by Gail Levin
On November 13, 1973, “Lee Krasner: Large Paintings” opened in New York at the Whitney Museum but did not go on tour. While the Whitney had continued to support the realism of artists such as Edward Hopper or Andrew Wyeth during the 1950s and 1960s, it also gave shows to vanguard abstract artists, though most of them were male. Krasner’s solo show, organized by Marcia Tucker, a dynamic thirty-three-year-old curator who had been working there since 1969, included eighteen large-scale canvases dating from 1953 to 1973. It was her first one-person show in a New York museum. Most of the work was still in Krasner’s possession and was lent courtesy of Marlborough Gallery.
One major canvas in her show, Pollination, was lent by the Dallas Museum of Art. According to Donald McKinney, then president of Marlborough, Krasner did not want to sell major works by Pollock to anyone but museums, and then only reluctantly. She did so more readily when museums also acquired her work.33 In the case of the Dallas Museum, however, the museum purchased her Pollination the year after it bought Portrait and a Dream, Pollock’s major canvas of 1953.34 If this was her strategy, it seems to have worked and benefited both the museum and the artist.
Even Time magazine covered her show, and the writer A. T. Baker defended Krasner against an earlier attack from Harold Rosenberg. “Critic Harold Rosenberg once credited her with ‘almost singlehandedly forcing up the prices for contemporary American Art.’ She lives comfortably now on Manhattan’s East Side, but beyond a weakness for fur coats, she takes little interest in her latter-day wealth. What occupies her is the determination to reassert her artistic individuality.”35 Such a relic of the old journalist vice of setting woman artists apart by discussing them in the context of fashion would never have been inflicted on a male.
Baker was not wrong in asserting that Krasner wanted individuality. In Newsday art critic Amei Wallach captioned her article: “Lee Krasner, Angry Artist.” She quoted Krasner saying, “I happen to be Mrs. Jackson Pollock, and that’s a mouthful. The only thing I haven’t had against me was being black. I was a woman, Jewish, a widow, a damn good painter, thank you, and a little too independent.”36
In his review for the New York Times, Hilton Kramer acknowledged that Krasner brought her own power to the abstract expressionist style that Pollock had pioneered. Kramer noted that Krasner’s work was “a less desperate and more lyrical affirmation, and there is no suggestion of anything secondhand or merely appropriated in these pictures.”37 He did question why this show was such “a fragmentary view” of a career that “has remained far too obscure.” Barbara Rose reiterated Kramer’s point about Krasner’s career in New York, writing that Lee Krasner’s “show is impressive and coherent, but overlooks her historic importance as one of the seminal forces among the Abstract Expressionists.”38
The curator, Marcia Tucker, wrote the show’s catalogue essay, and Pamela Adler compiled the chronology, which reflected Krasner’s direct confrontational style. For 1959, we find: “November, Clement Greenberg schedules a solo exhibition for her at French & Company. Krasner cancels show because of Greenberg’s attitude.”39 The chronology also featured, for the first time, Krasner’s real birth date, a notable change from “all the other ones I’ve given in the past, on licenses and things.” Krasner reflected that she “was in analysis a long time and couldn’t handle [aging].”40
Tucker pronounced that Krasner’s paintings were “rich, authoritative, impetuous and vibrant,” and declared, “The artist’s role as participant and contributor to what is the major, seminal art movement in the country has yet to be fully documented.” She explained that “Krasner matured in an artistic milieu to which women were admitted reluctantly, if at all. Many were the wives of other artists and played a secondary role in relation to their husbands.”41
As Tucker worked with Krasner on the exhibit, she got a feeling for Krasner’s stubbornness about art. “Even though Lee Krasner had a reputation as a tough old bird, we got along well…. When I told her she couldn’t watch while I installed the work, she reacted as though I’d stabbed her with a pitchfork.”42
Tucker complained about “spending weekends alone with Lee in East Hampton, never leaving the house, while she reviewed every single aspect of her life, obsessively cataloguing the ideas that she said her husband, Jackson Pollock, had borrowed from her…. I was always hungry when we worked: either Lee couldn’t cook or she didn’t like to eat.”43
Krasner may have sensed that Tucker arrived with a bias based on having heard tales about her “reputation as a tough old bird,” for Krasner seems to have offered less hospitality to her than to others. Many friends and visitors recall eating well and even some delicious home-cooked food, like her famous clam chowder or fresh local fish. Krasner’s close friend Eugene V. Thaw, who coauthored the Pollock catalogue raisonné, recalled having lavish food and drinks at her home.44 The young photographer Mark Patiky recalled her delicious cooking. Tucker must have confused Krasner’s comments about Pollock borrowing ideas from her with statements made by another woman artist, since through her many documented interviews and encounters Krasner barely claimed to have influenced Pollock at all.
