Lee Krasner

by Gail Levin

  Given her aesthetic ideal of moving into the realm of the inevitable, Krasner relished the directness of children, who often seemed to understand her art. When, during the summer of 1965, she invited into the barn studio to see new work Christopher Stewart, her ten-year-old great-nephew, and his mother (her niece Rusty Kanokogi), she asked the boy what he would call her latest painting (70 by 161 inches). When he burst out, “Combat,” she accepted it at once.6 It was the last painting she finished before her first show in London opened in the fall.

  To name her pictures, Krasner often preferred the intuition of children, poets, and novelists over that of dealers or critics. When Krasner’s Detroit dealer, Frank Siden, supplied her with names for the new work, all gouache on paper, that she was including in her solo show at his gallery there in 1965, she rejected almost all of them, even though his choices alluded to forms in nature. For example, Siden’s Pertaining to Fauna became her Ahab.7 Krasner and Pollock had named their brown poodle Ahab after Captain Ahab in Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick—the book was read by many of their abstract expressionist acquaintances.8 (Ahab’s mission to get even with Moby Dick, the ferocious white whale that bit off his leg, must have appealed to Krasner’s sense of tragic strife.) One of Siden’s titles that she kept was Night Creatures. However, she did reject titles like Bathsheba’s Garden, now known as Summer Play, and First Step into Eden, now known as Autumnal.9 Either Krasner rejected these latter two names because of their references to the Hebrew Bible and her long discomfort with the attitude toward the female in traditional Jewish culture or she just found them too pretentious.

  According to Sanford Friedman, Krasner once rejected Entering Jerusalem as a title for a painting that evoked a palm. “What are you crazy?” he exclaimed. “She didn’t want anything Christian [Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday]; not that she had so much love for the Jews’ Old Testament.”10

  Terry Netter remembers the time when Krasner came with Josephine Little to hear Netter preach at the Catholic church in East Hampton, then known as St. Philomena, even wearing a hat for the occasion.11 When Netter decided in 1968 to leave the Jesuits and marry Therese Franzese, “the pretty sister of one of his students,” Krasner was supportive.12 Apparently, “Therese loved her.”13

  Despite her skepticism about organized Judaism, Krasner saw herself as Jewish. “She made a point of making everybody know she was Jewish,” Netter recalls. And she remained fascinated with the appearance of Hebrew and other exotic writing. She continued her interest in the visual form of writing systems in a painting of 1965 that she called Kufic, which is an ancient form of Arabic. Though painted on an ochre background, this large canvas continues the themes of her more hieroglyphic Little Image paintings during the late 1940s.

  Krasner’s interest in the forms of letters and the looks of different languages led her to attend lectures at the Morgan Library by the art historian Meyer Schapiro about the Book of Kells, a manuscript she revered.14 In 1967, Krasner painted Uncial, a canvas named for the Latin term for the hooked medieval handwriting that she admired when she visited the Morgan Library to look at illuminated manuscripts.

  Krasner’s love of illuminated books and her admiration for the poet and critic Frank O’Hara led her to accept the Museum of Modern Art’s invitation to participate in their publication In Memory of My Feelings: A Selection of Poems by Frank O’Hara, for which she produced a two-part drawing. O’Hara had written the first monograph about Pollock, which was published in 1959 by George Braziller. Krasner had been very positive about this book, preferring a poet’s impressions over those of art critics.15

  On September 21, Krasner’s first ever retrospective opened at London’s Whitechapel Gallery. The organizer and gallery’s director, Bryan Robertson, had already achieved what he had wanted with Pollock seven years earlier, so he clearly chose to organize Krasner’s first retrospective with no hidden agenda. White chapel Gallery exhibited but did not collect art. From 1952 to 1968, when Robertson was in charge, he staged many other important shows, from the major American artists such as Mark Rothko and Robert Rauschenberg, to many emerging British artists, including Anthony Caro, David Hockney, and Bridget Riley.

