EIGHT

A New Attachment: Life with Pollock, 1942–43

Lee and Jackson in what may be the first photograph of the couple together. Taken at the home of Tillie Shahn, in Truro, Massachusetts, 1944, during a summer spent in Province town, where they socialized with many friends, including those there with the Hofmann School. Photographed by the artist Bernard Schardt, whose wife, Nene, was, like Krasner, a student of Hofmann’s.

KRASNER SAW GEORGE MERCER AGAIN IN NEW YORK IN EARLY January 1942, and afterward he wrote to her: “Miró with you was great fun for me. Then I liked that crazy evening or rather-whacky dine and dance hall we went to up top.”¹ This was the Lafayette Hotel on University Place in the Village, where French food, drinks, and the atmosphere encouraged guests to linger, as if in a Parisian café. He praised Krasner’s dancing and thanked her too “for being such a willing and devoted listener.”²

For Krasner, however, Mercer, frustrated about art and stuck in the army, could not compete with the excitement Pollock generated with his amazing paintings, rugged sex appeal, and immediate availability.

What had first sparked Krasner’s interest in Pollock, their impending joint appearance in John Graham’s show “American and French Paintings,” turned out to be all that she had hoped for. It was advertised in the New York Times for January 18, 1942, and ran from January 20 through February 6. Graham had chosen to show her Abstraction, a canvas from 1941 that was forty by thirty-six inches, in which a still life subject is still intelligible. Distinguished by its bold Picassoid forms, impasto surface, and Mondrian-like heavy black outlines, the painting resembles an approach to Picasso’s work already explored by her friend Gorky. “My own excitement around it was overwhelming,” Krasner recalled. “I found myself flanked by a Matisse on one side and a Braque on the other.”³

Among the other works on view was Pollock’s Birth, which stood out for its bold forms, colors, and original composition, though Picasso’s impact was still apparent. De Kooning showed Standing Man, which Krasner said depicted “a young boy, very well dressed, very nostalgic, the image very clear, not abstract at all.”⁴ There were also works by Picasso, including Portrait of Dora Maar, Roses, Femme aux Deux Profils, and Femme au Fauteuil. Matisse’s La Jeune Femme en Rose was in the show as well, along with works by other Europeans, including Bonnard, de Chirico, Rouault, Modigliani, Segonzac, Braque, and Derain.

Art Digest wrote about the show: “Most of the Americans…have French leanings, or being primitives, have a naive approach often typical of the School of Paris.”⁵ The magazine went on to say, “A strange painter is William Kooning [sic] who does anatomical men with one visible eye, but whose work reveals a rather interesting feeling for paint surfaces and color.”⁶

The magazine did not mention Krasner’s painting in the show, but her friends from the Hofmann School took a close look at it, especially Perle Fine, who wrote to say how much she liked it: “It was so much more spatial and the color looked so much richer than anything I had seen of yours previously (and you know how much I liked your other work). It had some real competition, I think, but stood up, Maurice [her husband, the photographer Maurice Berezov] & I agreed, very admirably. We’re proud of you.”⁷

Despite her excitement about Pollock, Krasner did not immediately cancel all of the connections that she had been building to focus on him alone. She was there when Mondrian’s first (and only during his lifetime) solo show opened that January at the Valentine Gallery (run by F. Valentine Dudensing) on Fifty-seventh Street; however, Mondrian stayed away because he had heard somewhere that artists do not attend the openings of their own shows.⁸ This disappointed some of his followers who had come to pay homage to him. Nonetheless, his work earned praise in the press.⁹

“After the terrible experience Mondrian had in the London blitz he was quite sick,” John Little recalled. Only after Mondrian felt that he had recovered did the Valentine Dudensing Gallery give him his show in January 1942 and invite a few artists “to meet Mondrian and attend a lecture on his theories.”¹⁰ Mondrian’s lecture, which Little remembered as having been called “Toward the True Vision of Reality,” took place on Friday, January 23, 1942, and appeared in the newspaper as “The Liberation of Oppression in Plastic Art and Life.”¹¹ Huge crowds, including Krasner, Little, and many of her other friends from the Hofmann School and the American Abstract Artists, jammed in to hear what Mondrian had to tell them.¹²

