Lee Krasner (34 page)

Like Krasner's, Pollock's artwork was getting attention from different sources. Specifically, his style of allover patterning attracted Alfonso Ossorio, heir to a Philippine sugar fortune, who bought Pollock's
Number 5
(1948) from Betty Parsons in January 1949. Ossorio saw in Pollock “a man who had gone beyond Picasso” and in whose work there was “a meeting of East and West.”
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But when Parsons shipped the painting, it arrived damaged. In April, Parsons took Pollock and Krasner to have a look at it at Ossorio's new place in Greenwich Village. Pollock offered to repair the painting in his Springs studio. The next month, Ossorio and his companion, Ted Dragon, a dancer with the New York City Ballet, drove out with the canvas, staying over with the Pollocks, and in the process becoming friends. The visit affirmed Ossorio's high esteem for Pollock's work. He also became interested in Krasner's work, which he saw at the house for the first time. Like so many others, Ossorio decided to rent a place and spend the summer of 1949 living in East Hampton.

“I saw a good deal of Lee and Jackson,” Ossorio recalled. “I met him just after he had stopped drinking and so I knew him for two years as a teetotaler.
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…With Jackson one didn't sit and have a long connected conversation. He would show the work, he would make very perceptive comments. His vocabulary was psychoanalytical in the sense that he had been in analysis and his intellectual vocabulary was based on that rather than on aesthetics or art history or philosophy.”
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Ossorio was stimulated by the Pollocks and was also a sophisticated influence on them. He was able to respond to and support Pollock's work because of his grasp of modernism in the context of international art, philosophy, and culture. By this time, Ossorio had already lived in the Philippines, England, and the United States, having gone to boarding schools in England and Rhode Island, before studying art history at Harvard for both undergraduate and graduate studies. At Harvard, Ossorio had developed a deep interest in Asian as well as European and American art. He
knew such scholars of Asian art as Benjamin Rowland and the important Ceylonese philosopher and art historian Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. At Harvard's Peabody Museum, Ossorio had studied objects from the Pacific Islands as well as exhibits about the history of indigenous peoples of North America, whose art had long interested both Krasner and Pollock. He became a friend and a patron to the couple, whose work influenced Ossorio's own paintings and abstract sculpture.

Pollock was then seeing Dr. Edwin H. Heller, a local general practitioner in East Hampton, who had managed to get him to stop drinking. Heller told Pollock that he had to forgo all alcohol, because even a small amount would provoke him to drink to excess. He also understood the role of alcohol to numb threatening feelings and anxieties. Krasner, perhaps unwilling to accept the idea that Pollock's psyche was damaged, said she never understood what Heller did that others could not. She only heard from Pollock that Heller was “an honest man; I can believe in him.”
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While in Heller's care, Pollock was able to remain “on the wagon.”

In January 1949, Stella Pollock wrote to Charles Pollock from her son Sande's house in Deep River, Connecticut: “Jack and Lee were here and we had a very nice Christmas…and there was no drinking. We were all so happy. Jack has been going to a Dr. in Hampton and hadn't drunk anything for over three weeks at Christmas. Hope he will stay with it. He says he wants to quit and went to the Dr. on his own. The Dr. told him he would have to leave it alone. Everything wine to beer for they were poison to him.”
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Pollock's second solo show with Betty Parsons opened on January 24, 1949. Among those present were Grace Hartigan and Harry Jackson, who would marry in March. Lee and Jackson agreed to act as hosts, matron of honor, and best man; they were also the only two witnesses for an intimate ceremony conducted by their neighbor Judge William Schellinger.

