Lee Krasner (37 page)

In the meantime, as Krasner and many others were well aware, Elaine had begun a long-term affair with Thomas Hess, the powerful critic and editor of
Art News,
though she continued to see Rosenberg long into the late 1950s and 1960s.
⁶⁴
In their biography of de Kooning, Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan state: “Many, in fact, believed that [Elaine] chose to sleep with the two critics in order to promote her husband's career. That act of devotion was, however, unnecessary; they were already committed to de Kooning.”
⁶⁵
It should be noted that these biographers fail to account for the fickleness of critics, whose loyalties do not necessarily last forever.

Krasner was among those who believed that Elaine slept with the two powerful critics as part of her strategy to promote her husband's work.
⁶⁶
Krasner not only disapproved of the kind of marriage Elaine and Bill had, in which both partners pursued sexual relations with others, but she was especially offended by Elaine's sexual liaisons with the two critics because they came to favor Bill's work over Jackson's.
⁶⁷

If the gossip about all these infidelities was not enough for Krasner to bear, she also had to be hospitable to another beautiful and much younger woman painter—Helen Frankenthaler, who was Clement Greenberg's new girlfriend. The couple arrived as the Pollocks' houseguests in the summer of 1952. At the time, Frankenthaler was in her early twenties, literally a generation younger than Krasner and Greenberg. She was the daughter of a New York superior court judge from a well-established German-Jewish family, the kind that often looked down on poor Russian-Jewish immigrants like Krasner's parents and older siblings or, for that matter, Greenberg's parents. A photograph of the foursome on the beach in East Hampton documents the visit and shows a slender Krasner looking tiny next to Frankenthaler's more buxom figure.
⁶⁸
Frankenthaler's threat to Krasner, however, was not as a glamorous younger woman artist who might try to take her famous husband away from her, but as one who would respond to Pollock's example and method, then enjoy the status afforded by her brief acquaintance with him. Frankenthaler became linked to Pollock's celebrity and style, but Greenberg, not Pollock, was her ticket to fame. By 1961, the artist Morris Louis, a Greenberg disciple, remarked that Frankenthaler served as “a bridge between Pollock and what was possible.”
⁶⁹

Krasner, however, took these challenges in stride and kept her focus on helping Pollock get ahead. She was responsible for arranging his first solo show at the Janis Gallery (located across the hall from Betty Parsons at 15 East Fifty-seventh Street) from November 10 to 29, 1952. Janis, who had known Krasner since before he published his 1944 book,
Abstract and Surrealist Art,
recalled that Pollock had dropped by his new gallery in 1948. “At the time he was showing with Betty Parsons, so I didn't say anything. Finally he left. Then, almost five years later, Lee Krasner came to us and said that Jackson was no longer with Betty Parsons and he was looking for a new gallery.”

Knowing that in recent years Pollock had had a show every year, Janis asked her, “Don't you think, Lee, that the market is rather saturated with Pollock's work?”

She responded, “Sidney, the surface hasn't even been scratched.”

“And how right she was!” he recalled. “Anyway, we got together, Lee and I, and we had a verbal contract, and we gave Jackson his first show…a magnificent show. He had changed from his ‘drip' image to a kind of impasto, pigment surface, and it was more figurative, but still had the Jackson Pollock bite. The show wasn't too successful.”
⁷⁰

Janis did point out that later he was able to sell some of these same paintings to museums. Greenberg, who by now felt Pollock's “inspiration was flagging,” declined to review the show at Janis.
⁷¹
In the
New York Times,
however, Howard Devree was more positive about Pollock than he had ever been before, comparing some of his new work to that of Kandinsky. He saw what he called a “source of inspiration with a use of deep space instead of obsession with mere surface.”
⁷²
Devree's opinion meant much less to Pollock and Krasner than Greenberg's silence, which really pained both of them.

A week after the Janis exhibition, Pollock's “first retrospective show” took place at Bennington College in Vermont, organized by Greenberg, who had handpicked eight paintings for the show. He had also written a note for the catalogue (a folder). His belief in Pollock is clear, though he had his own idea of Pollock's strengths: “Most of the paintings on view are major works, major in a way that very little American art has been up to now. That is, they determine the main tradition of painting at their point in time.”
⁷³

