Lee Krasner (26 page)

Mercer also inquired about Krasner: “What about you? And your co-exhibitor friend that you think you like? Write and let me know.”
³⁴
Their friendship was such that she had confided in Mercer, indeed shared, the excitement she felt upon meeting Pollock.

On March 16, 1942, Mercer wrote to Krasner, asking about the AAA show.
³⁵
He referred to the Sixth Annual Exhibition of the American Abstract Artists held at the Fine Arts Galleries, 215 West Fifty-seventh Street, and described by
Art News
as “the best show of abstract painting seen in some time.”
³⁶
Among the artists were both Krasner and her hero, Mondrian. Unlike Harry Holtzman, she was not, thankfully, singled out in the press for “slavishly” imitating the Dutch master. Though there were no published comments about Krasner's heavily impastoed work, the
New York Times
critic Edward Alden Jewell did list “Leonore [
sic
] Krasner” as one of the forty-six participants.
³⁷

Some, however, received more prominent notice. The reviewer for
Art Digest
singled out Bolotowsky, Slobodkina, Glarner, Holty, Xceron, and, of course, Mondrian and Léger—not so much for their aesthetics, but rather for their foreign birth, viewing these artists as Russian, Swiss, German, Greek, Dutch, and French.
³⁸
Krasner, of course, was American.

By April 1942, Mercer reported that he had been chosen for officers school. “How is Monsieur Pollack [
sic
]? You like him, yes,” he wrote to her, then: “Krasner, I have spring fever. Tonight I wish we were walking together down along the docks, walking and talking until dawn broke, physically exhausted. How does that old song go…You are my favorite star.”
³⁹
A month later, he asked again, “What about Mr. Pollack [
sic
]?”

Mercer rattled on: “I met Fritz [Bultman]'s sister [Muriel Francis]. She is a MONSTER. Krasner, you have the life—giving touch. You are WONDERBAR as the Germans say—only they don't say it that way. (By the way, I should like to see you.)”
⁴⁰
After dismissing Miss Bultman, then active as an art collector, Mercer tells Krasner that he “was interviewed last night and asked a lot
of interesting and peculiar questions. I was asked to tell
just
where I had been in Europe, especially Germany, Austria, Italy, and France. When they saw from my classification card that I was a painter—landscape & still life variety, they wanted to know if I could paint and draw coastlines! Good bye, honey. I'm off for a commando outfit or something like that. Jesus how I wish I could get into something terribly exciting, thrilling and dangerous. Only to kill this christ-awful dragging on and on.”
⁴¹

After the end of officers' training and his promotion to lieutenant, Mercer reflected, “I can almost see now why I liked painting. Every now and then I find some phenomenon I would like to paint or draw but the chance and the will are fading. I know that painting is impossible. Even this writing demonstrates that I give it some thought but for now it is on the wane. I guess the death, for a time?, of the painter was a beautifully painful experience. And I can even summon that feeling again, as I have said. I am hardly mad about it any more.”
⁴²
When Barbara Rose asked her years later, “Were people affected by the war?” Krasner answered: “People were very affected by the war. But it didn't mean you stopped painting unless you were called into the army; then you just couldn't paint. But otherwise one continued.”
⁴³

Ever more mindful that most of the eligible men had been drafted by the armed forces, Krasner had set her eye on Pollock, conveniently classified 4-F or unfit for military service because of his psychological problems, but still ambitious enough to paint. “We had a helluva lot in common—our interests, our goal.
Art
was the thing, for both of us. We focused on it, zeroed in on it, because our backgrounds, though different, were not so different as all that. Cody…Brooklyn. Not so different.”
⁴⁴
Indeed, compared to Pantuhoff, Krasner and Pollock were not from such dissimilar social classes.

