Lee Krasner (44 page)

In hindsight it is easy to see the opportunist in Gibbs. In 1993, long after Krasner's death, he was exhibiting his own artwork in Connecticut, where he elicited this write-up: “The third artist, David Gibbs, was born in England and saw service in World War II before becoming a banker and an art dealer. Upon settling in the United States, in the early 1960s, Mr. Gibbs met Lee Krasner, who appointed him executor of Jackson Pollock's estate. She also turned over to him the studio in which she and her husband had painted. But seemingly Mr. Gibbs osmosed nothing from the atmosphere there.”
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Though Krasner may have allowed Gibbs to paint in the studio when she was in one of her so-called dry periods, the notion of her turning Pollock's studio over to anyone seems like the kind of exaggeration that Gibbs could have made only after her death.

To some extent, Krasner got what she bargained for with Gibbs. Seeking to market Pollock's work, Gibbs thought of Frank Lloyd, the head of the prominent London gallery Marlborough Fine Art Limited, which was then looking to open an American outpost. Though it is not known when Gibbs and Lloyd met, they were both players in the small world of upscale London art dealers. They were both among the handful of dealers featured by the London
Sunday Times
in May 1960 in the article “Atticus among the Art Dealers.” The piece described Marlborough Fine Art as “a good example of what can still be done in the art world with a knowledge of painting and business flair.”
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Lloyd, a diminutive but dashing Jew, was born Franz Kurt Levai in 1911 in Austria, where his parents and one set of grandparents were well-known antique dealers. Krasner's near contem
porary, he was married and a tough businessman who had landed with the British Army during the Normandy invasion. He had a taste for collecting art and was said to have twinkling blue eyes that helped to conceal his toughness. Krasner, however, probably recognized and respected his pugnacity because it mirrored her own. Evidently she liked his Viennese charm—as a former oil importer, he was much more interested in money than art.

After all, money saved his life in 1938. He had been able to trade his Vienna apartment and its contents (including art by Picasso and the Fauves) for a visa to escape the Nazis. He escaped to Paris, where he joined his brother. In 1939, Germany was poised to invade France, so Lloyd and his brother fled Paris for Biarritz. French authorities put Lloyd and his brother in an intern camp as Jewish refugees. After being released, Lloyd escaped to London, taking a Polish boat from St.-Jean-de-Luz.
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Lloyd founded the Marlborough gallery in London in 1946 together with Harry Fisher, a fellow Austrian Jew.
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The name was meant to evoke British aristocracy, and at first they focused on impressionist and post-impressionist art and early-twentieth-century French modernists. Two years later, David Somerset, who later became the Duke of Beaufort, joined their enterprise and helped them make overtures to cash-strapped aristocrats with art to sell. Not one to accept limitations, Lloyd soon began to sell contemporary art, which he knew would never be in short supply.

By late November 1960, Gibbs had negotiated a deal between Lloyd and Krasner. She agreed to show sixty works by Pollock in March 1961 at his proposed gallery in New York, half of which would be made available for purchase. On December 13, Gibbs wrote to the New York collector Ben Heller, thanking him for allowing him to bring Lloyd to see his collection, which included Pollock's
Blue Poles
and other works, and telling him the terms of the new arrangement.

Months before Gibbs placed Pollock's work with Lloyd, Krasner signed an exclusive contract with the Howard Wise Gallery
for her own work. Wise had just opened a new place at 50 West Fifty-seventh Street, and he had written to Krasner to invite her to the opening party to “make yourself known to me.”
²⁹
His overture worked, and Wise became Krasner's “exclusive sales agent.”

During the summer of 1960, Krasner gave Wise the courtesy of asking his advice before agreeing to lend one or two pictures to the Angeleski Gallery on Madison Avenue for a group show called “Leading Women Painters and Sculptors of the U.S.” Wise replied, “I really don't see the point in a show of work by lady painters. Who cares about the sex the painter belongs to, when it is the painting that counts? And I doubt that you are ambitious to be known as a lady painter, even the best lady painter. There are so many of them, and as such they are not held in particularly high esteem. My inclination would be to suggest that you not participate in this exhibition, or indeed in any other exhibition of works by lady painters.”

