Lee Krasner (27 page)

The anticipation of a visit from his mother that May propelled Pollock into a binge of drinking that ended with his admittance to Bellevue Hospital, a New York City public hospital well known for its psychiatric facilities—the hospital had established a dedicated unit for alcoholics as early as 1892. (In fact, by 1936, 40 percent of Bellevue's 25,000 annual admissions were alcoholics.)
⁷⁷

Krasner recalled the spring morning when Pollock's brother Sande knocked on her door, asking, “Did Jackson spend the night here last night?” When she asked why, he replied, “Because he is in Bellevue Hospital and our mother has arrived in New York. Will you go with me and get him?” Krasner later told how she had gone with Sande to the Bellevue ward: “He looked awful. He had been drinking for days. I said to him, ‘Is this the best hotel you can find?' At Sande's suggestion I took him back to my place and fed him milk and eggs to be in shape for dinner that night with Mother. We went together. It was my first meeting with Mother. I was overpowered by her cooking.”
⁷⁸
Krasner was caught off guard: “I had never seen such a spread as she put on.” Seeing that Stella Pollock had prepared the abundant home-cooked dinner and even baked the bread, Krasner's first response was to be impressed. She told Jackson, “You're off your rocker, she's sweet, nice.” It took Krasner time to appreciate why there was a problem between Jackson and his mother, how she dominated her youngest son.
⁷⁹

To understand how Krasner dealt with Pollock's drinking problem at the time, it is necessary to consider how the interpretation of alcoholism was then evolving. At the time of Pollock's hospitalization, alcoholism was generally regarded as “a self-induced condition that was more a reflection of moral weakness than medical illness.”
⁸⁰

By 1943, when Pollock was admitted to Bellevue, the old cultural paradigm saw alcohol and drunkenness as “sin and moral degeneracy.” However, this interpretation was giving way to the new “metaphor of alcoholism as a disease.”
⁸¹
Krasner never would have subscribed to the old notion of alcohol as “sinful”—after all, she was too hip, too rebellious, too much a part of a social milieu that accepted drinking. Instead, she accepted medical authority that invoked the problem of alcoholism as a disease, as it had been viewed in the nineteenth century, well before Prohibition.
⁸²

If alcoholism was a disease, then treatment was possible if
one could only find the right cure. Awestruck by Pollock's extraordinary talent and other redeeming qualities, Krasner was determined to try to help him. Her experience dealing with Igor's problems with alcohol made Pollock's more severe problems seem at once familiar and more manageable. But as Krasner searched for treatments not only for Pollock's alcoholism but also for other maladies of her own, she was exposed to a great deal of medical quackery.

Early twentieth-century addiction specialists had argued that putting alcoholics in medically supervised settings was necessary to treat them effectively. Of course, neither Pollock nor other alcoholics could easily be persuaded to remain in a mental hospital such as Bellevue long enough for treatment to succeed. During the postwar years, drinking was heavy in the art community, and that made Krasner's efforts more difficult. Bars were the hangouts of choice, where one went to make the necessary connections, while entertaining at home also included copious amounts of alcohol.

Thus Krasner became a part of Sande's efforts to conceal Jackson's drinking from their mother and get him into a better state to welcome her.
⁸³
In doing so, Krasner gradually became aware of the depth of Pollock's problems, which began to take up more and more of her time.

During Stella Pollock's visit that May, she stayed with Sande and his wife, Arloie, whom he had known since high school, in the fourth-floor walk-up apartment on Eighth Street that they shared with Jackson. Stella wrote to their brother Charles that it was “almost ten o'clock” and Jack “has just left for his girls [
sic
] home.”
⁸⁴
She appears to have been pleased.

As long as she hid Pollock's problems from his mother, from herself, and from others, Krasner was not alone in her positive assessment of Pollock and his talent. Finally, George Mercer met Pollock while visiting Krasner in New York in August 1942. After he returned to North Carolina, he wrote, “I have been meaning to write and tell you what a good time I had in New York with you
and Pollack [
sic
]. What a change it was from the life here. I was a little disappointed that New York wasn't all lighted up for my arrival but then one must put up with the war, you know.”
⁸⁵
Mercer was supportive of his friend's new companion, telling her, “I not only liked Pollack [
sic
] but approved of him as well. You may tell him so if you wish. His quiet intelligence is particularly admirable. Few people are able to give the impression of intelligence without noisy reminder. He is one of the few.”
⁸⁶

