Here’s a guide to the galleries—the art world in a nutshell—a tree of contemporary art from pure (abstract) ‘paintings’ (on your left) to pure (illustrative) ‘pictures’ (down on your right). If you know what you like but don’t know anything about art, you’ll find the artists on your left hardest to understand, and the names on the right easiest and most familiar (famous).”
Reinhardt put the names of the American artists on leaves of their own and grouped the leaves on branches according to his perception of their aesthetic. He placed Krasner near some of the women with whom she had shown in the American Abstract Artists group shows—Slobodkina, Alice Trumbull Mason, Ray Eames, and Suzy Frelinghuysen. But he also placed Krasner close to “de Kooning,” presumably Willem not Elaine, as well as men such as Werner Drewes, John Ferren, Charles Shaw, Carl Holty, and Stuart Davis. Pollock, misspelled “Pollack,” was on another branch along with such names as Arthur B. Carles, George McNeil, Hans Hofmann, and Arthur Dove. From Reinhardt’s perspective, both Krasner and Pollock were clearly avant-garde.
Soon they were settled enough to invite Pollock’s family for Thanksgiving dinner. They had no coal yet, and Jackson complained that “wood burns like paper at $21 a cord.”47 They found local shopping convenient, thanks to the opening in mid-November of Dan T. Miller’s new general store in Springs. He sold both hardware and groceries and once took a painting in trade.
Before Pollock’s show with her in April 1946, Guggenheim came out from the city to visit the newlyweds. She must have wanted to see something of what Pollock would be showing at her gallery that spring. It was “so cold there was ice in the toilet,” Krasner recalled. “We gave her an oil stove for warmth and she carried it around with her. She came down in one of her negligees with the oil stove and said, ‘This reminds me of the castles in England.’”48 Careful to keep Peggy’s support, Pollock designed the dust jacket for her book of memoirs, Out of This Century. For the front-cover motifs, he recycled a black-and-red serigraph Christmas card that he had designed in 1944.49
Krasner later said that Guggenheim had sent them a copy of the book inscribed “‘To Jackson.’…She had not included me in the inscription and I remembered being quite hurt by this. I genuinely liked Peggy. I must not have realized that she probably resented my attachment to Jackson, and that, basically, she had very little use for women.”50
Krasner understood that the prejudice she had to deal with was not in her home. “It wasn’t [Jackson] who was stopping me, but the whole milieu in which we lived, and the way things were, which I accepted. Because as long as I could keep working, I was perfectly willing to go along with it, with irritation, with impatience. But it didn’t interfere with my work, and that was the main thing.” She insisted: “My irritation, anger and rage was with the entire situation, not with the family.”51 “Painting is revelation, an act of love. There is no competitiveness in it,” she explained. “As a painter I can’t experience it any other way.”52
Pollock’s third show opened at Art of This Century in early April 1946. He and Krasner arranged to stay for two weeks at their old place at 46 East Eighth Street, which Pollock’s brother Jay and his wife, Alma, now shared with James Brooks, a painter both he and Krasner knew from the WPA.53 They would continue to stay here when visiting the city over the next several years.
Back in Springs, Pollock painted his last big canvas on the floor of his bedroom studio. The Key, a brightly colored canvas nearly five by seven feet, “took up the whole space on the floor,” Krasner recalled. “He could barely walk around it.”54 The Key was part of a series he named “Accabonac Creek,” after the body of water behind their home. The Key would be one of sixteen oils in his last solo show for Guggenheim’s Art of This Century in January 1947.
Among the weekend visitors in the summer of 1946 was Lee’s old friend Clement Greenberg, who by the time he came out to visit Lee and Jackson at the end of July 1946 was the art critic at The Nation.55 Krasner and Pollock treated him with kid gloves. They stayed up late as the critic usually did, sitting at the kitchen table and talking until the early hours of the morning. Greenberg, who recognized Krasner’s keen intelligence, later reflected: “Without her Jackson wouldn’t have made it the way he did. She did everything. She had a great eye.”56
Pollock listened carefully to what Greenberg had to say about his pictures and later advised Fritz Bultman to “be nice to Clem…if he likes your work he’ll help you.”57 Bultman was in Provincetown that summer with George Mercer, who wrote on August 11, 1946, to say that Hans and Miz Hofmann were asking about her. Though he felt that Provincetown was the place for him, he yearned for “a day or so of pure talk” with Krasner. He had just sent a gift of a necklace and bracelets.58
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MOVING INTO HER OWN STUDIO UPSTAIRS PROBABLY ENABLED KRASNER to make a definitive break with her past. “All I know is that is where my Little Image paintings began, when I started painting in the bedroom,” she recounted. “The grayness of the streets finally began to open up in the Little Image paintings. It was a great change.”59 She described the Little Images as taking her “some three years and what began to emerge in the first of these, which was around ’46, were very small canvases, these things around here, what I refer to as the little image, were the first as I gained confidence and strength, it expanded—it grew bolder in time.”60 While some are larger, several of these canvases measure only from about twenty to thirty inches on each side. The paintings are known for their abstract, allover patterns and thick textures forged by layers of paint.