He suggested that she wait to participate until a woman's show would be organized by “some very important organization such as the Museum of Modern Art.”
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(Of course, this didn't happen in her lifetime.) Wise offered to write the Angeleski Gallery a polite letter of refusal for Krasner.

Wise grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and then studied at Cambridge in England and at the Louvre. His father forced him to go into his paint company, but he finally started a gallery in Cleveland, where he mainly sold prints.
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For his opening show in New York, he chose the abstract expressionist painter Milton Resnick. Russian-born, Resnick had arrived in New York at age five in 1922, when his family settled in Brooklyn. If Krasner had not met Resnick during their days on the WPA, she would have known him during the 1940s, when he was de Kooning's friend.

Whether Wise approved or not, Krasner exhibited in three group shows at the Signa Gallery in East Hampton during the summer of 1960 and for the last received a mention in
The New Yorker.
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Also that summer Krasner gave what she said was her
first interview ever to Louise Elliott Rago, a high school teacher who was writing for
School Arts
about “Why People Create.” Asked if she really believed that there have been no great women painters since Mary Cassatt, Krasner responded, “I do not think it is a question of Mary Cassatt's greatness. It's like asking when were women permitted to give up their veils? I believe this is a problem for the sociologist and anthropologist. We are discussing a living problem and painting is one of the most complex phenomena today. There is undoubtedly prejudice. When I am painting, and this is a heroic task, the question of male or female is irrelevant. Naturally I am a woman. I do not conceive of painting in a fragmented sense.”
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When asked if she had responded to the “explosion of color painting of the sixties,” she remarked, “I have a perverse streak. When all that color painting was going on, I did my umber paintings. But I think one is affected by many things, consciously and unconsciously. My pull towards Matisse dates way back, and if I had to point to a colorist today, he would still be the one, whether the sixties acted as a catalyst or not, I can't really say.”
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“The impact of the first Matisses I saw is still within me. It was always part of the background of my work,” Krasner explained years later.
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She had seen her first Matisses in person when the Museum of Modern Art was still new and she still a student at the National Academy. Asked what she liked about Matisse, Krasner replied, “It's the air-borne quality of it…. It doesn't grind you down to the earth, it allows you to move into space, infinite space.”
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Another time she reflected that color-field painting was becoming prominent in the early 1960s and it was “a very different form of painting from what is happening with me…. It seems to me that I'm dealing with the whole alphabet, while color-field goes from A to B. Well, why put that kind of restriction on painting? I don't understand it.”
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By “A to B” Krasner referred to color-field painting's flat color on a flat picture plane, often stained into the
canvas, as championed by Clement Greenberg, who argued that some of the abstract expressionists such as Rothko and Newman made work that utilized vast areas of flat, solid color instead of gesture and brushstrokes. Greenberg also promoted color-field painters such as Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland.

