by Gail Levin
When Gaby Rodgers, an interviewer for the Women Artists Newsletter, asked Krasner in 1977 if she felt the women’s movement had made errors, she responded, “Every revolution makes errors. The women’s movement is the major revolution of our time; it’s natural for them to make errors. I don’t kid myself. Women are not yet equal—we are still second-class citizens.”74 Rodgers, editorialized, “I am sure glad [Krasner] is around. Today, when the feminist movement looks for role models and young people flock to gurus for wisdom, we would do well to pay attention to the wise women amongst us, to keep a dialogue with the accomplished women of Lee Krasner’s generation. Aside from her extraordinary gifts as an artist, she can tell us what it was like out there during a lifetime of struggle and dedication.”75 Krasner told art historian Cassandra Langer in 1981 that she realized the recognition she had received recently was “entirely due to the women’s movement,” repeating her oft-spoken pronouncement: “The raising of women’s consciousness is one of the major revolutions of our time.”76
Krasner always maintained that she had benefited from the efforts of some men, especially John Graham and Jackson Pollock. But she loved to repeat the story of her teacher, Hans Hofmann, who in examining her work in class, had commented, “This is so good you would not believe it was done by a woman.” When an interviewer commented that this was “a kind of a mixed compliment,” Krasner responded, “Well, yes. You know, you get a cold shower before you’ve had a chance to receive the warmth of the compliment.”77
Krasner’s intensity could be intimidating to male artists. Bill King, who was seeing Cile Downs in the late 1970s, recalled parties at which the guests were drinking heavily, where he felt “chilled” by “a certain kind of women’s laughter” that made him think of “maenads that tore Orpheus apart. My hair stood on end. I was scared of Krasner, especially when she laughed.”78 In a time of feminist activism, such perceptions and their consequences cannot be discounted.
In January 1977, the exhibition “Women Artists: 1550–1950,” organized by feminist art historians Linda Nochlin and Ann Sutherland Harris, which had just opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, was reviewed by Robert Hughes in Time. He asserted that “an area of great consequence for art history has now been opened up” and argued that “the last section, spanning about 1900 to 1950 makes the contribution of women to modern art seem less than it actually was. Painters of large and unquestionable talent, like Lee Krasner, are not seen at their best.”79
That fall the show opened at the Brooklyn Museum. Among those who came to see it was Joan Mondale, the wife of Vice President Walter Mondale. She stayed to meet with twenty-five women artists and art historians, including three living artists who were in the show: Krasner, and the representational painters Isabel Bishop and Alice Neel.
Mondale spoke to the select audience: “The present administration is interested in discrimination against women.” She had brought along Midge Costanza, the director of the Office of Public Liaison in the White House, who read a letter she had sent to the General Services Administration, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Smithsonian Institution advising them “to initiate remedial procedures” to correct discrimination against women artists.80 The letter was written in response to a protest the previous March by the New York group called Women in the Arts against President Carter’s choice of ten artists—all male—for a series of prints connected to his inauguration. Krasner had picketed MoMA with the group five years earlier.