Mercer also liked Krasner's canvas in progress. “The painting was and is very beautiful. Don't change it. Or have you done so already? Next time I will have to see it in the daytime. I too would like to delve into the matter of color. I am about on the verge of buying some colored pencils. What a splurge. I'd sort of like to sneak off and put some colors on paper.”
⁸⁷

That fall, Jackson's brother Sande left New York City to take a defense industry job in Connecticut, which allowed him to avoid military service. He must have felt relieved to be able to leave Jackson in Lee's hands. Only at that point did Krasner give up her own place.
⁸⁸
Charles Pollock, their elder brother, later reflected, “Lee and I never had much to say to each other and I had no real impression of her work. Lee had strength, which Jack needed, and ways of opening up avenues for him. If he hadn't met her, he might have gotten tied up with a lethal woman.”
⁸⁹

Charles's wife, Elizabeth Pollock, added, “Jackson was narcissistic, totally in love with Jackson; that's why he had to be mothered. Lee struck me as extremely capable and domineering; I knew immediately why Jackson was with her. He had found a ‘mummy.'”
⁹⁰

With Pollock's family gone, Krasner moved in with him at 46 East Eighth Street, around the corner from her previous apartment, taking the place of his brother Sande and Sande's wife, Arloie, who had looked after Jackson. Krasner was able to paint, working at the other end of Pollock's studio. But still their relationship was not an easy one.

“I was out one afternoon and I came in,” she recalled, “and I found that the painting I had on the easel, that I was working, you know, and I said, ‘That's not my painting,' and then the second reaction was, he had worked on it. And in a total rage, I slashed the canvas…. I wished to hell I had never done it, but…And I guess I didn't speak to him for some two months, and then we got through that.”
⁹¹

It was bad enough that Hofmann had made corrections on her drawings, but this intrusion and interference by Pollock was totally unbearable. Those who claim that Krasner did not continue to show her own work because she did not want to appear competitive should take into account her anger at his attempt to improve upon her painting.

By October 1, 1942, Krasner had taken charge of the City War Services Project and had eight artists under her supervision, including Pollock.
⁹²
Of Krasner's group, the artists John [later, Jean] Xceron and Serge Trubach were fellow members of the American Abstract Artists. In a letter to Audrey McMahon, who was the general supervisor of the City War Services Project, Pearl Bernstein wrote of “the difficulties” Krasner “encountered in coordinating all of the work in spite of academic and other temperaments. The fact that all those who worked on the displays still seem happy about them, is not the least of the things to Miss Krasner's credit.”
⁹³
It is notable that Krasner reported to McMahon, because in December 1936, it was McMahon who had called the police in against the Artists Union demonstrators, some of whom they brutalized; both Trubach and Krasner were among them.
⁹⁴

Several of the artists who worked with Krasner on this project were deeply engaged with modernism. Ben Benn, who had studied at the National Academy of Design from 1904 to 1908, had participated in “The Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters” held in 1916 at the Anderson Galleries in New York, along with Thomas Hart Benton, who had been Pollock's
teacher. Early on, Benn felt the influence of Matisse, Picasso, and Kandinsky.

Xceron, who had first gone to Paris in 1927, was another enthusiastic advocate of modernism in the group. He had worked in Paris as a syndicated art columnist for the European editions of the
Chicago Herald Tribune,
the
Boston Evening Transcript,
and the
New York Herald Tribune,
newspapers with high circulations. Imbued with modern sensibilities, he was a strong advocate for non-objective painting.

In October 1942, Igor returned to New York for a short time. Jeanne Lawson Bultman, who was involved with Igor after Lee and before her marriage to Fritz, recalled Igor telling her that he had wanted to see Lee but that he upset Jackson so much that Jackson began throwing things at him to hasten his departure.
⁹⁵
Apparently Krasner no longer wanted Igor back and had to force him to leave her in peace. Now that he had had a change of heart, he was the rejected one.

Krasner wrote to Mercer about it; he responded, “I think that I would like to have witnessed the splash of plates. At any rate it amused me. It sounds as tho Igor is gone for good now. The last shower of crockery symbolizes something. I like the way you were forced to stop to be honest by the way.”
⁹⁶

Krasner's catalogue raisonné dated a canvas called
Igor
to circa 1943, but it probably was completed in late 1942 in response to the unexpected return of the man who had deserted her. The central motif of
Igor
(which has too often been reproduced upside down) looks like an abstract head of a rooster. Though it is not clear that Esphyr Slobodkina had shown Krasner the 1934 caricature that she had made of her friend astride a cock, the sexual metaphor of the cock was well known to their generation.