The end of that summer was marked by a holiday gathering over Labor Day weekend, which included Bob Friedman and his wife, Abby, his brother Sandy, Richard Howard, Len Siegel (Lee's therapist), and Lee—discussing the meaning of “complexity.”
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Thus we know that Krasner continued to see Siegel, but it is unclear whether she was still his patient.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the excitement of her friendship with Gibbs, Krasner had a productive year during 1960, painting
Night Watch, Triple Goddess, Uncaged, Entrance, The Guardian, Fecundity, Charred Landscape, The Eye Is the First Circle, Seeded, Vigil, Celebration,
and
Polar Stampede.
She continued to paint during sleepless nights, working in umber and white under artificial lights. She explained, “I don't like to deal with color in artificial light.”
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Krasner discussed some of her work from this period in an interview with Richard Howard. “Well
The Eye Is the First Circle
…. That was painted in East Hampton—its title was the first line of Emerson's essay on circles…,” to which Howard responds: “Yes, the
literary
titles were both yours, one from Emerson and the other from Rimbaud” and she rejoins:
“What Beast Must I Adore.”
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Howard emphasized to Krasner that she seemed “exultant about these paintings,” and she concurred: “I remember how excited I was when I finished
The Eye Is the First Circle.
I was hardly depressed.” She described the painting as being “as though you were descending once more, bringing forth from the unconscious, subconscious, or whatever area you bring forth from, as one does in a dream.”
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In this case, to name her picture, she recalled
that she drew upon Emerson's words, which had “preoccupied [her] many years before.”
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The opening lines of Emerson's “Circles” appealed to Krasner's deep appreciation of nature and patterns: “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.”
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Of course Krasner had focused on disembodied eyes as early as the 1930s, when she was briefly under the influence of Surrealism. Krasner said that she titled the painting after she finished it and saw those eyes.
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Krasner's fourth solo show took place at the Howard Wise Gallery from November 15 through December 10, 1960. Wise offered Krasner's recent paintings for sale at prices from $1,800 for
Breath,
$3,750 for
Seeded,
and $7,500 for
The Eye Is the First Circle,
a work that was nearly eight by sixteen feet.
Cool White,
which David Gibbs had purchased, was included in the show but not offered for sale. Prices were mutually agreed upon, and the gallery's commission was one-third of the sales price.

Krasner received a number of reviews for this show. “Miss Krasner whips up her severely colored shapes into a wild whirlpool-like dance. They beat with a powerful, even pulse and can be imagined as being accompanied by a tom-tom. She sees to it, as well, that they do not get out of hand,” wrote Stuart Preston in the
New York Times.
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Emily Genauer, reviewing for the
New York Herald Tribune,
described “huge abstract-expressionist canvases…vast, highly complex networks of tortured line (all but one limited to shades of brown and white) through which peer countless agonized eyes, never relaxing their watch despite imprisoning labyrinths and swirling vortices.”
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The critic for
Arts Magazine,
Vivien Raynor, was less enthusiastic, even baffled. “One felt physically thumped by Miss Krasner's very severe, monochromatic work…. It is perhaps some measure of their power that they did not permit scrutiny and analysis;
indeed it would be easier to analyze a breaking wave than
The Gate.
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…If the ideal painting of our time should be an exterior, threatening force, then these are it. It was as if some Norse god had taken a sabbatical from tossing anvils and had painted for a stretch of time and canvas—each square foot of fabric carried an equal share of pressure. Miss Krasner denies us a sensual experience from her work.”
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Raynor did acknowledge that Krasner had “the power both to disturb and compress.”
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More terse, but more positive, was Irving H. Sandler in
Art News,
noting that her “mural-size canvases have been influenced by the works of her late husband, Jackson Pollock, but arrive at personal images.” Disagreeing with Raynor, he wrote, “Miss Krasner dramatizes a mythological content.
Celebration,
an abandoned bacchanal of orange belly shapes, whirls the viewer into its vigorous all-over action. Other, brown and white, paintings are less orgiastic, more brooding and ominous. The spectator is allowed to trace his way through labyrinths of whipped lines in which are encountered fetichistic eyes. These might be the eye of God, Cyclops or Medusa, the evil eye, the inner eye, the artist's eye or the eye of the hurricane.”
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In contrast to Raynor, Sandler elaborated, “In
The Gate,
Miss Krasner compresses her totemic imagery into staccato stabs and showers of sparks. One senses the struggle she had with this dense picture.”
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And Krasner did struggle. She titled a painting she made in 1961
Assault on the Solar Plexus,
saying that “for me it was an embarrassingly realistic title. I experienced it.”
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The solar plexus, another name for the
Celiac plexus,
is often used to refer to the site of a blow to the stomach or the general region where it is located. Such a blow can cause the diaphragm to spasm, resulting in difficulty in breathing. “Getting the wind knocked out of you” is the idiomatic expression, which is often used to express the kind of painful emotional trauma that Krasner had experienced around Pollock's death. Krasner also related the pain of this period to her
blowup with Greenberg and to the death of her mother. She had also just pulled the Pollock estate out of the Sidney Janis Gallery.