by Gail Levin
But Lee had made a mistake in not removing all alcohol from the house, and soon she was stunned to see Pollock pull a bottle of whiskey from under the sink and fill two large glasses as he said to Namuth: “This is the first drink I’ve had in two years. Dammit, we need it!”68 Lee was horrified at the tragedy of Pollock’s act. In fact, Pollock got so drunk that he turned the dinner table over onto the laps of their guests, destroying both the food and the evening. Pollock didn’t even try to justify himself. A few days later, he told a concerned Jeffrey Potter: “Shit, I wasn’t upset! The table was.”69
And Pollock’s doctor, Edwin H. Heller, had been killed in a car crash six months earlier. The death was devastating, and sudden. He had been the only doctor who succeeded in keeping Pollock away from alcohol. The nasty comment published in Time and the disturbance Namuth caused by filming the insecure artist in the process of painting combined to wear away Pollock’s resolve to stay on the wagon.
Pollock’s fourth solo show with Betty Parsons opened on the evening of November 28 and remained on view through December 16, 1950. Among the thirty-two works were several now considered his best: Autumn Rhythm, Lavender Mist, and One, which, ironically, given the show’s failure to sell, are now in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art.70 Only Lavender Mist did sell, to Ossorio for $1,500.71
Parsons had crammed Pollock’s monumental paintings into an inadequate space that didn’t do them justice. “The show was a disaster,” Parsons recalled. “For me it was heartbreaking, those big paintings at a mere $1200. For Jackson it was ghastly; here was beauty, but instead of admiration it brought contempt.”72
Pollock’s brother Marvin Jay wrote from New York to their brother Frank in Los Angeles: “The big thing right now is Jack’s show. Alma and I were there and it was bigger than ever this year and many important people in the art world were present. Lee seemed very happy and greeted every one with a big smile.”73
Among those whom she could not have been pleased to see was Elaine de Kooning, still married to (though estranged from) Willem de Kooning. According to Clement Greenberg, “This was Jackson’s best show, and up came Elaine de Kooning, who said the show was no good except for one painting—the only weak picture in the show, the one he painted [on glass] when they were working on the movie. The show was so good, it’s unbelievable.”74 Elaine de Kooning’s comment can only have irritated Krasner. She must have noted that Ossorio purchased not only the Pollock but also three oils on paper from de Kooning’s women series.
Even the reviews for the show were mixed. The critic for the New York Times, Howard Devree, called Pollock one of two (with Mark Tobey) of “the most controversial figures in the field” and declared that the “content” in Pollock’s work was “almost negligible.” He trivialized the artist by asking, “But isn’t all this rather in the nature of day-dreaming we have all done while staring at a wallpaper pattern and ourselves investing it with ideas?”75 Robert Coates of The New Yorker also professed doubt about the work, asking, “Does personal comment ever come through to us?”76
Even though more positive notices appeared in Art News and Art Digest, they were not enough to boost Pollock’s sinking spirits.77 Art News chose Pollock’s show as one of the three best one-man shows of the year, ranking it ahead of the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti’s, but behind the early American modernist John Marin’s.78 When the sales that Pollock had hoped for did not materialize, it compounded his letdown.79 His serious lack of self-esteem made things worse. Krasner had her hands full.
TWELVE
First Solo Show, 1951–52
Lee Krasner with her painting Stop and Go, c. 1950, photographer unknown. Ever frugal, she created this tondo of 1949–50 by reusing the round wooden base that had served her while making the two mosaic tables. She invented repeated hieroglyphic-like symbols that were reminiscent of some of the rhythmic forms on the tables.
