by Gail Levin
In her own defense, Krasner reiterated in 1984, “It’s quite clear that I didn’t fit in, although I never felt I didn’t. I was not accepted, let me put it that way…. With relation to the group, if you are going to call them a group, there was not room for a woman.”74
Krasner returned from Houston exhausted but elated at the acclaim. Though she had been in a wheelchair, she had nonetheless spent hours looking at her works on view.75 She was now crippled by rheumatoid arthritis—she could barely stand, and it was impossible for her to walk. She “took to bed” and was too weak to return to painting. Darby Cardonsky, her assistant, would read her reviews to her.
Krasner was also suffering discomfort from intestinal problems such as diverticulitis (weak spots in the colon wall) and what may have been the complications of Crohn’s disease.76 Krasner had no choice but to write to Henry Hopkins, the director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, that “health concerns” would not allow her to make the trip to see her retrospective installed there.77
Edward Albee admired Lee’s strength and recalled that she was in so much pain from arthritis that she remained confined to New York City, where she was taking gold injections.78 They were supposed to relieve joint pain and stiffness, reduce swelling and bone damage, and lower the chance of joint deformity and disability. But the injections didn’t help Krasner.
Assigned by Newsweek to go and photograph Krasner at her New York apartment, Bernard Gotfryd arrived to find that the ailing artist had not even gotten out of bed yet. He offered to return another time, but, not wanting to postpone the shoot, she asked him to wait for her to get ready. She wanted to know whom else he had photographed and he replied, “The list is so long, I’ll be here forever.”
“Then you photographed a lot of painters?” Krasner wanted reassurance. “Georgia O’Keeffe, Salvador Dalí, Andy Warhol, Barnett Newman,” he replied. When she responded to Barnett Newman’s name, he told her a story of taking Newman’s photograph during the installation of his show at the Guggenheim in the spring of 1966. Naturally the installation took place on a day when the museum was closed to visitors. Newman had gone downstairs to use the men’s room and not returned, so after a while Gotfryd went in search of him, finding the artist locked in the restroom, banging on the door, trying to summon someone to rescue him. Newman screamed, “What do they want me to do, have a heart attack?” Gotfryd forced the door open, got Newman out, but the artist was “in a rage,” even as he posed for the rest of the photographs. Krasner loved hearing the story about her old friend, who, in fact, had died of a heart attack in 1970, and, even in her pain, she smiled for Gotfryd and posed in front of her 1983 collage.79
Krasner also received a positive review in Newsweek from Mark Stevens, a future biographer of Willem de Kooning, who asserted, “Krasner fully deserves to be counted as one of the handful of important abstract expressionists.”80 Gotfryd’s photograph accompanied the review.
Krasner finished this collage and reworked a painting on New Year’s Eve 1983, even though she was suffering unbearable pain.81 By March she had lost a lot of weight, and her health had deteriorated to the extent that she began going to New York Hospital for treatment.82 Deborah Solomon, then writing a biography of Pollock, spoke to her briefly by phone as Krasner lay in her hospital bed on March 20, 1984, but by then Krasner was in no condition to give an interview. She was far too weak and too thin. Barbara Rose believes that Krasner was in so much pain that she stopped eating.
Krasner nonetheless agreed to be present in order to accept an honorary doctor of fine arts degree from the State University of New York at Stony Brook on May 20, 1984. John H. Marburger, the university’s president, wrote to her: “I am sorry to hear from Terry Netter that your arthritis is giving you worse trouble.”
Unfortunately Krasner was too ill to attend the ceremony at Stony Brook. Special permission was obtained to award the degree to her in absentia. This was the only honorary degree she ever received. The distractions of her failing health and her retrospective meant she worked very little during the last year: “I’m just poking along these days. Not working at full intensity,” she told a visiting critic.83 She knew she would not be able to make it to the Springs studio that summer.
LEE KRASNER DIED UNEXPECTEDLY AT THE AGE OF SEVENTY-FIVE ON June 19, 1984, at New York Hospital in Manhattan. She had been taken there for a transfusion in an effort to stop her weight loss, which had reduced her to ninety-four pounds. She had not survived long enough to see her long-anticipated retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, though she was at least assured that it was taking place.
