NINE

Coping with Peggy Guggenheim, 1943–45

Jackson Pollock with Peggy Guggenheim in front of Mural, a 1943 painting that she commissioned from him for the entrance hall of her town house at 155 East 61st Street. Lee recalled that Guggenheim had sent a copy of her book inscribed, “‘To Jackson.’…She had not included me in the inscription…. I must not have realized that she probably resented my attachment to Jackson.” Photographed by George Karger.

THE SURREALISTS TRULY BEGAN TO MAKE HEADWAY IN NEW York when the heiress Peggy Guggenheim opened her gallery, Art of This Century, at 30 West Fifty-Seventh Street on October 20, 1942. She was the niece of Solomon Guggenheim, the founder of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, then at 24 East Fifty-Fourth Street. She had previously run her own commercial gallery in London, which she named Guggenheim Jeune, at once hitching her star to her uncle’s fame and giving the appearance that she was his daughter, instead of his niece.

Peggy’s wealthy parents, Benjamin Guggenheim and Florette Seligman, were one of the most socially influential Jewish families in New York, but in 1912, when Peggy was only fourteen years old, her father perished in the sinking of Titanic. As a young woman, she discovered the avant-garde while working at the Sunwise Turn, a radical bookstore in Greenwich Village run by her cousin Harold Loeb. She forged friendships not only with artists but also with others on the cutting edge of change.

In connection with the opening of her gallery in New York, Guggenheim published a catalogue, Art of This Century, which included prefaces by Mondrian, André Breton, and Jean Arp, demonstrating her connections with those in both abstract and Surrealist art. She wanted her gallery to be noticed, so she commissioned an unusual interior design by Frederick J. Kiesler, a European-born and-trained experimental artist, theoretician, and architect.

Guggenheim opened with a show of her collection of modern paintings and sculpture. Many of the paintings were shown without frames to avoid the look of tradition; sculpture was suspended in the air, walls were curved, and special biomorphically shaped chairs were flipped over to become sculpture pedestals. “We, the inheritors of chaos,” said Kiesler, “must be the architects of a new unity. These galleries are a demonstration of a changing world, in which the artist’s work stands forth as a vital entity in a spatial whole and art stands forth as a vital link in the structure of a new myth.”¹

Peggy’s uncle’s museum, the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, had hired Pollock as a custodian in May, just months after the WPA ended his employment. He worked on making frames and counting attendance and did other odd jobs. Later on, when an interviewer asked her what she had been doing, Krasner replied that she stayed home and was “very busy keeping house.”² In fact, she was focused on taking care of Jackson, wanting this relationship to last.

Pollock would soon come to Peggy Guggenheim’s attention through a series of connections. Previously he had worked on the WPA easel project, where he had met William Baziotes, an artist Krasner knew in the WPA, who hung out with the Chilean painter Matta.³ Krasner recalled that in early 1942, Matta suggested that Baziotes introduce Pollock to Robert Motherwell, a young painter from a relatively well-to-do family, who invited Pollock to show in a group exhibition of Surrealists. He explained the concept of “psychic automatism,” only to find that Jackson already embraced the role of the subconscious in art. Still, Pollock disliked group activities and so declined to join the projected show.

Despite Krasner’s own previous experiments with Surrealist imagery, she was turned off by the men’s chauvinism. “I was there, too, but that was irrelevant,” she remembered about male artists whom she thought never paid her much respect.⁴ Krasner liked to rail against the way the Surrealists treated their wives and how this way of treating women influenced the American male artists who looked up to the Surrealists. “There were the artists and then there were the ‘dames,’” she explained. “I was considered a ‘dame’ even if I was a painter too. And they had this terrible custom, the artists we knew. It was something they’d picked up from the Surrealists. I think—they used to dress up their wives to go out to parties. Very elaborate costumes, and hairdos and everything.”⁵ A much younger Krasner had once liked having Pantuhoff manipulate her style, but after him, though she enjoyed fashion, she had no tolerance for this sort of behavior, which she just saw as men treating women like dolls to be adorned.