POLLOCK’S RELAPSE SUBJECTED KRASNER TO INCREASED STRESS. “As Jackson’s fame grew, he became more and more tortured,” she reflected. “My help, assistance, and encouragement seemed insufficient. His feelings towards me became somewhat ambiguous. Of course, he had many other supporters. Tony Smith, then an architect (later a sculptor), was among the strongest, as was [the abstract painter] Clyfford Still, whose letters and comments meant a great deal to Jackson. He adored Franz Kline [another abstract painter]—whom he could talk to. And of course there was Clement Greenberg, who from the very first was one of his most avid supporters.”1 Fritz Bultman blamed Lee for Jackson’s problems, claiming, “In a way Jackson was Lee’s creation, her Frankenstein; she set him going. And she saw where he was going, aside from the talent and all that, but he was devastated by fame coming to him.”2
Pollock began to deteriorate rapidly. Nothing seemed to go right for him. He wrote to Ossorio and Dragon in January 1951, “I found New York terribly depressing after my show—and nearly impossible—but I am coming out of it now.”3 In late January 1951, Ossorio offered Pollock $200 a month “towards the next painting of yours that we acquire.” Yet other anticipated sales did not materialize. A few weeks later, he wrote Ossorio, “I really hit an all time low—with depression and drinking—NYC is brutal.”4 Pollock tried seeing his regular homeopathic doctor, Elizabeth Hubbard, but nothing mitigated his depression.
Ossorio also lent Jackson and Lee his New York town house so Jackson could be in the city to see a new therapist, Ruth Fox, M.D., beginning in March 1951. Fox served as president of the New York City Medical Society on Alcoholism and vice president of the National Committee on Alcoholism. Lee had learned about the doctor through Elizabeth Hubbard. Fox treated alcoholism through psychoanalytic therapy combined with participation in Alcoholics Anonymous, which meant that Jackson had to adhere to total abstinence.5 Fox prescribed a drug called Antabuse, which makes the patient sick if he or she drinks alcohol. In 1948 Fox had helped bring the drug to the United States from Denmark, where it was developed.6 Pollock resisted both taking Antabuse and going to meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous in Southampton, which he did not like, perhaps because of its group interaction and its religious invocations.
Fox also insisted that alcoholics realize how much their families suffered. Sober partners had to deal with an alcoholic’s mood changes and their demands for “exclusive attention,” and they became exposed to ostracism and shame in the community.7 For Krasner, Pollock’s behavior when drunk was so outrageous that their marriage and their social life withered. Their friends were amazed at the extent of Krasner’s devotion under such trying circumstances. Linda Lindeberg, a painter who had been a Hofmann student, recalled that Lee “was like his left hand and though she lived with an alcoholic, never, never did I hear her say anything against Jackson.”8
In an essay, “The Alcoholic Spouse,” published in 1956, Fox wrote: “The wives of alcoholic men…will make almost any sacrifice to help their husbands once they have learned to look upon them as sick individuals. This is partly because of their greater tendency to mother and sympathize with the husband, sensing that he cannot help himself.”9 Fox also defined three types of alcoholics, of which she would have placed Pollock among the “primary addicts…persons who have been psychoneurotic throughout their lives, with alcoholism starting at an early age, often in their teens. These individuals were obviously maladjusted on an emotional level prior to their compulsive drinking. They might have been introverted or insecure with respect to interpersonal relations, or excessively dependent.”10
Years later Krasner told a journalist who inquired about Pollock’s drinking, “Who knows why people drink? With all that’s been written about alcoholism, we still don’t know what really causes it. In all the years I knew him, he drank off and on except for one two-year period. He tried every known way to stop, except for AA, which for some reason he couldn’t accept, and I still have all the bills to prove it. He never drank when he was working; it was two different cycles of his life.�
��11 Another time she commented that Pollock’s heavy drinking related to the macho image that “originated as far back as [his teacher] Benton, where it was he-man stuff to do.”12
On March 9, 1951, Pollock signed a will, leaving everything to Krasner. In the event she predeceased him, he left everything to his brother Sande McCoy. In the event that neither survived him, he arranged to have his estate divided among his other three brothers, Frank, Jay, and Charles. Alternative executors included Sande McCoy, Clement Greenberg, and Alfonso Ossorio, in that order. In a separate letter that accompanied the will, Pollock wrote, “Lee—if you are the Executrix lend some of the paintings to my brothers then living. Remember those paintings will belong to you alone and you alone can decide which paintings are to be borrowed and for how long. This is a request which I have purposely omitted from my will because of its complicating nature.”13
Krasner and Pollock showed together with many other abstract artists in the Artists Club’s 9th Street Show. The show was curated by Leo Castelli and opened on May 21, 1951. The announcement for the show still spelled her name with the double s. The few other women artists in the large show included Elaine de Kooning and Grace Hartigan.14
On June 7 the Pollocks were back in Springs, and Jackson wrote to Ossorio that Krasner was preparing for her first solo exhibition in New York City.15 Pollock had persuaded his dealer, Betty Parsons, to show her work. Parsons later explained that she “didn’t believe in having husband and wife in the same gallery. Jackson knew this—he said they shouldn’t be with the same analyst either—but for Lee he could be persistent. And I felt if I didn’t show her, there would be problems.”16 So Parsons agreed to give Krasner a show to satisfy Pollock.