When asked in 1977 if she felt that women artists have an easier time being an artist than in the past, she exclaimed that “the next generation, [Grace] Hartigan, [Joan] Mitchell, [Helen] Frankenthaler had an easier time of it. Galleries existed, dealers. We didn’t have that. We had to create all this. The next generation had an open door. This has all happened in a short passage of time.”81
“But you see,” Krasner reflected, “I can rattle off right away three names of women artists without stopping to think. During other periods in history, you couldn’t think right away of women painters. That’s a little bit of progress.”82
In February 1977, in Arts Magazine, Barbara Rose published “Lee Krasner and the Origins of Abstract Expressionism,” seeking to expand the perception of Krasner to “a broader historical perspective, to acknowledge her importance not as the wife and greatest supporter of Jackson Pollock, but as a modernist painter of the first rank, whose name belongs on any list of first-generation Abstract Expressionists…. It is particularly ironic that Krasner is excluded from standard histories of the New York School such as Irving Sandler’s The Triumph of American Painting, since she and she alone had contact with all of the major forces that shaped its evolution.”83 Rose concluded, “Her ability to embody conceptual ideas within a concrete work of art exposes the vacuity of current abstraction devoid of mental content. Ignored by the canonizers of the pantheon of Abstract Expressionism, Krasner emerges as a survivor with history now on her side.”84
The insult of being omitted from standard histories of the New York School only strengthened Krasner’s determination. “‘Survivor,’ she called herself. ‘Yes, I think that’s what counts in the end. If you can live long enough…. I say, Betty Friedan—great. But I didn’t need The Feminine Mystique to get me off the ground…. Let me say the women’s revolution is the only real revolution of our time,’” proclaimed Krasner to Jerry Tallmer, a genial male reporter from the New York Post.85
Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, had helped to ignite a renewed interest in feminism that came to be called the “second wave,” taking up where the suffrage campaigns of the previous century had left off. Friedan had brought attention to the limited career prospects for women and to the myth that the suburban housewife had found fulfillment.86 But Krasner never envisioned being a housewife or accepted the restraint society imposed on women.
The art critic David Bourdon noted that Krasner said, “As a painter, I never thought of myself as anything but LEE KRASNER,” with a certain satisfaction. “I’m always going to be Mrs. Jackson Pollock—that’s a matter of fact—but I’ve never used the name Pollock in connection with my work. I painted before Pollock, during Pollock, after Pollock.” Bourdon found Krasner “unpretentious” and “uncommonly openminded…. Krasner belongs chronologically and contextually to the Abstract Expressionist generation—and is usually ignored in annals of the New York School. Some contemporary critics, mainly women, now assert that Krasner is ‘a modernist painter of the first rank’ whose achievement is on a par with other ‘first generation’ Abstract Expressionists. I agree that Krasner, at her best, is a first-rate painter, but I question whether she needs to be elevated to this particular pantheon,” argued Bourdon.87 He tried to support this position by claiming that Krasner was “an atypical modernist insofar as she is not eager to relinquish the past. She is by no means a reductive artist who steadily eliminates everything inessential. To the contrary, she is a synthesizer.”88
Her collages made with cut fragments of charcoal drawings from her Hofmann School days in the late 1930s were then on view in a solo show at Pace Gallery. “She audaciously recycles her own past to concoct new works that seemingly summarize modern art from Cubism to Abstract Expressionism,” concluded Bourdon.89 Regardless of Bourdon’s categorizations, the fact that Krasner’s aesthetic had begun to reach beyond her earlier abstract expressionist work anticipated the definition of her later work as part of postmodernism.90
The title of Krasner’s 1977 show at Pace was “11 Ways to Use the Words ‘To See.’” She had created a series of collages the year before from her old figure drawings and the rubbed-off ghost images that the charcoal sketches made while forgotten in storage. Krasner had only discovered the portfolios of her old drawings during a visit from Bryan Robertson years after he organized her 1965 Whitechapel show. He spotted the portfolios in the barn and inquired what was in them. He “pulled them out and saw there was no fixative on them, so the charcoal had blurred and even
made some mirror images. He said, ‘Get them into New York and get fixative on them.’ I did that, and brought them to this apartment. The first time I’d looked at them in almost 30 years.”91 She went through her old drawings and picked out some to be framed, while setting others aside to be discarded.
