by Gail Levin
In May 1961, Krasner was preparing to travel to London for the opening at Marlborough Fine Art of a show of works by Pollock selected from her collection. It would be only her second trip overseas, and her first to England. She would also reunite with David Gibbs while there. At fifty-three, “the idiosyncrasies of her figure loom (surely the right word) problematically for any dressmaker,”65 remarked her friend the poet Richard Howard. To create a suitable wardrobe for the trip, Fritz Bultman suggested she consider using the designer Charles James, “once famous for his romantic ‘architectural’ clothes.” James asked “how she wanted to confront the English art world—Do you want to charm them? To astonish them?” She replied that she wanted to “look invisible,” to which James retorted, “That, Mrs. Pollock, is one thing I cannot do for you.”66
In the end she commissioned three outfits, recalled by Howard as “a stiff white-silk evening gown, a green woolen suit, a brocade cocktail dress. The clothes emphasized all the apparent defects of Lee’s body rather than attempting to conceal or compensate for them…. And lo! by some structural law unknown to ‘Mode,’ these clothes were a marvel; they made Lee look not invisible but invulnerable, not at all in fashion but beyond, entirely attractive and secure; and like no one else.”67
Howard was amazed that Krasner submitted cheerfully to so many fittings, enduring delay and tolerating the entire process. He did not know that Krasner had adored drawing fashions when she was a child and that she had studied fashion design at Cooper Union. Nor did he realize that Igor Pantuhoff had once dressed Krasner like a model. Charles James had a lot of cachet in the art world, including patrons such as Dominique de Menil and Millicent Rogers (both of whom founded their own museums, the former in Houston and the latter in Taos, New Mexico).68 Krasner’s decision was applauded by Fritz Bultman’s wife, Jeanne, who had actually worked for James and admired his designs. For Krasner this was the opportunity of a lifetime. As the fashion photojournalist Bill Cunningham once pointed out, James “presented women with a shape that was not their own. You went in to Charles James deformed, and you came out a Venus de Milo.”69
Krasner enjoyed London, where she stayed at the Ritz and met such notables as the art historian Sir Kenneth Clark and Sir John Rothenstein, then the director of the Tate Gallery, who, according to Richard Howard, “made much of her company.”70 Professionally the London connection would continue to be productive for her.
Krasner’s relationship with Gibbs continued to thrive enough that they traveled that June on a whirlwind trip to Paris, Zurich, Bern, Turin, and Milan, the better to create an international market for Pollock’s work. Gibbs made the arrangements, billed her, and she picked up the tab. Five nights were devoted to Paris, creating a better memory than her first trip there, which had ended with the news of Pollock’s death. They spent the tenth of June at the Excelsior Hotel Gallia in Milan, where “Sig. David Gibbs” was accompanied by “Mrs. Pollock,” added by hand to the printed bill.71 Gibbs billed Krasner three thousand dollars for his consultant’s fees from May 1, 1961, to October 31, 1961, but he also billed her that December for an “Agreed bonus” of five thousand dollars for the same period.
The following autumn, Marlborough Fine Art Limited in London staged “The New New York Scene,” an exhibition of abstract American art that included, among others, Krasner, Ellsworth Kelly, Raymond Parker, Helen Frankenthaler, and Lee Bontecou. Representing Krasner were Cool White (1959, 72 by 114 inches) and Triple Goddess (1960, 86 by 58 inches).72 The future novelist, then art historian at the University of Reading, Anita Brookner, reviewed the show for Burlington Magazine. Clearly not well informed as a critic of contemporary art, she wrote that she wanted to append a subtitle to the show: “Painting to be viewed through dark glasses” and commented “Lee Krasner paints rather more spontaneously [than the minimalist art of Kelly or Parker]: the man [sic] is clearly a romantic.”73 Brookner’s failure to discern or to research Krasner’s gender is a testament to her objectivity as a critic, who reported only how she responded to what she saw. Krasner might have been pleased to be mistaken for a male artist, at a time when men still monopolized power and prestige. It was important to Krasner that her work be appreciated on its own terms, without regard to her history and role as Pollock’s spouse. This mistake was more likely to happen abroad, because she was virtually unknown outside of the circle of New York artists with whom she had long been affiliated.