This lecture was the second in a series of informal meetings sponsored by the American Abstract Artists.¹³ Actually it was a member of the group, Balcomb Greene, who read Mondrian’s contribution, in which he reflected on abstract art and how different the intuitive power of adults was from the instinctive capacities of primitives and children. He also explained his theories of composition and how he determined space in his pictures.¹⁴ Mondrian’s lecture was later published as an essay entitled “A New Realism” by the American Abstract Artists in their yearbook.¹⁵

Mondrian’s art and theories had become known as “Neoplasticism” after he published a manifesto of that name in 1920. His work had been known as part of the Dutch De Stijl movement founded in 1917 by Theo van Doesburg. It stressed pure abstraction and universality, reducing subject matter to the essentials of form and primary colors—red, blue, and yellow—or the non-colors of black, gray, and white. Those in the movement favored asymmetry, while Mondrian liked to limit himself to vertical and horizontal lines. In Paris, Mondrian had joined a broader association of abstract artists (including Kandinsky, Jean Arp, and hundreds of others) founded in 1931 and called the Abstraction-Création movement.

After the lecture, John Little and Krasner went to a party to welcome Mondrian to America at Café Society Uptown, which at that time “was the in place in New York and featured the latest music form, boogie-woogie, with Louis Armstrong at the piano and Hazel Scott, the exciting young singer [and pianist]. Mondrian was delighted, and we danced through the night.”¹⁶

Café Society Uptown, the second branch of a successful downtown nightclub, was established in October 1940. The first Café Society, in downtown Manhattan, was written about in Time magazine as “a subterranean nightclub” that attracted connoisseurs of jazz. Its founder, Barney Josephson, was said to be “a mild-mannered shoe store owner” from Trenton, New Jersey. Josephson recalled that his aim was to create the “first truly integrated nightclub in this country.”¹⁷

Krasner’s friend from the WPA Lou Bunce recalled, “Going and listening a lot…I had known some jazz people, particularly two-beat jazz in those years…. We went to the opening of Café Society. There was a friend of mine by the name of Anton Refregier, who did decorations, and…he managed to invite us there and it was our night out on the “town there…. It was kind of a neat place. It was beautiful. And I remember there was a jazz pianist by the name of Hazel Scott. And she was just absolutely great. That was the opening gun. It was quite an experience.”¹⁸

Krasner’s admiration for Mondrian was such that she must have relished the opportunity to mingle with him once again. For her friend John Little, and for other Americans already influenced by Mondrian’s work, meeting him was sensational, an event they, like Krasner, recollected for the rest of their lives. Many of the Americans, including Krasner and Little, among many others, had experimented with the master’s Neoplasticism, trying out variations of his structure, forms, color, space, and content.¹⁹

But they were also impressed with Mondrian’s engaging personality. His enjoyment of boogie-woogie music and dancing also added to the fun. Krasner recalled that they “liked to listen to jazz, and we used to go to a Café Uptown or Café Downtown…and dance.”²⁰ She considered Mondrian one of her most outstanding partners for dancing. “I was a fairly good dancer, that is to say I can follow easily, but the complexity of Mondrian’s rhythm was not simple in any sense.”²¹ “I nearly went mad trying to follow this man’s rhythm.”²²

Krasner remembered a particular evening with Mondrian at the Café Uptown or Café Downtown. “First, he waited through several numbers for a particular piece that he wanted to dance to,” she recalled. “Then he said, ‘Now!’ and we went around in what I would describe as one of the strangest rhythms I’ve ever had to deal with. In other words, I had to do major concentration to follow this man…. I noticed lots of heads looking at us and I thought, ‘Of course, they’re looking at us, because I’m dancing with Mondrian.’ Then we swung around a corner and I could see the couple behind us, and it was some movie actor and a divine-looking woman, and that’s who were being watched!”²³

American Abstract Artists member Charmion von Wiegand described Mondrian as “a perfect dancer [who] danced in a way so perfect that it was almost too perfect…it was alive.” Another recalled that Mondrian “danced stiffly, with his head thrown back.”²⁴ Mondrian apparently liked women and once gave this explanation for why he never married: “I have not come so far. I have been too occupied with my work.”²⁵ Though he had purportedly been in love several times, it was rumored that he had not married because he lacked adequate money and security to support both his work and a wife. Described by some as a “passionate, virile man,” Mondrian, according to von Wiegand, liked to dance to the accompaniment of boogie-woogie, not the melody.²⁶

Harriet Janis (Sidney’s wife) recalled that Mondrian’s favorite haunt was “Café Society, Downtown, where he went especially to hear Albert Ammons, Mead Lux Lewis, and Pete Johnson, the Negro boogie-woogie pianists.”²⁷ Boogie-woogie was considered the least melodic form of jazz and the most technical, and for Mondrian, it related to music in the same way that abstract art related to traditional representational art: “Boogie-Woogie was to jazz what Neoplasticism was to Cubism,”²⁸ he said. He loved the rhythm.

