Lee Krasner (52 page)

When Krasner's show of works on paper traveled from New York to Reese Palley Gallery in San Francisco, the local critic, Alfred Frankenstein, observed that her work resembled Pollock's, “but it has such force, richness, and individuality as to set one wondering just who, in this instance, influenced whom.” The poster featured Mark Patiky's photograph of her.

Krasner told Patiky that he was the first person to photograph her in the process of painting. He stayed for the weekend and enjoyed the dinner Krasner made, especially the fettucini with fresh dill and cottage cheese, and the chocolate nut sundae for dessert.

What Patiky observed was Krasner's avowed preference for having her canvas “within my physical scope including jumping up to hit the top of the canvas”: “What I don't want to do is get up on a ladder and hit the top. I want it to be within my body experience. I don't want assistants working for me. I don't experience it that way. I want to be in contact with my body and the work.”
⁸²

Krasner had another New York solo show at Marlborough in October 1969. John Gruen reviewed the work, praising her series
of small abstract gouaches as echoing her monumental oils, “but whose reduced scale produces a singular delicacy of design. There is all manner of invention and all manner of sensitivity at work here.”
⁸³
The reviewer for
Art News
was less clear, writing that “each work is its own adventure.”
⁸⁴

The following month Krasner's show of works on paper traveled from New York to Reese Palley Gallery in San Francisco, advertised there by a poster with Patiky's photograph of her. The local critic, Alfred Frankenstein, opined, “Her work strongly resembles Pollock's, but it has such force, richness and individuality as to set one wondering just who, in this instance, influenced whom.”
⁸⁵

Gail Levin, then curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, with Lee Krasner, Springs, summer 1977.

T
HE POSITIVE RECEPTION IN
L
ONDON FOR
K
RASNER'S
1965
RETROSPECTIVE
at the Whitechapel Gallery led Barbara Rose to complain in 1972, “It remains, however, for America to acknowledge that Lee Krasner's works share the same esthetic, the same content, the same history and are the same quality as those of her male colleagues, the ‘first generation' New York painters.
¹

“Perhaps because these painters called themselves ‘heroic,' and because we as a people are slower to honor our heroines than our heroes, this recognition has been unnecessarily delayed. But, throughout our history, we have had brave, self-reliant American women who struck out on unknown paths. Lee Krasner is one of them.”
²

Krasner was outspoken about the discrimination she experienced as an artist. Though she hadn't been discriminated against at the Woman's Art School at Cooper Union and on the WPA, once “the scene moves from Paris, which was the center, and shifts to New York” problems became apparent. Krasner attributed these problems to “a group of Surrealists who treated their women like well-groomed poodles and then the abstract expressionists—where we now have galleries, prices, money, attention. Up to then it's a pretty quiet scene. That's when I am first aware of being a woman and a situation is there.”
³
That she had been insulted at the National Academy of Design, where as a female she was forbidden to paint a fish still life in the basement, now seemed less significant.

Krasner's deeply held beliefs led her to reject the work of many artists in the feminist movement. During the second half of the 1950s, Krasner met the artists Miriam Schapiro and her husband, Paul Brach, who had purchased a barn in East Hampton as their summer home. Both Schapiro and Brach were then working in an abstract expressionist style. Later Schapiro moved to California, following her husband's new job as dean in the new California Institute of the Arts, funded by the Walt Disney Company. There Schapiro got to know another artist, Judy Chicago, who was sixteen years younger than Schapiro and who pioneered new ways of educating women as artists.

The two worked together to move Chicago's innovative education plan for women artists from California State College at Fresno to Cal Arts in Valencia, where it became known as the Feminist Art Program. During the fall of 1971, they took over an abandoned house in Los Angeles. With the help of their students, they produced
Womanhouse
(1972), a temporary installation and performance space that examined the role of women and creativity in the setting of a house. These two feminist art pioneers were among those featured in the spring of 1972 at the Corcoran Conference for Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.
⁴

Lee Krasner's absence from the conference was notable. When asked about women “banding together, forming an old-girl network,” she demurred, “I wouldn't become a part of that. I'm an artist not a woman artist. The pendulum is swinging to the other side. It comes a little late for me.”
⁵