Krasner was not alone in her reaction against the Surrealists’ behavior. Even though her old friend Gorky became close to André Breton, Matta, and a number of the Surrealists in New York, his close friend, the painter Saul Schary, insisted, “Gorky was not a Surrealist. He never was a Surrealist, because the Surrealists believed that by taking reality and putting it together in strange and unusual juxtapositions, they made it sur-real. ‘You know, Schary,’…Gorky said to me, ‘I made a terrible mistake getting in with these Surrealist people. They’re terrible people. The husbands sleep with each other’s wives and they’re terrible people.’”⁶ Gorky was referring to his own wife’s affair with Matta, one of several torments that contributed to his suicide.⁷

Krasner also recalled the “little social engagements” that she and Pollock had with Matta, Baziotes, and Motherwell, during which they played the after-dinner Surrealist game Exquisite Corpse. She described this as: “It was to draw a figure, and you do the head, and then fold the paper and then give it to me, so that I’d start the upper part of the torso, and then I’d fold it up, and so on; it isn’t a literary concept.”⁸ Jackson and Lee also began to experiment with writing automatic poetry, emphasizing one’s stream of consciousness with Motherwell, Baziotes, and their wives—but merely as an after-dinner game.

Through Motherwell, Pollock received an invitation to take part in Peggy Guggenheim’s show of collages that was held from April 16 to May 15, 1943. The two men worked together on their collages in Pollock’s studio. Pollock was also invited to submit his work to the jury for the Spring Salon for Young Artists (under the age of thirty-five) at Art of This Century. Krasner, who would not turn thirty-five until October, did not submit anything, though she continued to work on her own art.

Guggenheim asked the English art and literary critic Herbert Read to help her choose the artists for her salon, and they worked together with her new employee, Howard Putzel, to organize the show. Putzel knew and supported Pollock. He visited Pollock’s studio in advance and told Pollock to send in his painting Stenographic Figure for this juried show.

Jimmy Ernst, Guggenheim’s assistant and the son of the famous artist Max Ernst, who was then briefly married to Guggenheim, was present when Mondrian and the other members of the jury—the French artist Marcel Duchamp, the critics James Johnson Sweeney and James Soby, Putzel, and Guggenheim—considered Pollock’s painting. Jimmy reported overhearing Mondrian comment that he found Pollock’s work “exciting and unusual,” though not easily understood. There was something new going on there, Mondrian noted, which might mean that Pollock was one of the most original American artists that he had ever seen. Guggenheim, who had not previously paid attention to Pollock’s work, soon made a date to visit his studio.

On June 23, Peggy arrived, but Lee and Jackson were a bit late, and when they arrived, they ran into her exiting their building. “Anticipating that we might be late we left the doors open for her,” Krasner recounted. “My paintings were up as well as Jackson’s…. [Peggy] started to bawl Jackson out for not being there on time, saying, ‘I came into the place, the doors were open, and I see a lot of paintings, L.K., L.K. I didn’t come to look at L.K.’s paintings. Who is L.K.?’ And she damn well knew at that point who L.K. was.”⁹ Eventually, they prevailed upon the irate Peggy to climb back up the stairs for a proper studio visit in Jackson’s presence. There, as they continued to mollify her, she warmed to his work.

It was Peggy’s friend Jean Connolly who wrote the review of the spring salon for The Nation, which Krasner liked to quote, for it said that Pollock’s canvas left the exhibition jury “starry-eyed.”¹⁰

This really made an impression on Krasner because Mondrian was one of the jurors. She might have been aware that at the time, Connolly was the lover of her old friend, the critic Clement Greenberg, who was then serving in the U.S. Army Air Force.¹¹ Krasner must have also liked what Robert M. Coates in The New Yorker had to say about Pollock’s work—“a real discovery.”¹² Others were now seeing what she had seen in Pollock a few years earlier. The future, for once, looked rosy.