Krasner was survived by two of her sisters, Esther Gersing and Ruth Stein. Because she left no instructions, the law designated that Krasner’s next of kin was Ruth Stein. She arranged for a funeral that took place on June 25 in Sag Harbor, conducted by Rabbi David Greenberg. Afterward she was buried in Green River Cemetery in Springs, next to Jackson Pollock’s grave. Gene Thaw is sure Krasner would have abhorred the Orthodox Jewish rites.84
Patsy Southgate recalled, “When I saw her three weeks earlier she was still being wheeled to the park, but she was very weak—and very low. She gave me the feeling of wanting to go, so it’s good that she did. But she wouldn’t have thought the funeral was so great—you can’t get the art world to come to Sag Harbor on a Monday.”85
Among the others who did come were Krasner’s nephews Ronald Stein and Jason McCoy and his wife, Diana Burroughs, and Krasner’s niece Rusty Glickman Kanokogi. At the service, Gene and Clare Thaw sat together with Gerald Dickler, Krasner’s longtime attorney, of whom she was quite fond. Among her Long Island friends were Jim and Charlotte Brooks, Ibram and Ernestine Lassaw, John and Josephine Little, Alfonso Ossorio and Ted Dragon, Terence and Therese Netter, Jeffrey Potter, the artist Esteban Vicente and his wife, Harriet, and Enez Whipple, the director of Guild Hall.
Krasner’s obituary in the New York Times stated, “In the last decade, Miss Krasner has begun to get her due, in part because of the effects of the women’s movement.”86 Barbara Rose offered words, saying, “Like Mondrian, she was a beacon of integrity. She had an absolute inability to compromise with anything.”
In accordance with Jewish tradition, Krasner’s gravestone was unveiled a year after her death, on June 23, 1985. Krasner’s grave is marked by a small stone that sits in front of Pollock’s larger stone. Many have observed that the stone appears to be located at Jackson Pollock’s feet and that his much larger stone grave marker overshadows hers. Others, however, have insisted that the smaller gravestone was what Krasner wanted: a place by Pollock’s side, but not to overshadow the man who she believed was the greater artist.
Her friend Ted Dragon later opined that Ronald Stein was responsible for the awkward arrangement in the cemetery and that he did it because he was angry at his aunt’s will. Krasner left Stein only $20,000, while she left several other family members, including her niece Rusty Kanokogi and her nephews Jason McCoy and Seymour Glickman, twice that sum. She appears to have based her decision on what she thought each relative needed at the time she signed her will in January 1979. She reserved most of her $10 million estate to fund the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.87
By leaving most of her fortune to endow the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, whose mission was to support “needy and worthy” artists, Krasner embraced the Jewish concept of Tikuun Olam, going out to repair the world. Terry Netter also believed that Krasner’s decision was a part of “the Judaic tradition of anonymous philanthropy,” because people can’t thank you personally when you’re dead. She had not forgotten the many years when she struggled to survive and the many artists who had never found adequate support. Among the needy artists that she helped after she had money was Igor Pantuhoff, her first love, who had fallen on hard times. He had died in 1972.
Krasner had been concerned about what would happen to the treasured home and studio, where she and Pollock had made art history. For help, she had turned to Netter, who had been the founding dire
ctor of the Fine Art Center at the State University of New York at Stony Brook since 1979. Because she left the bulk of her estate to support artists in need, Krasner’s will stated that her home should become a museum only if an appropriate institution could be found to run the Springs house.
Netter spoke with John Marburger, the university’s president and a distinguished scientist, who agreed to run the house as a museum and study center. The house is now open as a museum, the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center. It is designated by the secretary of the interior as a National Historic Landmark because it has exceptional value or quality in illustrating or interpreting the heritage of the United States. Visitors can tour the house and the studio in which both Pollock and Krasner worked.