Yet the catalogue raisonné suggests the impetus for this picture rests in the princes that Krasner would have known from the Russian fairy tales that her father read to her. It is much more likely
that Krasner's
Igor
refers not to literary lore or to Borodin's opera
Prince Igor
but to her own experience, first growing up in rural East New York with its farms, where she recalled going to fetch buckets of fresh milk for her family, and then at her parents' farm in Greenlawn, where they raised chickens. Like any farm girl, she would have known that though the cock was not monogamous, he would attack other roosters who entered his territory, where his hens were nesting. Likewise, Krasner knew that Igor had wandered into the arms of other women, often the society women he depicted in commissioned portraits, but that he had returned to her, wanting to reclaim his territory. Thus, this canvas is a self-declaration that she had moved on.

As Pantuhoff's fortunes diminished, Krasner saw Pollock's potential. Unlike Igor, whose work had become increasingly conservative and out of step with their contemporaries, Jackson was moving in avant-garde directions, challenging tradition, even contemporary leaders like Matisse and Picasso, whose influence can be seen in her canvas
Igor.
While the suave Igor charmed society women, Jackson maintained a bad-boy persona, but that could be regarded as linked to the antics of Dada artists like Duchamp and the Surrealists, who were then making their mark in New York.

Jackson Pollock with Peggy Guggenheim in front of
Mural,
a 1943 painting that she commissioned from him for the entrance hall of her town house at 155 East 61st Street. Lee recalled that Guggenheim had sent a copy of her book inscribed, “‘To Jackson.'…She had not included me in the inscription…. I must not have realized that she probably resented my attachment to Jackson.” Photographed by George Karger.

T
HE
S
URREALISTS TRULY BEGAN TO MAKE HEADWAY IN
N
EW
York when the heiress Peggy Guggenheim opened her gallery, Art of This Century, at 30 West Fifty-Seventh Street on October 20, 1942. She was the niece of Solomon Guggenheim, the founder of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, then at 24 East Fifty-Fourth Street. She had previously run her own com
mercial gallery in London, which she named Guggenheim Jeune, at once hitching her star to her uncle's fame and giving the appearance that she was his daughter, instead of his niece.

Peggy's wealthy parents, Benjamin Guggenheim and Florette Seligman, were one of the most socially influential Jewish families in New York, but in 1912, when Peggy was only fourteen years old, her father perished in the sinking of
Titanic
. As a young woman, she discovered the avant-garde while working at the Sunwise Turn, a radical bookstore in Greenwich Village run by her cousin Harold Loeb. She forged friendships not only with artists but also with others on the cutting edge of change.

In connection with the opening of her gallery in New York, Guggenheim published a catalogue,
Art of This Century,
which included prefaces by Mondrian, André Breton, and Jean Arp, demonstrating her connections with those in both abstract and Surrealist art. She wanted her gallery to be noticed, so she commissioned an unusual interior design by Frederick J. Kiesler, a European-born and-trained experimental artist, theoretician, and architect.

Guggenheim opened with a show of her collection of modern paintings and sculpture. Many of the paintings were shown without frames to avoid the look of tradition; sculpture was suspended in the air, walls were curved, and special biomorphically shaped chairs were flipped over to become sculpture pedestals. “We, the inheritors of chaos,” said Kiesler, “must be the architects of a new unity. These galleries are a demonstration of a changing world, in which the artist's work stands forth as a vital entity in a spatial whole and art stands forth as a vital link in the structure of a new myth.”
¹

Peggy's uncle's museum, the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, had hired Pollock as a custodian in May, just months after the WPA ended his employment. He worked on making frames and counting attendance and did other odd jobs. Later on, when an interviewer asked her what she had been doing, Krasner replied
that she stayed home and was “very busy keeping house.”
²
In fact, she was focused on taking care of Jackson, wanting this relationship to last.

Pollock would soon come to Peggy Guggenheim's attention through a series of connections. Previously he had worked on the WPA easel project, where he had met William Baziotes, an artist Krasner knew in the WPA, who hung out with the Chilean painter Matta.
³
Krasner recalled that in early 1942, Matta suggested that Baziotes introduce Pollock to Robert Motherwell, a young painter from a relatively well-to-do family, who invited Pollock to show in a group exhibition of Surrealists. He explained the concept of “psychic automatism,” only to find that Jackson already embraced the role of the subconscious in art. Still, Pollock disliked group activities and so declined to join the projected show.

