Lee Krasner

by Gail Levin

  After staying with friends through the winter, Krasner then tried living on in Springs, but she disliked being alone in the house. “It was hard at first, damned hard. I’m not the country type. And the loneliness,” she complained.8 “After Pollock’s death I came back to New York, rented an apartment and then abandoned it after two years. I couldn’t stand it. So I went back out to Springs. The second attempt was very beautiful. I wasn’t depressed at all. Then, at a point during that time [the two years], I took over the barn. There was no point in letting it stand empty. I had difficulty trying to reestablish myself in New York.”9

  But Krasner soon realized that she couldn’t spend all her time in Springs alone, so she also tried to get back into New York. She rented an apartment in 1957 at 147 East Seventy-second Street in Manhattan, signing a two-year lease. That summer she had tried out painting in the barn that had been Pollock’s studio. She had been able to tolerate staying in the old Springs house, however, only when she had been able to get someone to stay there with her. She depended on hired assistants, friends, and, if they lived nearby, even their teenaged children.10

  As a widow, Krasner was not just moving into her late husband’s studio to paint, but rather she was also focused on how best to place Pollock’s work in museums and important private collections. At first she kept Pollock’s work with his last dealer, Sidney Janis, but she did need to raise a certain amount of money to pay estate taxes. In the year before Pollock’s death, Janis had offered Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm to the Museum of Modern Art for $8,000, but the museum rejected the price as too high. Now Alfred Barr, on behalf of the museum, made another inquiry about the painting. This time Janis, after speaking with Krasner, asked for $30,000.11 Evidently Barr was so stunned by the increase that he never even responded. Janis sold the picture to the Metropolitan Museum instead—a success for Krasner, even though the deal for $20,000 included an agreement that she would buy back another one of Pollock’s canvases (Number 17, 1951) for $10,000.12 Nonetheless, she had now set a new record for Pollock’s prices. Her skill in marketing Pollock’s work slowly and judiciously would also help to set much higher prices for other abstract expressionist works.

  Janis later commented: “After the second [Pollock] exhibition following his death [in 1958], Lee was a little discouraged by our selling quite a few at low prices and decided not to deal here. He died a little too soon, but other artists were immediately affected—began selling and raising their prices after that romantic death—like Van Gogh’s.”13

  Krasner’s marketing strategy was bound to affect the way her own paintings were seen and shown and how she was perceived. “After Jackson died the load was far heavier on me than when he was alive,” she maintained. “He was painter number one and the whole art world turned on me. It was like I wasn’t there. It was very rocky.”14

  “She didn’t get anywhere, until her husband died,” the painter Buffie Johnson told an interviewer. “We were good friends for a while, and then I showed one of my old realistic paintings in the East Hampton Guild Hall, because they’d asked me to put something in a realistic show. She stopped on the street in front of the post office and harangued at me for doing this. I said, ‘Well, I don’t deny my early work. If Picasso shows his realistic things and his abstract things side by side, I don’t know why [I shouldn’t].’ [Lee] said, ‘We’ve spent years trying to get the Guild Hall to accept abstract work, and you come along and undo all our work.’ She’s a very emphatic woman…. I felt very injured.”15

  WITH POLLOCK’S DEATH, KRASNER HAD TO PICK UP THE PIECES AND put her life back together. What she had left was her art, and she soon returned to it. When she was asked how she managed to do this so quickly, she responded, “I don’t think I thought about it. And I don’t feel I had a choice. It was just extremely difficult to get to do it. ‘I had to’ is the only way I can put it, and it was not easy…. I was not in a position to say I will not continue painting or I will continue painting.”16 She explained her motivation this way: “I am preoccupied with trying to know myself in order to communicate with others. Painting is not separate from life. It is one. It is like asking—do I want to live? My answer is yes—and I paint.”17