Krasner and Pollock borrowed Ossorio's station wagon to drive up to Bennington for the opening, accompanied in the car by Greenberg and Frankenthaler. They planned to make an unhurried trip, stopping at the home of the sculptor David Smith and Jean Freas in Bolton's Landing, New York, on Lake George. Greenberg later told a biographer that Krasner had a “tantrum”
after he, Pollock, Smith, and Frankenthaler spent a long time in Smith's studio having drinks and looking at his new work.
⁷⁴
Krasner must have panicked, fearing that Pollock would be too drunk to show up at his own opening. She insisted that they leave at once for Bennington without touching the carefully prepared supper.
⁷⁵

According to Freas, the Pollocks stopped in Bolton's Landing because a reporter for “the March of Time was coming” and expected to film both artists. Freas also described Krasner's arrival “wearing a fur coat—because by then they were getting some recognition—and I had made this really nice meal and so forth. And she said, ‘Oh, we couldn't possibly eat here.' Pollock was—if you even spoke to him he'd turn red. He just—and he looked thoroughly miserable, he was sober.”
⁷⁶
If, however, as Greenberg recalled, Pollock had already been drinking, Freas might have been wrong.

Krasner's insistence that Pollock stop drinking in Bolton's Landing offended Freas, who in retrospect appears to have been naive: “At this point they were like—she was calling every shot, and he stayed wherever Mama said. She was very ambitious, which I don't—I'm not rebuking her for that—but she was very nasty, to me—and I know why she was nasty: because I was young and pretty, and she was—I think she may have been the ugliest woman I've ever seen. The god that made her was not kind to her. She was behind the door when the looks—she had this quivering upper lip, like this, and—I don't know what she became later on, but I know she had this trembling, thick upper lip.”
⁷⁷

Freas said that Krasner was “very tough. You talk about tough. Whoa! She was
the
toughest woman in the art world. No question about that.”
⁷⁸
A generation younger than Krasner, Freas had just graduated from Sarah Lawrence two years earlier. Freas married Smith, bore him two daughters, and then divorced.
⁷⁹
As “Jean Smith,” she later became a TV journalist and writer, but she never competed as an artist with David Smith, even working in the same arena, as Krasner did with Pollock.

Interviewed years later, Freas was critical of Krasner, whom she believed ordered Pollock around. She had little sympathy for being the wife of a troubled alcoholic: “He had to pay for every time he'd ever misbehaved, by her. And she was uncouth, she was mean—that's the only side of her—she may have had wonderful sides to her, I never saw them.”
⁸⁰
Freas recalled that Pollock was the most diffident person she'd ever met when he was sober. “But when he was drunk he was horrible. He was like a gargoyle. He was very handsome, you know, until he drank, and then his whole face underwent change. Ugh! I've never known an alcoholic to change so entirely as he did.”
⁸¹
According to Freas, she and Smith saw Pollock mainly at the Cedar Bar, “usually not with her [Krasner], because they would have these fights, and they wouldn't be together.”
⁸²
She seems not to have understood that Krasner detested the Cedar Bar. Thus Krasner not only had to deal with Pollock's alcoholic unraveling before his show opened, but she also had to struggle to extricate him from their “friends” who were indifferent, even hostile, to her trials.

In Bennington, the painter Paul Feeley and his wife, Helen, hosted a party following the show's opening. Feeley was the chair of the art department where Frankenthaler had studied. Krasner, still anxious, volunteered to tend the bar so that she could monitor what Pollock drank. As the party wound down, someone unaware of the situation offered Pollock a drink—in earshot of Greenberg, who told him, “Lay off,” to no avail. “Fool,” Pollock retorted as he bolted down the drink.
⁸³
Nothing more needed to be said.

After breakfast the next morning, Pollock drove Greenberg and Frankenthaler to their train for New York while he and Krasner headed back to Springs. “When he called me a fool,” said Greenberg years later, “I was furious and I was off him for a couple of years. I didn't say it but Jackson sensed it…. Besides, he had become, if not famous, at least notorious, and I suppose the battle had been won.”
⁸⁴
Another time, Greenberg said that he was “dissatisfied” with most of Pollock's work after 1952.
⁸⁵

Immediately following the Bennington fiasco and Pollock's show at Janis, gossip circuits buzzed when Rosenberg's “The American Action Painters” appeared in the December
Art News.
The article created a stir that pained Pollock, who felt personally attacked by Rosenberg's thesis on “action painting,” even though Rosenberg did not identify him by name. Pollock claimed that in conversation with Rosenberg, he had referred to his canvas as an “arena” he did not approve of the subsequent use Rosenberg made of the term.
⁸⁶
Lee made notes on the article in her copy of
Art News
and carefully examined Rosenberg's main point.
⁸⁷
She commented on the attitudes of other artists she knew who read the piece, noting that Clyfford Still stopped by and “had a fit about it” then de Kooning and Philip Pavia stopped by and said that they liked the piece. “So there was a good deal of screaming on the subject,” she recounted.
⁸⁸