Despite Krasner's own previous experiments with Surrealist imagery, she was turned off by the men's chauvinism. “I was there, too, but that was irrelevant,” she remembered about male artists whom she thought never paid her much respect.
⁴
Krasner liked to rail against the way the Surrealists treated their wives and how this way of treating women influenced the American male artists who looked up to the Surrealists. “There were the artists and then there were the ‘dames,'” she explained. “I was considered a ‘dame' even if I was a painter too. And they had this terrible custom, the artists we knew. It was something they'd picked up from the Surrealists. I think—they used to dress up their wives to go out to parties. Very elaborate costumes, and hairdos and everything.”
⁵
A much younger Krasner had once liked having Pantuhoff manipulate her style, but after him, though she enjoyed fashion, she had no tolerance for this sort of behavior, which she just saw as men treating women like dolls to be adorned.

Krasner was not alone in her reaction against the Surrealists' behavior. Even though her old friend Gorky became close to André Breton, Matta, and a number of the Surrealists in New York, his close friend, the painter Saul Schary, insisted, “Gorky
was not a Surrealist. He never was a Surrealist, because the Surrealists believed that by taking reality and putting it together in strange and unusual juxtapositions, they made it sur-real. ‘You know, Schary,'…Gorky said to me, ‘I made a terrible mistake getting in with these Surrealist people. They're terrible people. The husbands sleep with each other's wives and they're terrible people.'”
⁶
Gorky was referring to his own wife's affair with Matta, one of several torments that contributed to his suicide.
⁷

Krasner also recalled the “little social engagements” that she and Pollock had with Matta, Baziotes, and Motherwell, during which they played the after-dinner Surrealist game Exquisite Corpse. She described this as: “It was to draw a figure, and you do the head, and then fold the paper and then give it to me, so that I'd start the upper part of the torso, and then I'd fold it up, and so on; it isn't a literary concept.”
⁸
Jackson and Lee also began to experiment with writing automatic poetry, emphasizing one's stream of consciousness with Motherwell, Baziotes, and their wives—but merely as an after-dinner game.

Through Motherwell, Pollock received an invitation to take part in Peggy Guggenheim's show of collages that was held from April 16 to May 15, 1943. The two men worked together on their collages in Pollock's studio. Pollock was also invited to submit his work to the jury for the Spring Salon for Young Artists (under the age of thirty-five) at Art of This Century. Krasner, who would not turn thirty-five until October, did not submit anything, though she continued to work on her own art.

Guggenheim asked the English art and literary critic Herbert Read to help her choose the artists for her salon, and they worked together with her new employee, Howard Putzel, to organize the show. Putzel knew and supported Pollock. He visited Pollock's studio in advance and told Pollock to send in his painting
Stenographic Figure
for this juried show.

Jimmy Ernst, Guggenheim's assistant and the son of the famous artist Max Ernst, who was then briefly married to Guggenheim,
was present when Mondrian and the other members of the jury—the French artist Marcel Duchamp, the critics James Johnson Sweeney and James Soby, Putzel, and Guggenheim—considered Pollock's painting. Jimmy reported overhearing Mondrian comment that he found Pollock's work “exciting and unusual,” though not easily understood. There was something new going on there, Mondrian noted, which might mean that Pollock was one of the most original American artists that he had ever seen. Guggenheim, who had not previously paid attention to Pollock's work, soon made a date to visit his studio.

On June 23, Peggy arrived, but Lee and Jackson were a bit late, and when they arrived, they ran into her exiting their building. “Anticipating that we might be late we left the doors open for her,” Krasner recounted. “My paintings were up as well as Jackson's…. [Peggy] started to bawl Jackson out for not being there on time, saying, ‘I came into the place, the doors were open, and I see a lot of paintings, L.K., L.K. I didn't come to look at L.K.'s paintings. Who is L.K.?' And she damn well knew at that point who L.K. was.”
⁹
Eventually, they prevailed upon the irate Peggy to climb back up the stairs for a proper studio visit in Jackson's presence. There, as they continued to mollify her, she warmed to his work.