Pollock’s art was growing in attention and in price. These factors, along with a lingering antipathy toward Krasner, may have provoked Peggy Guggenheim to sue Pollock’s estate in federal court, charging that Pollock had defrauded her when he was under contract to give her all of his works (except for one each year) in exchange for an allowance of $300 a month for two years, starting on March 15, 1946. Guggenheim had become aware that in 1960 the American Friends of the Tate Gallery in London had paid $100,000 for a painting by Pollock, and she wanted $122,000 from Krasner.74 Guggenheim charged that Krasner had been fraudulently holding on to some of Pollock’s paintings that belonged to her. Since there was as yet no catalogue raisonné, the exact number of works Pollock had produced in that particular two-year period was then unknown and not easy to ascertain. The case did not close until 1965.
Krasner didn’t want to spend the summer alone again, and she looked for someone to live at the Springs house. Her nephew had been teaching at Rutgers in New Jersey, where Robert Miller and Betsy Wittenborn had just graduated. When Krasner met them at the opening of a show, she invited Bob to work as her studio assistant. He subsequently worked for her in East Hampton, taking the place of Richard Howard and Sandy Friedman, who stayed friends but wanted to move on. By the time Bob and Betsy got married in 1964, Krasner had discovered that she and Betsy both were born on October 27, which helped to forge a bond.75
That summer Newsday ran a feature on Krasner—“Pollock’s Widow Paints in His Old Studio.” Calling her “a serious and talented abstract expressionist in her own right,” Lois Tenke reported that the artist told her, “All my time now is devoted to my work and handling my husband’s exhibits. I don’t have time for anything else.”76 At the time, Krasner claimed to have “just one small painting of his in my bedroom.” When Tenke asked Krasner about the material success of her own work or lack of it, she responded, “I know that a lot of my fellow artists have realized far more success than I have, but it doesn’t bother me. The fact that my work isn’t financially successful has less effect on me now than it did in the past, because of my own assurance in what I am doing.”77 Krasner was now confident that she would never be financially needy again, as she had been with both Pantuhoff and Pollock. Pollock’s rising fame and her large collection of his work guaranteed her security. She no longer had to answer to anyone. In fact, Pollock’s prices had so escalated that Krasner became afraid to have even his one small painting on view in her bedroom, lest it be stolen.
By February 12, 1962, Krasner had grown displeased with her arrangement with Gibbs and had Dickler, her attorney, write to him explaining her concerns about “the triangular relationship” between him, Krasner, and the Marlborough Gallery.78 Dickler summed up why she had gone with him: she wanted to move Pollock’s work to Europe from New York to escape the burden of duties involved. With the planned opening of Marlborough in New York, Krasner saw that Gibbs would have to serve their interest in his new role as its New York representative. She also feared upsetting the New York art market by helping to set up a British competitor on their turf.
From March 6 to 30, 1962, Howard Wise Gallery gave Krasner another solo show, which was generally well received. Also, her prices went up. The Seasons at $8,500; Fragments from a Crucifixion at $6,000; and White Rage at $5,000. Her work once again attracted Irving Sandler, who reviewed the show for Art News. Sandler thought she had produced two groups of action paintings. He viewed one group as “composed of impulsive, curvilinear sweeps on bare canvas” similar to those of her previous show a year earlier. He thought that paint
ings in “the other series relate to a denser and more complex canvas, The Gate, which was in her last show. They consist of splashed and spattered whites and off-whites varied with staccato dark brown stabs which open up light brown backgrounds. In an explosive White Rage, Miss Krasner attempts a fusion of the two ways of working. This picture, the most impressive in the show, avoids the tendency to thinness in the linear works and to decoration in the more painterly ones.” Sandler found her work more abstract and noted “the works are as abandoned and expansive as before, but Miss Krasner now celebrates the act of painting—a new delight in the manipulation of space—rather than a mythological content.”79 While the critic for the New York Times praised her “rhythms” and “subjugation of color,” Vivien Raynor, reviewing for Arts Magazine, concurred about the “strong rhythm,” but warned “the paintings occasionally veer close to textile design.”80
BY THE END OF THE SUMMER OF 1962, KRASNER WAS DISTRESSED THAT sales of Pollock’s work were disappointing despite Marlborough Gallery’s international efforts. Pressured by Gibbs and Lloyd to cut prices, she declined in almost every case, preferring, she insisted, to withdraw them from the market. On September 14, Dickler even wrote to Gibbs inquiring whether the expenses he billed were “solely on her behalf.”81 Through her attorney, Krasner kept a close watch on the Pollocks she had consigned or loaned to Marlborough.
