by Gail Levin
After her brief marriage of convenience to Schuyler Livingston Parsons ended in divorce, she found herself in Paris in the 1920s, where she studied both painting and sculpture and began to live as a lesbian. When her ex-husband could no longer afford alimony during the Depression, Betty returned to America and began to work for galleries in New York, including one owned by Mrs. Cornelius J. (Mary J. Quinn) Sullivan, one of the founders of the Museum of Modern Art. In September 1946, Parsons opened her own gallery at 15 East 57th Street with a show of Northwest Coast Indian art. She obtained an essay for the catalogue from her friend the artist Barnett Newman, whom she knew from working with him at the Wakefield Bookshop Gallery, where she was director from 1940 to 1944.
Until the end of Pollock’s contract, all of his new work, with the exception of one painting per year, was to go to Guggenheim. Parsons agreed to continue paying Guggenheim the proceeds from Pollock’s paintings that Guggenheim already owned, and she agreed to continue paying him his monthly allowance. Parsons also committed to give Pollock a solo show the following winter.
AROUND THIS TIME MORE AND MORE RESEARCH WAS COMING OUT about alcoholism. Medical interpretations of alcoholism acquired increasing authority, fostered by the new antibiotics that were saving lives. A Johns Hopkins psychiatrist, Robert V. Seliger, wrote Alcoholics Are Sick People, a book published in 1945, arguing that “physicians, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, nurses, social workers, clergymen, educators, patients, and relatives” all had to work together to rehabilitate the alcoholic.81
At this point, Pollock’s drinking was episodic, which meant that he and Krasner were able to have a social life. Their friendship with George Mercer continued, and in early June 1947, he spent a week with them in East Hampton, writing, “The good effects of my stay with you have not disappeared yet…. Being with you enabled me to start on a gouache which seems to be progressing fairly well. I was shocked by its superiority over a painting which I completed three years ago—the one which includes the ruins of the church. That kind of shock is encouraging.”
David Slivka and a new acquaintance drove out to East Hampton one Sunday in the latter’s Jaguar, and dropped in unannounced on Pollock and Krasner. They found the couple having a backyard picnic with artists and future spouses Jim Brooks and Charlotte Park. Rather than continuing to visit with his guests, Pollock immediately wanted to drive the sports car. Krasner, Slivka remembered, was always “gracious,” “very intelligent,” but said she had an “ironic kind of humor—she could destroy some one with a couple of phrases.”82
With a circle of local friends, Pollock and Krasner were thriving in Springs and profited from being in the country. That summer, they had a “swell garden,” proclaimed Stella Pollock as she praised her son’s cantaloupes and their “wonderful flavor.” Mrs. Pollock sent Lee an apron, hoping to encourage her daughter-in-law’s efforts at cooking.83 Years later, Krasner reflected, “There was this side to the marriage that was cozy, domestic and very fulfilling.”84
ELEVEN
Triumphs and Challenges, 1948–50
Lee Krasner in Jackson Pollock’s studio, April 1949, photographed by Harry Bowden. Pollock renewed his contract with Betty Parsons at the end of June 1949 to run through January 1, 1952. They told Pollock’s mother that the sales from his show had been “very good” and that they wanted to make a trip to the West Coast.
IN DECEMBER 1947 POLLOCK SIGNED A CONTRACT WITH BETTY Parsons, effective through June 1949, and began to focus on preparing for his first show at her gallery. Stella Pollock noted her son and daughter-in-law’s happiness after a Thanksgiving visit, attributing this improvement to their move out of the city. She reported that Lee was also painting.1
With the chill of winter, since they had only enough money to heat one floor of their house at a time, Krasner began working on mosaic tables downstairs in the back parlor, through which everyone who entered the house had to walk, making privacy to paint impossible. She tried her hand at making a piece of furniture, which they really needed. Pollock had already moved his work into the barn, eventually heating it with a kerosene stove.
