Lee Krasner (39 page)

One night Krasner had invited Ward to dinner at her house. Ward recalled, “The relationship [between Jackson and Lee] was very, very curious. Once at dinner there was a bowl of peaches Lee had made, which Jackson wouldn't touch. She said, ‘Now Jackson, they're good for you. Eat them.' He picked up a spoon like a child being told what to do.”
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Ossorio also commented about the “ma
ternal aspect” in their relationship, “the way she treated him like a child and he hating it.”
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The younger artist Nicolas Carone, who shared with Krasner the experience of having studied with both Leon Kroll and Hans Hofmann, felt he understood what their relationship was about: “She took care of him; you don't let go of a Jackson. You have to watch him every minute, and more; a woman taking care of such a man is not just feeding him and darning his socks; she's living with a man who might flip any minute. Think of the tensions she lived under! Lee knew she was dealing with a powder keg.”
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Dan T. Miller, the proprietor of the General Store in Springs, not far from the Pollocks' home, recalled: “I've seen him drive up here to these gas pumps for gas and get in and drive away with Mrs. Pollock sitting beside him, and I wouldn't have sat beside him in that condition he was in but she did. There was a quality of love or however you want to put it. But the point I wanted to make is that she didn't just get up and run when things got a little bit rugged. She sure didn't. I thought to myself more than once ‘Well Lee I wouldn't drive with that son-of-a-gun—I'd get up and walk off' but she didn't.”
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Pollock's mother, Stella, suffered a series of heart attacks in late November 1954. Soon after, Lee went with Jackson to see Stella at Sande and Arloie's home in Deep River, Connecticut. At Christmas they returned. Lee offered to have Stella come and live with them in Springs, thinking that Stella might help save Jackson, but Arloie refused, citing Stella's age and condition: “Jack didn't have anything to help her with. He and Lee were not in a very happy situation and she [Stella] didn't need that aggravation; the strain would have been huge.”
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Pollock became more and more desperate as he became less able to paint. In 1955 he told his homeopath, Dr. Hubbard, that he had not painted for a year and a half because he wondered if he was saying anything.
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In the middle of February, he broke his ankle again, this time wrestling with Sheridan Lord. Jackson had
challenged Sheridan on his own living room floor. Sheridan's wife, Cile, recalled that “Lee had been trying to get him not to, and he knew his bones were brittle…. It was such a dumb thing to do, I wasn't even sorry for him.”
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But Cile was sorry for Lee. “It was hell. I thought that we were going to lose Lee. She got thinner and thinner.”
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Things got slightly better in 1956. Pollock told Dr. Hubbard that he felt better even though he couldn't “stand reality.”
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In the early spring of 1956, the painter Paul Jenkins saw Pollock at Clement Greenberg's on Bank Street and encouraged him to come to Paris. Pollock protested, saying, “It's too late for that.”
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He was just forty-four.

In April Greenberg arranged for Jenkins and two other abstract painters, the German-born Friedel Dzubas and Alan Davie (then visiting from Scotland for his show in New York), to stay in The Creeks and meet Pollock. Krasner cooked lunch for them. Jenkins said her cooking was “extraordinary.” He recalled that Pollock was sober, and that he drove the two of them out to Montauk Point, the scenic spot at the end of Long Island.
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Jenkins knew that Pollock's work was admired in Paris, and he invited Pollock and Krasner to come there and see him and his wife. Jenkins had no trouble interesting Krasner, but he had trouble with Pollock. Nevertheless he applied for a passport, and then never used it. Perhaps he only got the passport to appease Lee.

One day Krasner recounted to Jenkins how she had gone to her therapist to talk about “one of the most terrifying nightmares anyone has ever told.” After the session, when she returned to Jackson, “he turned white when he saw her. He walked up to her and clasped both of her hands and they sat down together. ‘What happened Lee?' ‘Jackson, please, I am all right.' ‘Please tell me. You are completely different!' Lee went on to explain Jackson's astonishment, and how she could not get over it.”
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Jenkins explained that what took place in Krasner's therapy session could be “compared to a kind of exorcism. A kind of monster that had
dwelt in her childhood had dissolved, vanished—and Jackson knew it, he did not just sense it. In Lee's dream, a frightening total monster lived in her cellar when she was a child, and it was real in her psyche, not her imagination.”
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At one point during his stay Jenkins witnessed Jackson shoot an arrow into the wall of the kitchen in his Springs house. After leaving the house, Jenkins sent Jackson and Lee a gift of
Zen in the Art of Archery,
a book written by the philosopher Eugen Herrigel in German and first translated into English in 1953. Jenkins wrote, “Again many good thoughts for the weekend spent with you both. Here is the archery book and Esther & I hope you enjoy reading it. Before returning to Paris I hope we will [have] another chance to talk—if we don't however it has been a real joy to have visited and will remember always your generosity.”
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After receiving the book, Krasner wrote herself a note: “I want to talk about my self destruction my disgust & stupidity—(waiting—paralysis) waiting—& trapped by…Zen & the mastery of Archery…began to breathe more easily & dove in—point I made about painting—let it come to me.”
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In her desperate search for inner peace in the face of Pollock's turmoil, Lee had been thinking about Zen concepts.

Krasner's fear was surely related to the disquieting presence in the painting she was working on in the summer of 1956: “The painting disturbed me enormously and I called Jackson to look at it. He assured me it was a good painting, and said not to think about it, just continue—do another one. Not tie into what my reaction to it was, the way I was doing.”
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Krasner ignored Pollock's suggestion that she remove the disembodied eye scratched onto the dark upper right corner of the composition. The painting, which she later titled
Prophecy,
always chilled her: “In that sense the painting becomes an element of the unconscious—as one might bring forth a dream.”
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Even Eleanor Ward, upon seeing the painting before it was ready, commented, “God, that's scary.”
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Krasner described this canvas as “a break in
color as well as imagery” and said, “I think I felt when I did the painting, it was
Prophecy,
as it was a new theme.”
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Alfonso Ossorio recognized how significant this canvas was and purchased it.

