Lee Krasner (58 page)

That day Krasner told him to “stick around. Tom Armstrong,
the director of the Whitney, is coming over to ask for a loan of a Pollock.”

The young man from Vassar watched the bow-tied director try to charm Krasner. But when Armstrong bent over to pull the Pollock catalogue raisonné off the shelf, “Krasner made a grotesque body motion toward him that he could not see, making clear that she just didn't like Tom Armstrong.”
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What the student did not realize was Krasner's long disdain for the Whitney for defining itself as a museum of “American art,” which she felt embraced nationalism. There were also rumors of Armstrong's anti-Semitism (though denied by his supporters), which would also have put her off.
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It is not clear if it was because she had qualms about Armstrong, but Krasner only donated one minor ink drawing by Pollock to the Whitney, presumably in appreciation of her “Large Paintings” show. However, she donated many works by Pollock to both the Metropolitan and the Museum of Modern Art.

Krasner paid John Post Lee fifty dollars a week, plus room and board, with no days off. He served as her driver in his own car, for which she paid for the gas. He recalled her “Gestalt as very Depression-oriented.”
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She had no idea how much a young man could eat, so he would often sneak over to the neighborhood pizzeria. He would mix her favorite drink, a “sunrise,” consisting of cranberry and grapefruit juices with a splash of vodka and Campari. He discovered that when she drank, she became less guarded in her conversation.

John Post Lee thought Krasner was “very generous” and recalled that they talked “about everything.” Her politics were clearly liberal. Krasner often had him read aloud to her in the sitting room. Often this meant the newspaper. She expressed extreme irritation at President Reagan's firing of the air traffic controllers.
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He also thought she was very intelligent and also “street smart.” He accompanied her everywhere that summer—to Terence Netter's show at Stony Brook, to the homes of Ibram and Ernestine Lassaw, Jimmy and Dallas Ernst, James and Charlotte Brooks, Jo
sephine and John Little, Patsy Southgate, and Edward Albee. He met her nephews Jason McCoy and Ronald Stein. Stein was then living next door and working as a pilot, flying out of East Hampton airport. As John worked with Krasner, he began to notice that she was quite infirm, already suffering from rheumatoid arthritis.

John Post Lee was with Krasner in August 1981, when the show “Krasner/Pollock: A Working Relationship,” organized by Barbara Rose, opened at Guild Hall. That fall the show traveled to the Grey Art Gallery at New York University. Interviewed about the prospect of seeing her work next to Pollock's chronologically, Krasner responded gruffly: “It could be a terrible pitfall for me as an artist. I'm aware of that. I've been around. But I couldn't give two hoots about that. I want to see it with my eye for myself—because I've never seen it visually, and until I see it visually, I don't know what they're talking about. And because I have an endless curiosity above and beyond the mob, I couldn't care less about what their reaction is.”
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Krasner was upset that those male colleagues who had been influenced by Pollock were never compared directly to Pollock.

“Look,” Krasner said. “They don't take de Kooning and put him up that way. And if de Kooning or Motherwell takes from Pollock, nobody even breathes a word about it. But with Lee Krasner, wow. It's been a heavy, heavy number. It's hard for them to separate me from Pollock in that sense.”
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Despite Krasner's frustrations, at least one reviewer at Guild Hall understood her plight—the artist William Pellicone sought to reverse the common conception of Krasner's position being beneath Pollock's in the pantheon of great artists. “Krasner is identified as Jackson Pollock's widow, an artist in her [own] right. It should read: Jackson Pollock, husband of Lee Krasner…. The revelation exposed is the fact that Lee Krasner gave Pollock everything because of her superior talent and he eventually destroys her true path with his superior barbaric, macho strength…. The Guild Hall show calls for a completely new evaluation of the Krasner-Pollock link.”
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Krasner was clear about dealing with Pollock's reputation so many years after his death: “I may have resented being in the shadow of Jackson Pollock, but the resentment was never so sharp a thing to deal with that it interfered with my work.”
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On the other hand, Krasner admitted, “I stepped on a lot of toes because you know Pollock remains the magic name, and they had to deal with me to get to his works and I can say no very harshly. As a result, people in the art world acted out against me as a painter.”
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When a journalist described Krasner as “slowed a bit by arthritis, still actively painting” at the age of seventy-three, she was clear about her decision to devote so much energy to Pollock and stated emphatically: “I don't feel I sacrificed myself And if I had it to do all over again from the very beginning, I'd do the same thing.”
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Barbara Rose maintained that had Krasner and Pollock lived during the days of feminism, Krasner might not have “played so wifely a role with Pollock” and might have even “dumped the genius.” Interestingly Krasner disagreed with Rose's speculation. “I think I would do the same, identical thing all over again in the presence of talent like that, but it takes that kind of talent to move me. Anything else is for the birds.”
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Nevertheless, in the show's catalogue, Rose argued that “of the many things Krasner and Pollock did for each other as artists, including criticize and support each other's works, the greatest thing they did was to free each other from the dogma of their respective teachers.”
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Rose also asserted, “Jackson helped her to be free and spontaneous, and she helped him to be organized and refined.”
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Krasner seemed to appreciate Rose's thoughtful advocacy.