When Rosenberg poked fun at an unnamed artist who claimed that another was not modern because “he works from sketches,” he was describing an attitude held by both Krasner and Pollock, neither of whom worked from sketches in making paintings.
⁸⁹
Rosenberg wrote, “A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist. The painting itself is a ‘moment' in the adulterated mixture of his life…. The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life.”
⁹⁰
This statement implicitly attacked Pollock, whose public behavior was too often dysfunctional, while his paintings had gained him both admiring and derisive attention. Rosenberg argued that “what gives the canvas its meaning” is “the way the artist organizes his emotional and intellectual energy as if he were in a living situation.”
⁹¹

Rosenberg taunted Pollock even more directly by discussing artists who, “lacking verbal flexibility…speak in a jargon” among the examples he gave of an artist describing his work was “It doesn't reproduce Nature; it is Nature,” which was Pollock's notorious retort to Hofmann's advice.
⁹²
Rosenberg may have revealed more than he intended when he stated “a piece of wood
found on the beach becomes Art…. Modern Art does not have to be actually new; it only has to be new to
somebody
—to the last lady who found out about the driftwood.”
⁹³

Driftwood would have been on his mind if he had seen Herbert Matter's photograph of Mercedes nude on the beach. Matter had used driftwood to frame Mercedes's breast. Pollock had a copy of the photo in his studio. In this regard, Rosenberg's apparently dismissive reference “to the last lady” may be an erotic wink to his mistress.

Hurt by gossip, Pollock told Jeffrey Potter, “The corner they got me in is more like what Harold Rosenberg wrote about Action Painters…. How does it go? Vanguard painters have a zero audience; the work gets used and traded but not wanted.”
⁹⁴
Rosenberg later wrote: “Art in the service of politics declined after the war, but ideology has by no means relaxed its hold on American painting. Zen, psychoanalysis, Action art, purism, anti-art—and their dogmas and programs—have replaced the Marxism and regionalism of the thirties. It is still the rare artist who trusts his work to the intuitions that arise in the course of creating it.”
⁹⁵

Yet Clement Greenberg wrote that Pollock mocked the very notion of “Action Painting,” which he understood, when sober, to be “a purely rhetorical fabrication.” Greenberg viewed Pollock as “the most intelligent painter” that he had ever known, “one of the most learned & truly sophisticated; without his intelligence, he would not have become the artist he was.”
⁹⁶

Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner in his barn studio with their Springs neighbor Sam Duboff, August 1953. Pollock's
Portrait and a Dream
is visible.

D
URING THE SPRING OF
1953,
IN THE MIDST OF HIS DRINKING
binges, Jackson Pollock drove his Model A into the wrong lane of traffic on Main Street in East Hampton, forcing a motorist coming toward him off the road.
¹
During this period, he had been preoccupied with trying to shingle and winterize his barn studio so that he could work comfortably during the winter, making a considerable financial stretch to achieve this goal. That summer he devoted himself to painting, managing to produce major canvases despite his growing self-doubt.

In the summer of 1953, Pollock posed for photographs with Raphael Gribetz, the adorable infant son of Joel and Helen Gribetz, a doctor and his wife, who rented the house next door for the summer. Though Pollock was just forty-one, he grinned like a proud grandfather. He had been longing to have a child of his own. Lee was then nearly forty-five and no more interested in hav
ing a child than when they had married almost eight years earlier. For her, as she later made clear, Pollock was enough of a child.
²
Both psychologically and economically, Krasner had felt that she did not have enough to share with yet another helpless human being. Nonetheless, Helen Gribetz found Krasner to be “a very giving person.” She still recalls how Krasner volunteered to take her family's wash to the Laundromat, since she was taking care of her five children that summer. The Gribetz couple socialized with Lee and Jackson that summer, so much so that Helen recalls Lee as “a most gracious hostess.”
³
Jackson too was helpful, taking the older Gribetz children to the beach.

At this time, it was not uncommon for women artists to choose not to have children, especially those women living in difficult circumstances. Krasner's friend, Slobodkina, described the pressure that her former husband, Ilya Bolotowsky, put on her to have children: “My NO was clear and firm. I had enough to do with one child in the family; and besides I married him to become an artist, not a mother.”
⁴
In Krasner's case, she had already become an artist and married Pollock just two days before her thirty-seventh birthday, prepared to take care of his intensive needs, not those of a child.

