Lee Krasner (41 page)

Krasner was not nearly as politically engaged during the 1950s as she had been during the 1930s, when the FBI seems to have ignored her. Nothing incriminating was ever found, and it appears that Krasner never knew she was being investigated. It is difficult to imagine Krasner operating as a spy, particularly since she had no access to any secret information that anyone would want. She certainly was preoccupied during this period with marketing Pollock's work, taking full advantage of the capitalist system.

Oblivious of the FBI, Krasner focused on exhibiting her
Earth Green
series at the Martha Jackson Gallery from February 24 through March 22, 1958. Located on the Upper East Side at 32 East Sixty-ninth Street, the gallery was relatively new, having opened a few blocks away in 1953. Nearly Krasner's contemporary, Martha Kellogg Jackson was born in Buffalo, New York, where she grew up interested in art. She graduated from Smith College and attended Moore College of Art in Philadelphia.
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She was said to be quite sympathetic to her artists, who, among Americans, also included Willem de Kooning, Paul Jenkins, and Louise Nevelson. She introduced some important European artists to the American public, including Antoni Tàpies from Spain and Karel Appel from the Netherlands.

Krasner's seventeen oil paintings at Martha Jackson were large, ranging from six to about seventeen feet in length. The longest,
The Seasons,
she had painted in the barn studio that had been Pollock's. Ben Heller recalls that Krasner enlisted him to help stretch her paintings at the gallery, causing his hands to be “sore.” He never bought any of her work.
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The show occupied two floors of the gallery. According to the gallery's press release, “All the canvases are closely related and actually form a series along a central theme. A deeply felt personal experience is suggested by such paintings as
Listen, Earth Green, Spring Beat, Upstream, Sun Woman, The Seasons,
and others such as
Embrace
and
Birth.
”
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Krasner chose B. H. Friedman to write an introduction in the catalogue for her show. After discussing why she had not yet received the recognition she deserved and discussing her devotion to Pollock, he concluded, “In looking at these paintings, listening to them, feeling them, I know this work—Lee Krasner's most mature and personal, as well as most joyous and positive, to date—was done entirely during the past year and a half, a period of profound sorrow for the artist. The paintings are a stunning affirmation of life.”
³³

Among the telegrams and notes of congratulations Krasner saved was a card of the type that usually arrives with flowers. It was inscribed “To Lee—The Best and the Most—Len Siegel,” a warm greeting from her therapist. The following July, according to Bob Friedman's journal, Krasner's therapist “‘dismissed' (her word)” her. Friedman commented cynically, “In this case dismissal means that he has gotten as much help from her as he can.”
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She had at least begun to work through her grief.

Nearly two decades later, Krasner spoke about the paintings in this series: “I can remember when I was painting
Listen,
which is so highly keyed in color—I've seen it many times since and it looks like such a happy painting—I can remember that while I was painting it I almost didn't see it, because tears were literally
pouring down.”
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The bright colors and biomorphic forms evoke a figure in a garden, an activity that she shared with Pollock after they first moved to Springs.

In 1979 Krasner wrote about the work
April,
which she related to
Listen, Sun Woman,
and
The Seasons
. “The title wouldn't necessarily mean that I painted this work
in
April. I might have, but it's too far away from me now. I think I felt the painting
was
April, whether the month was April or not. I paint a picture and the title follows, so there must have been something in either the color or the iconography to indicate why I chose
April
as this title. I'd say that this painting would be typical of the color in that show.”
³⁶

