Lee Krasner (54 page)

Krasner answered questions from the audience. She described
her work schedule as “a very neurotic rhythm of painting. I have a high discipline of keeping my time open to work. If I'm in a real work cycle, I'll pretty much isolate myself and paint straight through, avoiding social engagements. After not painting for two months due to lecturing in Miami, I'm getting restless, nervous, irritable.”
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In January 1975, “Lee Krasner: Collages and Works on Paper, 1933–1974” opened at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., organized by Gene Baro, a freelance critic. It surveyed her art from a 1933 Conté crayon nude drawn from the model through recent abstract gouaches. The list of lenders to this show offers a view of those with whom the artist had been closely associated, including her therapist Dr. Leonard Siegel, her friends Edward Albee, Hans Namuth, Alfonso Ossorio, and Edward F. Dragon, and Krasner's old flame David Gibbs and his wife, Geraldine Stutz. B. H. Friedman was represented by his company, Uris Buildings Corporation.

Baro called Krasner “an artist of natural sensations, of elemental attributes and appearances of things. Her interest isn't to describe an experience but to reorder or reinvent it as visual feeling.”
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Paul Richard wrote for the
Washington Post:
“Lee Krasner is a famous artist whose fame has hurt, not helped her.” After rehearsing her life with Pollock, he concluded, “Lee Krasner is no mere imitative artist.”
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Additionally the reviewer Benjamin Forgey noted, in the
Washington Star-News,
that “Krasner is obviously a talented artist” but lamented not being able to consider her recent, large, oil-on-canvas paintings.
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The Corcoran show traveled to both the Pennsylvania State University Museum of Art and the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University.
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Reviewing the show in the
Boston Globe,
Robert Taylor began by pointing out that Krasner was “victimized by our inability to distinguish between the relevant aspects of an artist's biography and an artist's work; but then so was her husband, Jackson Pollock. He was a drunk, with all a drunk's self-hatred, yet
the least relevant aspect of his career was the boisterous romanticism that made him such a wretched custodian of his talent.”
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He continued, however, to note: “Of course, Brandeis's show not only indicates that she can stand on her own, but that she is a serious and highly significant American painter.”
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In a related article, Lucille Bandes noted that Krasner was finally beginning to gain recognition “as a major figure in contemporary art,” while noting how devoted she was to her husband's needs. “Those who knew them both well report that in addition to the necessity to earn money and to guard Pollock from the effects of his heavy drinking, she found it difficult to paint because he resented it. She herself insists that her husband encouraged her art, but she does say, ‘I would give anything to have someone giving me what I was able to give Pollock.'”
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In 1975, Krasner produced
Free Space,
a serigraph on paper, for a print and sculpture portfolio and a traveling exhibition project called “An American Portrait,” timed to coincide with the bicentennial. The exhibition was produced by Alex Rosenberg under the name Transworld Art Corporation, and it featured thirty-two other artists, including Alex Katz, André Masson, Romare Bearden, and Karel Appel. Rosenberg said that working with Krasner was easy because “she was a pro, an absolute pro.”
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Rosenberg found Krasner to be very friendly and “not as tough as she was made out to be.”

When he asked her, “What was a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn doing with Jackson Pollock?” she responded, “Who said I was a nice girl?”
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There was a brief statement about the project that read: “Krasner, who risked a depth of exploration of the psyche, gained by it; ‘We shall not cease from exploration' is a T. S. Eliot line that Krasner likes to quote.”
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That summer Ruth Appelhof, then a graduate student at Syracuse University, arranged to spend time with Krasner in Springs. She drove Krasner out from the city—Lee no longer
drove anywhere herself. While Appelhof served Krasner's need not to be alone in the house, she got to conduct research for her master's thesis. Appelhof recalled an excursion to swim at Louse Point, the bay beach after which de Kooning named one of his canvases. There, they ran into Harold and May Rosenberg, who had a cordial exchange with Krasner. Appelhof observed that Krasner “had a sexual demeanor about her. She was very aware of her body and apt to show it off.”
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The young scholar could hardly have known of those long past sensual scenes with Pantuhoff on the beach.

