by Gail Levin
Impressed by Krasner’s strong beliefs and good sense of humor, John Post Lee returned to Vassar at the end of the summer and wrote his senior thesis on Krasner’s collages, Eleven Ways to Use the Words to See.36
Among Krasner’s friends that she saw frequently in this period were the playwright Edward Albee, Sanford Friedman, and Richard Howard. Albee, who got along well with Krasner, surmised that, like her gay male friends, she considered herself “an outsider.” “She had a good anger. I admired it. She was a survivor.”37 He also admired her honesty but was puzzled at her dislike of Louise Nevelson, a close friend of his. Because both women came from poor Jewish immigrant families and had to struggle as women artists, Albee believed they were fighting similar battles. It’s more likely that Krasner was not thrilled to play the number two spot in the heart of Arnold Glimcher, their shared art dealer, who built his career promoting Nevelson’s work.
In late 1981, Krasner left Glimcher’s Pace Gallery, where she had been since 1977. The departure from Pace was described as “amicable” by both sides. Krasner commented, “We never had a fight. We are still friends. But I remember the dealer Pierre Matisse saying, ‘It’s the artists who’ve made my gallery.’ Arne, on the other hand, feels his gallery made his artists, and this is a serious disturbance. I wasn’t comfortable there.”38
On the other side, Glimcher maintained, “She wants a closer connection with her dealer, and I think she has made the right decision, although she certainly had the greatest success of her life in my gallery. I think she’s a wonderful artist, and I wish her the best.”39
In August 1981, a journalist reported that Krasner’s works commanded “as much as $30,000 and are in the collections” of major museums, including the Guggenheim Museum, the National Gallery, London’s Tate Gallery, and the Cologne Museum. If the journalist’s statements are true, then a sale to the Tate Gallery must already have been in the works when Krasner left Pace.40 In fact the Tate’s purchase of Krasner’s Gothic Landscape of 1961 was not announced in the press until March 1982. At that time, Tim Hilton, in the Observer in London, identified Krasner as “Jackson Pollock’s widow, long overshadowed and now in the odd position of being famous for being neglected,” while praising the new acquisition as “a marvelous picture.” He insisted, “This is better painting than the Gottliebs that hang next to it. I dare say that it’s better painting than the new Barnett Newman.”41 These words must have been music to Krasner’s ears. Glimcher sent her the clipping, which he inscribed, “Dear Lee—Thought that you’d like to have this—Arne.” Given Glimcher’s successes in placing Krasner’s pictures, it’s very possible that the unspoken point of difference between the dealer and the artist might have revolved around his desire to gain access to the estate of Jackson Pollock, which Krasner continued to hold close.
From the Pace Gallery, Krasner moved to the Robert Miller Gallery, then founded five years earlier. She was fond of Miller and his wife, Betsy, with whom Lee shared a birthday. Before they married in 1964, the Millers had both studied art at Rutgers, where they met Krasner’s nephew Ronald Stein, then teaching there. He had introduced them to Krasner and, as a result, Bob had become her studio assistant in 1963.42 Soon he moved on to work for the New York dealer André Emmerich during the same period that Pollock’s nephew Jason McCoy also worked there. Krasner’s long and affectionate association with Miller helps to explain her departure from Pace.
Nathan Kernan, who was then a young man working at the Robert Miller Gallery, recalls that he and his colleague John Cheim “loved especially the rather terrifying way she once said, in speaking of her annoyance with her former dealer, ‘I made it cry-stal clear to him…!’ She always pronounced the word collage with the accent on the first syllable, ‘COLL-age’ and ‘retrospective’ became, with perhaps an undertone of irony, ‘The RET-ro-spect.’” Kernan remembers that when they called Krasner from the gallery, “she would answer the phone suspiciously, ‘What’s up?’ immediately on alert for a problem and ready to pounce on any ambiguity or inanity we might have the misfortune to utter. We lived in terror of having something made ‘crystal clear’ to us.”43
Her first show there took place in October 1982 and was called “Lee Krasner: Paintings from the Late Fifties.” Grace Glueck described her work on view as “high-key abstractions that derive from figuration,” which “reinforces our astonishment that recognition was so late in coming to an artist of such gifts.”44
For Krasner’s efforts on behalf of Pollock’s art, she was named Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. Jack Lang, the French minister of culture, presented the award to her on January 11, 1982, just before the opening of a major Pollock retrospective at the Musée national d’art moderne at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Krasner had made the show possible with her loans to the museum. She enjoyed receiving the award and getting attention at the opening, but she fell and injured her arm. The accident prevented her from making a planned visit to the caves of Lascaux.45 She had long been interested in prehistoric art, so it was quite a disappointment to forgo the visit. Krasner returned alone to New York, traveling on RMS Queen Elizabeth 2 (known as the QE2) from Southampton.