By July 15, Pollock proudly wrote to Lee on Long Island, where she was visiting her aging and ailing parents, that he had signed a contract from Peggy Guggenheim. Like Krasner, Guggenheim seemed fortunate to have found in Pollock a talented young male American artist who wasn’t in military service. Guggenheim scheduled a solo show for him in November, commissioned a mural-size painting for the entrance hall of her town house at 155 East Sixty-first Street, and agreed to pay him $150 a month for a year with a settlement at the end of the year. If more than $2,700 worth of art were sold (less one-third commission for the gallery), he would receive further payment, and if less, he would make up the difference in paintings turned over to Guggenheim.¹³ Her patronage seemed fantastic. It immediately enabled him to quit the custodial job that he held at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, where, like many of the artists-employees, he felt threatened by the dogmatic director, the Baroness Hilla Rebay.

That same summer, Krasner wrote to Jackson’s mother, Stella Pollock: “I’m really ashamed for not having written sooner but life in N.Y. is complicated and in spite of the fact that I’m not working (except for the posing I do for Sara) and I seem to be kept busy every minute. It was nice seeing Frank and in uniform, much to everyone’s surprise and Sande (who’s getting fatter every day).”¹⁴

She exulted about the wonderful things that were beginning to happen to Jackson: Peggy Guggenheim’s visit to his studio, her purchase of a drawing, and her promise of a solo show for him in November. “She is really very excited about his work; in fact she said one of the large canvases was the most beautiful painting done in America. She wants to handle his work and can do a lot for him,” she enthused.¹⁵ She also told how James Johnson Sweeney had offered Jackson a teaching job in Buffalo, New York. It was not tempting, but it was flattering, and it suggested that he was destined for success.¹⁶ And there was more: “some woman who came in from the coast to arrange some shows for the San Francisco Museum offered him an exhibition of his drawings and I can’t remember what else is happening but it’s all very wonderful.”¹⁷

Lee also wrote to Stella: “Please be sure and send me the information about your shoes so I can get them quickly—are you thinking about coming East soon? I’ll write soon.” She signed her letter to Jackson’s mother “Love, Lee.”¹⁸ Though not yet married, she was clearly behaving like an ingratiating daughter-in-law.

On April 6, 1943, Krasner applied to the City of New York to correct her birth certificate, which had been issued incorrectly as “Lena Kreisner.” She petitioned to have it changed to “Lenore Krasner,” not using the “Lee” from either Cooper Union days or the 1930 U.S. census. She reported that her parents Anna (not Annie, as had been recorded on the original certificate) and Joseph were aged seventy and eighty and were living at Delaware Avenue and Winfield Place in Huntington Station, Long Island, New York. She also noted that Joseph had “operated a fish store,” not worked as a “Fisher.”¹⁹ The reason Krasner elected to file this official paper could be related to her desire to marry. Though Jackson had problems, things seemed to be falling into place.

While Krasner’s relationship with Pollock was developing, Hans Hofmann was helping to promote her work. Eventually Sidney Janis, who had helped arrange the New York showing of Picasso’s Guernica, noticed her. Janis even selected work by Lee, Mercedes Carles, and their pal Ray Eames, all former Hofmann students, to include in his book, Abstract & Surrealist Art in America, which would be published in November 1944. The three women were featured along with Hofmann as well as Stuart Davis, John D. Graham, Byron Browne, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and others who worked under the rubric “American Abstract Painters.” Krasner’s unsigned contribution, which Herbert Matter photographed, was called Composition (1943) and reproduced across the gutter from John Graham’s Studio. Though Krasner employed various colors, her palette, emphasizing red, yellow, and blue, still attests to her adulation of Mondrian at the time. She listed her date of birth as 1911, intentionally shaving three years off her age, as so many women did in those days of intense gender discrimination.²⁰ It is not clear if she lied about her age to Pollock, but in retrospect, it seems unlikely that he would have paid much attention to such a detail at the time they were first attracted to each other.