In July 1975, Krasner accepted an invitation to be artist in residence at Marge Schilling's artists' conference at Dune Hame Cottage in Watch Hill, Rhode Island. The invitation offered a pleasant setting and a chance for a change of pace.
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Marge Schilling was a New York portrait painter who worked on commissions, mainly of children. She also supported herself organizing this annual conference for women artists at her Rhode Island summer home. None of the women who attended were famous, but they were thrilled to have Krasner present.
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One of the artists who attended the conference was Majorie Michael, whose sculpture was the subject of a book,
A Woman's Journey,
published the previous year.
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She found Krasner to be “a remarkable woman” and considered her an “excellent painter” the two got along well.
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Michael made many sketches and took photographs of Krasner during the week at Watch Hill so that she could start making a portrait bust. Krasner liked the project enough that she traveled that October to the suburbs north of New York City to sit for Michael in her Chappaqua, New York, studio.
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Krasner inspired Michael, who wrote in her journal in 1977, “Like Lee Krasner says, ‘It is a big wide canvas but I can reach it all with a little jump!'”
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Michael kept in touch with Krasner, visiting her in East Hampton in 1981.

Schilling hired Dyne Benner to be the cook at the conference. Benner had studied painting at the Art Students League with
Morris Kantor and Theodoros Stamos, and she photographed some of the group in Rhode Island, including Krasner, who was wearing a fashionable brown strapless bra under a see-through brown tunic of Indian muslin.

That fall Krasner invited Benner to Long Island for a couple of days, but Benner found Krasner too bossy and felt uneasy, so she departed. When Krasner asked Benner, “What do you want from me?,”
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Benner was unable to respond. Others, like Ronald Stein, Clement Greenberg, or David Gibbs, usually wanted something from her.

Later that summer Krasner turned down an invitation to take part in a group show at Ashawagh Hall, just down the road from her home, where she had often been in the annual exhibitions. This time, however, the organizers, Joan Semmel and Joyce Kozloff, had just arrived on the scene and proposed a new theme for the familiar venue: “Women Artists Here and Now.”
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It's possible that Krasner didn't want to associate with feminist artists. She knew that Semmel and Kozloff made feminist art, as did some of the artists in the show—Miriam Schapiro, Audrey Flack, and Carolee Schneemann. And though Krasner curtly refused, Perle Fine, Elaine de Kooning, Betty Parsons, and Hedda Sterne all accepted, and none of them made feminist art. During the show on August 29, 1975, Schneemann staged a now-legendary performance nude before the audience, in which she read from a script on a scroll that she slowly pulled out of her vagina.
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Perhaps Krasner's posing for nude photographs on the beach had faded from memory, but she could not conceive of the new feminist performance as art.

In June 1976, Krasner left Marlborough for Pace Gallery, which was on the same street. She would be the third woman at Pace, joining Louise Nevelson and Agnes Martin. Denying that the move had anything to do with Marlborough's notorious abuse of the Mark Rothko estate, the
New York Times
quoted Krasner: “All good things come to an end. It's the longest time I've been
with any dealer, and it's time for a change.”
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She also removed Pollock's work from Marlborough, perhaps to protect his estate from a fate similar to Rothko's, although that motive was not acknowledged.