The feminist art that Chicago and Schapiro made was anathema to some women, among them Krasner. She recognized the need for a feminist movement, but she had no affinity for feminist art, or anything with labels for that matter. In 1972 she commented to Barbara Rose: “I don't suppose I know what's meant by ‘feminine' subject matter, any more than I understand, what's meant by ‘masculine' subject matter. I'm sympathetic to the women's movement, but I could never support anything called ‘American art.'”
⁶
On another occasion she declared, “When I see those big labels, ‘American,' I know someone is selling something. I get very uncomfortable with any kind of chauvinism—male, French or American.”
⁷
The link that Krasner felt between chauvinism and nationalism began when as a girl she first became aware that not everyone could qualify as “American,” certainly not recent immigrants. Fanatical patriotism and the prejudiced belief in the superiority of one group over another often excluded Jews and the newly arrived. In 1929, some critics had protested that artists such as Max Weber, Jules Pascin, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi should not have been considered American for inclusion in the MoMA show “Nineteen Living Americans.” Rose published in 1972 a
Vogue
article, “American Great: Lee Krasner.” Beneath the title she quoted Krasner: “I'm an artist—not a ‘woman artist' not an ‘American artist.'”
⁸

Some of Krasner's hesitation about categorizing art came from her own struggles to deal simultaneously with both anti-Semitism and antifemale prejudice. In a 1972 interview, Krasner pointed out that an article (in
Art in America
from August 1965) about the abstract expressionist movement included only four women—Marisol, Hedda Sterne, Alice Mason, and Louise Nevelson—out of seventy-
three artists. The article had appeared the very same year as Krasner's first retrospective—in London, not New York. When asked who else might have been named, Krasner immediately reeled off “female artists dating possibly from late 1935 to the mid-1940s that I was aware of: Loren MacIver, I. Rice Pereira, Louise Bourgeois, Jeanne Reynal, Anne Ryan, Sonia Sekula, Louise Nevelson, Alice Mason, Peter (Gertrude) Greene, [Suzy] Frelinghuysen, Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning, [Maria Helena] Vieira de Silva, Barbara Hepworth, and lastly but hardly least, Miss Georgia O'Keeffe.” She allowed that “when you restrict it to abstract expressionism, some of the names would have to be removed.”
⁹

Despite her uneasiness about feminist art, Krasner benefited enormously from the feminist movement, and she embraced it without accepting the art that carried the name. “I'm glad I'm alive, now that women's lib has brought a new consciousness,” Lee Krasner admitted to an interviewer in 1973. “Thank you, women's lib. In that sense, [life now] is better than forty plus.”
¹⁰

In 1980 she reiterated to another journalist, “Women's liberation helped me enormously—if they have to have someone, I'm not so bad as an artist—and I've benefited from the opportunity.”
¹¹

Later Cindy Nemser interviewed Krasner and wrote several articles about her work, including one for
Artforum
. Commenting from the perspective of a woman artist, Krasner noted, “It's too bad that women's liberation didn't occur thirty years earlier in my life. It would have been of enormous assistance at that time.”
¹²

 

D
URING THE
1970
S, THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT ENCOURAGED FEMALE
critics, curators, and historians to focus on the achievements of women artists, and Krasner welcomed the increasing attention. She had once been reluctant, but now she joined calls on art museums to show more women, and she accepted many requests to lend work to all-female exhibitions and to make personal appearances. On April 14, 1972, Krasner joined demonstrators organized
by Women in the Arts to dramatize “inequities against women pervading galleries, universities, and museums.”
¹³
The group of some three hundred demanded an exhibition of women artists chosen by their own membership that would take place simultaneously at the Brooklyn, Metropolitan, Whitney, Modern, and Guggenheim museums. Among the other demonstrators who are now well known were Louise Bourgeois and Chryssa. Another demonstrator, the feminist critic Cindy Nemser, spoke to Grace Glueck, who was covering the event for the
New York Times:
“The demonstration also has to do with the corrupt and decadent structure of the art world. Women are leading the way to a new art world that is open and inclusive. We want a diversity of styles, not just fashion shows of this year's trends.”
¹⁴
Glueck reported that the demonstrators wore signs with statements such as MOMA
PREFERS PAPA
and
SIGMUND, THIS IS WHAT WE WANT, AN END TO DISCRIMINATION
.

The demonstrators at MoMA handed out pink leaflets that detailed discriminatory practices by museums and galleries. One claim was that MoMA had held one thousand one-artist shows in forty-three years, but only five times had the artist been a woman. Another charge was “that in ten leading New York galleries, 94.6 percent of the artists represented were men.” According to the
New York Times,
MoMA countered by claiming that it “had staged only 293 one-artist shows since 1929 and twenty-seven, or approximately 9 percent, were devoted to women artists.” The museum admitted that in the painting and sculpture department's permanent collection, women represented “slightly less than 10 percent.”
¹⁵
The percentages were still very low, so it's difficult to know why the museum bothered to quibble.

