Lee Krasner (21 page)

Krasner's struggle was with both finding income enough to survive and coping with loneliness. Her $10 rent was modest, but her income was unsteady and minimal. She lived sparingly and occasionally borrowed from friends, such as “Sarah,” Mercedes Matter's aunt Sara Johns, the commercial fashion artist for whom Krasner sometimes worked as a model.

On the back of Mercer's last envelope, Krasner has made notes about her budget:

Without Igor to keep her company, Krasner remained preoccupied with the AAA, but she continued to see Gorky and de Kooning, who shunned that group. Before long she met an acquaintance of theirs, John Graham, who was also an immigrant, through Aristodimos Kaldis, whom she knew from the WPA.
⁹⁰
Kaldis may have had more than a passing interest in Krasner. On January 1, 1941, he sent her a picture postcard of an Aztec Goddess of Flowing Water with the note: “I hope that during the coming year you'll descend from the ethereal cosmos to our prosaic world. Aristo.” His choice of image reflects contemporary artists' enthusiasm for the MoMA show “Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art” of the previous year, but his references to both a goddess and her place in “the ethereal cosmos” suggest that he was attracted to her but found her too aloof.

One day, while Krasner was walking near her apartment on Ninth Street, she ran into Kaldis, and he introduced her to Graham, who at once commented, “You're a painter.”
⁹¹

She remembered thinking, “My God, that man has magical insight.” She asked him how he knew, and he pointed to her legs, which had specks of paint on them.
⁹²
He then asked to see her work, and she agreed.

Graham had come to New York from Paris, but he was born Ivan Gratianovitch Dombrowski in 1886 of Polish parents in Kiev, Ukraine (then in the Russian empire). Like Pantuhoff's father, he had fled the Bolsheviks in 1920 after fighting in the civil war on the side of the tsar. Graham enrolled at the Art Students League in 1923, where he worked as assistant to the realist painter John Sloan before getting his first solo museum show in 1929. During this time, Graham traveled between New York and Paris, dealing in African art and bringing the ideas of European modernism to America.

Graham's immense influence on American artists derived from the sophisticated perspective he conveyed in his articles and his book,
System and Dialectics of Art
(1937), which many read with
intense interest and respect. “He was in touch with artists,” Krasner recalled. “He knew European painters. He had an awareness of what was happening. He moved around. And in that sense one knew that John Graham was one of the people—there were so few then—who was interested in the painting that interested us.”
⁹³
Krasner also said that she responded to Graham because of his “fascinating personality. He had this marvelous little museum where he lived…. It opened up a whole new world in that sense.”
⁹⁴

On November 12, 1941, following his impromptu visit to her studio, Graham sent Krasner a postcard: “Dear Lenore—I am arranging at an uptown gallery a show of French and American paintings with excellent publicity etc. I have Braque, Picasso, Derain, Segonzac, S. [Stuart] Davis, and others. I want to have your last large painting. I will drop at your place Friday afternoon with the manager of the gallery. Telephone me if you can. Ever GRAHAM.”
⁹⁵

Graham's invitation gave Krasner an unimagined opportunity: “I was delighted to be in the exhibition because the French names were Matisse, Braque, Picasso.”
⁹⁶
The Americans in the show, besides her, were Stuart Davis, Walt Kuhn, Virginia Diaz, H. Levitt Purdy, Pat Collins, Willem de Kooning, David Burliuk, and Jackson Pollock. The Europeans, beyond Graham and those named by her and on his postcard to Krasner, were Bonnard, Modigliani, Rouault, and de Chirico.

Later Krasner often told the story about how she wondered who the “unknown Americans” in Graham's show would be and that she was surprised to find only one who was unknown to her—Jackson Pollock. By the time Graham's show was announced, she knew de Kooning well, and he had known Graham since the spring of 1929, when he had seen Graham's solo show at Valentine Dudensing Gallery in Manhattan, a gallery frequented by Krasner as well.