  In a brief preface for the show’s catalogue, Robertson wrote, “[Krasner’s] contribution to American painting has yet to be properly recorded or assessed: the present large exhibition represents a fraction only of the total work.”16 He also wrote, “In 1955 Lee Krasner held an exhibition of collages in New York which Clement Greenberg has described as a major addition to the American art scene of that era.”17 Robertson’s report seems likely to be accurate, because it was never repudiated by Greenberg, who notoriously wrote caustic letters denouncing material he considered false. In fact in a 1975 interview, Greenberg told Ruth Appelhof, then a graduate student, “I have always considered Lee’s best period to have been in 1955. She developed a quality of humanness, an expansiveness, which could be seen not only in her personality but in her paintings as well.”18

  The catalogue also featured a much more substantial introduction by B. H. Friedman, who had earlier commissioned her mosaic murals for his company’s building: “First, it must be said that Lee Krasner is a woman—in a field which still, even now in 1965, barely tolerates women, condescends to them with the phrase ‘woman painter,’ as odious and pejorative as ‘woman writer’ or ‘woman driver.’ In her work, Lee Krasner wants to be judged—or, better, experienced—as a painter. She wants no special categories. It may even be, whether consciously or unconsciously, that this is why she took the sexually anonymous name ‘Lee.’”19

  Friedman showed cultural sensitivity in noting the androgynous character of the name, which others too have remarked on. Ironically, the nickname was used, if not coined, by her classmates at the Woman’s Art School at Cooper Union and appeared in the student newspaper in the 1920s—at that time and in that place she surely had no reason to pretend to be male.

  Robertson’s young assistant, Tejas Englesmith, described the show at Whitechapel as “quite beautiful” and said that he “loved Lee.”20 He remembered that “the Snowdons” (Princess Margaret and her husband, the photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones, who was created Earl of Snowdon by the queen) came to see the show. Sir Kenneth Clark, whom she had met when she visited London for the Pollock show in 1961, was supposed to take her to dinner but “rang the gallery to say that he had to cancel because Lady Clark drank a bit too much.”

  Englesmith recalled that Krasner said to him, “I’m free. Are you free? So let’s do something.” Krasner then changed a hundred dollars for pounds, which was “a lot of money in those days,” especially for a poorly paid assistant curator. Krasner handed him the money to take charge of and said, “Let’s have a good time.” They went to dinner and then to see the Beatles’ new film, Help!, with very good seats. For Krasner the film must have epitomized the youthful energy she felt in London, liberated from the constraints on her career that she had felt in New York. With her interest in primitive art, she must have loved the film’s scene of exotic sacrifice. The evening ended with drinks at her hotel and her giving Englesmith money and urging him to take a cab home. He accepted her invitation to stay with her in New York. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

  The show attracted a good deal of attention in the British press, but it was not initially about Krasner as an artist. Instead Krasner was heralded as “the widow of probably the most important artist that America has produced, Jackson Pollock.” Krasner told one reporter: “Things have been loaded against me in New York. Here I should get a fighting chance of some unprejudiced criticism.”21

  She exulted in the fact that she had arrived on the Queen Elizabeth, and that she was staying at the Ritz, which was a much fancier address than the apartment she then rented in New York at 70 East End Avenue. It was a remarkable contrast to the poverty she and Pollock had suffered. “In the 1930s and in New York, there were no galleries, no audience and nobody buying abstract paintin
gs. We were pioneers. It was like trying to get up a mountain made of porcelain. There were just no finger holds.”22

  The reporter for the London Sunday Times mentioned that a good painting by Pollock “could fetch £100,000,” but that Pollock never got more than £1,000 for any of his paintings.23 Krasner even told how she had quickly and unsuccessfully tried to resolve the Pollock estate: “I looked around for somebody to give the collection to, but nobody would take them unless I paid for the upkeep.”24 When the reporter asked if it was not particularly tragic that Pollock was not around to reap the financial benefit of his work, she replied, “He had a high awareness of his own talent. The money would not have made much difference. It’s just the way things are. When somebody comes along and opens a door, you can’t expect everyone to see it. The next genius that comes along is not likely to be recognized in his own time.”25 She claimed that despite the money, “she would still consider giving all her husband’s paintings away, if they were properly housed.”26