After Krasner’s return, the photographer Ann Chwatsky got an assignment to photograph her as one of five Hamptons artists for Long Island Magazine. She arranged for the shoot to take place in midmorning at Krasner’s apartment on East Seventy-ninth Street. When she arrived, Krasner was dressed in a “navy house smock,” looking “like the wrath of God.” When Chwatsky told Krasner that she wanted her to look as strong as her paintings, Krasner, who was then suffering from her arthritis, commented how hard it was for her to get ready without any help. Chwatsky had brought along makeup, which she applied, and a long magenta shawl, which she draped around the ailing artist for the shoot. The result was pleasing to both the photographer and her subject.
For several of Chwatsky’s shots, she posed Krasner in front of her latest painting, which she had made for “Poets and Artists,” an invitational show of forty-two artist-poet collaborations scheduled for Guild Hall that July. Although some of the artists and poets were paired by the show’s organizers, Krasner had teamed up with poet Howard Moss, whom she knew well through their mutual friend, Edward Albee.46 The idea for the show had come from the painter Jimmy Ernst, Krasner’s friend since the days when he worked for Peggy Guggenheim at Art of This Century. Taking the title of Moss’s poem “Morning Glory” as the title of her painting, Krasner inscribed in the upper-left-hand corner of her abstract canvas “How blue is blue,” the opening words of the poem.
That same summer Krasner called Chwatsky and invited her for lunch in the Springs house. Chwatsky sensed Krasner’s loneliness and invited her to go to a movie. They saw Diner, a 1982 film about the 1960s that Krasner loved. While they stood in line, many people recognized Krasner. Chwatsky observed that Krasner, who seemed aged and tired, was cranky as a result of dealing with her illness but extremely nice. Krasner spoke not about Pollock but of her concerns about conserving his paintings.47
Krasner’s nephew Ronald Stein was dismayed by her choices of medical treatment: “Lee was not into medical doctors…. If she had been properly dealt with medically, she wouldn’t later have refused to take cortisone for her arthritis because it might be bad for her health; yet here was a woman dying because she couldn’t move. And her colitis—that’s in the family and probably psychosomatic, only they would go to doctors who prescribe corrective medication and it would disappear. But Lee? She would go to witch doctors.”48
Krasner definitely preferred alternative medicine. Her last assistant, Darby Cardonsky, remembers that she went for acupuncture treatments.49 I recall that she wore copper bracelets, which she said were supposed “to help her arthritis.” Wearing copper for arthritis pain relief is an old folk remedy, based on the belief that copper is absorbed by the skin to relieve joint pain. The idea remains controversial. Out of desperation to find cures, Krasner had long
turned to ideas from alternative and folk medicine, including some that were definite dead ends.