Though some deny that Pollock supported Krasner as an artist, Parson’s statement corroborates Krasner’s claims that he did. Certainly Pollock might have pretended otherwise on occasion, especially to please his male colleagues, but in the letter he wrote to Ossorio and Dragon and in the efforts he made with Parsons, his actions confirm Krasner’s sense of the matter.
Krasner always said that Parsons gave her a show because “Jackson asked Betty…to come and look at my work with regard to giving me a show. And so she came, and she looked, and scheduled a show. But the show was like nine months away or something. And right after she left…my image so-called broke…. A whole new thing happened and that became my first show with Betty Parsons.”17
Krasner tried to explain the concept of her art changing as “going for a certain length of time” before “the image breaks again.”18 From the time Parsons saw her work and agreed to a show, Krasner admitted, “it was a far cry from what is now known as the ‘Little Image.’”19 Krasner’s show “Paintings 1951, Lee Krasner” presented canvases that were larger than she had been making. “You could say they maybe started to blow up. For me it was only holding the vertical, though some of them move horizontally as well.” After making this comment to the critic Cindy Nemser in an interview in 1972, Krasner proudly quoted Pollock’s 1951 letter to Ossorio: “‘Lee is doing some of her best painting. It has a freshness and bigness that she didn’t get before. I think she will have a handsome show.’”20 This was Krasner’s first solo show ever, and it ran for a month, starting on October 15.
Among the fourteen canvases she showed at Parsons, Krasner kept only two in their original state. She either reused the old canvases as backgrounds for the collages she made for a show in 1955 or cut them up.21 She later described one of the fourteen as “a vertical-horizontal measurement of space in soft color.”22 She was probably referring to the canvas known as Number 2 which survived rolled up as late as 1967, and measures 92.5 by 132 inches.23 The geometric shapes and overlapping forms relate to Mondrian, but the more innovative palette is composed mainly of earth tones.
Along with Krasner, Parsons also showed Anne Ryan, who had been active as a writer in Greenwich Village during the 1920s. Ryan was married, the mother of three children, and a poet. In 1941 she took up painting and then joined Atelier 17, Stanley Hayter’s printmaking studio. Subsequently she produced prints and collages, the latter after being inspired by a show of Kurt Schwitters’s work.24 Ryan also designed scenery for the theater and costumes for the ballet. A generation older than Krasner, Ryan must have made an impression on Krasner. When interviewed later in life about women artists, Krasner named Ryan as one who had come to her attention.25
Both Ryan’s small collages and Krasner’s paintings were reviewed together, like their shows, by Stuart Preston in the New York Times. About Krasner, he wrote: “By means of their placid rectangular forms, by their discreet, limpid color and their unobtrusive handling, these paintings, large and small, emanate feelings of calm and restraint. Roughly, here is the Mondrian formula worked out with feminine acuteness and a searching for formal and chromatic harmonies rather than a delivery of water-tight solutions. Here designs are occasionally awkward, but they are ever clear and it is to her credit that the more complex they get the better they come off.” He even wrote of one work’s “majestic and thoughtful construction.”26 How, one wonders, did he define “feminine acuteness,” and was it intended as a compliment?