  However, she reflected: “I know that having them [Pollock’s paintings] means I am very rich. I can stay at the Ritz. That’s the fun thing. But I could give it up. Caring for the paintings is a lot of worry.”27

  When a reporter asked Krasner how the exhibition happened, she responded: “I cannot say I chose to come here, as I was invited. But had I been able to choose, this is where I would have wanted to come.”28 It was a good strategy. The reporter pronounced her “an important figure in American abstract painting” and noted that “a strong independent streak runs throughout her work…. Her own talents as a painter, which are considerable as anyone who goes to the Whitechapel Gallery can see, have been overlooked.”29

  The London Times reviewer declared that “while participating in a general trend which places her in relation with other American abstract painters, Miss Krasner, it can be appreciated, has preserved an individuality of her own. A strong, decorative rhythm, very attractive in its expansion on a large scale, a sense of colour, sometimes employed with a deliberate restraint but on occasion rich and intricate and a capacity for bold design, exemplified in a number of collages, are the qualities that appear.”30 Writing in the Observer, Nigel Gosling declared, “I doubt whether anybody would guess from the paintings that they are by a woman. On the other hand, they are unmistakably American. The free, confident handling, the relaxed bigness of scale, and the driving vigour which runs through the largest composition like sap, are enviable birthmarks of her time and place.”31

  John Russell, in the Sunday Times, pronounced the show “exhilarating.”32 Sheldon Williams, writing for the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune, declared Krasner “a prime mover in the abstract-expressionist revolution that fired the first shot in the battle to put U.S. modern artists into the front line of world appreciation.”33 At least three of Krasner’s London reviewers saw the influence of Mark Tobey on her work, especially the last of her Little Images. This was an inaccurate judgment based on the journalists’ greater and earlier familiarity with Tobey’s work from his living, teaching, and exhibiting in England.34 Norbert Lynton, writing in Art International, made the boldest claim by stating that “Tobey’s influence appears to have been disastrous and dominates her work round about 1948–9.” Nevertheless, Lynton still viewed Krasner as “a considerable and enjoyable follower, synthesizer, adapter and recreator of elements that have been presented by others. This is more than I should say of a great many artists who are more widely admired than she.”35 Despite such quibbles, most of the press was very positive, and Krasner was no doubt quite pleased.

  When asked by Andrew Forge about the stylistic break from brown earth tones, which she had painted under artificial light, to the bold forms and bright colors in her recent work, Krasner admitted, “It used to frighten me, you know, work and then this break would happen and I would have to be the first to deal with the break and accept it.” She then commented that her show at Whitechapel was “the first opportunity I have to see a period of work from about ’46 and the rewarding thing to see for me is that the break isn’t quite so violent as it seems at the time it’s taking place, and in that sense I think every painter should have an opportunity to put up a ten-year period of work some place so that the painter can see what’s taking place.”36

  Included in the Whitechapel show was Right Bird Left, a canvas of 1965, painted in bright rich colors with biomorphic shapes repeated across the wide canvas. It is possible to see what could be a bird form, however abstract, on the left side of the painting. The title is noteworthy, though it is not known whether Krasner chose it herself or accepted a suggestion from one of her friends. This is the only painting in which she alludes to her difficulty in telling right from left.

  During the festivities in London, Krasner did not see David Gibbs, who had been so central to her first London visit in 1961. The very week her show was opening in London, Gibbs, at age forty-three, had divorced his wife and was in New York marrying Geraldine Stutz, forty-one, described as “a 5'6", 110-pound, perfect size 6.” She was president of Henri Bendel, the chic Manhattan shop. The wedding notice identified him as an “abstract painter.”37

  Before Gibbs’s marriage to Stutz ended in 1976, New York featured them as a couple, stating, “Her elegant and erudite English husband discarded his lucrative career as a London art dealer when he decided he wanted to paint.”38 His decision was no doubt helped by Stutz’s success, which was so great that she eventually bought Henri Bendel for a reputed eight million dollars.