In August 1982, Lee Krasner joined John Little at Guild Hall in East Hampton, which held a retrospective of his work, and they posed before one of his colorful abstract canvases. Krasner and Little were two old friends who once danced together to boogie-woogie music forty years earlier, in the days when they were acquainted with Piet Mondrian. Photograph by Rameshwar Das, courtesy of the East Hampton Star.
Bill Lieberman, a former curator at MoMA and then at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said that Krasner “painted in the modern idiom when Jackson was still in the regional style…. She should be remembered for the strength of her decorative sense and as an excellent draftsman.”88 Krasner’s friend Eugene Thaw, who coauthored and helped to fund the definitive catalogue of Jackson Pollock’s art, commented, “We are coming to the end of an era and she was a significant part of it. But because she was a woman and because she was overshadowed by Pollock, her due was late in coming.”89
A memorial service, arranged by Bill Lieberman, was held in the Medieval Sculpture Court at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on September 17, 1984. Among those who spoke were writer Susan Sontag, the art critic Robert Hughes, Terence Netter, and Edward Albee. Albee remarked that Krasner always “demanded the quality she gave. She looked you straight in the eye, and you dared not flinch.”90 Sontag praised Krasner’s art and her “talent for friendship, her genuine vitality and openness to experience.”91
Netter read from a citation that accompanied an honorary doctor of arts degree that the State University at Stony Brook awarded Krasner the previous May, declaring that she was “among the most distinguished American artists of the century” and an “inspiration to aspiring women artists.”92
A NOTE ABOUT SOURCES
THE BIOGRAPHER’S TASK OF TELLING THE STORY OF A REMARKABLE artist and a courageous woman is rendered more difficult because so many of the usual written sources are lacking. Lee never told her own story, and she left behind few personal letters or other written accounts. In the mid-1960s, Krasner was urged to write a memoir by the literary agent, Oscar Collier. He recommended one ghostwriter, but Lee rejected him, through her trusted attorney, Gerald Dickler.1 Collier next tried to persuade her to work with Parker Tyler, a film and art critic whom he had successfully represented, sending her Tyler’s latest book and its reviews.2 Krasner, who knew Tyler, appears to have let the project drop, because the next year (1968), she asked her friend B. H. Friedman to write a biography of Pollock, a challenge he accepted and met, telling not hers but Pollock’s story, as she intended. In the end, their long friendship broke up over her desire to suppress his biography.3 Krasner came to distrust biographers in general.
Doing justice to Lee Krasner challenges biographers and art historians alike, which may be one reason why some who have written about her and the abstract expressionist movement have confused dates and facts, garbled stories, and even overlooked her active role at significant moments in art history. Most such errors have gone unchallenged, yet as they multiply and fester unremarked, there is the risk that the public will form false impressions.4 My research was inspired and disciplined by a desire to give Krasner’s qualities and achievements their full and accurate due. In my dual role as an art historian and a biographer, I have tried to sort out what could be known and proven from what was in fact hearsay and in some cases palpable fiction.
I have interrogated sources that have been previously accepted, casting doubt on their reliability. For example, Krasner’s sister, Ruth Stein, who survived her, made disparaging remarks about Lee. Yet my interviews with other family members led me to conclude that Ruth was a tainted witness. When referring to their brother Irving, Ruth claimed that Lee “wanted Irving to be close to her, but he never was. Never.”5 Yet Muriel Stein Dressler and Rusty Kanokogi, nieces to both Ruth and Lee, recalled a close relationship between Lee and her eccentric brother, who for years appeared at Lee’s home for family dinners and even “collected art.” Krasner’s nephew, Ruth’s son, Ronald Stein, referred to his Aunt Lee as his “alter-mother” and became an artist, modeling himself on his Aunt Lee and Uncle Jackson.6 Moreover, Ronald’s wife of many years, Frances, recalled that Lee had a troubled relationship with Ruth: “Lee and Ruth could get along for maybe seventeen minutes and then had to be dragged apart. Ruth fumed and seethed and made fists at Lee, who would get angry and then forget it.”7 In my view, Ruth was clearly determined to settle old scores with her deceased older sister. Her negative testimony about Lee seems to be the last shot of a jealous sibling.