In March 1974, Miriam Schapiro’s students in the Feminist Art Program at California Institute of the Arts reached out to Krasner, requesting that she write a “Letter to a Young Woman Artist.” The letter could have been “about your experiences, or advice, or whatever feelings you might wish to express.” She responded by having Donald McKinney, Marlborough’s president, send in a quotation by her for the students’ publication:
On a questioning of my newer work being more organic and close to nature images, I think for every level you go higher, you slip down one or two levels and then come back up again. When I say slip back, I don’t mean that detrimentally. I think it is like the swing of a pendulum rather than better or back, assuming that back means going down. If you think of it in terms of time, in relation to past, present and future, and think of them all as a oneness, you will find that you swing the pendulum constantly to be with now. Part of it becomes past and the other is projection but it has got to become one to be right now. I think there is an order, but it isn’t better, better, best. I don’t believe in that kind of scaling.45
For her statement, Krasner adapted her own response to a question Cindy Nemser had posed in an interview. Her long-standing preoccupation with time, past, present, and future would become a theme of a show of her work held in 1977.
With the help of feminists, more attention was focused on Krasner’s work. Cindy Nemser interviewed Krasner and wrote several articles about her work, including one for Artforum focused on paintings from the late 1940s. The Alumni Association of Cooper Union took notice and awarded Krasner its Augustus Saint-Gaudens Medal (named for the sculptor who studied there in 1861) for “her accomplishments as a painter and her influence on the art world.” Unfortunately that influence was a thinly veiled reference to her having been Jackson Pollock’s wife. No other women from her time as a student at Cooper Union made names for themselves.
At this time, Krasner accepted shows in obscure places in order to build her reputation. In March 1974, she sent a small show of work from the years 1946 to 1972 to the Teaching Gallery of Miami-Dade Community College. The art critic of the Miami Herald, Griffin Smith, wrote that the show offered evidence that “not only is a re-evaluation of her painting in terms of its impact on other pioneer first-generation New York abstract expressionists long over due, but that Krasner herself, far from being merely ‘Jackson Pollock’s widow who paints,’ is a major artist in her own right.”46 In May, Smith’s review was reprinted in Art News magazine. The exposure was paying off.
The Miami Herald also sent a staff writer to interview Krasner for a feature story about the show. The writer asked Krasner about Ruth Kligman’s memoir, which was about to be published. “Pollock had many affairs that I knew about,” Krasner replied. It was a rare moment of candor. “That this pathetic and petty person should exploit him like this is…. Well, the explo
itation of him has been indescribable, painful for me…. The affairs irritated the hell out of me, of course they did,” she added. “This Ruth Kligman…All right, she may have slept with him, and if she wants to make a mountain out of a molehill, that’s her problem not mine.”47
The next month, Krasner was on the road again—this time in the Atwood Gallery at Beaver College in suburban Philadelphia. A show in a one-room gallery at a small college was a far cry from her dream—a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Yet she went. Her appearance, at the age of sixty-five, before undergraduate students prompted the following: “Lee Krasner is just herself: Dull gray hair in a Dutch-boy style, pale—if any—color on her full lips, unstylish brown plastic glasses, shapeless black and white polka-dot dress, flat shoes.”48 A photograph of Krasner talking to a student in front of her 1972 painting Sundial was staged in the gallery. Laurel Daunis, a freshman who just happened to pass through the gallery, remembered Krasner seeming “very sweet, personable.”49
Krasner answered questions from the audience. She described her work schedule as “a very neurotic rhythm of painting. I have a high discipline of keeping my time open to work. If I’m in a real work cycle, I’ll pretty much isolate myself and paint straight through, avoiding social engagements. After not painting for two months due to lecturing in Miami, I’m getting restless, nervous, irritable.”50
In January 1975, “Lee Krasner: Collages and Works on Paper, 1933–1974” opened at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., organized by Gene Baro, a freelance critic. It surveyed her art from a 1933 Conté crayon nude drawn from the model through recent abstract gouaches. The list of lenders to this show offers a view of those with whom the artist had been closely associated, including her therapist Dr. Leonard Siegel, her friends Edward Albee, Hans Namuth, Alfonso Ossorio, and Edward F. Dragon, and Krasner’s old flame David Gibbs and his wife, Geraldine Stutz. B. H. Friedman was represented by his company, Uris Buildings Corporation.