Krasner must have longed for the more effusive enthusiasm Preston reserved for Ryan’s collages, which he described as “abstracts made with bits of colored paper and cloth. Nothing new in the way of praise can be said about these fragments of delicacy that has not appeared in this column before. Their taste is as refined as it is unvarying and she seems to have a power of self-criticism that some of her more flamboyant colleagues lack. Free from ostentation, she stands in relation to them rather as Boudin to the great Impressionists.”27
Regardless of how Krasner judged herself in relation to Ryan, the more interesting question to ask is: what had influenced Krasner’s shift in style before she showed with Ryan? One answer might be geometric abstractions by I. Rice Pereira, who was one of only three women in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1946 show “Fourteen Americans.” Then, along with Ryan, she was one of only seven women in that museum’s 1951 traveling survey, “Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America.” Opinion remains divided as to whether the geometric work Krasner showed at Parsons owed a debt to Mondrian, whom she acknowledged, or Rice Pereira, whom she did not.28
The artist Robert Goodnough reviewed Krasner’s show in Art News, noting: “One comes away with the feeling of having been journeying through a vast uninhabited land of quiet color.”29 Reviewing the show in Art Digest, the critic Dore Ashton also focused on her “love for delicate, closely related color tonalities,” remarking that she used “right-angle tensions related to Mondrian in structure, if more sensuous in color.”30
Another review, also clipped and saved by Krasner, which appears to be written by Emily Genauer, the chief art critic at the New York Herald Tribune, linked Krasner to “a purification of Mondrian, whose rigid formalism has been purged of all harshness.”31 Given Krasner’s strong interest in nature, she must have cringed when this same review stated: “This art seems to demand no identification with nature, nor does it command a vital illusion.” Still, this reviewer admitted to being “touched” by Krasner’s “painted surfaces…beautifully smoothed into quietly innocuous patterns of arresting, sweetly cultivated tonal composition.”32 It was not a bad set of reviews for a solo debut in New York, but Parsons did not arrange much in the way of either sales or publicity, leading to Krasner’s disappointment. Most likely the huge fuss made over Pollock’s shows had raised her expectations beyond what was typical or likely, especially for a woman artist in 1951.
When Krasner and Pollock learned in 1951 that a seventy-acre estate on beautiful Georgica Pond in East Hampton that had once been owned by the late painter/designers Albert and Adele Herter was on the market, they recommended that Ossorio buy it and move out from the city.33 Ossorio drove out in August, saw the mansion and its sprawling grounds, called The Creeks, and took their advice. Soon he was acting as host for many who came out to visit, among them Parsons and
abstract expressionist painters like Clyfford Still and Grace Hartigan.34
Pollock’s fifth show at Parsons followed later that fall, opening on November 26, 1951. Greenberg, having resigned from The Nation, wrote in Partisan Review of “achieved and monumental works of art, beyond accomplishedness, facility or taste.” He concluded, “If Pollock were a Frenchman, people would already be calling him ‘maitre’ and speculating in his pictures.” At this moment, Greenberg identified Pollock as “the best painter of a whole generation.”35
Greenberg didn’t write a word about Krasner’s show, which was odd, because the three of them were close friends. Greenberg admitted that he really only conversed with Krasner, and not Pollock, about art. “Lee and I and Jackson would sit at the kitchen table and talk for hours—all day sometimes. Jackson usually wouldn’t say much—we’d drink a lot of coffee. I know that this sounds like part of a myth. We would sit for hours and go to bed at three or four in the morning.”36 Krasner cannot have missed the irony in this situation. She had first introduced Greenberg to avant-garde art, to Hofmann, and continued to provide articulate intelligent art talk for him, and yet he wrote only about Pollock’s work.
At this same time, Pollock, still seeing Dr. Ruth Fox, was going for intensive “biochemical” treatment for alcoholism that he had begun in September 1951, some six months after beginning with Fox. Discouraged by Pollock’s refusal to go to Alcoholics Anonymous and to take Antabuse, she eventually objected to these concurrent treatments, causing Pollock to cease seeing her in June 1952. For these “biochemical” treatments that continued through the fall of 1953, Pollock traveled to Park Avenue in New York to see Grant Mark, who was not a physician but had been recommended by Pollock and Krasner’s homeopathic doctor, Elizabeth Hubbard, who worked with Mark for a time. One of Pollock’s friends later characterized Mark as “a biochemist with a Svengali air,” likening his excessive control over Pollock to the villainous hypnotist in George du Maurier’s 1894 novel, Trilby.37 Krasner, who was herself prey to medical charlatanism, also received treatments from Mark, who accepted two of her paintings for his fees.38