Meanwhile Pollock's reputation was carrying him along, even though he was no longer productive. In May, the Museum of Modern Art told Pollock that he would be featured in a solo midcareer show of twenty-five works, the first of a series of shows of “Work in Progress.” That June Pollock said in an interview, “I don't care for ‘abstract expressionism'…and it's certainly not ‘nonobjective,' and not ‘nonrepresentational' either. I'm very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you're painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge. We're all of us influenced by Freud, I guess. I've been a Jungian for a long time…. Painting is a state of being…. Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.”
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By this time, however, Pollock had serious doubts as to what he was.

Hoping to cheer up Pollock, Krasner invited Charlotte Park and Jim Brooks for dinner on June 18, 1956. Charlotte wrote in her journal, “Went to Pollocks for dinner last night. Had invited them here but Jackson's going through another bad spell…. Jackson is in bad shape but went to bed about a half-hour and when he got up was much more coherent.”
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Back in New York, at the Cedar Bar, Pollock ran into Audrey Flack, an ambitious young painter then just twenty-five, who recalls seeing him earlier at the Artists Club on Ninth Street. Flack recalls that she went to the Cedar alone, hoping to meet her heroes, including Pollock, de Kooning, and Kline. When Pollock approached her at the bar, however, she describes how he tried “to grab me, physically grab me—pulled my behind—and burped in my face…. He was so sick, the idea of kissing him—it would be like kissing a derelict on the Bowery.”
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She was so appalled that she never again visited the Cedar.

Shortly after her encounter with Pollock, Flack met Ruth Kligman, a stunningly beautiful young woman who had just moved to
the city from New Jersey and was working for $25 a week as an assistant at the obscure Collector's Gallery. When Kligman asked her for the names of important artists she should meet, Flack replied, “Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, or Bill de Kooning.” “She asked which one was the most important,” Flack recalled, “and I said Pollock; that's why she started with him. She went right to the bar and made a beeline for Pollock. Ruth had a desperation and a need.”
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She was a “star-fucker,” commented Flack, using the word “star” as a noun and object of the verb.
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Accounts have variously described Kligman as endowed with “an Elizabeth Taylor aspect” and as “coquettish” during the time she ensnared Pollock at the Cedar.
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Patsy Southgate said that she and Jackson “talked a lot about Ruth and we talked a lot about Lee; he was very excited about Ruth and terribly afraid of Lee, desperately afraid of Lee…. He viewed the whole thing as an amazing adventure; he wondered if he could pull it off with Lee, keep Ruth going along. Like a little boy, his dream was to have both.”
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Ruth was “an art bobby-soxer,” said Carol Braider, who had showed Krasner's work at her House of Books and Music. “As for the ‘Lee doesn't understand me' line he handed out, most of us would say, ‘Oh fuck off, Jackson!'”
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B. H. Friedman, who met with both Krasner and Kligman during this period, described Lee as “lively, talkative, gregarious” and Kligman as someone who told Pollock in his dissipation that he was “still alive.”
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Ossorio considered Pollock's relationship with Ruth to be “pathetic…a young girl throwing herself at his feet.”
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Kligman sensationalized and capitalized on her time with Pollock in a 1974 memoir called
Love Affair
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She wrote that she would tell him that he was married and that she had to “make a life” for herself and that Pollock would argue against this by insisting, “My analyst says the opposite. That we're good for each other. I told him all about you, and he encouraged me.”
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She claimed more than once that Pollock told her of his analyst's support for
their relationship. Kligman also asserted that Jackson questioned her about her grandparents—the kind of stock she came from—telling her that he planned to marry her and suggesting by this interest that he fantasized about having a child with her. Not surprisingly, these reports are consistent with Ralph Klein's reputation—one that led to his losing his license to practice.

The affair became intolerable for Lee when Jackson got Ruth to spend the night in his studio with Lee not far away in their house. She gave him an ultimatum to stop seeing Ruth and announced that she was going to take the anticipated trip to visit the Jenkinses in Europe in three days and would return in three weeks. Both of them would have time and space to consider their future.

Krasner's bold actions forced Pollock to reconsider his impetuous affair. According to the Pollocks' neighbor, the painter Nicolas Carone, “He went through the act of getting rid of Lee to bring in Ruth with the romantic notion of filling in a moment in his life, an interlude and then realized it was shit. Also, he realized that he needed his wife, so he'd staked all on a move that didn't have any substance. Lee understood the psychotic problems and knew he was miserable. And she knew that the real value of his work was more important to her than it was to him.”
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Pollock's realization perhaps caused him to then turn against Ruth. A number of friends later noted that Pollock misbehaved with Ruth as he had with Lee. Charlotte Brooks commented that “Jackson was pretty tough with Ruth,” and Cile Downs reflected that she couldn't “imagine Jackson and Ruth being a couple for long, and he was hostile to her—really rude, mean to her—although I never saw any physical violence.”
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When Krasner left for Europe in July, it was intended to be a trial separation, but it upset them both. “While she was in Paris,” Jenkins recalled, “[Lee and I] saw painters, met old friends like John Graham at the Deux Magots…. Maybe if Jackson had gone to Paris, it might have turned him around.”
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In a Paris café, Krasner chanced upon Charles Gimpel, an art dealer whom she had hoped to see in London. He invited her to visit his home in Provence in the south of France, expanding her plans.
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Gimpel had been hoping to arrange a show of Pollock's black-and-white work at his London gallery. Lee wrote to Jackson from Paris on July 21: