Lee Krasner (59 page)

Krasner's nephew Ronald Stein was dismayed by her choices of medical treatment: “Lee was not into medical doctors…. If she had been properly dealt with medically, she wouldn't later have refused to take cortisone for her arthritis because it might be bad for her health; yet here was a woman dying because she couldn't move. And her colitis—that's in the family and probably psychosomatic, only they would go to doctors who prescribe corrective medication and it would disappear. But Lee? She would go to witch doctors.”
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Krasner definitely preferred alternative medicine. Her last assistant, Darby Cardonsky, remembers that she went for acupuncture treatments.
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I recall that she wore copper bracelets, which she said were supposed “to help her arthritis.” Wearing copper for arthritis pain relief is an old folk remedy, based on the belief that copper is absorbed by the skin to relieve joint pain. The idea remains controversial. Out of desperation to find cures, Krasner had long turned to ideas from alternative and folk medicine, including some that were definite dead ends.

In August a frail Krasner joined John Little at Guild Hall, which held a retrospective of his work. Krasner held on to his arm as they posed for a photograph before one of his colorful abstract canvases—two old friends who once danced together to boogie-woogie music in the days when they met Mondrian more than forty years earlier.
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Almost a year later, in June 1983, Krasner received a letter from Steven W. Naifeh requesting an interview for a book he said he was writing on the history of the art world from the 1940s to the 1960s.
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This book was eventually published as a biography of Jackson Pollock, coauthored by Naifeh and Gregory White Smith. Krasner's assistant, Darby Cardonsky, replied to the letter in June, suggesting that Naifeh contact her after the first of July, when Krasner expected to be in East Hampton. A bit earlier Krasner made appointments to be interviewed by Deborah Solomon, the author of a biography of Pollock, which appeared two years earlier than Naifeh and Smith's, but she canceled them, the last time for February 28, 1984.
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Krasner was still bristling over Friedman's biography of Pollock and was wary of biographers and, indeed, of all who wrote about her and Pollock, especially people she did not know well. Barbara Rose and Gene Thaw both recall how Krasner was at this time completely focused on her first American retrospective, even while daunted by her failing health.
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“During Lee's last summer,” Carol Braider recounted, “when I was sort of her sitter, she was consumed by rage. She was afraid
that if she couldn't find a way to take out her hate on the world, she wouldn't be able to go on painting or even exist. Those weeks were a nightmare. It was as if rage were all she had. Of a Bill de Kooning work going for $2 million, Lee said, ‘If Bill thinks that's something, wait until he hears the latest in Jackson's sales.'”
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Krasner was preoccupied with Barbara Rose's text in the catalogue for the retrospective. The show was to open at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston on October 27, 1983, Krasner's seventy-fifth birthday. Krasner enlisted Terry Netter to come out and help her edit it. He spent a week in the Springs house reading every word aloud to her. She would stop him and call Rose to ask for changes, which she could trust that Rose would make. Netter remarked, “Lee loved to think. She liked intellectuals. She was very bright. I don't think that she read very much.”
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He suspected she was dyslexic.

As the opening neared, the press's interest grew. Krasner told Michael Kernan at the
Washington Post
that she wished that museums would give artists retrospectives “every ten years or so, for the artists' sake, so they can see the cycle of their own work…. Really, it shouldn't be a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”
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Still, she said she would miss having her paintings around—“It'll be two years before I get them back.”
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Before the show opened, Krasner admitted that she hadn't let Rose see all of her work. She had kept one finished painting that Rose would have wanted—just to hang it on her wall. “I wanted to keep the one I just finished because I need to have my work to look at. Even when I'm just looking; I am working.”
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This was probably her
Untitled
collage on canvas (dated 1984 in the catalogue raisonné, but actually finished in 1983) before which she would pose in December 1983 for a photograph by Bernard Gotfryd.
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Krasner flew to Houston accompanied by Bob Miller and John Cheim and Nathan Kernan, who worked for the gallery. She was now in a wheelchair and had to spend much of the time in her room at the Warwick Hotel across the street from the museum.
Among the dignitaries there to greet her was her friend James Mollison, director of the Australian National Gallery, who became notorious in 1973 for paying $2 million for Jackson Pollock's
Blue Poles,
setting a new record price not only for Pollock but also for American painting. The money went not to Krasner but to the New York businessman and art collector Ben Heller, who had paid only $32,000 in 1956, when he had purchased the large 1952 painting once sold by Sidney Janis for only $6,000.
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When Krasner had told Janis that Pollock's work was underpriced, she was correct. Now she could take satisfaction in what she had achieved in creating an international market for Pollock's art. In 1978, Mollison purchased for his museum Krasner's
Cool White,
a major canvas from 1959, once owned by David Gibbs, and then he followed that by acquiring several of her works on paper.

The large installation in Houston featured 152 paintings and drawings, including a biographical section, “Lee Krasner: The Education of an American Artist,” emphasizing the artist's thorough training in the use of line. The exhibition was reduced in size in the show's subsequent venues at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the MoMA in New York.

Krasner was delighted by the Houston opening. “The show looks terrific! Of course, I didn't exactly have a chance to take a leisurely look [during the opening]; people were wishing me happy birthday and talking to me, but I found it a bit overwhelming—overpowering.”
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Terry Netter recalls that Krasner entertained a few close friends in her hotel suite, among them “Buddha” Eames from Krasner's time at the Hofmann School. Krasner returned to look at the show again without the crowds.

In
Time,
the critic Robert Hughes, who attended the opening of the show in Houston, wrote that Krasner was a major American artist and wondered aloud what kept her from earlier recognition. He provided his audience with an answer that also gave voice to some of Krasner's frustrations: “Women artists through the '40s and into the '50s in New York City were the victims of a sort of
cultural apartheid, and the ruling assumptions about the inherent weakness, derivativeness and silly femininity of women painters were almost unbelievably phallocentric…. Add this to Krasner's prickly contempt for diplomacy with critics, and one can see why for most of her life her work was scanted as ‘minor,' an appendage to Pollock's.”
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Hughes thought that “her dislike of groups always stopped her from presenting herself as a ‘feminist' artist. Hence by the '70s there was no lack of denigrators on both sides of the sex war tacitly writing her off as an art widow first, a painter second.”
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Though a feminist artist such as Judy Chicago scorned Krasner as “male identified,” Krasner's ambivalence about feminist art is much more complicated than just not liking groups.
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Yes, she may have identified herself in relation to males, but her devotion to a man like Pollock stemmed not from an aversion to feminist groups, but rather from her love and admiration for him. Her choices were also affected by the cultural matrix of her immigrant childhood. She saw how women were treated in the world, and risked her own future by hitching onto the coattails of a man whom she saw as a genius and whom she believed she could nurture to success.

Hughes praised Krasner's artistic “formal instinct,” noting that “she wanted to combine Picassoan drawing, gestural and probing, with Matissean color…. Is there a less ‘feminine' woman artist of her generation? Probably not. Even Krasner's favorite pink, a domineering fuchsia that raps hotly on the eyeball at 50 paces, is aggressive, confrontational…her line evokes eros…. This is an intensely moving exhibition, and it will suggest to all but the most doctrinaire how many revisions of postwar American art history are still waiting to be made.”
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In reviewing the retrospective for
Artweek,
Susie Kalil repeated Rose's argument and supported Hughes's criticism: “Of all the abstract expressionists, only Krasner had contact with virtually every major force that shaped its evolution…. Why hasn't Krasner been accorded her due as a painter? The inequity can be directly
attributed to the sexist attitudes rampant among critics and artists alike during the 1940s and 1950s. Krasner matured in an artistic environment to which few women, if any, were admitted.”
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Los Angeles Times
critic William Wilson, who had rejected the feminist art movement during the 1970s, wrote that Krasner “may not be quite the peer of the great Action Painting innovators Pollock and de Kooning, but she certainly can be thought of in the same breath with Hans Hofmann, Robert Motherwell, and Franz Kline. She is arguably a better painter than such lesser lights as Adolph Gottlieb or William Baziotes.”
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At the time he wrote, this was a radical statement.

In San Francisco, Thomas Albright, a local newspaper critic beloved in the Bay Area for his promotion of local artists, reviewed Krasner's traveling retrospective. He accused Rose of writing the catalogue essay in a “relentlessly uncritical, Horatio Alger style that has become the norm for this generally lamentable literary genre.”
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He also questioned “whether this hard-won reputation is wholly justified by the work itself, or whether it is more a product of feminist advocacy and/or the insatiable craving of art historians for disinterring new ‘masters' from the Potters' Field of the past.”
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Other critics also took issue with Rose. A Houston-based husband-and-wife team of artists, Ed Hill and Suzanne Bloom, argued in
Artforum:
“We should make no mistake in our reading of this innocent art play: Rose was writing history here, or, rather, correcting it to her image. Krasner would appear to have been the beneficiary of Rose's historicism, but in truth she may have been simply the occasion for it. As a curator Rose has no light touch. She overdraws her case.”
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In
Art in America,
Marcia Vetrocq made an argument similar to the one made by the Blooms. Vetrocq claimed that Rose was preoccupied “with most art historians' omission of Krasner from the first generation of Abstract Expressionism…as it has come to be petrified in art historical accounts…. [Krasner] will prob
ably never be judged an innovator of the magnitude to satisfy a [Irving] Sandler or a [Henry] Geldzahler.”
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Vetrocq was correct that Sandler's mind was too closed to be able to see Krasner as one of the founding members of abstract expressionism, which would have forced him to revise his own narrative.
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Though Vetrocq praised Krasner's work and acknowledged that it had been “so little shown or reproduced,” she also asserted, “Krasner need not be proved the first or the only or the earliest in anything for her work to reward our attention and assume a position of dignity and significance in the history of postwar art. She has earned it.”
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In her own defense, Krasner reiterated in 1984, “It's quite clear that I didn't fit in, although I never felt I didn't. I was not accepted, let me put it that way…. With relation to the group, if you are going to call them a group, there was not room for a woman.”
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Krasner returned from Houston exhausted but elated at the acclaim. Though she had been in a wheelchair, she had nonetheless spent hours looking at her works on view.
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She was now crippled by rheumatoid arthritis—she could barely stand, and it was impossible for her to walk. She “took to bed” and was too weak to return to painting. Darby Cardonsky, her assistant, would read her reviews to her.

Krasner was also suffering discomfort from intestinal problems such as diverticulitis (weak spots in the colon wall) and what may have been the complications of Crohn's disease.
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Krasner had no choice but to write to Henry Hopkins, the director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, that “health concerns” would not allow her to make the trip to see her retrospective installed there.
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Edward Albee admired Lee's strength and recalled that she was in so much pain from arthritis that she remained confined to New York City, where she was taking gold injections.
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They were supposed to relieve joint pain and stiffness, reduce swelling and
bone damage, and lower the chance of joint deformity and disability. But the injections didn't help Krasner.

Assigned by
Newsweek
to go and photograph Krasner at her New York apartment, Bernard Gotfryd arrived to find that the ailing artist had not even gotten out of bed yet. He offered to return another time, but, not wanting to postpone the shoot, she asked him to wait for her to get ready. She wanted to know whom else he had photographed and he replied, “The list is so long, I'll be here forever.”

“Then you photographed a lot of painters?” Krasner wanted reassurance. “Georgia O'Keeffe, Salvador Dalí, Andy Warhol, Barnett Newman,” he replied. When she responded to Barnett Newman's name, he told her a story of taking Newman's photograph during the installation of his show at the Guggenheim in the spring of 1966. Naturally the installation took place on a day when the museum was closed to visitors. Newman had gone downstairs to use the men's room and not returned, so after a while Gotfryd went in search of him, finding the artist locked in the restroom, banging on the door, trying to summon someone to rescue him. Newman screamed, “What do they want me to do, have a heart attack?” Gotfryd forced the door open, got Newman out, but the artist was “in a rage,” even as he posed for the rest of the photographs. Krasner loved hearing the story about her old friend, who, in fact, had died of a heart attack in 1970, and, even in her pain, she smiled for Gotfryd and posed in front of her 1983 collage.
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