John Post Lee read Rose's manuscript aloud to Krasner sentence by sentence. He recalled that she would occasionally say, “That's not true.” He also remembered that she paid particular attention to the mention of Pollock's drinking, giving it emphasis.
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At another point, Krasner objected: “How come I'm the only one that is held accountable for being influenced by Pollock? Robert Motherwell pretends that he splatters paint because he was looking at a wave
splashing on the beach. Oh, come on.”
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She also expressed disdain for de Kooning: “He's interested in two things—women and real estate, so he buys a house and puts a woman in it.”
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Impressed by Krasner's strong beliefs and good sense of humor, John Post Lee returned to Vassar at the end of the summer and wrote his senior thesis on Krasner's collages,
Eleven Ways to Use the Words to See
.
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Among Krasner's friends that she saw frequently in this period were the playwright Edward Albee, Sanford Friedman, and Richard Howard. Albee, who got along well with Krasner, surmised that, like her gay male friends, she considered herself “an outsider.” “She had a good anger. I admired it. She was a survivor.”
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He also admired her honesty but was puzzled at her dislike of Louise Nevelson, a close friend of his. Because both women came from poor Jewish immigrant families and had to struggle as women artists, Albee believed they were fighting similar battles. It's more likely that Krasner was not thrilled to play the number two spot in the heart of Arnold Glimcher, their shared art dealer, who built his career promoting Nevelson's work.

In late 1981, Krasner left Glimcher's Pace Gallery, where she had been since 1977. The departure from Pace was described as “amicable” by both sides. Krasner commented, “We never had a fight. We are still friends. But I remember the dealer Pierre Matisse saying, ‘It's the artists who've made my gallery.' Arne, on the other hand, feels his gallery made his artists, and this is a serious disturbance. I wasn't comfortable there.”
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On the other side, Glimcher maintained, “She wants a closer connection with her dealer, and I think she has made the right decision, although she certainly had the greatest success of her life in my gallery. I think she's a wonderful artist, and I wish her the best.”
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In August 1981, a journalist reported that Krasner's works commanded “as much as $30,000 and are in the collections” of major museums, including the Guggenheim Museum, the Na
tional Gallery, London's Tate Gallery, and the Cologne Museum. If the journalist's statements are true, then a sale to the Tate Gallery must already have been in the works when Krasner left Pace.
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In fact the Tate's purchase of Krasner's
Gothic Landscape
of 1961 was not announced in the press until March 1982. At that time, Tim Hilton, in the
Observer
in London, identified Krasner as “Jackson Pollock's widow, long overshadowed and now in the odd position of being famous for being neglected,” while praising the new acquisition as “a marvelous picture.” He insisted, “This is better painting than the Gottliebs that hang next to it. I dare say that it's better painting than the new Barnett Newman.”
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These words must have been music to Krasner's ears. Glimcher sent her the clipping, which he inscribed, “Dear Lee—Thought that you'd like to have this—Arne.” Given Glimcher's successes in placing Krasner's pictures, it's very possible that the unspoken point of difference between the dealer and the artist might have revolved around his desire to gain access to the estate of Jackson Pollock, which Krasner continued to hold close.

From the Pace Gallery, Krasner moved to the Robert Miller Gallery, then founded five years earlier. She was fond of Miller and his wife, Betsy, with whom Lee shared a birthday. Before they married in 1964, the Millers had both studied art at Rutgers, where they met Krasner's nephew Ronald Stein, then teaching there. He had introduced them to Krasner and, as a result, Bob had become her studio assistant in 1963.
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Soon he moved on to work for the New York dealer André Emmerich during the same period that Pollock's nephew Jason McCoy also worked there. Krasner's long and affectionate association with Miller helps to explain her departure from Pace.

Nathan Kernan, who was then a young man working at the Robert Miller Gallery, recalls that he and his colleague John Cheim “loved especially the rather terrifying way she once said, in speaking of her annoyance with her former dealer, ‘I made it
cry-stal clear
to him…!' She always pronounced the word
collage
with the accent on the first syllable, ‘COLL-age' and ‘retrospective' became, with perhaps an undertone of irony, ‘The RET-ro-spect.'” Kernan remembers that when they called Krasner from the gallery, “she would answer the phone suspiciously, ‘What's up?' immediately on alert for a problem and ready to pounce on any ambiguity or inanity we might have the misfortune to utter. We lived in terror of having something made ‘crystal clear' to us.”
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Her first show there took place in October 1982 and was called “Lee Krasner: Paintings from the Late Fifties.” Grace Glueck described her work on view as “high-key abstractions that derive from figuration,” which “reinforces our astonishment that recognition was so late in coming to an artist of such gifts.”
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For Krasner's efforts on behalf of Pollock's art, she was named Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. Jack Lang, the French minister of culture, presented the award to her on January 11, 1982, just before the opening of a major Pollock retrospective at the Musée national d'art moderne at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Krasner had made the show possible with her loans to the museum. She enjoyed receiving the award and getting attention at the opening, but she fell and injured her arm. The accident prevented her from making a planned visit to the caves of Lascaux.
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She had long been interested in prehistoric art, so it was quite a disappointment to forgo the visit. Krasner returned alone to New York, traveling on RMS
Queen Elizabeth 2
(known as the
QE2
) from Southampton.

After Krasner's return, the photographer Ann Chwatsky got an assignment to photograph her as one of five Hamptons artists for
Long Island Magazine
. She arranged for the shoot to take place in midmorning at Krasner's apartment on East Seventy-ninth Street. When she arrived, Krasner was dressed in a “navy house smock,” looking “like the wrath of God.” When Chwatsky told Krasner that she wanted her to look as strong as her paintings, Krasner, who was then suffering from her arthritis, commented how
hard it was for her to get ready without any help. Chwatsky had brought along makeup, which she applied, and a long magenta shawl, which she draped around the ailing artist for the shoot. The result was pleasing to both the photographer and her subject.

For several of Chwatsky's shots, she posed Krasner in front of her latest painting, which she had made for “Poets and Artists,” an invitational show of forty-two artist-poet collaborations scheduled for Guild Hall that July. Although some of the artists and poets were paired by the show's organizers, Krasner had teamed up with poet Howard Moss, whom she knew well through their mutual friend, Edward Albee.
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The idea for the show had come from the painter Jimmy Ernst, Krasner's friend since the days when he worked for Peggy Guggenheim at Art of This Century. Taking the title of Moss's poem “Morning Glory” as the title of her painting, Krasner inscribed in the upper-left-hand corner of her abstract canvas “How blue is blue,” the opening words of the poem.

That same summer Krasner called Chwatsky and invited her for lunch in the Springs house. Chwatsky sensed Krasner's loneliness and invited her to go to a movie. They saw
Diner,
a 1982 film about the 1960s that Krasner loved. While they stood in line, many people recognized Krasner. Chwatsky observed that Krasner, who seemed aged and tired, was cranky as a result of dealing with her illness but extremely nice. Krasner spoke not about Pollock but of her concerns about conserving his paintings.
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