On Christmas night 1962, while at a dinner party in East Hampton with Ronald and Frances Stein, Krasner suffered a brain hemorrhage. She insisted on telephoning Dr. Elizabeth Hubbard, who treated the incident as if it were a migraine headache. Realizing the seriousness of his aunt’s condition, Stein interceded and called a nearby doctor and the police. Krasner was then rushed to Southampton Hospital. When tests disclosed a bleeding on the brain, she was transferred to Saint Luke’s Hospital in New York, where she underwent surgery to remove an aneurysm in the artery that encircles the brain. Afterward she chose to convalesce at the Hotel Adams on the Upper East Side.
Sandy Friedman wrote to David Gibbs, telling him about Krasner’s ordeal and its effect on her: “There has been a marked change in Lee. Before all this happened, I think she had reached a point where she was soured and fed up with the Art World. She had devoted her life’s blood to art, to Pollock; and had lived through Pollock’s tragedy and its disturbing aftermath; the feuds, the jealousies, the petty politics and grasping.” He attributed her turnabout to a “flood of notes and flowers and messages of concern from almost everyone—even unexpected sources like Harold and May Rosenberg.”
In some ways the ordeal made Krasner easier to deal with, even if for a short time. According to Friedman, “Something inside her—her hostility, defensiveness (dare I call it paranoia?) has relented, relaxed. For the first time since I’ve known her, she is filled with tolerance, sympathy, even tenderness for her fellow artists and the art world in general.”82 A week later, after seeing Lee, Fritz Bultman quipped, “Not only didn’t she lose any wheels, she seems to have added a few.”83 By February 3, Sandy was more pessimistic about Krasner, who was resting at the Hotel Adams. “Once again here with Lee—feeling so different now: troubled by her isolation, her disconnection, the imposition of her convalescence. Everything I said in my last letter seems reversed—it’s all so ephemeral—tomorrow may be entirely different—who knows?”84
He added, “She doesn’t know yet what has happened to her. Like an infant she feels she must start all over again from scratch. Like an infant, she must learn to walk, to relate, to be in the world. Like an infant, she knows nothing about ART, but must familiarize herself with her own bone, body, her tongue and speech, people and the world.”85
More than two weeks passed, and Sandy, visiting Lee at the Adams, transcribed for her a letter to David Gibbs: “Once my fury against ART relented it began to waiver [sic] between Elizabeth Hubbard and David Gibbs—though at the moment it seems to favor Elizabeth—No telling how I’ll come out with you David.”86
Gibbs also heard from Ronald Stein, who wrote to him on April 19, 1963, asking for his help in getting Frank Lloyd to take an interest in showing his work in his New York gallery. Lloyd had just purchased the Otto Gerson Gallery in Manhattan and was planning to open the following fall as Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, which would feature Jackson Pollock’s work. Krasner essentially withdrew her work from the Howard Wise Gallery at this time.87 Stein described himself as “despondent” because he was “galleryless.” Krasner had already persuaded Lloyd to visit Stein’s studio, from which he purchased a small sculpture. Stein reported to Gibbs that “Lee was overjoyed with [Lloyd’s] response” and that he was also “delighted with his reaction and proceeded to get smashed for three days afterward.”88 Given his aunt’s experience with Pollock’s alcoholism, this was a slightly ominous note.