Almost miraculously Krasner's instinct for self-preservation emerged out of the chaos of Pollock's self-destructive binges. She finally got her own separate studio, after they bought an acre adjoining their house on the north side and moved onto it a little shack, which had once been a smokehouse, for her to work in. Perhaps finally realizing what she was up against, and finding herself less and less able to help Pollock, she lost herself in her own work and made a new set of collages, recycling older work. She later said, “These were inspired by earlier drawings that I had torn, feeling somewhat depressed. The studio was hung solidly with drawings I couldn't stand. 1953 was the deluge in this spurt of collage. It led to the exhibit at the Stable Gallery in 1955.”
⁵

In many ways, Krasner's work was a continuation of her
studies. “Back in the '30s as a Hofmann student, I had cut and replaced portions of a painting. I had also transposed a painting thinking I would put it into a mosaic form. There is a challenge in reshaping and re-adhering imagery from the earlier periods…. Well, there is a recycling of the self in some form.”

In East Hampton, Guild Hall held a summer group show of seventeen local artists. Though the organization had claimed eight years earlier that it was difficult to identify the artists in its community,
New York Times
journalist Stuart Preston commented, “It must have required considerable tact to choose such a comparatively small number from the large and energetic picture-producing community there, but those who made the grade should be well satisfied.”
⁶
The artists, most of whom were now working abstractly, included both Krasner and Pollock, as well as James Brooks, Balcomb Greene, Alfonso Ossorio, Willem de Kooning, Elaine de Kooning, Wilfrid Zogbaum, and the realist Alexander Brook, who showed a romantic landscape.

Never a supporter of abstraction, Preston singled out “[Willem] de Kooning's blithe and violent figures of women. As a pure sensationalist this artist has no equal here. There is much the same degree of energy in Jackson Pollock's single canvas on which swirling tides of sullen paint encircle pockets of bright color.” Again, he criticized Krasner, saying that her “propeller and ribbon shapes in two contrasted colors are too sluggishly drawn to come off as they should.” She cannot have appreciated his comment, but at least he did manage to spell her name correctly.
⁷

By mid-October, Pollock had become more and more dysfunctional as his binge drinking continued and his life spun out of control. Unable to paint and prepare for his next show on time, he had to ask Janis for “another advance” against sales. “Why the hell I let myself get in this position I don't know—took off too big a bite on shingling the house I guess.”
⁸
Janis had to postpone until the following February the show he had originally scheduled for November, because Pollock did not have a new body of work ready
for it. The promised show, consisting of ten works, finally ran from February 1 to 27, 1954. Although Clement Greenberg did not review it, he was not silent. When he did express himself in 1955, he was pointedly negative: “Few of [Pollock's] fellow artists can yet tell the difference between his good and his bad work—or at least not in New York. His most recent show, in 1954, was the first to contain pictures that were forced, pumped, dressed up, but it got more acceptance than any of his previous exhibitions.”
⁹

In the spring of 1954, a troubled Pollock traded the art dealer Martha Jackson two of his black and white paintings for her green 1950 Oldsmobile convertible. He told Jeffrey Potter that he was thinking about letting Lee learn to drive on the Model A, “the clutch being almost gone, anyway.”
¹⁰
Patsy Southgate, a newcomer to the region, had stepped in: “I took Lee's side strongly from the point of view that ‘This Woman Is Not Being Treated Fairly.' I mean literally. Lee had two pairs of britches to her name, was trapped in the house, and didn't know how to drive. Jackson didn't want her to, but he had mobility. He would go off, had this large studio, this person making delicious food, and pretty much what he wanted.”
¹¹

Southgate was a mother with two young children. She and her husband, the writer Peter Matthiessen, had only just arrived on Long Island the year before from Paris, where he had founded the
Paris Review
. Krasner and Southgate quickly became close friends. Krasner was attracted not so much to the younger woman's legendary beauty as to her intelligence and the sophistication she had acquired in France. Southgate also understood what it meant to go through a difficult time. She offered to give Krasner driving lessons in return for painting instruction, though she quickly realized that she could not paint. And Krasner was having trouble learning to drive, which Southgate attributed to a lack of self-confidence: “She had to take her license test a couple of times, but she did get her license finally. Then she was liberated: She could go shopping, see friends, be on her own. Jackson didn't like my
teaching her at all; if you give people a car and a license, they have independence. I don't think he wanted that.”
¹²

The importance of driving to boost women's confidence and as a remedy for inferiority complexes had been promoted at least since 1939, when an article in the magazine
Independent Woman
stated, “This consciousness and power that come with successful handling of an automobile might even prove an important antidote for personality quirks…. It can make us feel infinitely more important than managing an egg beater.”
¹³
The notion that women who could master driving an automobile might achieve biological and psychological equality with men had pervaded popular culture. The thought of Lee driving fueled some of Pollock's fears, exacerbating his deep insecurities as a man, as a driver, and as a painter.