Once thinking about her palette, she reflected, “I have no idea as to why I sometimes go from no color to a very high keyed color. I have no way of explaining this to myself—what makes this happen—and so I've ceased to try to explore it, and simply go with it. I either feel color, or I don't, and when it doesn't happen, I don't feel the need to explain it to myself now, as strongly as I did in the past when I was more preoccupied with this question.”
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Finally, at what the press release announced as “her third one-man show,” Krasner won over the critics. In the
New York Times,
Stuart Preston opened his article with: “The bravado of Lee Krasner's recent and huge abstract paintings at the Martha Jackson Gallery presents a raw challenge to the eye whether or not we accept the symbolic intentions of her sequences of whirling shapes. What impresses the spectator is the sheer energy that Miss Krasner manages to generate on her picture surfaces. We feel that somewhere behind each picture is a spring that sets off the killing pace of her shapes like an alarm clock.”
³⁸
Time
magazine devoted an entire article to “Mrs. Jackson Pollock,” chronicling her early history back to the months leading up to the McMillan show of 1942. Though the article got a few details wrong, including the date, it noted the important fact that “Blue-eyed Lee Krasner, 49,” had met Pollock and “In the years that followed, the pair made art
history; one with commotion—Jackson Pollock; the other with devotion—Lee Krasner, who became his wife.”
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Time
quoted Krasner about her work in the show: “These are special paintings to me. They come from a very trying time, a time of life and death.” The writer went on to say: “[The paintings] have haunting titles; e.g.,
Visitation, Listen.
They mostly seem to explore death-haunted themes that, Lee Krasner says, make it ‘hard enough for me just to accept my own paintings.' But they also strike a lonely note of hope: one of them is entitled
Birth
.”
⁴⁰

Even women, such as the critic Anita Ventura, who reviewed Krasner's show in
Arts Magazine,
felt compelled to see this art through the lens of Pollock's work: “Her paintings stand in a relationship to Jackson Pollock's that is similar to that of Juan Gris's Cubist works to Picasso's or Braque's, or of Dufy's Fauve paintings to Matisse's. This is particularly true of her successes:
Earth Green
and
Listen
(related to Pollock's totem series and
Ocean Greyness
—to my mind his best paintings), in which she moves his energetic forms toward a rose-beige-brown, emerald-green and fuchsia delicate beauty.”
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Ventura qualified her praise by writing, “Her less successful works, in which the energy is dissipated rather than transformed, become unintentional caricatures.”

Ventura viewed Krasner as one of the earliest to assimilate Pollock's innovation: “It isn't that the second [Krasner] lacks spirit; it has its own sensibility.”
⁴²
She then recalled how the Arensbergs, Los Angeles collectors of cubism and Dada, had cared for “the first harsh moment when something not quite comprehensible was got hold of, when nobody knew whether the work was ugly or not until somebody else came along and made it beautiful.”
⁴³

Parker Tyler, writing in
Art News,
came to a similar conclusion, declaring though one “saw clearly, sex and the woman,” Pollock's “motifs of flesh and fecundity are repeated by his wife in a palette that oddly suggests off-pink cosmetic and fuchsia lipstick as well as flower petal, plant leaf and the void. The scale is audacious, the derivation as legitimate as a painter might wish.”
⁴⁴

Krasner readily acknowledged the importance of Pollock on her artistic development, saying, “He would have influenced me even if I hadn't married him. So did Picasso and Matisse and Mondrian. But I think I've held my own identity right through.” At the same time, the influence was inevitable by virtue of their marriage: “How can you live with someone without that happening, too? We never sat down and had a big art talk together. He'd come in and say, ‘Want to look at what I've done?' And I'd invite him into my studio. Maybe I'd say, ‘Want to look at what I've done?' But we never talked about, say, whether the edges should go inside or out, that sort of thing.”
⁴⁵
When Krasner was asked if she had an influence on Pollock, she was only willing to say, “I daresay that the only possible influence that I might have had was to bring Pollock an awareness of Matisse.”
⁴⁶

At the time of Krasner's show at Martha Jackson, the International Council of the Museum of Modern Art had, with her help and her approval, organized a circulating show of sixty of Pollock's paintings that would travel around Europe, going from the Galleria Nazionale in Rome to museums in Basel, Amsterdam, Hamburg, and London.
⁴⁷

Krasner's own work got international attention in April 1958, when it was included in “International Art of a New Era,” an art exhibition arranged by the French curator and critic Michel Tapié at the Gallery of Takashimaya for Japan's Osaka Art Festival. Krasner was represented by
Rose Red
(1958) and her monumental canvas
The Seasons
(1957), which features forms that make allusions to human anatomy, suggesting sexuality and regenerative life forces. Krasner feared flying, so she chose not to travel with her art to Japan and missed an opportunity to promote her work in Asia.