Some have tried to attribute Krasner’s two mosaic tables to Pollock, who suggested she “try a mosaic” and provided her with some glass tesserae left over from his work with the WPA.2 Yet Krasner had already attended lectures on mosaics while at the National Academy and had worked on preparing Harry Bowden’s design for a mosaic while on the WPA. Thus she hardly needed Pollock’s WPA mosaic design to get ideas about the technique. Indeed, her originality went far beyond his tesserae, improvising with shells, pebbles, broken glass, keys, coins, and bits of costume jewelry. For the tables’ frames, Krasner used two old iron rims of wagon wheels they found abandoned in the barn. As the child of impoverished immigrants, she hardly needed to find precedents for making do with what was on hand.
When Pollock’s show opened at Betty Parsons Gallery on January 5, 1948, the event gave Krasner reasons for hope. It prompted responses from younger artists such as Harry Jackson and Grace Hartigan, who recalled, “We had just seen the first drip show of Pollock. We were fascinated. I’d seen it, I think, fifteen times.” When they told this to Sonja Sekula, another of the gallery’s artists, she said, “Why don’t you call him and tell him? He’s moved to the country and Peggy Guggenheim’s gone back to Europe and he’s lonely, broke, and no younger people have said they liked his work.”3 Harry phoned and Pollock invited the couple out to Springs for a visit. Harry did not want Grace, to whom he was not yet married, to let it be known that she was also a painter. “It was only when Harry and Pollock went out to a bar and I was alone with Lee,” Hartigan, who was fourteen years younger than Krasner, recounted, “and she said, ‘Confess. You’re a painter, aren’t you?’ So we two women painters sat and talked about my work.”4
Hartigan remembered: “Lee had a beautiful body with a perfect hour-glass figure. She wore Rider jeans that looked as though they had been made for her.”5 Hartigan recalled that Pollock was terribly shy—like “a clam without a shell,” while Harry has often been quoted as saying that Jackson put Lee down by calling her “the little woman,” or “you goddamn cunt.”6 But Grace disagreed with her former husband and insisted that “Jackson had a great love for Lee. He was never cruel to her.”7 Grace’s insistence is supported by the fact that Harry Jackson inveterately mythologized himself.8 Born Harry Aaron Shapiro, Jr., he goes by his mother’s maiden name after his father deserted the family. Much later on, he fulfilled his artistic fantasies and his desire to be a cowboy by settling in Cody, Wyoming, to make bronze sculptures with western themes in the tradition of Frederic Remington. Telling colorful yarns, he has captivated a coterie of male biographers and scholars, who still flock to Wyoming eager to hear about his connections to Pollock.
Despite visits from enthusiastic young people and other positive responses to Jackson’s work, by April 1948 the Pollocks were again facing trouble covering their expenses. Parsons wrote to Guggenheim in Venice, telling her of the “terrible financial condition of the Pollocks.”9 Evidently others noted the problem. MoMA curator James Johnson Sweeney tried to secure financial assistance for Pollock by getting him $1,500 from the Eben Demarest Trust Fund for the advancement of art and archaeology. The money was to be paid out in quarterly installments from July 1948 through July 1949.
During the summer, the Pollocks invited Elaine and Willem de Kooning to the house. Lee was scornful that the painter Elaine Fried had taken her husband’s surname, while Krasner had refused to change hers.10 (Elaine, who was a decade younger than Lee, remained married to de Kooning through decades of his infidelity, including his fathering a child with another woman.) Like so many guests, Elaine and Bill eventually also moved to the area.11
Mercedes Carles Matter and Herbert Matter had returned from California, and that summer they and a German couple, named Vita and Gustave “Peter” Petersen, who had arrived in New York before the war, shared a rented house near Pollock and Krasner. Vita, an artist, had also
studied with Hofmann.12 For the duration of the rental, the Matters, the Petersens, and the Pollocks saw a lot of each other, although Herbert and Peter came out only for weekends because they had to work in the city during the week. When the two women drove into town to shop, they passed by the Pollocks’ home and picked up Lee, who still did not know how to drive.
Vita Petersen recalled her friend Mercedes’s extraordinary beauty, as well as her intensity, and said that Mercedes only had intimate relationships with artists if she “admired” their work—then “it became personal, intense 100%.”13 Mercedes, whom many men found irresistible, had earlier had affairs with Zogbaum, Gorky, and Hofmann, among others.