Baro called Krasner “an artist of natural sensations, of elemental attributes and appearances of things. Her interest isn’t to describe an experience but to reorder or reinvent it as visual feeling.”51 Paul Richard wrote for the Washington Post: “Lee Krasner is a famous artist whose fame has hurt, not helped her.” After rehearsing her life with Pollock, he concluded, “Lee Krasner is no mere imitative artist.”52 Additionally the reviewer Benjamin Forgey noted, in the Washington Star-News, that “Krasner is obviously a talented artist” but lamented not being able to consider her recent, large, oil-on-canvas paintings.53
The Corcoran show traveled to both the Pennsylvania State University Museum of Art and the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University.54 Reviewing the show in the Boston Globe, Robert Taylor began by pointing out that Krasner was “victimized by our inability to distinguish between the relevant aspects of an artist’s biography and an artist’s work; but then so was her husband, Jackson Pollock. He was a drunk, with all a drunk’s self-hatred, yet the least relevant aspect of his career was the boisterous romanticism that made him such a wretched custodian of his talent.”55 He continued, however, to note: “Of course, Brandeis’s show not only indicates that she can stand on her own, but that she is a serious and highly significant American painter.”56
In a related article, Lucille Bandes noted that Krasner was finally beginning to gain recognition “as a major figure in contemporary art,” while noting how devoted she was to her husband’s needs. “Those who knew them both well report that in addition to the necessity to earn money and to guard Pollock from the effects of his heavy drinking, she found it difficult to paint because he resented it. She herself insists that her husband encouraged her art, but she does say, ‘I would give anything to have someone giving me what I was able to give Pollock.’”57
In 1975, Krasner produced Free Space, a serigraph on paper, for a print and sculpture portfolio and a traveling exhibition project called “An American Portrait,” timed to coincide with the bicentennial. The exhibition was produced by Alex Rosenberg under the name Transworld Art Corporation, and it featured thirty-two other artists, including Alex Katz, André Masson, Romare Bearden, and Karel Appel. Rosenberg said that working with Krasner was easy because “she was a pro, an absolute pro.”58
Rosenberg found Krasner to be very friendly and “not as tough as she was made out to be.”
When he asked her, “What was a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn doing with Jackson Pollock?” she responded, “Who said I was a nice girl?”59
There was a brief statement about the project that read: “Krasner, who risked a depth of exploration of the psyche, gained by it; ‘We shall not cease from exploration’ is a T. S. Eliot line that Krasner likes to quote.”60
That summer Ruth Appelhof, then a graduate student at Syracuse University, arranged to spend time with Krasner in Springs. She drove Krasner out from the city—Lee no longer drove anywhere herself. While Appelhof served Krasner’s need not to be alone in the house, she got to conduct research for her master’s thesis. Appelhof recalled an excursion to swim at Louse Point, the bay beach after which de Kooning named one of his canvases. There, they ran into Harold and May Rosenberg, who had a cordial exchange with Krasner. Appelhof observed that Krasner “had a sexual demeanor about her. She was very aware of her body and apt to show it off.”61 The young scholar could hardly have known of those long past sensual scenes with Pantuhoff on the beach.