Some art historians have challenged the validity of the “spoken word” as evidence and the reliance on interviews in the genre of biography in general. With regard to Krasner and Pollock in particular, concerned readers should consult what the art historian Anne Middleton Wagner has written about how various authors have tried to misuse oral sources “to invent a Pollock,” meaning that they sought to create a mythic figure that differs from Krasner’s actual experience and testimony. Wagner argued that these authors’ “fiction depended on Krasner—on both the woman herself and the character she was assigned to play in the Pollock drama.” Wagner points out that all of these authors had to negotiate “a relationship” to Krasner as “the official repository of Pollock’s memory.”8 Wagner suggested that they chose interviews as a means to reduce Krasner to “one among many witnesses, if a valued one; her word need not be taken as law.”9 It has been my aim to restore Krasner’s voice. I have paid close attention to her spoken words, taking them as clues for further research, which often confirmed and expanded upon her statements. Her testimony almost always proved accurate, but I have pointed out rare cases where she contradicted herself or where she confused dates.
In their biography of Pollock, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith ascribe to Krasner dialogue spoken by a fictional character in B. H. Friedman’s 1975 novel, Almost a Life. Naifeh and Smith describe their sourcing as follows: “this novel is a fictional account of JP and Lee Krasner by a friend, in which many of the details are taken from their lives.”10 However, B. H. Friedman told me that his fictional couple was not modeled on Krasner and Pollock.11 Indeed, the character of the wife in his novel is not even an artist. Friedman insisted to me that he invented these characters and all their dialogue. Even without Friedman’s clear denial, dialogue from the novel ascribed to Krasner did not ring true to many who knew Krasner, nor is it consistent with the facts of her life and social environment as reconstructed by my research. Yet the words from Friedman’s novel placed in quotation marks in a biography suggest an authenticity that is damaging to Krasner. For example: “According to one friend, she [Krasner] described herself…as ‘an old maid. A fucking old maid.’”12
Naifeh and Smith also assigned Krasner an even more colorful bit of dialogue from Friedman’s novel, spoken by his “LK character” as they call her: “It was an embarrassingly slow start for a woman, who, at the National Academy of Design, ‘never went anywhere without a diaphram [sic].’ ‘If a guy interested me, really interested me,’ Lee once said of her student days, ‘I slept with him because I wanted to know him better and wanted him to know me better. That was my morality.’”13 These fictional quotes portray Krasner as promiscuous at a time when she was completely devoted to Igor Pantuhoff, as her contemporaries
have testified. The credits for these quotations in Friedman’s novel are available only in the source notes of the Pollock biography, and it is easy to understand how some readers would assume that Krasner made these statements in one of her many oral interviews, even though she did not.
Readers familiar with the literature on Krasner, Pollock, and abstract expressionism may note that I have omitted a few previously published stories about Krasner because of information that makes them unconvincing. In one instance, I discovered that two related, but conflicting stories appear in two well-known books. Both cannot be true, for, with the exception of Krasner, the main characters are not even the same, though the plots are almost identical. The authors in question, Naifeh and Smith in their Pollock biography and Andrea Gabor in an essay on Krasner in her 1995 book, Einstein’s Wife, based their conclusions on interviews.14 One story, recounted by Naifeh and Smith, who interviewed Fritz Bultman, purports to be about Krasner’s interaction with Willem de Kooning and has been repeated in a 2004 biography of de Kooning by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, who cite Naifeh and Smith’s Pollock biography as their only source for this story.15
Andrea Gabor recounted the second, related story (without de Kooning), which she heard from Bultman’s wife, Jeanne, who dated Igor Pantuhoff after Lee, but well before she married Fritz. The climax of each tale is that Krasner, fully clothed and dressed up at a party, got thrown into a shower—either by Fritz Bultman in Naifeh and Smith’s version or by Igor Pantuhoff in Gabor’s account.16 Since Jeanne Bultman also told me that Igor constantly talked to her about Lee, I conclude that she was surely Fritz’s source for this story, which he or someone else garbled.17