Petersen also recalled that Mercedes was attracted to Pollock and admired his work. They may have gone to bed once or twice, but she is doubtful they had an affair. Like Krasner, Petersen thought Pollock was “adorable, gentle, poetic, a nice and kind person when not drinking.”14
For Krasner, however, the attention Pollock paid to these two attractive and slightly younger women (five and seven years Krasner’s junior) had to have been painful, especially because Mercedes had long been one of her closest friends. Even harmless teasing might have seemed sexually suggestive.
Pollock kept copies of at least two photographs of Mercedes that Herbert had taken on the beach in Provincetown in 1940. One is overtly erotic, showing Mercedes nude on the beach, her head, shoulders, and one breast visible, framed with driftwood, a cliché typical of the times. The photographs probably came from Mercedes, instead of Herbert, who was hurt by his wife’s affairs but tolerated her behavior.15 Although Krasner too had once delighted in such exhibitionism on the beach in Provincetown, by 1948 she was thinking about exhibiting her art, not her body.
Perhaps provoked by jealousy over Pollock’s flirtation with these two women, Krasner allowed Igor Pantuhoff to stay as a houseguest in Springs. As Vita Petersen recalled, he was on his way to somewhere else and was only there for a day or two.16 To Petersen, Pantuhoff seemed “sort of chic,” but his presence was disturbing for the insecure Pollock, who began drinking again.17 At one point, Jackson, Peter, Vita, and Igor went for a walk while Lee stayed at home. Jackson and Igor began to fight and had to be pulled apart by Peter, who saved Igor from anything worse than a cut lip.
IN THE AUTUMN OF 1948, MRS. JACKSON POLLOCK BEGAN TO BE PUBLICLY and professionally called “Lee Krasner”—for the first time spelled with only one s.18 As recently as the show at Putzel’s 67 Gallery in July 1945, the press had identified her as “Leonore Krassner,” perhaps adding the o in error. Surely she did not want to be confused with the British Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington or the Argentine Surrealist painter Leonor Fini, both of whom exhibited at Art of This Century. Krasner’s classmates at Cooper Union in the late 1920s, however, had already dropped Lena and Lenore for Lee. Now that she was facing turning forty, she inevitably thought about the significance of her life so far. She had lied about her age to the press, so she was unable to celebrate her fortieth year publicly. Nonetheless she began to focus once again on her own identity as an artist.
As “Lee Krasner,” she took part in an exhibition at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery. The show, September 20 through October 16, 1948, was billed as a collaboration between “architect, interior-designer, and artist to make the modern house come alive.”19
Schaefer showed two model living room schemes built around unique coffee tables by Krasner that Schaefer saw as meant for houses designed by contemporary architects such as Edward Durell Stone and Carl F. Brauer.
A reporter described one of Krasner’s tables as “a large round table, its metal rim taken from a wagon wheel. The center is filled with a mosaic pattern and worked into concrete by Lee Krasner. Pieces of rich blue glass plus such trivia as keys and coins form a varied pattern and give color clues for the fabrics.”20 This was the first of the two tables Krasner made in the back parlor of the Springs house, begun during the winter of 1947, when money was lacking to heat the upstairs bedroom during the day.