The rejected drawings languished in her New York studio, only to be rediscovered in 1975, when they inspired her to collage once again. “At first I did have some nostalgia about the drawings,” she reflected. “But then I began to look at them as if they weren’t done by me—simply pieces of material for making new work. Of course I had shaky moments after I’d started—I thought, what the hell’s happening here? What am I doing? Is it valid? Whenever work breaks or changes I go through that process. But the idea that I’d done the drawings 30 years ago and could use them now, excites me.”92
Krasner compared her use of her own earlier work to her collages of the 1950s. The difference between the two sets of work was that with the first set, she had torn up her canvases. Now she cut her early drawings with scissors: “I wanted precise incision, no torn edges.”93 When asked if she would call the new collaged works “an extension of cubism,” she replied, “Oh no. God no. It’s like taking Cubism and carrying it to a totally new dimension. I think it’s called Conceptualism. I don’t call it that, but I think they do. I hate those titles.”94 What she was referring to was an aesthetic, propounded by artists like Sol LeWitt: “In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”95
One of the visitors to the Pace show that winter was the young artist Deborah Kass, who ran into Krasner going in the building on West Fifty-seventh Street. Kass was only twenty-four and she thought Krasner “looked exactly like Maureen Stapleton in Bye Bye Birdie,” since she was wearing a long fur coat, sensible, perhaps orthopedic, shoes, and was carrying shopping bags from Bergdorf’s in each hand. Kass recalled that Krasner “looked just as formidable as one would imagine she would, but I gathered my wits and stepped into the elevator with her. As the doors opened and we both stepped out I screwed up my courage and asked, ‘This is your show, isn’t it?’
“And she looked me up and down and said, ‘Are you a painter?’
“‘Am I leaking?’ I replied. ‘Yes, I love your work. You are a hero.’ I couldn’t believe I spoke to Lee Krasner. In that moment I so loved New York and I loved my life.”96
Krasner disappeared into the office, and Kass spent time looking at Krasner’s work. Afterward Krasner came out and gave her own show “a good long look.” Kass, who once again followed Krasner into the elevator, asked if she could walk with her a bit. Kass recalled that she and Krasner “discussed her new work literally cut from the old, which brought up time and history, women and painting, Pollock, New York. I was in heaven. At one point looking south there was a reflection in a high-rise glass building of other buildings and glass that looked exactly like her collages. Pointing to the reflections in the gridded glass, I said, ‘Look at that! That’s amazing!’ I didn’t have to say why it was so obvious.
“‘It is!’ said she as we both stood still looking at the Krasner in the sky.”
Kass was only one of many young artists and critics who flocked to Krasner’s show. The press also took notice. The New York Times critic Hilton Kramer called Krasner’s show at Pace “a cold-blooded act of self-criticism that is also a bizarre form of artistic self-cannibalization.” He saw the new works as “late Matisse-type pictures of a sort that she has excelled at in recent years. As the drawings themselves owe much to Picasso, this ‘new work’ puts Miss Krasner in the position of conducting a kind of visual dialogue between the two great masters of the School of Paris.”97 He also saw the work as a commentary on the relationship of the “young, aspiring artist Miss Krasner then was to the mature, more knowledgeable artist she is now.”98
Another critic, for the SoHo Weekly News, concluded, “These are heroic paintings. The artist is working through her heritage to establish an identity which has up to now been eclipsed by Pollock’s legend. And it has a decidedly feminist bent: she is working ‘through the flower.’”99 In referring to Krasner’s forms as “like those petals made with a compass,” the critic William Zimmer, alluded to the feminist artist Judy Chicago’s 1975 memoir, Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist, and to her series of paintings by that name. Chicago described these as “an image of a cunt/flower/formal structure, which is opening up on to a vista of blue sky and open space.”100 Chicago’s metaphor appeared in The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, who wrote, “We speak of ‘taking’ a girl’s virginity, her flower, or ‘breaking’ her maidenhead…as an abrupt rupture with the past.”101 With this body of work, Krasner had not only broken out from Pollock’s shadow, but she had also reclaimed her independent identity as an artist from the years before she and Pollock became a couple.
The Women in the Arts Foundation published a newsletter in which the artist Jenny Tango clearly agreed with Zimmer. “I find this work very much a feminist work. It is biographical and uses oneself out of which to create the work. It has all the strength and passion usually attributed to women.” Tango went on to argue perceptively that “the kinetic quality of action painting animates under the surface but there is no macho, no self-destruct, no philosophizing—only the movement of relationships and the daring in restructuring these relationships. Collage, legitimized by feminist art, made it possible for Krasner to piece herself together in an exciting way.”102 Krasner had exhibited a body of collages at the Stable Gallery in 1955, long before the existence of feminist art, but collage became popular among feminist artists during the 1970s, in part because of its relationship to traditional women’s crafts such as quilts and Victorian collages made out of memorabilia. Miriam Schapiro even dubbed her feminist collage “femmage,” hoping to distinguish them from the great men who made collages such as Picasso and Kurt Schwitters.