Through her friendship with de Kooning, Krasner also knew
Virginia Diaz, and perhaps through her had met Pat Collins, an Irish-born former circus performer and boxer. Collins had also studied in New York at both the National Academy and the Art Students League, so Krasner could have run into him at the academy or when he worked on the WPA.
⁹⁷
Kuhn, famous for his role in organizing the Armory Show in 1913, made many portraits of circus and vaudeville performers, so he might also be a link among Graham, Collins, and Diaz. Krasner knew Stuart Davis from both the Artists Union and
Art Front
magazine. She either knew David Burliuk, or could have considered him European, since he arrived in the United States in 1922 and was already a fully trained artist. If, however, H. Levitt Purdy was ever known to Krasner, his or her identity has been erased from history.

Krasner's story that she failed to recognize only Pollock's name does not fully convince; after all, she thought she knew most of the art world. She explained that she began asking around before the show but found no one who knew him. Then she attended an opening at Edith Halpert's Downtown Gallery.
⁹⁸
She surely knew the exhibiting cartoonist William Steig from the academy, but even so, there is a good chance she wasn't even going to see the artwork so much as to hang out, make connections, and trade art talk. Steig's “amusing drawings of metropolitan types” were hanging in the Downtown Gallery's group show. For a few years, he had been making “symbolic drawings,” pen-and-ink works that tried to convey states of mind. Most of the others on view were rather established American artists and gallery regulars, all much older than Krasner.

At the gallery, Krasner ran into Lou Bunce (Louis Demott Bunce), whom she knew from the WPA mural project. As they chatted, he asked, “By the way, do you know this painter Pollock? He's a good painter; he's going to be in a show that John Graham is doing.”
⁹⁹
“Good painter” then meant to them a modernist who was painting abstractly. Bunce had met Pollock in his third year at the Art Students League in 1930.
¹⁰⁰

Bunce was making abstract paintings at the time, and he later recalled hearing Léger speak one evening at the Artists Union.
¹⁰¹
Bunce recalled too that he “was running around a little bit with Jack [Pollock] then. And he was excited as well as I was about the Surrealists. And I remember we went to see a big, beautiful Miró show at the modern museum in '41. It was a dinger, I'll tell you. And a lot of those people were in New York at that time. Seligman, and Ernst came, and Tanguy.”
¹⁰²

Krasner learned from Bunce that Pollock lived just around the corner from her on Eighth Street between Broadway and University Place, so she soon dropped by to “make his acquaintance.” Uncertain of his apartment, she climbed to the top floor and ran into Pollock's brother Sande McCoy, who, when asked, directed her to Pollock's door.
¹⁰³
A balding fellow a few years her junior answered the knock. She recognized him as someone she had danced with some years earlier at an Artists Union party. His studio seemed strange because there were no books anywhere.
¹⁰⁴

When she got to know Pollock a little better, she once asked him, “Don't you ever read anything?”

He said, “Of course I do.”

“Why don't I ever see a book?”

He then showed her his back closet and various drawers which he kept “packed with books.” She exclaimed, “Well Jackson, this is mad! Why have you got these books pushed away, locked up?”

He said, “Look, when someone comes into my place, I don't want them to just take a look and know what I'm all about.”
¹⁰⁵

Yet his work impressed her enormously. She later described it as “wild enthusiasm.”
¹⁰⁶
Another time she said that her reaction was “the same sort of thing that I responded to in Matisse, in Picasso, in Mondrian.”
¹⁰⁷
She recalled that one particular canvas “just about stunned me. I saw a whole batch of early work there, finished paintings, not drawings. He had already moved to that point. I was confronted with something ahead of me. I felt elation.
My God, there it is.
”
¹⁰⁸
In the account Krasner gave to
Time
in
1958, she said, “I lunged right over and when I saw his paintings I almost died. They bowled me over. Then I met him, and that was it.”
¹⁰⁹

The writer B. H. Friedman, who was a young collector still in his twenties when he first encountered Pollock and befriended the couple in the spring of 1955, described what Krasner first found artistically significant in the new man: “Jackson had cubism. He had already assimilated the two-dimensionality of the canvas. What interested him most, in addition to Picasso's early masterpiece,
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon,
was the emotional content of that artist's later work in such paintings as
Guernica
and the studies for it.”
¹¹⁰
Friedman also recognized that though Pollock was not a big fan of Surrealist painting, he believed in many of the “Surrealist intuitions,” especially the subconscious as a basis for art and the use of accident. He understood that Krasner saw Pollock as attacking the “holy images” of cubism and Surrealism through his ability to assimilate both styles.