  Though Krasner’s abstract paintings were not usually very representational, a canvas such as Three in Two painted in 1956 begs a biographical reading. The catalogue raisonné refers to Three in Two as having a “cryptic title,” which “probably relates in some way to Pollock’s equally ambiguous There Were Seven in Eight of c. 1945.” Yet Krasner’s enigmatic canvas might be read as three vertical panels of fragments of figures inspired by her favorite painter, Matisse. His Bathers by a River of 1909–1910 was well known to her from the 1951 Matisse retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art as well as from Greenberg’s 1953 book on Matisse.18

  Taking a hint from Matisse, Krasner could have painted Three in Two in order to reference Pollock’s earlier canvas, Two, of 1945, a painting that had already been compared to Bathers.19 Following this, Krasner may have inserted a third figure between the male and female figures that critics have identified in Pollock’s Two. Chances are this third figure represents Ruth Kligman, who had intervened and split up Pollock and Krasner’s relationship in the same year that Krasner produced this painting. In a very literal sense, Kligman inserted herself between the pair—a third figure wedged into two.20

  Another blow to Krasner came on May 1957, when Life magazine ran an article called “Women Artists in Ascendancy” featuring five women artists—“none over 35.” Naturally it omitted Krasner, who was nearly fifty. The article featured Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, Jane Wilson, Helen Frankenthaler, and Nell Blaine, touted as a “Young Group [that] Reflects Lively Virtues of U.S. Painting.” With glamour in mind, Life stressed both the youth and the physical attractiveness of these younger women artists and even exulted that Jane Wilson “works as a New York fashion model.”21 It made good copy, but it already relegated to the dustbin of history the older women who had labored among the male abstract expressionists of the first generation, such as Krasner, Perle Fine, and even the somewhat younger Elaine de Kooning.

  The critical dismissal was premature. Krasner was now painting in Pollock’s barn studio, enjoying for the first time its excellent light and ample space. Her work’s scale soon expanded. Though her paintings appear to mirror her emotions, sometimes they are the opposite of this. For example, after Pollock’s sudden death, she painted bold and upbeat works in a series she called Earth Green. Her impulse was to reach out and boldly embrace life, which had so swiftly left Pollock. Her frequent preoccupations include an emphasis on nature, and she sometimes hints of birth, destruction, and regeneration.

  At the same time, one must take into account the possibility that Krasner was actually relieved to be free of Pollock’s debilitating behavior and the constant anxiety it created not only in her but also in many others who came into contact with him. Years later, she reflected: “Look, it was a mixed blessing—our relationship. It had many, many pluses and several minuses. His drinking, for instance, was very rough on me, to put it mildly.”22

  Krasner perhaps expressed the burden Pollock represented in a memorable dream: “Jackson and I were standing on top of the world. The earth was a sphere with a pole going through the center. I was holding the pole with my left hand. Suddenly, I let go of the pole, but I kept holding on to Jackson, and we both went floating off into outer space. We were not earthbound.”23 She had supported Pollock as long as she could, but eventually his drinking and the emotional pain that caused him to drink produced a situation that was too difficult to endure. Krasner had never, however, intended to let go of Pollock.

  Though Krasner was still working, she needed to be able to show her paintings—being able to do so meant continuing to exist in the world. But she, and many of her contemporaries, were concerned about the lack of opportunity to show their work. The artists John Little and Elizabeth Parker, both of whom had also studied with Hofmann, joined with Alfonso Ossor
io to open the Signa Gallery in 1957 at 53 Main Street in East Hampton in a space that was formerly a small market. Financed by Ossorio, this was the first commercial gallery in the area devoted to contemporary vanguard work. The gallery’s profile was high, and its openings became popular social events, often attracting up to five hundred people.24

  Signa Gallery lasted for four years. Krasner showed her painting Spring Beat (1957) in a group show from August 11 to 24, 1957, along with Paul Brach, David Hare, Franz Kline, Costantino Nivola, Charlotte Park, Elizabeth Parker, and Theodoros Stamos.25 She showed fewer works than the others, but her canvas (at 98 by 124 inches) was the largest object on view. Krasner also participated in “A Review of the Season,” Signa’s September show that same year.