In August a frail Krasner joined John Little at Guild Hall, which held a retrospective of his work. Krasner held on to his arm as they posed for a photograph before one of his colorful abstract canvases—two old friends who once danced together to boogie-woogie music in the days when they met Mondrian more than forty years earlier.50
Almost a year later, in June 1983, Krasner received a letter from Steven W. Naifeh requesting an interview for a book he said he was writing on the history of the art world from the 1940s to the 1960s.51 This book was eventually published as a biography of Jackson Pollock, coauthored by Naifeh and Gregory White Smith. Krasner’s assistant, Darby Cardonsky, replied to the letter in June, suggesting that Naifeh contact her after the first of July, when Krasner expected to be in East Hampton. A bit earlier Krasner made appointments to be interviewed by Deborah Solomon, the author of a biography of Pollock, which appeared two years earlier than Naifeh and Smith’s, but she canceled them, the last time for February 28, 1984.52 Krasner was still bristling over Friedman’s biography of Pollock and was wary of biographers and, indeed, of all who wrote about her and Pollock, especially people she did not know well. Barbara Rose and Gene Thaw both recall how Krasner was at this time completely focused on her first American retrospective, even while daunted by her failing health.53
“During Lee’s last summer,” Carol Braider recounted, “when I was sort of her sitter, she was consumed by rage. She was afraid that if she couldn’t find a way to take out her hate on the world, she wouldn’t be able to go on painting or even exist. Those weeks were a nightmare. It was as if rage were all she had. Of a Bill de Kooning work going for $2 million, Lee said, ‘If Bill thinks that’s something, wait until he hears the latest in Jackson’s sales.’”54
Krasner was preoccupied with Barbara Rose’s text in the catalogue for the retrospective. The show was to open at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston on October 27, 1983, Krasner’s seventy-fifth birthday. Krasner enlisted Terry Netter to come out and help her edit it. He spent a week in the Springs house reading every word aloud to her. She would stop him and call Rose to ask for changes, which she could trust that Rose would make. Netter remarked, “Lee loved to think. She liked intellectuals. She was very bright. I don’t think that she read very much.”55 He suspected she was dyslexic.
As the opening neared, the press’s interest grew. Krasner told Michael Kernan at the Washington Post that she wished that museums would give artists retrospectives “every ten years or so, for the artists’ sake, so they can see the cycle of their own work…. Really, it shouldn’t be a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”56 Still, she said she would miss having her paintings around—“It’ll be two years before I get them back.”57
Before the show opened, Krasner admitted that she hadn’t let Rose see all of her work. She had kept one finished painting that Rose would have wanted—just to hang it on her wall. “I wanted to keep the one I just finished because I need to have my work to look at. Even when I’m just looking; I am working.”58 This was probably her Untitled collage on canvas (dated 1984 in the catalogue raisonné, but actually finished in 1983) before which she would pose in December 1983 for a photograph by Bernard Gotfryd.59
Krasner flew to Houston accompanied by Bob Miller and John Cheim and Nathan Kernan, who worked for the gallery. She was now in a wheelchair and had to spend much of the time in her room at the Warwick Hotel across the street from the museum. Among the dignitaries there to greet her was her friend James Mollison, director of the Australian National Gallery, who became notorious in 1973 for paying $2 million for Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles, setting a new record price not only for Pollock but also for American painting. The money went not to Krasner but to the New York businessman and art collector Ben Heller, who had paid only $32,000 in 1956, when he had purchased the large 1952 painting once sold by Sidney Janis for only $6,000.60 When Krasner had told Janis that Pollock’s work was underpriced, she was correct. Now she could take satisfaction in what she had achieved in creating an international market for Pollock’s art. In 1978, Mollison purchased for his museum Krasner’s Cool White, a major canvas from 1959, once owned by David Gibbs, and then he followed that by acquiring several of her works on paper.
The large installation in Houston featured 152 paintings and drawings, including a biographical section, “Lee Krasner: The Education of an American Artist,” emphasizing the artist’s thorough training in the use of line. The exhibition was reduced in size in the show’s subsequent venues at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the MoMA in New York.
Krasner was delighted by the Houston opening. “The show looks terrific! Of course, I didn’t exactly have a chance to take a leisurely look [during the opening]; people were wishing me happy birthday and talking to me, but I found it a bit overwhelming—overpowering.”61 Terry Netter recalls that Krasner entertained a few close friends in her hotel suite, among them “Buddha” Eames from Krasner’s time at the Hofmann School. Krasner returned to look at the show again without the crowds.