Since her show at Parsons, Krasner had begun to work in black and white, using ink, gouache, and collage on paper, canvas, or canvas board. Her forms were biomorphic, yet the titles give nothing away. She showed with other women in “Eight Painters, Two Sculptors” that summer at the Hampton Gallery and Workshop in Amagansett.

Krasner also had a solo show of her Little Image paintings and some recent collages for only one day in August at the House of Books and Music, an East Hampton shop where her friend Patsy Southgate worked. The owners of the shop, Donald and Carol Braider, stored some of their stock in a place known as the “red house” in the nearby town of Bridgehampton, which that summer a group of artists including the de Koonings rented. Pollock drove over one June day, hoping to visit with Franz Kline and de Kooning. They were all drinking and horsing around, when suddenly Pollock was on the ground with a broken ankle.

“He was absolutely indignant,” Elaine de Kooning said.

“He said: ‘I've never broken a bone.'”

The accident forced Pollock to abandon “that ridiculous little car of his there.”
¹⁴

Pollock painted little during this year. He was filled with doubt. Matthiessen, who saw him during this period, described Pollock as “wonderful in many ways” and “calm if not plastered,” but recalled that he appeared to have “a hand grenade in his pocket” that could go off at any time.
¹⁵
Even though the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (formerly the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, founded by Peggy's uncle) acquired Pollock's 1953 painting
Ocean Greyness
in November 1954, the sale to a museum did little to assuage his deep-seated doubts about himself. His drinking continued to increase.

Meanwhile Clement Greenberg definitively ended his relationship with Helen Frankenthaler in April 1955. Though he had written negatively about Pollock's last show, Krasner still welcomed him in Springs several times. Greenberg came because he hoped to see his new psychotherapist, Ralph Klein, who was vacationing with his colleagues nearby at Barnes Landing, an East Hampton community that bordered Springs on the east.

While at Springs, Greenberg sided with Krasner against Pollock's worsening alcoholism. “That summer they were fighting all the time and I'd be there…. Well, I thought, ‘Why don't you get out?'…She had this drunkard on her hands. I don't like calling Jackson a drunkard, but that's what he was. He was the most radical alcoholic I ever met, and I met plenty.”
¹⁶

Krasner was still recovering from a severe attack of colitis from a year before. According to Greenberg, the illness changed her: “Before Lee got sick she was pretty intense; always talking about art. What do we think of this? What do we think of that?…Now Lee, I'd always had respect for. She was formidable; made of steel. And so competent at everything, except not the business head she was reputed to be…. Then when she was soft after her colitis, she didn't give a shit anymore, for a while. It was delightful that she didn't give a shit about what she thought about art. That was all off, she thought about life…. Jackson couldn't stand it. I'll
go on record here. That's when he began to turn on her. It wasn't so much attacking her as rejecting something.”
¹⁷

When Greenberg saw Pollock drinking and in a rage at Krasner, he suggested that she see either Ralph Klein or the psychiatrist Jane Pearce, who was Klein's colleague. Both were still associated with the William Alanson White Institute, which continued the teachings of Harry Stack Sullivan after his death in 1949. Sullivan, an American follower of Freud, had emphasized the importance of parent-child relationships. His so-called followers, known as “Sullivanians,” were led by Pearce's husband, Saul Newton.
¹⁸
The group has been labeled “blasphemous” for invoking Sullivan's name and for encouraging the severing of all family ties.
¹⁹
In Newton and Pearce's 1963 book,
Conditions of Human Growth,
they argued that the nuclear family prevented individual growth and creativity and they advocated breaking such ties.
²⁰
Their activist form of therapy advocated new “growth experiences.” It must be noted that Newton only had a B.A. degree.

The day after talking to Greenberg, Krasner took his advice and was referred to Leonard Israel Siegel, another Sullivanian colleague. Unlike Saul Newton, Siegel actually had professional training, including a degree in medicine from Johns Hopkins University and a residency in psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital in New York. He purported to be a disciple of Sullivan, but his close association with Pearce and Newton suggests that his therapy then diverged from Sullivan's teachings as theirs did.