In July 1975, Krasner accepted an invitation to be artist in residence at Marge Schilling’s artists’ conference at Dune Hame Cottage in Watch Hill, Rhode Island. The invitation offered a pleasant setting and a chance for a change of pace.62 Marge Schilling was a New York portrait painter who worked on commissions, mainly of children. She also supported herself organizing this annual conference for women artists at her Rhode Island summer home. None of the women who attended were famous, but they were thrilled to have Krasner present.63
One of the artists who attended the conference was Majorie Michael, whose sculpture was the subject of a book, A Woman’s Journey, published the previous year.64 She found Krasner to be “a remarkable woman” and considered her an “excellent painter” the two got along well.65 Michael made many sketches and took photographs of Krasner during the week at Watch Hill so that she could start making a portrait bust. Krasner liked the project enough that she traveled that October to the suburbs north of New York City to sit for Michael in her Chappaqua, New York, studio.66 Krasner inspired Michael, who wrote in her journal in 1977, “Like Lee Krasner says, ‘It is a big wide canvas but I can reach it all with a little jump!’”67 Michael kept in touch with Krasner, visiting her in East Hampton in 1981.
Schilling hired Dyne Benner to be the cook at the conference. Benner had studied painting at the Art Students League with Morris Kantor and Theodoros Stamos, and she photographed some of the group in Rhode Island, including Krasner, who was wearing a fashionable brown strapless bra under a see-through brown tunic of Indian muslin.
That fall Krasner invited Benner to Long Island for a couple of days, but Benner found Krasner too bossy and felt uneasy, so she departed. When Krasner asked Benner, “What do you want from me?,”68 Benner was unable to respond. Others, like Ronald Stein, Clement Greenberg, or David Gibbs, usually wanted something from her.
Later that summer Krasner turned down an invitation to take part in a group show at Ashawagh Hall, just down the road from her home, where she had often been in the annual exhibitions. This time, however, the organizers, Joan Semmel and Joyce Kozloff, had just arrived on the scene and proposed a new theme for the familiar venue: “Women Artists Here and Now.”69 It’s possible that Krasner didn’t want to associate with feminist artists. She knew that Semmel and Kozloff made feminist art, as did some of the artists in the show—Miriam Schapiro, Audrey Flack, and Carolee Schneemann. And though Krasner curtly refused, Perle Fine, Elaine de Kooning, Betty Parsons, and Hedda Sterne all accepted, and none of them made feminist art. During the show on August 29, 1975,
Schneemann staged a now-legendary performance nude before the audience, in which she read from a script on a scroll that she slowly pulled out of her vagina.70 Perhaps Krasner’s posing for nude photographs on the beach had faded from memory, but she could not conceive of the new feminist performance as art.
In June 1976, Krasner left Marlborough for Pace Gallery, which was on the same street. She would be the third woman at Pace, joining Louise Nevelson and Agnes Martin. Denying that the move had anything to do with Marlborough’s notorious abuse of the Mark Rothko estate, the New York Times quoted Krasner: “All good things come to an end. It’s the longest time I’ve been with any dealer, and it’s time for a change.”71 She also removed Pollock’s work from Marlborough, perhaps to protect his estate from a fate similar to Rothko’s, although that motive was not acknowledged.
As she aged, Krasner began to take up some of the activities of her youth. She joined a political protest against the French government’s release of the suspected Palestinian terrorist Abu Daoud, who was the alleged mastermind of the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre. Krasner lent her name to an advertisement in the New York Times that announced that the petition’s signers were boycotting the opening of the government-sponsored museum le Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou (also known as le Centre Beaubourg). The campaign was organized by her dealer, Arnold Glimcher of Pace Gallery, and her fellow gallery artist Louise Nevelson. Many artists joined the list of protesters, including Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, James Rosenquist, and Lucas Samaras, as well as critics Dore Ashton, Barbara Rose, and Robert Hughes.72
At the end of the year, she told Newsday that the best thing that happened to her during 1976 was that she “started to dance again…. John Bernard Meyers [an art dealer] asked me to dance at a party. At first I refused, but then I said, ‘If you go very, very easy or very slowly,’ because I hadn’t danced for years. I used to be mad for it. Well, after a few numbers, it was he who had to be walked away.”73