  Gibbs’s actions may have affected Lee’s work over the next year, 1966. Much is discernible from the titles of her paintings then—Memory of Love, Courtship, and Siren. Siren refers to the female Sirens in Homer’s Odyssey who promise to sing of all history and nature to seafarers passing by their island. However, those who approach the Sirens die at their feet. Another title besides Siren was Gaea (“Earth”), which recalls another layered myth: primordial Earth gave virgin birth to Sky (Uranos), who promptly cohabited with his mother to produce offspring called Titans. When Sky blocked his mother, Gaea, from giving birth to monsters, she conspired with their son, Kronos, who castrated his father. The painting’s agitated biomorphic forms in bright magenta suggested the violence of the title.

  Krasner defended her nomenclature, stating, “I wouldn’t call it monstrous or underworld. You use the word monstrous as though it were relegated to a realm other than man. I would call it basic, insofar as I am drawing from sources that are basic.”39 Krasner herself named Courtship, which was most likely an allusion to David Gibbs. To Krasner, Gibbs was “a charming cad,” in the words of her friend the art dealer Nancy Schwartz.40 Yet Krasner had not lost out. Gibbs had given Krasner what she wanted—access to an international market for Pollock’s work and a chance for her to exhibit in Europe—and she remained on friendly terms with him, even inviting him and his new wife to her events.

  News of Krasner’s success prompted her old beau Igor Pantuhoff to write to her in the late spring of 1965: “I want to congratulate you for making a jerk out of Peggy…. Good for you! Igor.”41 He alluded to press reports that Krasner had prevailed against Guggenheim’s lawsuit claiming that she contractually owned more of the works in the Pollock estate from the years 1946 and 1947. Guggenheim had been forced to drop her claim for damages of more than $122,000, “retract all charges of wrongdoing on the part of the defendant,” and settle for only two small works by Pollock then said to be worth only $400.42 It has been said that Guggenheim lost her case because of a sentence she wrote in her book Confessions of an Art Addict, describing the unsold pictures in the aftermath of Pollock’s first show with Parsons: “All the rest were sent to me, according to the contract, at Venice, where I had gone to live.”43

  Krasner had won out over Guggenheim in another sense—here was Krasner’s revenge against someone who had asked Pollock, “Who is this L.K.? I didn’t come to see work by LK,” at his studio in New York. Now Krasner was having a retrospective in London, where Guggenheim h
ad opened her first art gallery.

  By January 1966, Krasner was again thinking about getting an apartment in the city and had taken a room at the Elysée Hotel.44 By the summer, she was back in Springs, where she was the most prominent of six artists featured in a show at East Hampton’s Guild Hall called “Artists of the Region.”45 The East Hampton Star wrote effusively that her Whitechapel Gallery show had been chosen by the British Arts Council to tour museums of the British Isles, then the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

  That same summer, Francis V. O’Connor, a thirty-year-old art historian, visited Krasner after sending her his recently completed doctoral dissertation on Jackson Pollock. She arranged for Alfonso Ossorio to pick up O’Connor at the East Hampton train station. O’Connor learned from Ossorio that Krasner had asked him to read the dissertation aloud to her and that the two of them had wept at learning so much about Pollock’s young life.46 The dissertation research became the basis of O’Connor’s work in the catalogue of the 1967 Pollock show at the Museum of Modern Art.

  In 1967 Krasner moved to 180 East Seventy-ninth Street, a building with a twenty-four-hour doorman. She took a spacious apartment with a large master bedroom that she used as her studio, because, as she said, “the light is magnificent.”47 She slept in the smaller bedroom and used the tiny maid’s room off the kitchen for guests. This arrangement was ideal for someone who lived alone and had wanted to have twenty-four-hour access to her studio, enabling her to go in at night if her insomnia returned. She rented secure storage for her paintings just one block away. The apartment studio, though atypical, fit her need to feel safe and complemented her use of the barn studio in Springs for the summers.