Later on the Museum of Modern Art tried to play catchup and organized a show of new acquisitions of drawings in the summer of 1977 called “Extraordinary Women,” which included Krasner along with such historical artists as Hannah Höch, Sonia Delaunay, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Natalia Goncharova, and Suzanne Valadon.
¹⁶
The following fall Krasner reflected that “the
Modern was like a feeding machine. You attack it for everything, but finally it's the source you have to make peace with. There are always problems between artists and an institution. Maybe that's healthy. You need the dichotomy—artist/museum, individual/society—for the individual to be able to breathe.”
¹⁷

Krasner saw both the positive and the negative aspects of the local community in East Hampton. She had not forgiven Harold Rosenberg's support for de Kooning instead of Pollock, yet she was not that angry, because when asked in 1972 if she still saw her old friends, she answered, “Not too many of them are alive. I see Giorgio Cavallon, whom I've known since the academy and Pat and Clyfford Still when they visit New York. When I'm in Springs, sometimes I see Gottlieb or de Kooning, although not often, and Harold and May Rosenberg.”
¹⁸
From the Hofmann School days, she could have also named Ray Kaiser and John Little, two friends with whom she stayed in touch.

Though she was genuinely grateful for Clement Greenberg's early support of Pollock's work, she was clear that his chauvinism bothered her. “Greenberg is very hung up on the subject of women, but he wasn't alone, his whole generation…. In my opinion, [Harold] Rosenberg as well as Greenberg, as well as most of my fellow artists.”
¹⁹
She qualified this point by conceding, “Well, it wasn't just Greenberg and Rosenberg…. Galleries were very uncomfortable with a woman in the art world. That would go for museums. To date, look at the record of the Museum of Modern Art with regard to showing women. They don't. Or the Guggenheim. So like, that's New York, the center of it all, where all the pow-wow goes on, and once you leave New York, it gets worse, not better.”
²⁰

Krasner continued to say negative things about the chauvinist attitudes of some of her male contemporaries, especially Newman and de Kooning. De Kooning painted a series of abstract women with violent, expressionist brushstrokes that many saw as misogynistic and Krasner rejected “them one hundred percent; I find
them offensive in every possible sense; they offend every aspect of me as a woman, as a female…. It's the hatred and hostility toward the female.”
²¹
She went on to say: “And as for de Kooning, I think his problem with women is so complex and difficult that we nod to each other, we say hello and good-bye after about forty-five years, but that's our full contact.”
²²

Simultaneously Krasner attacked de Kooning's aggressive images of women, maintained her antipathy toward feminist art, and voiced her sympathy with, and need for, the feminist movement.

Among the all-women shows Krasner participated in was “Woman as a Creator,” held in early 1973 at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks as part of the 4th Annual Writer's Conference. The conference's theme for the year was “Women in the Arts.” Among the conference speakers were the novelist, critic, and memoirist Mary McCarthy, the poets Gwendolyn Brooks, Carolyn Kizer, and Diane Wakoski, and the playwright Myrna Lamb. Krasner's work was featured together with fourteen artists, including Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, Diane Arbus, and Jeanne Reynal.
²³

Although Krasner did not travel to North Dakota, Judy Chicago did go and spoke during the group show. She recorded in her journal that she found the women to be passive, repressed, apathetic, isolated, and ignorant.
²⁴
Perhaps Krasner would have been more understanding, but by early 1973, she was busy preparing for her next solo show on West Fifty-seventh Street at Marlborough.

Regardless, the North Dakota show was well reviewed in the college newspaper. “It's hard to keep politics out of art when an exhibition is arranged around a political motif like blackness, or femaleness. These artists were chosen because of their art and incidentally, since it was the nature of this conference, because they were women,” wrote Jackie MacElroy in the campus newspaper, the
Dakota Student.
She was impressed that Krasner had “favored the University Art Gallery by sending three works, two of which are commonly reproduced and indeed are among her
best canvases,” noting that Krasner “was and remains an abstract-expressionist and successful despite the odds. There are many things in the Gallery which represent a more innovative approach than Krasner's work but few if any exceed the sureness and fluidity of her mature style.”
²⁵