  August 1957 marked a year since Pollock’s death. Krasner’s friends Giorgio Cavallon and Linda Lindeberg wrote, telling her that she was in their thoughts and how wonderful she had been in the past year, “always making something positive and clear out of the tragedy of Jackson’s death.” They said how they admired her positive attitude, her courage, and her new paintings.26 Krasner spent Thanksgiving that year with Bob and Abby Friedman, Barnett and Annalee Newman, and Sheridan and Cile Lord, recorded in a snapshot probably taken by Cile.

  In 1949, U.S. Representative George Dondero had denounced “the link between the Communist art of the ‘isms’ and the so-called modern art of America.”27 Now, at the height of the cold war, the Federal Bureau of Investigation investigated Krasner under the names “Mrs. Jackson Pollock” and “Lee Pollock” for espionage.28 Most of her FBI file, which is only two pages long, has been blacked out, but the following is visible: “Mrs. Pollock is an artist of the modern school.” The FBI continued looking into her case until December 16, 1957. It appears that someone had reported her. One explanation is that the person did it out of anger. Another possibility is that Krasner, when she was in Europe at the time of Pollock’s death, had some innocent contact with someone who had political connections that raised suspicion about her activities. One must note that the FBI also investigated a number of her contemporaries, for example, Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, to name just two. Like Krasner, both were Jewish. It has been suggested that at this time “sectors of the U.S. government were openly racist” and anti-Semitic.29

  Krasner was not nearly as politically engaged during the 1950s as she had been during the 1930s, when the FBI seems to have ignored her. Nothing incriminating was ever found, and it appears that Krasner never knew she was being investigated. It is difficult to imagine Krasner operating as a spy, particularly since she had no access to any secret information that anyone would want. She certainly was preoccupied during this period with marketing Pollock’s work, taking full advantage of the capitalist system.

  Oblivious of the FBI, Krasner focused on exhibiting her Earth Green series at the Martha Jackson Gallery from February 24 through March 22, 1958. Located on the Upper East Side at 32 East Sixty-ninth Street, the gallery was relatively new, having opened a few blocks away in 1953. Nearly Krasner’s contemporary, Martha Kellogg Jackson was born in Buffalo, New York, where she grew up interested in art. She graduated from Smith College and attended Moore College of Art in Philadelphia.30 She was said to be quite sympathetic to her artists, who, among Americans, also included Willem de Kooning, Paul Jenkins, and Louise Nevelson. She introduced some important European artists to the American public, including Antoni Tàpies from Spain and Karel Appel from the Netherlands.

  Krasner’s seventeen oil paintings at Martha Jackson were large, ranging from six to about seventeen feet in length. The longest, The Seasons, she had painted in the barn studio that had been Pollock’s. Ben Heller recalls that Krasner enlisted him to help stretch her paintings at the gallery, causing his hands to be “sore.” He never bought any of her work.31 The show occupied two floors of the gallery. According to the gallery’s press release, “All the canvases are closely related and actually form a series along a central theme. A deeply felt personal experience is suggested by such paintings as Listen, Earth Green, Spring Beat, Upstream, Sun Woman, The Seasons, and others such as Embrace and Birth.”32 Krasner chose B. H. Friedman to write an introduction in the catalogue for her show. After discussing why she had not yet received the recognition she deserved and discussing her devotion to Pollock, he concluded, “In looking at these paintings, listening to them, feeling them, I know this work—Lee Krasner’s most mature and personal, as well as most joyous and positive, to date—was done entirely during the past year and a half, a period of profound sorrow for the artist. The paintings are a stunning affirmation of life.”33

  Among the telegrams and notes of congratulations Krasner saved was a card of the type that usually arrives with flowers. It was inscribed “To Lee—The Best and the Most—Len Siegel,” a warm greeting from her therapist. The following July, according to Bob Friedman’s journal, Krasner’s therapist “‘dismissed’ (her word)” her. Friedman commented cynically, “In this case dismissal means that he has gotten as much help from her as he can.”34 She had at least begun to work through her grief.