It was Peggy's friend Jean Connolly who wrote the review of the spring salon for
The Nation,
which Krasner liked to quote, for it said that Pollock's canvas left the exhibition jury “starry-eyed.”
¹⁰

This really made an impression on Krasner because Mondrian was one of the jurors. She might have been aware that at the time, Connolly was the lover of her old friend, the critic Clement Greenberg, who was then serving in the U.S. Army Air Force.
¹¹
Krasner must have also liked what Robert M. Coates in
The New Yorker
had to say about Pollock's work—“a real discovery.”
¹²
Others were now seeing what she had seen in Pollock a few years earlier. The future, for once, looked rosy.

By July 15, Pollock proudly wrote to Lee on Long Island, where she was visiting her aging and ailing parents, that he had signed
a contract from Peggy Guggenheim. Like Krasner, Guggenheim seemed fortunate to have found in Pollock a talented young male American artist who wasn't in military service. Guggenheim scheduled a solo show for him in November, commissioned a mural-size painting for the entrance hall of her town house at 155 East Sixty-first Street, and agreed to pay him $150 a month for a year with a settlement at the end of the year. If more than $2,700 worth of art were sold (less one-third commission for the gallery), he would receive further payment, and if less, he would make up the difference in paintings turned over to Guggenheim.
¹³
Her patronage seemed fantastic. It immediately enabled him to quit the custodial job that he held at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, where, like many of the artists-employees, he felt threatened by the dogmatic director, the Baroness Hilla Rebay.

That same summer, Krasner wrote to Jackson's mother, Stella Pollock: “I'm really ashamed for not having written sooner but life in N.Y. is complicated and in spite of the fact that I'm not working (except for the posing I do for Sara) and I seem to be kept busy every minute. It was nice seeing Frank and in uniform, much to everyone's surprise and Sande (who's getting fatter every day).”
¹⁴

She exulted about the wonderful things that were beginning to happen to Jackson: Peggy Guggenheim's visit to his studio, her purchase of a drawing, and her promise of a solo show for him in November. “She is really very excited about his work; in fact she said one of the large canvases was the most beautiful painting done in America. She wants to handle his work and can do a lot for him,” she enthused.
¹⁵
She also told how James Johnson Sweeney had offered Jackson a teaching job in Buffalo, New York. It was not tempting, but it was flattering, and it suggested that he was destined for success.
¹⁶
And there was more: “some woman who came in from the coast to arrange some shows for the San Francisco Museum offered him an exhibition of his drawings and I can't remember what else is happening but it's all very wonderful.”
¹⁷

Lee also wrote to Stella: “Please be sure and send me the information about your shoes so I can get them quickly—are you thinking about coming East soon? I'll write soon.” She signed her letter to Jackson's mother “Love, Lee.”
¹⁸
Though not yet married, she was clearly behaving like an ingratiating daughter-in-law.

On April 6, 1943, Krasner applied to the City of New York to correct her birth certificate, which had been issued incorrectly as “Lena Kreisner.” She petitioned to have it changed to “Lenore Krasner,” not using the “Lee” from either Cooper Union days or the 1930 U.S. census. She reported that her parents Anna (not Annie, as had been recorded on the original certificate) and Joseph were aged seventy and eighty and were living at Delaware Avenue and Winfield Place in Huntington Station, Long Island, New York. She also noted that Joseph had “operated a fish store,” not worked as a “Fisher.”
¹⁹
The reason Krasner elected to file this official paper could be related to her desire to marry. Though Jackson had problems, things seemed to be falling into place.

While Krasner's relationship with Pollock was developing, Hans Hofmann was helping to promote her work. Eventually Sidney Janis, who had helped arrange the New York showing of Picasso's
Guernica,
noticed her. Janis even selected work by Lee, Mercedes Carles, and their pal Ray Eames, all former Hofmann students, to include in his book,
Abstract & Surrealist Art in America,
which would be published in November 1944. The three women were featured along with Hofmann as well as Stuart Davis, John D. Graham, Byron Browne, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and others who worked under the rubric “American Abstract Painters.” Krasner's unsigned contribution, which Herbert Matter photographed, was called
Composition
(1943) and reproduced across the gutter from John Graham's
Studio.
Though Krasner employed various colors, her palette, emphasizing red, yellow, and blue, still attests to her adulation of Mondrian at the time. She listed her date of birth as 1911, intentionally shaving three years off her age, as so many women did in
those days of intense gender discrimination.
²⁰
It is not clear if she lied about her age to Pollock, but in retrospect, it seems unlikely that he would have paid much attention to such a detail at the time they were first attracted to each other.