According to Little, Mondrian’s patron (probably Holtzman) invited them for breakfast at Child’s restaurant, not far from Mondrian’s Fifty-sixth Street studio. From there Krasner and Little headed back to the Village, tired but invigorated by the memorable night out.

Inspired, Mondrian would go on to begin work that summer on his famous canvas Broadway Boogie-Woogie (1942–43), which the Museum of Modern Art rushed to acquire in May 1943 and exhibit the following summer. “I especially like the metropolitan life of New York,” exclaimed Mondrian. “Very noisy, but that doesn’t hinder me. I think that in America there is much more general appreciation for the new things than in France and in London. I don’t know the reason but it may be that Americans see freer—a very good quality.”²⁹ For the unfinished Victory Boogie-Woogie of 1943–44, where he added some secondary colors, Mondrian relied on both bits of colored paper and small bits of Dennison adhesive tape, which were then produced in primary colors.³⁰

For one of Krasner’s works called Mosaic Collage (estimated in the catalogue raisonné to have been produced sometime in 1939–40), she appears to have seized on a jazz rhythm like Mondrian’s. She too experimented with mostly primary colors and small bits of colored paper to achieve an optical effect that also vibrates. Though Mondrian rejected curves in his classic abstractions, Krasner employed curves and circles both here and in her other Mondrian-inspired works while emphasizing primary colors, such as in her Red, Yellow, Blue of 1939–40.³¹ Her single collage of this period is a unique work in her oeuvre and seems unlikely to be related to anything but Mondrian’s work.

Mondrian’s place in Krasner’s thinking is even more evident in Mercer’s reply to a letter she sent him in February 1942. “You are right,” he wrote to her about Mondrian. “Piet is wrong. He’s cloistered. ‘Good’ and ‘Bad,’ pure and impure are equally valid. But then, if we will be ourselves, what can Piet do? His purity makes for impure in painting—or doesn’t it? (One can still like him).”³²

From Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where Mercer was running a camouflage school, he confided his anxiety that America might not win the impending war. Krasner’s friendship with Mercer resulted in her close exposure to a reluctant and frustrated soldier’s view of the war. Not long after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, he reflected his frustration that the United States had allowed Japan to open hostilities and complained that we had been “so blind to the moral condition of Germany.”³³

Mercer also inquired about Krasner: “What about you? And your co-exhibitor friend that you think you like? Write and let me know.”³⁴ Their friendship was such that she had confided in Mercer, indeed shared, the excitement she felt upon meeting Pollock.

On March 16, 1942, Mercer wrote to Krasner, asking about the AAA show.³⁵ He referred to the Sixth Annual Exhibition of the American Abstract Artists held at the Fine Arts Galleries, 215 West Fifty-seventh Street, and described by Art News as “the best show of abstract painting seen in some time.”³⁶ Among the artists were both Krasner and her hero, Mondrian. Unlike Harry Holtzman, she was not, thankfully, singled out in the press for “slavishly” imitating the Dutch master. Though there were no published comments about Krasner’s heavily impastoed work, the New York Times critic Edward Alden Jewell did list “Leonore [sic] Krasner” as one of the forty-six participants.³⁷

Some, however, received more prominent notice. The reviewer for Art Digest singled out Bolotowsky, Slobodkina, Glarner, Holty, Xceron, and, of course, Mondrian and Léger—not so much for their aesthetics, but rather for their foreign birth, viewing these artists as Russian, Swiss, German, Greek, Dutch, and French.³⁸ Krasner, of course, was American.