In 1965 Krasner told B. H. Friedman that she called this group her “hieroglyphs.”61 She described herself as “waiting for something to happen.” She also knew she had to deal with “pigment and canvas, which was the only thing I knew…. I was pretty confident something would happen, I guess, because I can remember Benton calling on Pollock [while they were still in the city]—which was the only time I ever met Benton—and he came up and Jackson introduced me and Benton said to me, ‘I hear you’re a painter.’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ And he said, ‘Can I see what you’re painting?’ And I just said, ‘Certainly,’ and walked him in front of this blank gray thing I had up there.”62
She described the silence that followed as “astounding.”63 Krasner allowed Pollock to change the subject, and they walked out of her studio, making her reflect, “I must have felt pretty hostile to Benton or confident in myself to show him what I knew was in the studio.”64
Krasner later clarified that her Little Image paintings were not painted on an easel and were “not easel in concept.”65 “The canvas is down on a floor or on a table and I am working out of a tiny can. In other words, I have to hold the paint so I can move it. But [contrasting her method with Pollock’s] I wouldn’t have been using Duco. My paint would always have been oil and I could get the consistency of a thick pouring quality in it by squeezing it into a can and cutting it with turp.”66 She thought the early Little Image pictures were the only time she ever dripped paint. “There’s what I would describe as a controlled dripping situation, very controlled and sustained, as it took many sessions to do one…. I have an awareness of that, of that kind of control.”67
“I couldn’t do those right on the wall,” she elaborated. “Those want to be—only group of my things and some watercolors—and some washes where I saturated the washes where I saturated the paper, dipped it in the bathtub and then had to hold it horizontally until the image fixed where I wanted it to be. And the Little Image I had to work in horizontal looking down. Otherwise every thing else I do is on the wall.”68 Another time, she explained the process of making the Little Images to a different interviewer: “I stayed with them until they built up surface. Until I got what I wanted.”69
Inspired by Pollock, Krasner now worked more from instinct than she had previously. She also tried to be more at one with nature, rather than standing back to depict it as she once had. She developed her own allover patterns of strokes with her palette knife, small squirts or blobs of paint direct from the tube, or controlled drips right out of a can of paint or off the tip of a stiff brush. Since her Little Images were on smaller canvases than Pollock’s, she did not need the kind of stepping motion of being in the painting as Pollock was. She simply stood over her canvases.
Specific interpretations of the meaning of Krasner’s Little Image paintings have sometimes seemed too limiting. An abstract painting like Night Life (1947) has been compared to “the buildup of seaweed, shells, stones, etc. at Louse Point, a bay beach” where Krasner and Pollock swam, but this abstract image might just as well have been inspired by the night sky and the fireflies that illuminate a Long Island summer night—just what Krasner liked to view from their back porch.70
Night Life could also refer to stepping out for entertainment, evoked by the recorded music that Pollock was constantly playing. Krasner recalled that Pollock “would get into grooves of listening to his jazz records—not just for days, day and night, [but] day and night for three days running, until you thought you would climb the roof!…Jazz? He thought it was the only other really creative thing happening in this country.”71
When Krasner worked, she did so in careful control, raising and lowering the source of the paint to change the amount of paint she allowed to flow onto her canvas. Other artists besides Pollock had been experimenting with dripping paint—for instance, the immigrant “housewife,” Janet Sobel, who had a solo show at Peggy Guggenheim’s in January 1946 and attracted Pollock’s (and probably Krasner’s) attention, or Mark Tobey, who showed canvases with his calligraphy-inspired “white writing” at the Willard Gallery in New York in 1944. Even Hans Hofmann and Max Ernst experimented.