She and Pollock shared a “mutual interest in painting which was the Paris School of Painting…. We'd either be talking about Picasso, or arguing about Matisse but…it was always French
painting. I knew of his early interest in Orozco and Siqueiros, but we were past that stage.”
⁴⁵
Krasner recalled that Pollock had “the last publication of the then Picasso (whether it was
Cahiers d'Art
or what, I don't know), thumbing through it, and going into a total rage about it, and saying, ‘That bastard, he misses
nothing
!,' which meant, like, he was with it, in that sense…so that his eye was very much directed towards what was happening in the so-called Paris School of painting.”
⁴⁶

Pollock was close to John Graham, whose ideas and art also informed Krasner's work in 1942. She seriously considered Graham's emphasis on an artist's need to unite thought, feeling, and a record of physical gesture, which he called
automatic writing,
or
“écriture.”
⁴⁷
He meant a combination of training and “improvisation.” Krasner took a close look at Graham's own drawing and experimented with some pen-and-ink sketches in which she played around with line and rhythm, searching perhaps for what Graham termed a child's “direct response to space.”
⁴⁸
In this sense, she could depart from Hofmann's attachment to nature and allow line to have a life of its own.

Graham also respected Mondrian's “Neoplasticism,” and wrote that “Mondrian had the vision and heart to start anew. Maybe he did not go far enough, but he had the courage at least to say a new ‘a.'”
⁴⁹

Graham began inviting Krasner and Pollock to elaborate Russian-style teas at his place, and soon enough, the three of them were spending a lot of time together. Krasner recalled: “He had already written his book which I had read prior to having met him…the book affected us and…he had these fabulous oceanic and African pieces.”
⁵⁰
Pollock was closer to Graham than Krasner because he had participated in a drawing group Graham held in his Greenwich Street studio.

Pollock had taken what was for him a rare initiative in order to meet Graham, writing to him after being impressed by Graham's article on Picasso and the unconscious.
⁵¹
The abstract painter Carl
Holty recalled getting to know “Pollock slightly” at Graham's studio. “We used to draw down there at night, he had models and we have this a good deal today in New York. You know, you get a model and a group of fellows will practice drawing.”
⁵²

One wintry night in early 1942, Krasner and Pollock were walking Graham back to his studio, when they ran into “a little man with a long overcoat,” whom Graham introduced: Frederick Kiesler, the architect and designer. Graham presented Pollock as “the greatest painter in America,” to which Kiesler, with his elegant European manners, bowed deeply and asked, “North or South America?”
⁵³

Krasner was also busy visiting the downtown location of the Café Society.
⁵⁴
Among her acquaintances, Reuben Kadish later recalled going to “Cafe Society Downtown on Sheridan Square. I saw the Mills Brothers there, Billie Holiday, and Lena Horne. It was worth dropping five dollars or so to see them.”
⁵⁵
Many of the patrons and even those who worked there had no idea that the Café Society was originally founded to raise funds for the American Communist Party and to guard against the spread of fascist ideas in the United States.
⁵⁶
Indeed, the radical periodical
New Masses
had been involved with the café's foundation.

Café Society also served as the locale for benefits for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
⁵⁷
It attracted radicals and intellectuals critical of American society. Even the name of the club was an attempt to put down the wealthy Upper East Side café society.
⁵⁸
The decor, produced by leftist artists such as William Gropper or Anton Refregier, reflected the same ideology, sending up the lifestyle of the rich. Café Society advertised that it was “the wrong place for the Right people” and appropriate for “Celebs, Debs, and Plebs.”
⁵⁹

The appearance there of boogie-woogie pianists Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson, and Meade Lux Lewis helped to create the craze for this music.
⁶⁰
Having enjoyed “dives” in Harlem, Krasner loved to go to Café Society, where those reported to have taken part in the racially mixed audience include Paul Robeson,
Nelson Rockefeller, Charlie Chaplin, Lillian Hellman, and Eleanor Roosevelt.
⁶¹
In his letter to Krasner of December 12, 1940, Mercer had jokingly referred to “Eleanor R.” in the same sentence as Piet Mondrian, suggesting that Krasner had either encountered Roosevelt at Café Society or at least had heard that she had once been seen there.

In between her Café Society visits, Krasner and Pollock began seeing each other more frequently, during which time, she insisted, “we didn't do art talk!”
⁶²
Most of her own engagements in the art world did not involve Pollock. Nevertheless, Krasner began to share with Pollock her enthusiasm for European modernism. Soon she was making efforts to have him go with her to look at work by modern masters. She later recalled that “while Pollock had Miró as a god, I favored Mondrian and Matisse.”
⁶³
Pollock also favored Picasso, but they both liked “early Kandinsky, the ones in the [collection of Solomon] Guggenheim…the 1913, '14, magnificent, beautiful, beautiful things. Those we saw I think at the Plaza hotel, which is where the Guggenheim, the Baronness Rebay prior to her opening, that's where the collection was.”
⁶⁴
She recalled seeing the Kandinsky paintings in what was then called the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, before it became the Guggenheim Museum.