By April 1942, Mercer reported that he had been chosen for officers school. “How is Monsieur Pollack [sic]? You like him, yes,” he wrote to her, then: “Krasner, I have spring fever. Tonight I wish we were walking together down along the docks, walking and talking until dawn broke, physically exhausted. How does that old song go…You are my favorite star.”³⁹ A month later, he asked again, “What about Mr. Pollack [sic]?”

Mercer rattled on: “I met Fritz [Bultman]’s sister [Muriel Francis]. She is a MONSTER. Krasner, you have the life—giving touch. You are WONDERBAR as the Germans say—only they don’t say it that way. (By the way, I should like to see you.)”⁴⁰ After dismissing Miss Bultman, then active as an art collector, Mercer tells Krasner that he “was interviewed last night and asked a lot of interesting and peculiar questions. I was asked to tell just where I had been in Europe, especially Germany, Austria, Italy, and France. When they saw from my classification card that I was a painter—landscape & still life variety, they wanted to know if I could paint and draw coastlines! Good bye, honey. I’m off for a commando outfit or something like that. Jesus how I wish I could get into something terribly exciting, thrilling and dangerous. Only to kill this christ-awful dragging on and on.”⁴¹

After the end of officers’ training and his promotion to lieutenant, Mercer reflected, “I can almost see now why I liked painting. Every now and then I find some phenomenon I would like to paint or draw but the chance and the will are fading. I know that painting is impossible. Even this writing demonstrates that I give it some thought but for now it is on the wane. I guess the death, for a time?, of the painter was a beautifully painful experience. And I can even summon that feeling again, as I have said. I am hardly mad about it any more.”⁴² When Barbara Rose asked her years later, “Were people affected by the war?” Krasner answered: “People were very affected by the war. But it didn’t mean you stopped painting unless you were called into the army; then you just couldn’t paint. But otherwise one continued.”⁴³

Ever more mindful that most of the eligible men had been drafted by the armed forces, Krasner had set her eye on Pollock, conveniently classified 4-F or unfit for military service because of his psychological problems, but still ambitious enough to paint. “We had a helluva lot in common—our interests, our goal. Art was the thing, for both of us. We focused on it, zeroed in on it, because our backgrounds, though different, were not so different as all that. Cody…Brooklyn. Not so different.”⁴⁴ Indeed, compared to Pantuhoff, Krasner and Pollock were not from such dissimilar social classes.

She and Pollock shared a “mutual interest in painting which was the Paris School of Painting…. We’d either be talking about Picasso, or arguing about Matisse but…it was always French painting. I knew of his early interest in Orozco and Siqueiros, but we were past that stage.”⁴⁵ Krasner recalled that Pollock had “the last publication of the then Picasso (whether it was Cahiers d’Art or what, I don’t know), thumbing through it, and going into a total rage about it, and saying, ‘That bastard, he misses nothing!,’ which meant, like, he was with it, in that sense…so that his eye was very much directed towards what was happening in the so-called Paris School of painting.”⁴⁶

Pollock was close to John Graham, whose ideas and art also informed Krasner’s work in 1942. She seriously considered Graham’s emphasis on an artist’s need to unite thought, feeling, and a record of physical gesture, which he called automatic writing, or “écriture.”⁴⁷ He meant a combination of training and “improvisation.” Krasner took a close look at Graham’s own drawing and experimented with some pen-and-ink sketches in which she played around with line and rhythm, searching perhaps for what Graham termed a child’s “direct response to space.”⁴⁸ In this sense, she could depart from Hofmann’s attachment to nature and allow line to have a life of its own.

Graham also respected Mondrian’s “Neoplasticism,” and wrote that “Mondrian had the vision and heart to start anew. Maybe he did not go far enough, but he had the courage at least to say a new ‘a.’”⁴⁹

Graham began inviting Krasner and Pollock to elaborate Russian-style teas at his place, and soon enough, the three of them were spending a lot of time together. Krasner recalled: “He had already written his book which I had read prior to having met him…the book affected us and…he had these fabulous oceanic and African pieces.”⁵⁰ Pollock was closer to Graham than Krasner because he had participated in a drawing group Graham held in his Greenwich Street studio.