The feminist art critic Cindy Nemser told Krasner that she thought of the Little Image paintings as “controlled chaos,” prompting Krasner to comment: “I love that…. This work is a key turning point.”72 Nemser once asked Krasner why she had not fought to have her achievement of this body of work acknowledged along with Pollock’s. The reply was unambiguous and blunt. “I couldn’t run out and do a one-woman job on the sexist aspects of the art world, continue my painting and stay in the role I was in as Mrs. Pollock. I just couldn’t do that much. What I considered important was that I was able to work and other things would have to take their turn. Now rightly or wrongly, I made my decisions.”73
Nemser had a clear understanding of the dilemma a woman artist faced. “It is important to remember before Krasner is blamed for not standing up more strongly for herself that it is very unlikely in those macho days of the later ’40s, the days of the returning GIs and the heavy reassertion of the feminine mystique, if any amount of protest or any amount of self promotion would have done Krasner much good.”74
“If I hadn’t been a woman, I’d have had a different situation,” Krasner explained. Asked about the few women among the abstract expressionists, she commented, “I was conscious of it and settled for the idea that I could continue working.” She also admitted that she “was willing to let everything else go aside, I was feeling pretty good because I was able to work.”75
Krasner was not able to show the Little Image paintings as a group to the public at the time she produced them. She had to rely on comments from friends or visitors. She recalled, “John [Bernard] Myers admired them and I can remember Clement Greenberg saying about an early one, ‘That’s hot; It’s cooking.’ I considered it a compliment.”76
The men’s opinions were the ones that seemed to matter. “Bradley Walker Tomlin admired a great many of my Little Image paintings. He saw them hanging in our guest bedroom as he was our house guest a good deal. He used to tell me how beautiful they were and his warm response to these paintings of mine I remember very well.”77 Tomlin, who was nearly a decade older than Krasner, had painted in a cubist style until he encountered Adolph Gottlieb, who introduced him to Motherwell, Philip Guston, Pollock, and Krasner. Once exposed to their abstract and expressive styles, Tomlin began to experiment and switched to a more spontaneous and abstract style of his own.
Years later the curator Marcia Tucker pointed out to Krasner that she painted from right to left, just as one would write Hebrew lettering, which Krasner had studied as a child. Though she had never thought about this, it turned out that Krasner indeed did work a canvas from right to left, so this theory made sense to her.78 At the time, no one considered that Krasner might have been dyslexic. This now common term for a reading disability that is caused by a quirk in the brain’s ability to process graphic symbols was not then current. Before research in the 1980s, dyslexia was not well understood. Now scientists describe “a neurologically-based, often familial, disorder which interferes with the acquisition and processing of language. Varying in degrees of severity, it is manif
ested by difficulties in receptive and expressive language.”79 People with dyslexia are known “to have a larger right-hemisphere in their brains than those of normal readers. That may be one reason people with dyslexia often have significant strengths in areas controlled by the right-side of the brain, such as artistic, athletic, and mechanical gifts.”
Krasner was fascinated with writing systems throughout her life. As a girl, Krasner had learned to write Hebrew but not to read it. As a child, she enjoyed writing messages in a secret language that she invented. This may have been an attempt to substitute a language that others could not decipher in reciprocity for her own trouble reading the letters that her family and society imposed on her—both English and Hebrew. Later on, Krasner became enamored of the visual art of creating symbols for language, and she explored calligraphy and explored the forms of Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Celtic, and Chinese characters.
POLLOCK HAD HIS LAST SOLO SHOW AT GUGGENHEIM’S ART OF THIS Century from January 14 through February 1, 1947. Many of the titles reflected his new environment and the new barn studio: Croaking Movement, Shimmering Substance, Eyes in the Heat, Earthworms, The Blue Unconscious, Something of the Past, The Dancers, The Water Bull, Yellow Triangle, Bird Effort, Grey Center, The Key, Constellation, The Teacup, Magic Light, and Mural. The last was the twenty-foot mural Guggenheim commissioned for her New York home and that Pollock painted in 1943.
The spring following this show, Guggenheim closed her gallery and moved to Venice. She found Betty Parsons to show Pollock until his contract with her ran out in early 1948. Unlike Guggenheim, Parsons was not only a dealer and a collector, but also an artist. Growing up in New York City in an upper-class family, Betty, at the age of thirteen, had attended the International Exhibition of Modern Art known as the Armory Show and absorbed the “New Spirit” of what she saw. She had attended the New York City private school Miss Chapin’s School, where she made friends who would support her throughout her life.80