Krasner was particularly impressed with Pollock's canvas
The Magic Mirror
of 1941. She saw beyond the influence of Picasso and felt that Pollock was destined to make a place in art history.
¹¹¹
“When I saw his work,” she later recalled, “I felt an immediate response. I was completely moved. It took me about three years to digest it for myself.”
¹¹²

Krasner later told Lawrence Campbell that Pollock had said at the time that he did not know if
The Magic Mirror
was finished, provoking her to “consternation” and eventually close association.
¹¹³
Mercedes Carles Matter, Betsy Zogbaum (wife of sculptor Wilfrid Zogbaum), and others later liked to claim that they had first recognized Pollock's talent, while Lee was simply taken with him as a man; but it seems clear that Lee was really attracted to the entire package.
¹¹⁴

Moreover, her belief in Pollock's genius never wavered. This kind of conviction evidently irked the art critic Clement Greenberg, who recalled, “Lee was a master of self-centeredness, a
prodigy of self-centeredness. She introduced me to Jackson on the street, saying in her uncouth way, ‘This guy is a great painter.' He looked bourgeois in a gray felt hat—the only time I ever saw Jackson in a hat—and affable but silent, with a reluctant smile. It was a hard face, having to do with alcoholism and with his needing help—with his always being in danger because he felt helpless.”
¹¹⁵

Krasner may have been interested in Pollock's obvious artistic talent, but she was also attracted to the shy, introverted man himself. Born January 28, 1912, Jackson was just over three years younger than Lee, a near contemporary, and unattached. Though not nearly as handsome as Igor, Jackson was rugged and available—that is, he was neither in the army nor in the bed of some southern belle. The previous April, Pollock had been in treatment for alcoholism and other mental problems with the Jungian analyst Violet Staub de Laszlo, who had classified him as 4-F, meaning that he was unqualified to be drafted for military service.
¹¹⁶

Krasner probably did not yet know it, but Pollock was similar to Pantuhoff in that his childhood had been marked by his family's hardships and frequent dislocation. In Pollock's case, the cause was not war but economic misfortune. Also, his parents' failed marriage affected his emotional development.

Unlike Pantuhoff, Pollock was born in America—in Cody, Wyoming—to American-born parents of Scotch-Irish extraction. Both his mother, Stella May McClure, and his father, LeRoy McCoy Pollock, were born and raised in Tingley, Iowa. Jackson was not even a year old when the entire family, including his four older brothers, moved to California. His childhood was marred by the family's frequent moves from town to town in search of better fortune, which ultimately proved elusive. Jackson suffered from his parents' dysfunctional marriage and his father's depression and failure to provide adequately for the family.

Already troubled in high school, Jackson was expelled. Finally he attended Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, where an
art teacher, Frederick John de St. Vrain Schwankovsky, introduced Jackson to Theosophy and the teachings of Krishnamurti. Theosophy is a system of beliefs of religious philosophy and mysticism holding that all religions are attempts by the “Spiritual Hierarchy” to help humanity and that each religion therefore has a portion of the truth. Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky cofounded the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875 and then moved it to India in 1882. There in a small town in the south of India in 1895, Krishnamurti was born. He was adopted in his youth by Dr. Annie Besant, then president of the Theosophical Society, who announced that he was to be a world teacher whose arrival the Theosophists had predicted. In 1929, however, Krishnamurti renounced the role that he was chosen to play, rejected the organization that had formed to support him, and gave back all the money and property that had been raised for this work. Instead he became an independent itinerant voice urging meditation and changing the world for the better.