Ray Eames’s For C in Limited Palette (1943), a small oil, just ten by thirteen and a half inches, was even more hard-edged than Krasner’s larger Composition, measuring thirty by twenty-four inches. Eames delved into “the recovery of form through movement and balance and depth and light.”²¹ Whereas Krasner employed heavy black outlines and mainly geometric shapes, Eames’s shapes included several that were clearly biomorphic, closer to de Kooning’s The Wave (1942–43), which was much more ambitious in scale at forty-eight inches square. Mercedes Carles’s Still Life in Red and Green (1935) reveals a thick application of paint, but forms that depend upon color do not read well in a small black-and-white reproduction of an original only sixteen by twenty inches.

It was Krasner who got Janis to look at Pollock’s work, which he had never seen.²² Janis recalled, “While I was working on the book, I was interested in meeting some of Hans Hofmann’s pupils. One of them was Lee Krasner. During the course of my visit, she asked me if I knew an artist by the name of Jackson Pollock. I said no. She then said that he was completely unknown and would I like to see his work? I said, by all means—especially if you recommend him. I did not know at the time that she was interested in Pollock in any way except artistically.” Janis told how Krasner took him to Pollock’s Eighth Street studio, where he saw the artist, whom he recalled as “a dour-looking fellow, who didn’t say one word during my entire visit. He was quiet and stood in a corner of his studio. He let Lee do all of the talking. Jackson just listened. He was that way, until he got to know you. A very reticent man, he was. And of course, he was cold sober. When not so sober, he did quite a lot of talking.”²³

In his book, Janis categorized Pollock as one of the “American Surrealist Painters,” along with artists such as Arshile Gorky, Mark Tobey, William Baziotes, Jimmy Ernst, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, among others. Janis featured Pollock’s forty-two-and-a-half-by-sixty-seven-inch painting The She-Wolf (1943) with a color plate, an honor Janis had also bestowed upon Hans Hofmann’s Painting (1944) in an earlier section of the book. Pollock, unlike Krasner, who was uncharacteristically silent, offered the following statement to Janis for his book: “[The] She-Wolf came into existence because I had to paint it. Any attempt on my part to say something about it, to attempt explanation of the inexplicable, could only destroy it.”²⁴

Janis was so impressed by Pollock’s work that he recommended The She-Wolf for purchase by the Museum of Modern Art, where he served on the Advisory Committee, which bought the painting for $600. He wrote to Pollock about how impressed he was and told Pollock that “L.K. is to phone when you feel like visiting me. Best to you both.”²⁵

But with Pollock’s success came frustration for Krasner. Mercedes had just moved to Santa Monica, California, and Krasner wrote to her to say, “I’m painting and nothing happens its [sic] maddening.”²⁶ She complained, “I showed Janis my last three paintings—He said they were to [sic] much Pollocks. It’s completely idiotic but I have a feeling from now on that’s going to be the story.”²⁷

The Matters had gone to California so that Herbert, still a Swiss citizen, could remain in the United States during World War II. He was allowed to work in the office of the designers Charles and Ray “Buddha” Eames, who had married in 1941 and were designing furniture and doing government work as part of the war effort.²⁸ Krasner assured her chum how much she missed them and how it seemed like they were just on a long vacation. “Your shack sounds wonderful and I really wish I was there. However don’t start getting ideas—I just don’t like the sound of California—but the waves and the aloneness that kind of aloneness seems wonderful—the fact that you can think about painting again and be away from the hysteria of the city—all that I envy.”²⁹

“I’m posing for Sara [Johns] now—They’ve asked her to try some covers and of course she gets more vague every day—But I’m sure she’ll get it done in her own strange way,” Lee wrote to Mercedes about their mutual friend and classmate, Buddha.

Ray Eames was born as Bernice Alexandra Kaiser in Sacramento, California, where she developed an interest in new forms of art, design, dance, and film. Later, short and squat, she seemed to have earned her nickname, though it probably reflected her serene personality. She studied at Sacramento Junior College before moving with her widowed mother to New York in 1932, in order to be closer to her brother, who was at West Point. She landed in the German emigré Hans Hofmann’s class at the Art Students League and followed him when he set up his own school later that year. She attended the Hofmann School in both New York and Provincetown, joined and exhibited with the American Abstract Artists, and also studied modern dance with Martha Graham and Hanya Holm. In the autumn of 1940, Kaiser left the Hofmann School to study modern design at the Cranbrook Academy in Michigan, where she met the designer Charles Eames, whom she married and with whom she would successfully collaborate. Buddha’s productive work relationship with Charles was in great contrast to Lee’s struggle to support Jackson’s career in the face of his alcoholism, while sometimes neglecting her own.