Krasner also introduced Pollock to Hans Hofmann by taking him to Pollock's messy studio, even though she knew that Hofmann, like Mondrian, favored cleanliness and order. Because he saw no evidence of still lifes or models in Pollock's studio, Hofmann asked Pollock, “Do you work from nature?” Pollock responded: “I am nature.” Hofmann then warned, “You don't work from nature, you work by heart. That's no good. You will repeat yourself.”
⁶⁵
Pollock then bellowed at Hofmann that his theories did not interest him, telling him to “put up or shut up! Where's your work?”
⁶⁶

“Hans had a marvelous way of being deaf to Jackson's aggressive/defensive manner,” recalled Bultman. “Hans was quite aware of
the hostility. Later when the Pollocks were in their worst financial straits, he bought a couple of pictures.”
⁶⁷
Lee's friends Mercedes Carles and Herbert Matter were also very supportive of Pollock. Herbert tried to bring Alexander Calder over to see Jackson's work. However, the sculptor, some of whose work can be described as drawing with wire in real space, found Pollock's work too “dense.” Herbert Matter then encouraged James Johnson Sweeney of the Museum of Modern Art to become an enthusiastic supporter of Pollock's.
⁶⁸

In May 1942, Krasner and Pollock both signed a petition to President Franklin Roosevelt in protest of the deterioration of creative activity on the WPA easel project in New York. At that same time, Krasner was working for the United States government on the War Services Project, the last hurrah of the WPA. She served as supervisor for the production of nineteen store window displays meant to publicize courses offered in New York–area schools to help the war effort. These courses were offered in the municipal colleges to prepare students for “service in the armed forces and in strategic war industries.”
⁶⁹
Krasner recalled that some of the displays were for the windows of Gimbels department store in Herald Square.
⁷⁰

In May Krasner went to observe a number of classes from various schools, “looking for the one spot that could be dramatized.”
⁷¹

These visits included a class on explosives with Professor Burtell of City College, who showed her “interesting and displayable items,” which she recorded and described. She focused on “a weird looking device like some alchemist's dream based on a series of glass jars and retorts connected by rubber tubes, which is used to test the amount of hydrogen in an explosive.”
⁷²
She made more “Notes on Ideas and Materials Available for Window Displays in Stores of the War Courses Given in the Colleges.” Additional course topics included cryptography, chemistry, civil defense, mechanical drawing, metallurgy, optics, military topography, radio, and spherical trigonometry.
⁷³

The montages that Krasner's team produced were accompanied by one designed by Herbert Bayer. This montage was supposed to be at Pennsylvania Station and in the store windows as “a unifying key or symbol.”
⁷⁴
The Austrian-born Bayer was already a famous Bauhaus-trained graphic designer whose montage displayed marching soldiers and students at courses in four different colleges. The caption for his montage read “50,000 Young People Prepare to Serve Their County.”

But the designs from Krasner's workshop were even more adventuresome than Bayer's. Documentary photographs survive from Krasner's group effort, although it is not possible to know who produced what part of most of the displays.
⁷⁵
There were strange juxtapositions of objects and scale, floating letters, lots of diagonal axes, and bold tonal contrasts. These works were all spatially complex and implied several levels of reality.

Krasner managed to get Pollock assigned to her team that summer. By the spring, he often stayed at Krasner's place on Ninth Street. In describing their “courting period,” Krasner said, “I resisted at first, but I must admit, I didn't resist very long. I was terribly drawn to Jackson, and I fell in love with him—physically, mentally—in every sense of the word. I had a conviction when I met Jackson that he had something important to say. When we began going together, my own work became irrelevant.
He
was the important thing. I couldn't do enough for him. He was not easy. But at the very beginning he was accepting of my encouragement, attention, and love.”
⁷⁶
Perhaps the self-sufficient Krasner was not so much drawn to weak, dependent, alcoholic men but was just capable, after a decade of living with Igor, of dealing with one.