As she aged, Krasner began to take up some of the activities of her youth. She joined a political protest against the French government's release of the suspected Palestinian terrorist Abu Daoud, who was the alleged mastermind of the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre. Krasner lent her name to an advertisement in the
New York Times
that announced that the petition's signers were boycotting the opening of the government-sponsored museum le Centre national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou (also known as le Centre Beaubourg). The campaign was organized by her dealer, Arnold Glimcher of Pace Gallery, and her fellow gallery artist Louise Nevelson. Many artists joined the list of protesters, including Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, James Rosenquist, and Lucas Samaras, as well as critics Dore Ashton, Barbara Rose, and Robert Hughes.
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At the end of the year, she told
Newsday
that the best thing that happened to her during 1976 was that she “started to dance again…. John Bernard Meyers [an art dealer] asked me to dance at a party. At first I refused, but then I said, ‘If you go very, very easy or very slowly,' because I hadn't danced for years. I used to be mad for it. Well, after a few numbers, it was he who had to be walked away.”
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When Gaby Rodgers, an interviewer for the
Women Artists Newsletter,
asked Krasner in 1977 if she felt the women's movement had made errors, she responded, “Every revolution makes errors. The women's movement is the major revolution of our time; it's natural for them to make errors. I don't kid myself. Women are not yet equal—we are still second-class citizens.”
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Rodgers, editorialized, “I am sure glad [Krasner] is around. Today, when the feminist movement looks for role models and young people flock to gurus for wisdom, we would do well to pay attention
to the wise women amongst us, to keep a dialogue with the accomplished women of Lee Krasner's generation. Aside from her extraordinary gifts as an artist, she can tell us what it was like out there during a lifetime of struggle and dedication.”
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Krasner told art historian Cassandra Langer in 1981 that she realized the recognition she had received recently was “entirely due to the women's movement,” repeating her oft-spoken pronouncement: “The raising of women's consciousness is one of the major revolutions of our time.”
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Krasner always maintained that she had benefited from the efforts of some men, especially John Graham and Jackson Pollock. But she loved to repeat the story of her teacher, Hans Hofmann, who in examining her work in class, had commented, “This is so good you would not believe it was done by a woman.” When an interviewer commented that this was “a kind of a mixed compliment,” Krasner responded, “Well, yes. You know, you get a cold shower before you've had a chance to receive the warmth of the compliment.”
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Krasner's intensity could be intimidating to male artists. Bill King, who was seeing Cile Downs in the late 1970s, recalled parties at which the guests were drinking heavily, where he felt “chilled” by “a certain kind of women's laughter” that made him think of “maenads that tore Orpheus apart. My hair stood on end. I was scared of Krasner, especially when she laughed.”
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In a time of feminist activism, such perceptions and their consequences cannot be discounted.

In January 1977, the exhibition “Women Artists: 1550–1950,” organized by feminist art historians Linda Nochlin and Ann Sutherland Harris, which had just opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, was reviewed by Robert Hughes in
Time
. He asserted that “an area of great consequence for art history has now been opened up” and argued that “the last section, spanning about 1900 to 1950 makes the contribution of women to modern art seem less than it actually was. Painters of large
and unquestionable talent, like Lee Krasner, are not seen at their best.”
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That fall the show opened at the Brooklyn Museum. Among those who came to see it was Joan Mondale, the wife of Vice President Walter Mondale. She stayed to meet with twenty-five women artists and art historians, including three living artists who were in the show: Krasner, and the representational painters Isabel Bishop and Alice Neel.

Mondale spoke to the select audience: “The present administration is interested in discrimination against women.” She had brought along Midge Costanza, the director of the Office of Public Liaison in the White House, who read a letter she had sent to the General Services Administration, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Smithsonian Institution advising them “to initiate remedial procedures” to correct discrimination against women artists.
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The letter was written in response to a protest the previous March by the New York group called Women in the Arts against President Carter's choice of ten artists—all male—for a series of prints connected to his inauguration. Krasner had picketed MoMA with the group five years earlier.

When asked in 1977 if she felt that women artists have an easier time being an artist than in the past, she exclaimed that “the next generation, [Grace] Hartigan, [Joan] Mitchell, [Helen] Frankenthaler had an easier time of it. Galleries existed, dealers. We didn't have that. We had to create all this. The next generation had an open door. This has all happened in a short passage of time.”
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