Lee probably first met Buddha Eames through Mercedes—in the early 1930s, both had attended the May Friend Bennett School in Millbrook, New York, where they studied art with the sculptor Lu Duble.³⁰ Also Buddha, Mercedes, and Lee then studied together at the Hofmann School. Lee also noted that she was amazed “you still speak to each other at all. I warned you not to break up a life long friendship.”³¹

Lee told Mercedes about a dinner party she gave a week earlier, where the guests included Hans and Miz Hofmann, Janet Hauke (a fellow student from the Hofmann School) and her husband, the artist Frederick Hauke (who had been on Krasner’s War Services Project), Peggy Guggenheim, and Howard Putzel. She pronounced the dinner “a complete success—food superb (Quote a line from Mr. Putzel to Mr. Pollock the following day ‘My Very Best regards to your Cordon Bleu chef”) Yes I’m cooking these days—seriously. As I was saying after a most charming dinner we all went up [to] Hans’ place to show Peggy his work—now mind—this business of casually walking down four flights at 46 E. 8th & walking up 3 flights at 44 E. 8th took all winter to plot—nothing must go wrong.”³² Cooking “seriously” meant that she was using her “womanly” skills to promote the art of Pollock and her former teacher—even as she struggled with her own painting.

Krasner complained that Janet Hauke “didn’t shut her mouth for one second & we were there for hours…. How ever the gods had destined a successful evening and Peggy was terribly excited about the work & asked if she couldn’t come up & see them quitely [sic] & to sum up she’s giving Hans a show this March—I think that [Sidney] Janis is in Calif. now & if you see him be sure to tell him about it. I think he’ll be quite surprised.”³³

Sometime in July 1943, on their Eighth Street rooftop, Krasner took a snapshot of Pollock, Morris Kadish, an unidentified friend (who appears to be George Mercer), and the artist Reuben Kadish, who, having headed the mural division for the Federal Art Project in San Francisco, was then serving in the army’s Artist Unit to document wartime life.³⁴ Krasner was probably using Kadish’s camera because he also photographed Pollock in the Eighth Street studio he shared with Krasner in front of his unfinished painting Guardians of the Secret, with her painting visible in the distance.³⁵

By August 1943, with Lee’s help, Jackson had ended Jungian analysis, which he entered in 1939 with Joseph Henderson and then, when the therapist moved to California in September of 1940, continued with Violet Staub de Laszlo. Instead, Pollock began treatment with Elizabeth Wright Hubbard, M.D., a homeopathic physician in New York. Hubbard practiced “holistic” medicine, characterized by exploring the psychological as well as the physical. Today Hubbard is considered to have been one of the foremost homeopaths, whose extensive writings are still influential. Hubbard was one of the first six women to graduate from the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University, and was a pioneer in the field of holistic medicine before her death in 1967.³⁶ One of the first to understand the significance of the mind-body connection, Hubbard treated a number of culturally prominent patients, including Alexander Calder, Darius Milhaud, and Marlene Dietrich.³⁷ Years later, Krasner recalled that Dr. Hubbard was a Theosophist.³⁸ Though Krasner only had a passing interest in such esoteric ideas, the spiritual leader Krishnamurti, who had himself been connected to Theosophy in his youth, had attracted Pollock’s attention during his high school days in California. After Pollock entered treatment with Dr. Hubbard, Krasner felt freer to focus on other goals.

By now it was clear that Krasner was Pollock’s facilitator in the world. She saw him as “riddled with doubt,” but believed that “no one knew as much about himself as Jackson did. He knew what he was about.”³⁹ She was also his cheerleader, guardian, and secretary. On November 1, Peggy Guggenheim’s assistant, Putzel, wrote to Krasner, asking her, “Lee, if you have time Tuesday can (or will) you help fold 1200 catalogues?”⁴⁰ He also invited them to join him at a concert by the classical guitarist Segovia.