Krasner continued to see friends in East Hampton, including Patsy Southgate, then divorced, who met her future husband, the artist Michael Goldberg at Krasner's home over Memorial Day weekend, which opened the 1958 season.
⁴⁸
During that summer, Krasner again showed her work at the Signa Gallery in East
Hampton. She participated in the second year's first show called “The Artists' Vision—1948–1958,” which featured the work of Hans Hofmann, who was “among the artists from outside this area who have been invited to participate.” Krasner showed
Continuum
(1949, a canvas on loan from Ossorio and not for sale), a collage called
The City
(1953, not for sale), and
Four,
a canvas from 1957, for which she asked one thousand dollars. Krasner's price was small compared to Hofmann's; his works were priced at three to six thousand dollars.
⁴⁹
Some of Krasner's old friends showed, including Perle Fine, Balcomb Greene, Ibram Lassaw, and the gallery's three founders.
⁵⁰

Krasner's friendship with Perle Fine was beginning to blossom again after their days together in Hofmann's class. Four years earlier, Krasner had convinced Fine to give up her Tenth Street studio and move out to Springs. “It was through Lee that we decided to come out here on the East End,” Fine explained. “Lee was always talking about how wonderful it was, how much she and Jackson enjoyed it.”
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That same summer Fine posed for a photograph taken by her husband, Maurice Berezov. The photo depicts de Kooning grinning in the center, flanked by Fine and, on the other side, a smiling Ruth Kligman, who had moved on after Pollock's death to have an affair with de Kooning. Though still technically married to Elaine, he had also fathered a daughter with Joan Ward just a few years before.
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It is not known if Krasner knew that Fine was spending time with de Kooning; but living in the small town, she did hear about Kligman's relationship with the artist who was still seen as Pollock's chief rival.

David Slivka recalled that Krasner invited him and his wife, Rose, to come out from the city for a weekend. Early in the morning, while the women were still asleep, Slivka went for a walk and ran right into de Kooning pushing Kligman on a bicycle. Bill invited him over for coffee. While there Slivka saw some of Ruth's paintings and thought it bizarre that she was trying to imitate de Kooning's style. When he returned to Krasner's, Rose asked where
he had been, and he said he'd been having coffee. But when he asked indiscreetly what Lee thought of Kligman and de Kooning renting Conrad Marca-Relli's cottage next door to her, she replied, “She's suing me!”
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Indeed Kligman had sued Krasner to force her insurance to pay her medical expenses from the crash that killed Pollock.

The gossip and posturing around Krasner must have made things difficult for her. She was not one to cower in a corner, however, and so she just kept trying to be Lee Krasner, the artist, which meant participating in a third show that season, called “The Human Image.” Thanks to Ossorio, the show projected an international perspective, including, among others, Dubuffet and Karel Appel, as well as sculpture by David Smith and James Rosati. Additionally there was the work of Pollock and Grace Hartigan, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, and the gallery's founders.

Krasner showed
Prophecy,
which was the canvas that had remained on her easel when she left for Europe in 1956. Ossorio had reserved it, so it was not for sale, but Krasner's agreement to have it in this particular show marks her public acknowledgment of its “human” or figurative image. “I got back from Europe and this painting—once more I had to look at it and deal with it;
Prophecy
still frightened me enormously. I couldn't read why it frightened me so, and even now would be hard put to do so. And so in that sense the painting becomes an element of the unconscious—as one might bring forth a dream.”
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Ossorio paid $720 to Martha Jackson Gallery for
Prophecy,
of which $120 went to Signa Gallery for its commission.
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