To others, though, Lee seemed fearless, willing to defy any orthodoxy for the sake of her art. She studied at the Women’s Art School of Cooper Union and continued her education at the National Academy of Design. Unlike the Art Students League, the Academy was a bastion of conservative, academic-style painting where students were required to draw from antique casts before being allowed to draw from life models. Lee, however, did not want to draw from antique casts. She was put on probation in January 1929, only four months after she started school. “This student is always a bother,” a teacher jotted in her file. In December 1929 Lee was suspended from the Academy for “painting figures without permission,” according to school records. That would always be true of her; she did things without permission.
She finished art school at the height of the Depression. Deciding she might as well be practical, she went to City College to get a teaching degree. Then she tore it up. “The last thing in the world I wanted to do was teach art,” she said. She managed to support herself in the early thirties by painting stripes on china and hats (“I ruined more felt hats . . .”) and donning silk pajamas to wait tables at Sam Johnson’s, a Third Avenue bar and nightclub, where she got to know such Village intellectuals as Harold Rosenberg and Lionel Abel. “I remember Harold Rosenberg,” she says, “because he never tipped.”
She was rescued from waitressing by the Project, on which she worked primarily as a mural assistant. She resented having to carry out other people’s plans and wanted to do a mural of her own. Maybe she’d have a better chance if the government didn’t know she was a woman, she thought. So she changed her name from Lenore to Lee, but her assignments remained the same.
While Pollock’s studies at the Art Students League insulated him from the avant-garde movements of the thirties, Lee joined with the avant-garde early in her career. In 1937 she signed up to study under Hans Hofmann, the leading proselytizer of Cubist doctrine in New York. He had his own school on West Eighth Street. Born in Munich, Hofmann had lived in Paris from 1904 to 1914, when he worked with Matisse, befriended Picasso, and saw the emergence of Cubism firsthand, and he brought to his students a deep appreciation of modern European art movements. Hofmann spoke with a heavy German accent, and Lee had difficulty understanding him—her friend Fritz Bultman used to translate for her in class—but she had no trouble putting his theories into paint. Hofmann was very impressed with her work, and once tried to offer her a compliment. “This is so good you would not know it was done by a woman,” he told her. Lee was furious at him, even though she knew that Degas had said the same thing to Mary Cassatt a half-century earlier.
Another of Lee’s early mentors was Piet Mondrian, whom she befriended when he came to New York in 1940. She once escorted him to an exhibit organized by the American Abstract Artists, the group of abstract painters through which she had met him. Mondrian paused in front of each painting and asked her “Who is this? Who is this?” When they came to Lee’s painting she proudly told him, “This is mine.” “Very strong inner rhythm,” he said. “Stay with it.”
Lee learned early in life that to be an artist is to assert one’s will, but to be a woman is to relinquish it. She was drawn to talented men, which usually meant making less of her own abilities. Her first love was Igor Pantuhoff. A Russian émigré, Igor had studied abstract painting under Hofmann along with Lee but was known as a portrait painter and had won the prestigious Prix de Rome before moving to New York. Igor was a man of sure charm and expensive tastes who refused to let poverty interfere with his ways. He always carried a hundred-dollar bill, and since no one could break it, he was often able to eat without paying for his meal. His trademark was a fine camel’s hair coat, which he had acquired by walking into a department store and announcing, “I’m Igor Pantuhoff. Great artist. Give me coat and I give you painting in return.” The store manager said he wasn’t allowed to give coats away. “But I’m Igor Pantuhoff! Great artist!” He got the coat.
Lee and Igor lived together for two years, sharing with Harold and May Rosenberg a twenty-three-dollar-a-month cold-water flat overlooking the Hudson River. May Rosenberg recalls the morning that Igor ended the relationship. “Igor couldn’t understand what Hofmann was doing,” she once explained. “Hofmann would look at Igor’s work and say, ‘No, that’s wrong’ and put a scratch across it. With their accents—Igor’s Russian and Hofmann’s German—they couldn’t understand each other. So Igor just decided one morning that he was taking a bus across the country and going to become a great portrait painter.”
Igor left New York without telling Lee, packing his suitcases and disappearing in the middle of the night. When she woke up, he was gone. A few weeks later she moved out of the room that she had shared with him and set up her own place on Ninth Street. On the walls of her studio she scribbled a few lines from Delmore Schwartz’s translation of Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell:
To whom shall I hire myself out? What beast must I adore?
What holy image is attacked: What hearts shall I break?
What lie must I maintain? In what blood tread?
The lines were written in black crayon except for a few words—“What lie must I maintain?” Those were written in blue.
In November 1941 Lee received a postcard from her friend John Graham. “Dear Lenore,” he wrote, “I am arranging at an uptown gallery a show of French and American paintings with excellent publicity, etc. I have Braque, Picasso . . . I want to have your last large painting. I will drop [in] at your place Friday afternoon.”
“American and French Paintings,” the show organized by Graham, opened in January 1942 to favorable publicity. Pollock and de Kooning received the first reviews of their careers, though the comments were rather brief. “Pollack” was cited in Art News for his “general whirling figures” and de Kooning, identified in Art Digest as “William Kooning,” was singled out as “strange.” Lee wasn’t mentioned at all, nor was John Graham, and none of the paintings sold. “The Americans looked very good,” de Kooning once said, “but nobody paid attention. It was not like today. People just weren’t buying American painting.”
When the exhibit closed in February 1942, Pollock and Lee removed their paintings from the gallery and took them back to Lee’s place on Ninth Street, where they were now spending most of their time. Pollock hung up his Birth on a wall dominated by Lee’s Cubist still lifes. He told her he wanted her to keep the painting for herself. It was the first of many works he was to give to her over the years.
Pollock was looking at Lee’s paintings one day when he offered her some advice. He told her to sign them. Lee, who had never signed her paintings, disagreed. She gave him a lecture on Mondrian, telling him Mondrian didn’t sign his paintings because signatures clutter up the picture surface and ruin the geometrical purity of the design. “You have to sign your paintings,” Pollock insisted. Lee started to tease him, saying the only reason he signed his canvases was because Benton did, and the only reason Benton did was because the Old Masters did. As Lee was talking, Pollock suddenly stood up. He loaded a brush with black pigment, walked over to a painting hanging on the wall, and across the bottom, in large, harshly slanted script, wrote “L. Krassner.” He went on to the next canvas: “L. Krassner,” and so on, until every painting in the room bore his mark.
Lee didn’t take any chances after that. She signed her paintings. She also managed to register her protest, signing them in abbreviated form—“L.K.”
While Pollock and Lee were spending most of their time by themselves, his circle of acquaintances was expanding. She introduced him to everyone she knew and often invited people up to his studio to see his work. He met her friends from the Hofmann School, friends from the Project, and more friends still from the American Abstract Artists. But this is not to imply that Pollock’s life became more social; to the contrary, Lee’s became more solitary. Most of her friends found it difficult to talk to him as he seemed preoccupied with his problems. To Fritz Bultman, a student of Hofmann’s, Pollock was a �
��human being in anguish.” To May Rosenberg, the wife of the critic, he was simply “a guy in overalls who never said a word.” Most of Lee’s friends couldn’t figure out what she saw in him.
To others Pollock seemed combative, and he often alienated people without intending to. Among the visitors to his studio was Alexander Calder, who was already well known as a sculptor; ten years earlier he had made his first mobiles, or “moving Mondrians,” as he called them. An engineer by training, Calder noticed as he glanced around Pollock’s studio that his work possessed none of the airy grace that was a distinguishing feature of Calder’s own work. Paint was jabbed on thickly, forms were packed tightly together. “They’re all so dense,” Calder commented. “Oh,” Pollock said good-naturedly, “you want to see one less dense?” He left the room and returned with the densest painting he had. Calder was not amused.
Another distinguished visitor to Pollock’s studio was Hans Hofmann. He lived in the building next door, and Lee was eager to hear what her former teacher thought of Pollock’s work. One day she invited him over. He spent a few minutes studying the unstretched paintings tacked on the walls, then offered a compliment for which Pollock would never forgive him. “You are very talented,” Hofmann told him. “You should join my class.”
Hofmann went on to question Pollock’s methods. The teacher was surprised by the bareness of the room. There were no antique casts, no tabletops set with bowls of fruit, no still-life arrangements from which the artist could abstract. Hofmann, who believed that nature was the source of inspiration of all art, wondered whether Pollock felt the same. “Do you work from nature?” he said.
Pollock, in his most famous display of bravado, blurted angrily: “I am nature.”
Pollock and Lee had both been on the Project now for seven years, he as an easel painter and she as a mural painter. But not too long after they met, in February 1942, the Project was reorganized as a division of the War Services Program. Artists were now required to report each morning to 110 King Street, where they were assigned to group projects relating to the war effort. They turned out material of all sorts: armbands for the Red Cross, pamphlets on air-raid precautions, posters announcing campaigns for victory gardens. This was precisely the sort of work that Pollock detested, as one who had no patience for teamwork. But fortunately he could not have had a more sympathetic supervisor. He worked under Lee, who, as a “supervisor of exhibits,” had managed to have Pollock put on her staff.
Lee was in charge of a specific project—designing window displays to promote the war-training courses being offered at city colleges. She oversaw a team of about ten artists, who worked closely together. But Pollock remained notably uninvolved. Peter Busa, one of his coworkers, later recalled that Lee was “highly protective” of Pollock and never gave him any assignments. She allowed him to work on whatever he wanted, and he appears to have spent his time contentedly making drawings and gouaches. His work was put to resourceful ends; Lee later pasted it, along with pictures of soldiers and tanks, into large collages that may well have been the most inventive window displays the government ever commissioned.
Jackson was now spending very little time in his apartment. Sande decided there was no point paying rent on an empty bedroom; he might as well offer it to his mother, who had wanted to come east for almost a year. By May 5, 1942, Stella had arrived in New York, from where she reported to Charles: “Tuesday night almost ten o’clock Jack & I washed the dishes read a while and listened to the radio, he has just left for his girls home.” Her letter went on to indicate that as a result of a new WPA rule prohibiting more than one person per household from collecting a paycheck, either Jackson or Sande would have to quit his job. With characteristic selflessness, Sande had already volunteered. He was planning on accepting a job in Connecticut with a company that manufactured airplane parts. “He and his wife,” Stella wrote, “will have to move which will be a job. Jack wants to keep this place.”
That September, Sande and his wife and their newborn daughter moved to Deep River, Connecticut. It had already been decided that Stella would live with them; she couldn’t remain in the city with Jackson, since he could barely care for himself, let alone his aging mother.
When Sande left New York, Lee moved into the apartment and took over his studio. She and Pollock were now working in adjacent rooms. Such close proximity necessitated that they maintain strict regard for each other’s privacy, and it was instantly agreed that neither would enter the other’s studio without permission. At the end of a workday, Lee would usually ask Pollock, “How did it go?” If it had gone well, he would invite her into his studio to show her the results. But even when he invited her in, he was touchy about her presence. Once Lee was in his studio when she picked up a paintbrush that had some wet pigment on it and accidentally sideswiped a black canvas. Pollock became upset. He walked into her studio and sat down and sulked. Lee apologized profusely, but Pollock continued to sulk for an hour.
After Lee moved in with Pollock, her art underwent a radical change. Overwhelmed by the power of Pollock’s art, she felt disenchanted with the geometric Cubist style in which she had been working for the past five years. She no longer wanted to paint from nature, according to the methods of Hofmann; she wanted to paint from her imagination. One morning Lee entered her studio, loaded a brush with pigment, and for the first time in her life attempted to make a picture without looking at a model or a still-life arrangement. She made some marks on a blank canvas and waited for an image to evolve. Nothing happened. She put down some more strokes. The colors started running together and turned muddy and gray. For the next three years, in her struggle to find a style of her own, Lee produced little else but these muddy paintings. She called them her “gray slabs” and later destroyed them.