Pollock had taken what was for him a rare initiative in order to meet Graham, writing to him after being impressed by Graham’s article on Picasso and the unconscious.⁵¹ The abstract painter Carl Holty recalled getting to know “Pollock slightly” at Graham’s studio. “We used to draw down there at night, he had models and we have this a good deal today in New York. You know, you get a model and a group of fellows will practice drawing.”⁵²

One wintry night in early 1942, Krasner and Pollock were walking Graham back to his studio, when they ran into “a little man with a long overcoat,” whom Graham introduced: Frederick Kiesler, the architect and designer. Graham presented Pollock as “the greatest painter in America,” to which Kiesler, with his elegant European manners, bowed deeply and asked, “North or South America?”⁵³

Krasner was also busy visiting the downtown location of the Café Society.⁵⁴ Among her acquaintances, Reuben Kadish later recalled going to “Cafe Society Downtown on Sheridan Square. I saw the Mills Brothers there, Billie Holiday, and Lena Horne. It was worth dropping five dollars or so to see them.”⁵⁵ Many of the patrons and even those who worked there had no idea that the Café Society was originally founded to raise funds for the American Communist Party and to guard against the spread of fascist ideas in the United States.⁵⁶ Indeed, the radical periodical New Masses had been involved with the café’s foundation.

Café Society also served as the locale for benefits for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.⁵⁷ It attracted radicals and intellectuals critical of American society. Even the name of the club was an attempt to put down the wealthy Upper East Side café society.⁵⁸ The decor, produced by leftist artists such as William Gropper or Anton Refregier, reflected the same ideology, sending up the lifestyle of the rich. Café Society advertised that it was “the wrong place for the Right people” and appropriate for “Celebs, Debs, and Plebs.”⁵⁹

The appearance there of boogie-woogie pianists Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson, and Meade Lux Lewis helped to create the craze for this music.⁶⁰ Having enjoyed “dives” in Harlem, Krasner loved to go to Café Society, where those reported to have taken part in the racially mixed audience include Paul Robeson, Nelson Rockefeller, Charlie Chaplin, Lillian Hellman, and Eleanor Roosevelt.⁶¹ In his letter to Krasner of December 12, 1940, Mercer had jokingly referred to “Eleanor R.” in the same sentence as Piet Mondrian, suggesting that Krasner had either encountered Roosevelt at Café Society or at least had heard that she had once been seen there.

In between her Café Society visits, Krasner and Pollock began seeing each other more frequently, during which time, she insisted, “we didn’t do art talk!”⁶² Most of her own engagements in the art world did not involve Pollock. Nevertheless, Krasner began to share with Pollock her enthusiasm for European modernism. Soon she was making efforts to have him go with her to look at work by modern masters. She later recalled that “while Pollock had Miró as a god, I favored Mondrian and Matisse.”⁶³ Pollock also favored Picasso, but they both liked “early Kandinsky, the ones in the [collection of Solomon] Guggenheim…the 1913, ’14, magnificent, beautiful, beautiful things. Those we saw I think at the Plaza hotel, which is where the Guggenheim, the Baronness Rebay prior to her opening, that’s where the collection was.”⁶⁴ She recalled seeing the Kandinsky paintings in what was then called the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, before it became the Guggenheim Museum.

Krasner also introduced Pollock to Hans Hofmann by taking him to Pollock’s messy studio, even though she knew that Hofmann, like Mondrian, favored cleanliness and order. Because he saw no evidence of still lifes or models in Pollock’s studio, Hofmann asked Pollock, “Do you work from nature?” Pollock responded: “I am nature.” Hofmann then warned, “You don’t work from nature, you work by heart. That’s no good. You will repeat yourself.”⁶⁵ Pollock then bellowed at Hofmann that his theories did not interest him, telling him to “put up or shut up! Where’s your work?”⁶⁶

“Hans had a marvelous way of being deaf to Jackson’s aggressive/defensive manner,” recalled Bultman. “Hans was quite aware of the hostility. Later when the Pollocks were in their worst financial straits, he bought a couple of pictures.”⁶⁷ Lee’s friends Mercedes Carles and Herbert Matter were also very supportive of Pollock. Herbert tried to bring Alexander Calder over to see Jackson’s work. However, the sculptor, some of whose work can be described as drawing with wire in real space, found Pollock’s work too “dense.” Herbert Matter then encouraged James Johnson Sweeney of the Museum of Modern Art to become an enthusiastic supporter of Pollock’s.⁶⁸

In May 1942, Krasner and Pollock both signed a petition to President Franklin Roosevelt in protest of the deterioration of creative activity on the WPA easel project in New York. At that same time, Krasner was working for the United States government on the War Services Project, the last hurrah of the WPA. She served as supervisor for the production of nineteen store window displays meant to publicize courses offered in New York–area schools to help the war effort. These courses were offered in the municipal colleges to prepare students for “service in the armed forces and in strategic war industries.”⁶⁹ Krasner recalled that some of the displays were for the windows of Gimbels department store in Herald Square.⁷⁰

In May Krasner went to observe a number of classes from various schools, “looking for the one spot that could be dramatized.”⁷¹

These visits included a class on explosives with Professor Burtell of City College, who showed her “interesting and displayable items,” which she recorded and described. She focused on “a weird looking device like some alchemist’s dream based on a series of glass jars and retorts connected by rubber tubes, which is used to test the amount of hydrogen in an explosive.”⁷² She made more “Notes on Ideas and Materials Available for Window Displays in Stores of the War Courses Given in the Colleges.” Additional course topics included cryptography, chemistry, civil defense, mechanical drawing, metallurgy, optics, military topography, radio, and spherical trigonometry.⁷³

The montages that Krasner’s team produced were accompanied by one designed by Herbert Bayer. This montage was supposed to be at Pennsylvania Station and in the store windows as “a unifying key or symbol.”⁷⁴ The Austrian-born Bayer was already a famous Bauhaus-trained graphic designer whose montage displayed marching soldiers and students at courses in four different colleges. The caption for his montage read “50,000 Young People Prepare to Serve Their County.”

But the designs from Krasner’s workshop were even more adventuresome than Bayer’s. Documentary photographs survive from Krasner’s group effort, although it is not possible to know who produced what part of most of the displays.⁷⁵ There were strange juxtapositions of objects and scale, floating letters, lots of diagonal axes, and bold tonal contrasts. These works were all spatially complex and implied several levels of reality.

Krasner managed to get Pollock assigned to her team that summer. By the spring, he often stayed at Krasner’s place on Ninth Street. In describing their “courting period,” Krasner said, “I resisted at first, but I must admit, I didn’t resist very long. I was terribly drawn to Jackson, and I fell in love with him—physically, mentally—in every sense of the word. I had a conviction when I met Jackson that he had something important to say. When we began going together, my own work became irrelevant. He was the important thing. I couldn’t do enough for him. He was not easy. But at the very beginning he was accepting of my encouragement, attention, and love.”⁷⁶ Perhaps the self-sufficient Krasner was not so much drawn to weak, dependent, alcoholic men but was just capable, after a decade of living with Igor, of dealing with one.

The anticipation of a visit from his mother that May propelled Pollock into a binge of drinking that ended with his admittance to Bellevue Hospital, a New York City public hospital well known for its psychiatric facilities—the hospital had established a dedicated unit for alcoholics as early as 1892. (In fact, by 1936, 40 percent of Bellevue’s 25,000 annual admissions were alcoholics.)⁷⁷

Krasner recalled the spring morning when Pollock’s brother Sande knocked on her door, asking, “Did Jackson spend the night here last night?” When she asked why, he replied, “Because he is in Bellevue Hospital and our mother has arrived in New York. Will you go with me and get him?” Krasner later told how she had gone with Sande to the Bellevue ward: “He looked awful. He had been drinking for days. I said to him, ‘Is this the best hotel you can find?’ At Sande’s suggestion I took him back to my place and fed him milk and eggs to be in shape for dinner that night with Mother. We went together. It was my first meeting with Mother. I was overpowered by her cooking.”⁷⁸ Krasner was caught off guard: “I had never seen such a spread as she put on.” Seeing that Stella Pollock had prepared the abundant home-cooked dinner and even baked the bread, Krasner’s first response was to be impressed. She told Jackson, “You’re off your rocker, she’s sweet, nice.” It took Krasner time to appreciate why there was a problem between Jackson and his mother, how she dominated her youngest son.⁷⁹

To understand how Krasner dealt with Pollock’s drinking problem at the time, it is necessary to consider how the interpretation of alcoholism was then evolving. At the time of Pollock’s hospitalization, alcoholism was generally regarded as “a self-induced condition that was more a reflection of moral weakness than medical illness.”⁸⁰

By 1943, when Pollock was admitted to Bellevue, the old cultural paradigm saw alcohol and drunkenness as “sin and moral degeneracy.” However, this interpretation was giving way to the new “metaphor of alcoholism as a disease.”⁸¹ Krasner never would have subscribed to the old notion of alcohol as “sinful”—after all, she was too hip, too rebellious, too much a part of a social milieu that accepted drinking. Instead, she accepted medical authority that invoked the problem of alcoholism as a disease, as it had been viewed in the nineteenth century, well before Prohibition.⁸²

If alcoholism was a disease, then treatment was possible if one could only find the right cure. Awestruck by Pollock’s extraordinary talent and other redeeming qualities, Krasner was determined to try to help him. Her experience dealing with Igor’s problems with alcohol made Pollock’s more severe problems seem at once familiar and more manageable. But as Krasner searched for treatments not only for Pollock’s alcoholism but also for other maladies of her own, she was exposed to a great deal of medical quackery.

Early twentieth-century addiction specialists had argued that putting alcoholics in medically supervised settings was necessary to treat them effectively. Of course, neither Pollock nor other alcoholics could easily be persuaded to remain in a mental hospital such as Bellevue long enough for treatment to succeed. During the postwar years, drinking was heavy in the art community, and that made Krasner’s efforts more difficult. Bars were the hangouts of choice, where one went to make the necessary connections, while entertaining at home also included copious amounts of alcohol.

Thus Krasner became a part of Sande’s efforts to conceal Jackson’s drinking from their mother and get him into a better state to welcome her.⁸³ In doing so, Krasner gradually became aware of the depth of Pollock’s problems, which began to take up more and more of her time.

During Stella Pollock’s visit that May, she stayed with Sande and his wife, Arloie, whom he had known since high school, in the fourth-floor walk-up apartment on Eighth Street that they shared with Jackson. Stella wrote to their brother Charles that it was “almost ten o’clock” and Jack “has just left for his girls [sic] home.”⁸⁴ She appears to have been pleased.

As long as she hid Pollock’s problems from his mother, from herself, and from others, Krasner was not alone in her positive assessment of Pollock and his talent. Finally, George Mercer met Pollock while visiting Krasner in New York in August 1942. After he returned to North Carolina, he wrote, “I have been meaning to write and tell you what a good time I had in New York with you and Pollack [sic]. What a change it was from the life here. I was a little disappointed that New York wasn’t all lighted up for my arrival but then one must put up with the war, you know.”⁸⁵ Mercer was supportive of his friend’s new companion, telling her, “I not only liked Pollack [sic] but approved of him as well. You may tell him so if you wish. His quiet intelligence is particularly admirable. Few people are able to give the impression of intelligence without noisy reminder. He is one of the few.”⁸⁶

Mercer also liked Krasner’s canvas in progress. “The painting was and is very beautiful. Don’t change it. Or have you done so already? Next time I will have to see it in the daytime. I too would like to delve into the matter of color. I am about on the verge of buying some colored pencils. What a splurge. I’d sort of like to sneak off and put some colors on paper.”⁸⁷

That fall, Jackson’s brother Sande left New York City to take a defense industry job in Connecticut, which allowed him to avoid military service. He must have felt relieved to be able to leave Jackson in Lee’s hands. Only at that point did Krasner give up her own place.⁸⁸ Charles Pollock, their elder brother, later reflected, “Lee and I never had much to say to each other and I had no real impression of her work. Lee had strength, which Jack needed, and ways of opening up avenues for him. If he hadn’t met her, he might have gotten tied up with a lethal woman.”⁸⁹

Charles’s wife, Elizabeth Pollock, added, “Jackson was narcissistic, totally in love with Jackson; that’s why he had to be mothered. Lee struck me as extremely capable and domineering; I knew immediately why Jackson was with her. He had found a ‘mummy.’”⁹⁰

With Pollock’s family gone, Krasner moved in with him at 46 East Eighth Street, around the corner from her previous apartment, taking the place of his brother Sande and Sande’s wife, Arloie, who had looked after Jackson. Krasner was able to paint, working at the other end of Pollock’s studio. But still their relationship was not an easy one.