For the summer of 1963, Krasner again settled in the Springs house, which by now, according to William K. Zinsser, writing for Horizon, was assuming mythic dimensions: “Jackson Pollock, fleeing the hostile New York art world, came to this isolated spot in 1946 [1945], and gradually other painters followed. As Pollock’s work at last caught on, and especially after his death in 1956, the colony became almost a shrine, and so did the Pollock house where his widow, Lee Krasner, still lives and paints. Today the abstract expressionists in The Springs form a sizable clique, and they do not lack for admirers—East Hampton is full of wealthy patrons and hangers-on.”89
This article featured a photograph of Krasner among a diverse group of luminaries who then spent their summers on the East End of Long Island, including the actors Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson, Gwen Verdon and her husband, the choreographer-director Bob Fosse, architects Gordon Bunshaft and Peter Blake (who had collaborated with Pollock), and writers such as Jean Stafford, Helen MacInnes, and Gilbert Highet. Krasner, identified as “the widow of Jackson Pollock,” was described as “anything but Bohemian, Miss Krasner has her clothes made by America’s most cerebral couturier, Charles James, and her house is tasteful and feminine. It is filled with her own paintings, but there are no longer any Pollocks—they have become too precious and costly for a summer house.”90 The feature allowed that “although her style was undoubtedly influenced by her late husband’s innovations and theories, it is quite distinctly her own.”91
That summer Krasner hired a young graduate student in American history, James T. Valliere, who had written a paper on El Greco’s influence on Pollock’s early work. He lived and worked in a small building behind her home for the next two summers, assuring that she was not there alone. She had him begin putting together material for what she envisioned as a complete catalogue of Pollock’s art. Valliere made a catalogue of all the books that had been in the Springs home before Pollock’s death and conducted some interviews about Pollock with some of the people who knew him.92
Krasner began experiencing dizzy spells, and once she tripped and fell while walking down Main Street in East Hampton and broke her right arm. She had to wear a cast, which left only her fingertips free. Undaunted, she devised a way to move her left hand around with her right fingertips, enabling her to paint. Using paint directly from the tube with a technique of spots sometimes called stippling, she managed to produce pictures such as Eyes in the Weeds, Happy Lady, Flowering Limb, and August Petals.93 In 1964, she explained: “This broken right hand which was done a year ago last summer, made me start painting with the left hand.”94
Despite her spunk in handling impediments to her health, Krasner could not deal with male colleagues, including de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and Barnett Newman, who treated her as less than equal. Of these, Newman was closest to Krasner. He and his wife had met her at the airport when she returned from Europe for Pollock’s funeral, so they recognized her as a widow, but often not as an artist in her own right. It was Newman who had failed to invite Krasner to join with Pollock and the other men in the protest that led to the infamous “Irascibles” photograph.
Newman’s attitudes as a Jewish man in particular reflected
those Krasner had encountered when at the age of thirteen she discovered that she could not sit with her father in the synagogue. “At that point I begin to realize the differences where they separate; in the synagogue the women have to sit upstairs and the men downstairs. That was the beginning of it.”95 Krasner never forgot the struggles she experienced trying to achieve parity as a woman and remained bitter about the morning prayer for women that she had recited daily in Hebrew in her Orthodox Jewish home, claiming, “That started up a revolution that I have not recovered from.”96
Krasner often spoke of her “running argument with Barnett Newman” over “the role of the female in Judea…we never settled that argument.”97 In a subsequent interview, she discussed how she had fought this ideological battle with Newman, who told her that she had missed the whole point. “I said I didn’t think I missed it, I thought I had it and I objected too. But the Christian concept is basically the same—it’s Judeo-Christian; and the Moslem concept is not much better. It will take time to iron the whole thing out,” she said, using a metaphor of domesticity. “It’s not just the fault of the Surrealists.”98
Of her bout with Newman, she recalled, “We battled till he died; he said I misunderstood and I said I understood loud and clear but I objected. Then one time he asked me whether I had seen the plans for his synagogue. I asked why I should see them.” He claimed that his design would settle the argument. “‘Well, where are the women in your synagogue,’ I asked. ‘You’ll see! You’ll understand!’ he said. ‘Right on the altar!’ And I said, ‘Never. You can sit on the altar and get yourself slaughtered. I want the first empty seat on the aisle.’”99