For the first time, the press singled out Krasner’s work for praise without reservation: Ann Pringle, writing in the New York Herald Tribune, called the total effect “magnificent.” Aline B. Louchheim, the critic for the New York Times, pronounced Bertha Schaefer’s “use of abstract designs for table tops…noteworthy,” and then singled out Krasner’s work: “a mosaic table made inside a thirty-eight-inch-diameter wagon wheel…. The pinwheel bright blues and reds and the irregular shapes are arranged in a satisfying abstract pattern. The other table consists of an oil painting with a wide black frame raised several inches above the surface of the canvas and a piece of glass at this level over the whole. As this design of thickly encrusted pigment is conceived as an all-over pattern, it looks as well from one angle or direction as another.”21
Ann Pringle reported in the New York Herald Tribune that Bertha Schaefer was “especially proud” of a “black wood coffee table in the Brauer house [that] has an oil painting by Lee Krasner as its top, and not the least of the table’s charms is that the painting succeeds in looking at home there.”22 The New York Times reported that this was “a rectangular wood coffee table with a canvas painted by Lee Krasner set into the center and glass covered.”23 The work is one of Krasner’s Little Image paintings, which she said she produced horizontally. This one, known as Composition, measures just twenty-one and a half by thirty-one and a half inches.24 Another of Krasner’s Little Images, Abstract No. 2 (1946–48), also appeared in the show. On the canvas several numbers can be read, especially 4 and 6, which may refer to the number of the apartment she shared with Pollock at 46 East Eighth Street.25
If Krasner minded having her art shown as part of a decorative ensemble, she never protested to Schaefer; nor did she actively pursue this as a marketing angle for her work. A reproduction of Krasner’s mosaic table, probably the first ever to be published of any of her work, was featured in the New York Herald Tribune; it showed her table standing on the floor beneath an oil painting of Dogtown by the late Marsden Hartley.26
At Pollock’s suggestion, Krasner gave the second of her two mosaic tables to Happy and Valentine Macy, who had admired it. The couple had just sold a home, and they gave Krasner and Pollock some furniture they no longer needed—a heavy pre-Jacobean court cupboard and two long tables. When Krasner hesitated about giving away her table and asked Pollock to give one of his paintings instead, he asked, “Did you ever hear them admire it?” Admitting that she had not, she parted with one of her two tables, never to make another.27
After the exhibit Krasner realized a connection between her mosaic tables and her paintings. Ever frugal, she reused the round piece of pressed wood that she had used as a base while making the two mosaic tables to create a tondo for Stop and Go (1949–50). It was a format that she chose only this once, covering the surface with hieroglyphic-like symbols that were reminiscent of some of the rhythmic forms on the tables. Like the mosaics, the images in some of her paintings would soon contain more repeated shapes, which were what she referred to as “hieroglyphics.” Because Krasner maintained her allover patterning by rhythmically repeating similar shapes from edge to edge instead of emphasizing any particular sequence of symbols, the viewer perceives the totality of the shapes working together rather than the individual shapes.
Like Krasner’s, Pollock’s artwork was getting attention from different sources. Specifically, his style of allover patterning attracted Alfonso Ossorio, heir to a Philippine sugar fortune, who bought Pollock’s Number 5 (1948) from Betty Parsons in January 1949. Ossorio saw in Pollock “a man who had gone beyond Picasso” and in whose work there was “a meeting of East and West.”28 But when Parsons shipped the painting, it arrived damaged. In April, Parsons took Pollock and Krasner to have a look at it at Ossorio’s new place in Greenwich Village. Pollock offered to repair the painting in his Springs studio. The next month, Ossorio and his companion, Ted Dragon, a dancer with the New York City Ballet, drove out with the canvas, staying over w
ith the Pollocks, and in the process becoming friends. The visit affirmed Ossorio’s high esteem for Pollock’s work. He also became interested in Krasner’s work, which he saw at the house for the first time. Like so many others, Ossorio decided to rent a place and spend the summer of 1949 living in East Hampton.
“I saw a good deal of Lee and Jackson,” Ossorio recalled. “I met him just after he had stopped drinking and so I knew him for two years as a teetotaler.29…With Jackson one didn’t sit and have a long connected conversation. He would show the work, he would make very perceptive comments. His vocabulary was psychoanalytical in the sense that he had been in analysis and his intellectual vocabulary was based on that rather than on aesthetics or art history or philosophy.”30
Ossorio was stimulated by the Pollocks and was also a sophisticated influence on them. He was able to respond to and support Pollock’s work because of his grasp of modernism in the context of international art, philosophy, and culture. By this time, Ossorio had already lived in the Philippines, England, and the United States, having gone to boarding schools in England and Rhode Island, before studying art history at Harvard for both undergraduate and graduate studies. At Harvard, Ossorio had developed a deep interest in Asian as well as European and American art. He knew such scholars of Asian art as Benjamin Rowland and the important Ceylonese philosopher and art historian Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. At Harvard’s Peabody Museum, Ossorio had studied objects from the Pacific Islands as well as exhibits about the history of indigenous peoples of North America, whose art had long interested both Krasner and Pollock. He became a friend and a patron to the couple, whose work influenced Ossorio’s own paintings and abstract sculpture.