“I was out one afternoon and I came in,” she recalled, “and I found that the painting I had on the easel, that I was working, you know, and I said, ‘That’s not my painting,’ and then the second reaction was, he had worked on it. And in a total rage, I slashed the canvas…. I wished to hell I had never done it, but…And I guess I didn’t speak to him for some two months, and then we got through that.”⁹¹

It was bad enough that Hofmann had made corrections on her drawings, but this intrusion and interference by Pollock was totally unbearable. Those who claim that Krasner did not continue to show her own work because she did not want to appear competitive should take into account her anger at his attempt to improve upon her painting.

By October 1, 1942, Krasner had taken charge of the City War Services Project and had eight artists under her supervision, including Pollock.⁹² Of Krasner’s group, the artists John [later, Jean] Xceron and Serge Trubach were fellow members of the American Abstract Artists. In a letter to Audrey McMahon, who was the general supervisor of the City War Services Project, Pearl Bernstein wrote of “the difficulties” Krasner “encountered in coordinating all of the work in spite of academic and other temperaments. The fact that all those who worked on the displays still seem happy about them, is not the least of the things to Miss Krasner’s credit.”⁹³ It is notable that Krasner reported to McMahon, because in December 1936, it was McMahon who had called the police in against the Artists Union demonstrators, some of whom they brutalized; both Trubach and Krasner were among them.⁹⁴

Several of the artists who worked with Krasner on this project were deeply engaged with modernism. Ben Benn, who had studied at the National Academy of Design from 1904 to 1908, had participated in “The Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters” held in 1916 at the Anderson Galleries in New York, along with Thomas Hart Benton, who had been Pollock’s teacher. Early on, Benn felt the influence of Matisse, Picasso, and Kandinsky.

Xceron, who had first gone to Paris in 1927, was another enthusiastic advocate of modernism in the group. He had worked in Paris as a syndicated art columnist for the European editions of the Chicago Herald Tribune, the Boston Evening Transcript, and the New York Herald Tribune, newspapers with high circulations. Imbued with modern sensibilities, he was a strong advocate for non-objective painting.

In October 1942, Igor returned to New York for a short time. Jeanne Lawson Bultman, who was involved with Igor after Lee and before her marriage to Fritz, recalled Igor telling her that he had wanted to see Lee but that he upset Jackson so much that Jackson began throwing things at him to hasten his departure.⁹⁵ Apparently Krasner no longer wanted Igor back and had to force him to leave her in peace. Now that he had had a change of heart, he was the rejected one.

Krasner wrote to Mercer about it; he responded, “I think that I would like to have witnessed the splash of plates. At any rate it amused me. It sounds as tho Igor is gone for good now. The last shower of crockery symbolizes something. I like the way you were forced to stop to be honest by the way.”⁹⁶

Krasner’s catalogue raisonné dated a canvas called Igor to circa 1943, but it probably was completed in late 1942 in response to the unexpected return of the man who had deserted her. The central motif of Igor (which has too often been reproduced upside down) looks like an abstract head of a rooster. Though it is not clear that Esphyr Slobodkina had shown Krasner the 1934 caricature that she had made of her friend astride a cock, the sexual metaphor of the cock was well known to their generation.

Yet the catalogue raisonné suggests the impetus for this picture rests in the princes that Krasner would have known from the Russian fairy tales that her father read to her. It is much more likely that Krasner’s Igor refers not to literary lore or to Borodin’s opera Prince Igor but to her own experience, first growing up in rural East New York with its farms, where she recalled going to fetch buckets of fresh milk for her family, and then at her parents’ farm in Greenlawn, where they raised chickens. Like any farm girl, she would have known that though the cock was not monogamous, he would attack other roosters who entered his territory, where his hens were nesting. Likewise, Krasner knew that Igor had wandered into the arms of other women, often the society women he depicted in commissioned portraits, but that he had returned to her, wanting to reclaim his territory. Thus, this canvas is a self-declaration that she had moved on.

As Pantuhoff’s fortunes diminished, Krasner saw Pollock’s potential. Unlike Igor, whose work had become increasingly conservative and out of step with their contemporaries, Jackson was moving in avant-garde directions, challenging tradition, even contemporary leaders like Matisse and Picasso, whose influence can be seen in her canvas Igor. While the suave Igor charmed society women, Jackson maintained a bad-boy persona, but that could be regarded as linked to the antics of Dada artists like Duchamp and the Surrealists, who were then making their mark in New York.