During this time Krasner made a breakthrough in the imagery
of her painting. “I have to go with it,” she explained of the change of direction, “so in that sense I find it a little off-beat compared to a great many of my contemporaries.”
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She referred to artists such as Rothko, Motherwell, or Gottlieb, who developed themes or signature images that they continued to explore over and over again. Her new direction employed a thinner paint application, a much larger scale, and, as she described it, “a vertical and horizontal distribution.”
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In mid-April, Stella Pollock visited Jackson and Lee again. She reported to Charles how happy she had been to find that Jackson was still not drinking and was getting ready to put in a garden. “They have good soil. Lee loves to dig in the dirt and she has green fingers. Jack is going to shingle his studio. Prices have dropped enough that he feels he can he will do it himself.”
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Pollock renewed his contract with Betty Parsons at the end of June 1949 to run through January 1, 1952. They told Pollock's mother that the sales from his show had been “very good” and that they wanted to make a trip to the West Coast.
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That July Krasner and Pollock were both in a show called “17 Eastern Long Island Artists,” held at East Hampton's Guild Hall. John Little, Lee's old chum from the Hofmann School, who was now living in Springs, organized the show, and the potter Roseanne Larkin and Enez Whipple, the cultural center's director, sponsored it against the protests of the conservative coterie of traditional artists who had been patronized by the Maidstone, a posh exclusive country club on the Atlantic Ocean in the village of East Hampton. These artists had dominated the local scene with their timid watercolors of seascapes and still lifes.

Little put himself in the show alongside a number of Krasner's and Pollock's friends, including James Brooks, Wilfrid Zogbaum, and Balcomb Greene, who were working abstractly, as well as more traditional figurative painters such as Alexander Brook and Raphael Soyer
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. The
New York Times
critic Stuart Preston reviewed the show, describing it as a balance “between conserva
tive and advanced art.” He made a special note of “Jackson Pollock's chromatic explosions, those free of instinct” and wrote that “Lee Krasner's rigidly patterned abstracts sound a call to order.”
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Preston's opinion held little weight for East Hampton's uptight, “white-gloved hostesses pouring tea and serving punch” who found abstract art in general and Pollock's work in particular shocking.
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Unlike the Guild Hall show, which didn't acknowledge Pollock and Krasner's marriage, Lee and Jackson showed in the Sidney Janis Gallery's exhibition “Husband and Wife” that September. The show also included eight other artist-couples, such as the de Koonings, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, and Picasso and Françoise Gilot.
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Stuart Preston covered this show too and wrote, “On the whole the husbands are the more adventurous, giving ideas their heads, whereas the wives are apt to hold them back by the short reins of the particular scheme of design or color on which they are based. This is noticeably true of the Jackson Pollock as opposed to Lee Krasner's conglomeration of little forms that are both fastened and divided by a honeycomb of white line. In exactly the same relationship are Willem and Elaine de Kooning.”
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Krasner reflected later that she thought the “title of the show is rather gimmicky, but for some reason Mr. Janis wanted to put on a show of husbands and wives who painted. And as a matter of fact, he had a curious accumulation there. I don't know whatever motive there was. It was sort of a catchy thing, I think.”
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She later told a reporter for
Time,
“I respected and understood his [Pollock's] painting as he did mine. There was never any cause for rivalry.”
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A third solo show for Pollock opened at Betty Parsons on November 21, 1949. Afterward Lee and Jackson again spent Christmas in Deep River, Connecticut, with Stella, who reported to Frank that the couple was “so tired from being in the City just worn out. Had the best show he has ever had and sold well eigh
teen paintings and prospects of others. They both are fine and he is still on the wagon.”
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During the winter of 1950, Lee and Jackson went to stay in Alfonso Ossorio's house at 9 MacDougal Alley while he and Dragon were abroad. As Lee wrote them, the couple took advantage of their time in the city to visit lots of artists' exhibitions. She liked the ones of Gorky and Buffie Johnson, found acceptable those of Pousette-Dart and Jim Brooks, and rejected those of Herbert Ferber and Mary Callery.
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That winter a group of artists, including de Kooning, Franz Kline, and the sculptor Philip Pavia, rented a loft and held meetings at 39 East Eighth Street. They called themselves the Club and later the Artists Club. Pavia recalled that Pollock “would come and stand in the back—later sometimes drunk—then Bill and Franz would take care of him.” Pavia's comments about women artists, however, are especially revealing: “The women's movement was born in the Club. They would get up there and tell us off—aggressive, and the joke was that we'd make monsters out of these women and got even the wives to talk. They did, too—like Lee, wanting to compete against Jackson.”
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Clearly the level of sexism at the Club had grown since the more egalitarian days of the WPA and the Artists Union, where Lee was able to speak out and be respected. Hedda Sterne recalled: “I went to the Club only once or twice. People were incredibly hostile to each other. Insults would fly…. But the Club changed my image of Pollock. I was influenced by those stories of his violence at parties, etc., and to see this gentle, quiet, moving person was such a contrast. He was even proud of being inarticulate…. Jackson was a social outsider and his gestures were that, defending himself against people. He needed affection—who doesn't?—but didn't know how to find it.”
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The Pollocks returned to East Hampton in the early spring. As the weather warmed, their friends began appearing. It was clearly a time when they enjoyed socializing in the local community.