Pollock’s first solo show opened at Art of This Century on November 8, 1943. “Sweeney is very pleased with Jackson & Jackson is very pleased with Sweeney,” Krasner noted of James Johnson Sweeney, the curator who had penned the catalogue’s brief note, which declared: “Pollock’s talent is volcanic. It has fire. It is unpredictable. It is undisciplined,” and it also praised him for painting “from inner impulsion without an ear to what the critic or spectator may feel.”⁴¹ Sweeney had been curator of the department of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art since 1935. The son of a rich importer of lace and textiles whose family had come from Donegal, Ireland, Sweeney had studied literature at Cambridge University and, among other work, assisted James Joyce in editing a manuscript. Well heeled and well educated, Sweeney probably had little in common with Krasner and Pollock, and they seem to have sensed that.

In addition to the activity at Guggenheim’s gallery, Sidney Janis had organized an exhibition called “Abstract and Surrealist Art in America,” which featured the artists from his book, including Krasner and Pollock. It began at the Cincinnati Art Museum, in February 1944, billed as organized by the San Francisco Museum of Art and selected by Sidney Janis. The show then traveled to four museums across the country before it hit New York at the Mortimer Brandt Gallery from November 29 through December 30.⁴²

After Pollock’s show with Guggenheim closed on November 29, Krasner wrote to Mercedes (whom she addressed as “Carles Darling”), “We’re just settling down to a normal existence. The show is over. Jackson says he isn’t going to paint until Peggy sells all his paintings. No use painting new ones. The Museum of Modern Art is going to buy one when they can decide which of two canvases they like best (I hope they make up their minds some time this year). Three gouaches were sold and that’s all—He got revues [sic] in the New Yorker, Art News, Art Digest—and the Nation—and one fan letter.”⁴³

For Jackson and Lee, life was particularly fine. She later reflected, “Jackson had a delightful sense of humor, and when I’d rant and rave about someone being a son of a bitch, et cetera, he’d calm me down considerably. When I bellyached about my work, he’d say ‘Stay with it.’ We had a continuing dialogue about our work and he always wanted me to see what he was doing; he was always asking my reaction.”⁴⁴

In her letter to Mercedes, Krasner demanded news of Buddha and whether the Matters’ young son, nicknamed “Pundit,” realized that he was in California: “I hope not—might have a bad psychological effect on him.”⁴⁵ She also recounted a bit of gossip: “Sande [Alexander ‘Sandy’ Calder] is making a bed for Peggy. Can’t get metal so its [sic] going to be in silver. And I’ve heard plenty of wise cracks about all three Sande—Peggy—and the Bed.”⁴⁶ Jackson too was taken with the bed project and later wrote about it to Herbert Matter: “Sande [sic] did an interesting end decoration for Peggy’s bed, a sort of enlarged ear-ring that hangs on the wall. We seldom ever see him.”⁴⁷

Pollock, thrilled with his “amazing success for my first year of showing,” wrote in 1944 to his mother and his brother Charles to recount the details of the magazine features. He was also relieved about having the security of a “contract set for next year” from Guggenheim.⁴⁸ He was still getting $150 a month, which he quickly realized “just about doesn’t meet the bills.”⁴⁹ When he asked for an increase to meet minimal living expenses, Guggenheim replied, “Tell Lee to go out and get a job.” Recalling the moment, Krasner explained, “Pollock wouldn’t accept that solution and she never dared mention it again.”⁵⁰

During this period Krasner was busy corresponding with her closest friends. After Hans Hofmann’s show at Art of This Century from March 7 to 31, 1944, Lee wrote about Guggenheim again to Mercedes. “To begin with ‘Peggy’ after that visit to Hans’ studio, had a severe change of heart—I couldn’t track down who was responsible for it—to some extent those fucking sur-real-ist[s] around her—at any rate she got more & more impossible as the time for the opening approached. How ever the show was finally hung—(I stayed away.) Jackson was there—& it naturally looked very exciting and she seemed to relax some what—She hates his large oils—loves his gouaches.”⁵¹ Krasner reported that Hans’s wife, Meetz, “Miz,” was “behaving beautifully around this business,” but that she preferred that the show feature the large oils. Peggy took the opposite view and, naturally, got her way.