  Nearly two decades later, Krasner spoke about the paintings in this series: “I can remember when I was painting Listen, which is so highly keyed in color—I’ve seen it many times since and it looks like such a happy painting—I can remember that while I was painting it I almost didn’t see it, because tears were literally pouring down.”35 The bright colors and biomorphic forms evoke a figure in a garden, an activity that she shared with Pollock after they first moved to Springs.

  In 1979 Krasner wrote about the work April, which she related to Listen, Sun Woman, and The Seasons. “The title wouldn’t necessarily mean that I painted this work in April. I might have, but it’s too far away from me now. I think I felt the painting was April, whether the month was April or not. I paint a picture and the title follows, so there must have been something in either the color or the iconography to indicate why I chose April as this title. I’d say that this painting would be typical of the color in that show.”36

  Once thinking about her palette, she reflected, “I have no idea as to why I sometimes go from no color to a very high keyed color. I have no way of explaining this to myself—what makes this happen—and so I’ve ceased to try to explore it, and simply go with it. I either feel color, or I don’t, and when it doesn’t happen, I don’t feel the need to explain it to myself now, as strongly as I did in the past when I was more preoccupied with this question.”37

  Finally, at what the press release announced as “her third one-man show,” Krasner won over the critics. In the New York Times, Stuart Preston opened his article with: “The bravado of Lee Krasner’s recent and huge abstract paintings at the Martha Jackson Gallery presents a raw challenge to the eye whether or not we accept the symbolic intentions of her sequences of whirling shapes. What impresses the spectator is the sheer energy that Miss Krasner manages to generate on her picture surfaces. We feel that somewhere behind each picture is a spring that sets off the killing pace of her shapes like an alarm clock.”38 Time magazine devoted an entire article to “Mrs. Jackson Pollock,” chronicling her early history back to the months leading up to the McMillan show of 1942. Though the article got a few details wrong, including the date, it noted the important fact that “Blue-eyed Lee Krasner, 49,” had met Pollock and “In the years that followed, the pair made art history; one with commotion—Jackson Pollock; the other with devotion—Lee Krasner, who became his wife.”39

  Time quoted Krasner about her work in the show: “These are special paintings to me. They come from a very trying time, a time of life and death.” The writer went on to say: “[The paintings] have haunting titles; e.g., Visitation, Listen. They mostly seem to explore death-haunted themes that, Lee Krasner says, make it ‘hard enough for me just to accept my own paintings.’ But they also strike a lonely note of hope: one of them is entitled Birth.”40

  Even women, such as the critic Anita Ventura, who reviewed Krasner’s show in Arts Magazin
e, felt compelled to see this art through the lens of Pollock’s work: “Her paintings stand in a relationship to Jackson Pollock’s that is similar to that of Juan Gris’s Cubist works to Picasso’s or Braque’s, or of Dufy’s Fauve paintings to Matisse’s. This is particularly true of her successes: Earth Green and Listen (related to Pollock’s totem series and Ocean Greyness—to my mind his best paintings), in which she moves his energetic forms toward a rose-beige-brown, emerald-green and fuchsia delicate beauty.”41 Ventura qualified her praise by writing, “Her less successful works, in which the energy is dissipated rather than transformed, become unintentional caricatures.”

  Ventura viewed Krasner as one of the earliest to assimilate Pollock’s innovation: “It isn’t that the second [Krasner] lacks spirit; it has its own sensibility.”42 She then recalled how the Arensbergs, Los Angeles collectors of cubism and Dada, had cared for “the first harsh moment when something not quite comprehensible was got hold of, when nobody knew whether the work was ugly or not until somebody else came along and made it beautiful.”43

  Parker Tyler, writing in Art News, came to a similar conclusion, declaring though one “saw clearly, sex and the woman,” Pollock’s “motifs of flesh and fecundity are repeated by his wife in a palette that oddly suggests off-pink cosmetic and fuchsia lipstick as well as flower petal, plant leaf and the void. The scale is audacious, the derivation as legitimate as a painter might wish.”44