Krasner was one of the thirty-three artists, along with Pollock and Bradley Walker Tomlin, whom Betty Parsons included in her review show of painters and sculptors in June 1950. In the
New York Times,
Stuart Preston reviewed the show, asking, “What meaning or value beyond themselves do these contrivances possess?” He also referred to the “impetuously handled, rather turgid colored forms of the painting of Lee Krasner,” noting that “of course Jackson Pollock's seething canvas, the furious shaking of a lion's mane of color, is the climax of this direction.”
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Around this time Krasner's work began to evolve away from the Little Image series. “I cannot make any connection why this happens,” she insisted over and over again.
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Krasner and Pollock both appeared in another show at Guild Hall of “Ten East Hampton Abstractionists” that opened on July 1. Among the other artists were friends and local acquaintances, including Motherwell, Linda Lindeberg, John Little, Wilfrid Zogbaum, James Brooks, and Buffie Johnson.
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The local newspaper reported that “Pollock, a prominent figure in American modern art, was one of the seven American painters chosen to represent this country in the world-renowned Biennale, which opened recently in Venice.”
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Like Buffie Johnson, who was identified as “Mrs. George [actually Gerald] Sykes,” Lee Krasner was identified as “Mrs. Jackson Pollock.” The practice of linking women's identities to their husbands' was common at this time in East Hampton society. Again Preston praised Pollock's big canvas, writing that it “dominates the North Gallery.” He was less harsh about Krasner's work than previously, noting that she drew from Pollock's influence.

At the opening of the East Hampton show, Pollock met Hans Namuth, a young German-born photographer whose teacher Alexey Brodovitch had told him that Pollock was preeminent among contemporary artists. Namuth was spending the summer in Water Mill, not far from East Hampton, and asked Pollock if he could photograph him while he was painting. Pollock agreed, offering to start a new picture for the session. Namuth spent many
hours taking photographs of Pollock that summer, a project Krasner thought would benefit Pollock's stature.

While at their house Namuth also photographed Krasner in her studio. She posed with two large paintings (now destroyed) that depicted large stick figures, painted light on dark grounds. These presumably were in her studio when Betty Parsons visited and agreed to give her a show. These canvases are a far cry from Krasner's Little Image paintings, but they also appear to be unrelated to the geometric pictures she eventually put in her show at Parsons. Instead Krasner's stick figures recall those in Miró's work as well as in Pollock's mural for Peggy Guggenheim and his
Guardians of the Secret,
both of 1943. Krasner appeared to be playing catch-up to Pollock's invention, and when she realized this, she destroyed the new work and went off in a geometric direction that veered sharply away from her husband's work.
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Many factors suggest that Pollock's star was on the rise, though he lacked the confidence to comprehend that. Pollock got a taste of widespread fame in August 1949 when
Life
magazine featured an article titled “Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?”
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The newfound celebrity, however, soon became difficult for Jackson to digest. His friend Jim Brooks recalled how the
Life
issue made Jackson “self-conscious.” Brooks continued to observe: “You know you're expected to do a hell of a lot, being famous, and it made him self-conscious…. I think right then Jackson saw what was coming and was scared to death.”
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