The collaged works at Pace generated an enormous amount of positive press. It also gave Krasner a chance to protest repeatedly the relative lack of attention that American museums paid to her work: “But do you realize,” she asked Amei Wallach, then the Newsday critic, who described Krasner’s “arms flying as she slouched in a velvet chair in her Manhattan apartment,” “to date as you are writing this piece, no museum in New York, where I have been born and bred and am part of history—where I fought the battle—no museum has given me a retrospective. When I think of it I go into a rage!”103 Five days later, Grace Glueck reported Krasner made the same rant to the New York Times: “Do you realize I’ve never had a retrospective here in the city where I was born, studied, and helped produce a revolution in art? But at least now they compare my work with Matisse’s rather than Pollock’s. That feels more objective. I’ve never been married to Matisse.”104
IN 1977 I WAS WORKING AS A CURATOR AT THE WHITNEY AND WAS collaborating with Robert Hobbs from the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell on a show to be called “Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years.” I had been interested in the abstract work on paper that Krasner produced under Matisse’s influence while she was in Hans Hofmann’s class during the late 1930s. That summer Hobbs and I went to East Hampton to meet with Krasner, whom I had first met and interviewed in 1971 as a graduate student. For the forthcoming show, I was determined to include some of Krasner’s abstract works on paper from her days at the Hofmann School, as well as some of her Little Image paintings from the 1940s. Krasner was puzzled that I wanted to include what she considered “student work.”
“Trust me,” I answered. “They are important. I want to show that you were painting abstractly before you were with Pollock.”105
While we were visiting Krasner at her home, Barbara Rose phoned about filming a documentary on Krasner. Rose asked us to stay over another day to interview Krasner on
camera, which we did.
Rose’s film Lee Krasner: The Long View, a half-hour documentary, was screened during the exhibition at the Whitney Museum from November 14 through December 2, 1978.106 Asked what she thought of the film, Krasner admitted, “I’m pleased with it,” then she added, “But if I did it again, I think I’d gripe a lot more.”107 In the film, the viewer sees Krasner in her studio, at home in Springs, and at her posh New York hairdresser, Kenneth. She blames the arrival of the Surrealists in New York as the start of when women in the arts were degraded.
Commenting on the film in Women Artists News, Diana Morris wrote, “She is shown unflatteringly getting a haircut at Kenneth’s, the salon of the beautiful people; she looks awful. When Rose asks her, rather tactlessly, why she cares how she looks, Krasner laughs: ‘Why do I care? Well, I am a member of civilized society, even if I do make pictures!’ No one who wants to become an art world myth would allow herself to be filmed with her hair in rollers, especially at Kenneth’s.”108
In an interview with Barbaralee Diamonstein in 1977, Krasner remarked, “The show that is being worked on now, which I think will be enormously interesting, is being done by Cornell and the Whitney, and it’s called ‘Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years,’ and it ought to be damn interesting.”109 Krasner, who understood that she was finally being considered with male colleagues of her generation, had a hunch this show would be significant for her career.
That hunch was right. The show opened to praise, especially for Krasner, who was finally recognized as a pioneer and first-generation abstract expressionist. Barbara Cavaliere wrote that “the recent ‘Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years’ was the first time a number of Krasner’s Little Image series of 1945–50 were seen in relationship with her peers’ work of the period. They are among her most powerful works, the achievements of a mature artist who had internalized the ideas behind Abstract Expressionism.”110 Hilton Kramer praised Krasner in the New York Times, noting the revision of the early history of Abstract Expressionism: “The exhibition, called ‘Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years,’ which opened last fall, was one of the first surveys of the subject to accord her an honored place in its history.”111