In Time, the critic Robert Hughes, who attended the opening of the show in Houston, wrote that Krasner was a major American artist and wondered aloud what kept her from earlier recognition. He provided his audience with an answer that also gave voice to some of Krasner’s frustrations: “Women artists through the ’40s and into the ’50s in New York City were the victims of a sort of cultural apartheid, and the ruling assumptions about the inherent weakness, derivativeness and silly femininity of women painters were almost unbelievably phallocentric…. Add this to Krasner’s prickly contempt for diplomacy with critics, and one can see why for most of her life her work was scanted as ‘minor,’ an appendage to Pollock’s.”62
Hughes thought that “her dislike of groups always stopped her from presenting herself as a ‘feminist’ artist. Hence by the ’70s there was no lack of denigrators on both sides of the sex war tacitly writing her off as an art widow first, a painter second.”63 Though a feminist artist such as Judy Chicago scorned Krasner as “male identified,” Krasner’s ambivalence about feminist art is much more complicated than just not liking groups.64 Yes, she may have identified herself in relation to males, but her devotion to a man like Pollock stemmed not from an aversion to feminist groups, but rather from her love and admiration for him. Her choices were also affected by the cultural matrix of her immigrant childhood. She saw how women were treated in the world, and risked her own future by hitching onto the coattails of a man whom she saw as a genius and whom she believed she could nurture to success.
Hughes praised Krasner’s artistic “formal instinct,” noting that “she wanted to combine Picassoan drawing, gestural and probing, with Matissean color…. Is there a less ‘feminine’ woman artist of her generation? Probably not. Even Krasner’s favorite pink, a domineering fuchsia that raps hotly on the eyeball at 50 paces, is aggressive, confrontational…her line evokes eros…. This is an intensely moving exhibition, and it will suggest to all but the most doctrinaire how many revisions of postwar American art history are still waiting to be made.”65
In reviewing the retrospective for Artweek, Susie Kalil repeated Rose’s argument and supported Hughes’s criticism: “Of all the abstract expressionists, only Krasner had contact with virtually every major force that shaped its evolution…. Why hasn’t Krasner been accorded her due as a painter? The inequity can be directly attributed to the sexist attitudes rampant among critics and artists alike during the 1940s and 1950s. Krasner matured in an artistic environment to which few women, if any, were admitted.”66
Los Angeles Times critic William Wilson, who had rejected the feminist art movement during the 1970s, wrote that Krasner “may not be quite the peer of the great Action Painting innovators Pollock and de Kooning, but she certainly can be thought of in the same breath with Hans Hofmann, Robert Motherwell, and Franz Kline. She is arguably a better painter than such lesser lights as Adolph Gottlieb or W
illiam Baziotes.”67 At the time he wrote, this was a radical statement.
In San Francisco, Thomas Albright, a local newspaper critic beloved in the Bay Area for his promotion of local artists, reviewed Krasner’s traveling retrospective. He accused Rose of writing the catalogue essay in a “relentlessly uncritical, Horatio Alger style that has become the norm for this generally lamentable literary genre.”68 He also questioned “whether this hard-won reputation is wholly justified by the work itself, or whether it is more a product of feminist advocacy and/or the insatiable craving of art historians for disinterring new ‘masters’ from the Potters’ Field of the past.”69
Other critics also took issue with Rose. A Houston-based husband-and-wife team of artists, Ed Hill and Suzanne Bloom, argued in Artforum: “We should make no mistake in our reading of this innocent art play: Rose was writing history here, or, rather, correcting it to her image. Krasner would appear to have been the beneficiary of Rose’s historicism, but in truth she may have been simply the occasion for it. As a curator Rose has no light touch. She overdraws her case.”70
In Art in America, Marcia Vetrocq made an argument similar to the one made by the Blooms. Vetrocq claimed that Rose was preoccupied “with most art historians’ omission of Krasner from the first generation of Abstract Expressionism…as it has come to be petrified in art historical accounts…. [Krasner] will probably never be judged an innovator of the magnitude to satisfy a [Irving] Sandler or a [Henry] Geldzahler.”71 Vetrocq was correct that Sandler’s mind was too closed to be able to see Krasner as one of the founding members of abstract expressionism, which would have forced him to revise his own narrative.72
Though Vetrocq praised Krasner’s work and acknowledged that it had been “so little shown or reproduced,” she also asserted, “Krasner need not be proved the first or the only or the earliest in anything for her work to reward our attention and assume a position of dignity and significance in the history of postwar art. She has earned it.”73