Pollock, by comparison, was experiencing his most rewarding period of painting so far. Part of the reason was surely the support offered by Lee. No one had ever believed in him to the extent that she did, and because he considered her very talented, her faith in him meant that much more. In 1942 Pollock applied himself to his work with a renewed sense of purpose. He produced only three paintings, but it is generally agreed that they mark his arrival at artistic maturity.
8
Surrealists in New York
1942–43
By 1942 most of the leading figures in European art had arrived in New York as refugees from the war. André Breton, the “pope” of Surrealism, was living in a fifth-floor walk-up on Eleventh Street. Roberto Matta was on Ninth Street. Fernand Léger could often be spotted herding large groups of friends to restaurants in Chinatown. Mondrian, a jazz buff, visited the dance halls of Harlem. Max Ernst was living in a fancy townhouse on East Fifty-first Street with heiress Peggy Guggenheim, who had helped him escape from occupied France and then demanded that he marry her. Duchamp was already here, having divided his time between Paris and New York since 1915. Although Picasso, Miró, and Matisse chose to stay behind in Europe, virtually all the major Surrealists spent the war years in New York, and their presence had a significant impact on the local art scene.
Pollock was drawn into the Surrealist movement through Robert Motherwell, a twenty-seven-year-old painter from Aberdeen, Washington, who had studied philosophy at Harvard. A slender, blond youth with an eager, deferential manner and a reverence for French culture, Motherwell was one of the few Americans to be accepted by the Surrealists. Already he had traveled to Mexico with Matta, studied in the studio of Kurt Seligmann, and been nicknamed affectionately by Breton “le petit philosophe.” Motherwell first met Pollock in the fall of 1942 when he was trying to start a group devoted to the exploration of Surrealist ideas. At the suggestion of the painter William Baziotes, who knew Pollock from the Project, Motherwell paid a visit to 46 East Eighth Street. His first impression was of a “deeply depressed man” who possessed a definite intensity. “He was so involved with his uncontrollable neuroses and demons,” Motherwell later said, “that I occasionally see him like Marlon Brando in scen
es from A Streetcar Named Desire—only Brando was much more controlled than Pollock.” Motherwell was eager to introduce his newfound friend to the Surrealists of his acquaintance.
Pollock, by now, was quite familiar with Surrealist art, which had been shown regularly in this country for more than a decade. De Chirico had exhibited in New York as early as 1927, Miró in 1928, Dali in 1933, and all of them were included in the Museum of Modern Art’s celebrated exhibition “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” of 1936. But it was not until the Surrealists migrated to New York that Pollock became fully aware of their accomplishments. Their arrival coincided with a critical moment in American painting, when the political art of the thirties had been abandoned but a new style had yet to be defined. Pollock, along with many others, began looking to the Surrealists as a source of new ideas. This is not to imply that he had any interest in the melting watches of Salvador Dali. For Pollock the magic of Surrealism lay in its freedom from academic convention. He was a great admirer of Miró, whose fantasy creatures and playful calligraphy were to have a definite influence on him. Another Surrealist whom Pollock admired was André Masson, a pioneer of “automatic” drawing, who was living in Connecticut during the war years.
Unlike Cubism, which was essentially a painting style, Surrealism was an organized movement, with leaders and followers, manifestos and magazines, exhibits and excommunications. It was founded in Paris soon after World War I by André Breton, a tall, magnetic poet with a large head and pronounced features invariably described as leonine. After studying medicine and serving as a doctor in psychiatric wards during the war, Breton developed an interest in the connection between dreams, madness, and poetry. In 1921 he made a pilgrimage to Vienna to meet Freud, whose writings were to be central to Surrealism. In 1924 Breton issued the first of his Surrealist manifestos. The goal of Surrealism was the radical transformation of human life, not only socially but at the deepest levels of existence. Its principal technique was “psychic automatism,” or the exploration of the unconscious.
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