Regardless, Krasner liked the outcome. “The show is really very very beautiful & alive and exciting…. The ‘Times’ reviewed the show…. The opening was mobbed—But none of your snobbish friends—and Hans was aware of it—not even Sandy [Calder]—Sweeney hasn’t seen the show yet but he will.”⁵² Krasner felt that Howard Putzel had been “wonderful throughout—He really likes Hans’ work—& he helped & plotted with us—Hans feels a great deal will depend on whether Sweeney approves or not—and to a great extent He’s right. If he does—it may break up that taboo which exists in that small but useful little groupe [sic]—Of course I’d prefer to use a bomb. The results would be much more to my liking—Yes you certainly picked the right winter to be away from N.Y.”⁵³

Krasner wanted her close friend to return to New York—what she called “this nice nest of snakes in the east.” She also confided: “Jackson censors my letters so He says I can’t tell you that Dr. Hubbards little pills are showing results—‘on him.’ He’s amazed that those silly little pills lessen the desire to drink—I’m keeping my fingers crossed—Remember How we poopooed Herbert when he suggested Hubbard?” Lee informed Mercedes, “By the way I gave her a good talking to about her ignorance of painting (modern). Did you know Cezanne used Homeopathy? That’s what started it—I mean my lecture—Also probably modern art.”⁵⁴ Though Krasner believed in Hubbard and was grateful to Herbert Matter for recommending him, she felt that she had to enlighten the doctor about art.

Lee also wrote that Jackson’s mother had just come east and stayed with them for two weeks. “We had a wonderful time eating a new cake every day—each one better than the one before.” Though she also asked how Herbert’s show had gone in Chicago, she was preoccupied by anxiety about Jackson’s relationship with Art of This Century and Peggy’s contract with Jackson that guaranteed him a minimal monthly income. This concern held her focus: “July 15th draws near & Peggy is not renewing the contract—She’s still as interested as ever in his paintings but she can’t stand ‘ties’—She’s been uncomfortable about it since the day she signed it. That’s why she’s probably had 4 husbands & is getting ready for a 5th. Strangely enough I can understand it—Maybe that’s why I don’t get married.”⁵⁵

Lee boasted that Jackson had “just finished the largest & possibly his best canvas to date—56 x 96"—Peggy is coming to dinner Sunday to see it—My painting stinks but I won’t give up—The horrible thing is that I’m painting every day (much more painting time than Jackson) but it still stinks.”⁵⁶ She was writing about Pasiphae, a canvas Pollock had not finished in time for his solo show in November 1943. She also reminded the Matters not to miss buying the April issue of Harper’s Bazaar, which featured Sweeney’s article “Five American Painters” and included a color reproduction of Pollock’s canvas The She-Wolf (1943).⁵⁷ The others featured were Gorky, Morris Graves, Milton Avery, and Matta.

Though Krasner did not save Mercedes’s letters to her, she did retain George Mercer’s letters. After Mercer visited Lee and Jackson in New York in the spring of 1944, he wrote on April 17, 1944, to tell them he had enjoyed seeing them and the “victory” dinner that they had shared. Pollock was celebrating getting a contract for another year after all. “I should have told you of my faith in order that the pressure could have been eased,” Mercer wrote to them. “But then, that might have removed the necessity or desire for an excursion with Bacchus. Those things can be fun.”⁵⁸ Clearly Mercer did not grasp the danger of alcohol for Pollock. He probably appreciated, even envied, that Pollock was free from military duty and able to paint. Another visitor was her friend and Hofmann School chum Ray “Buddha” Eames, who was visiting New York with her husband.

In June 1944, Lee wrote to Mercedes, this time from Cape Cod, where she and Jackson, having sublet their place in the city, planned to spend the summer: “Now we are settled in P-town—15 Cottage St. and things seem a little more settled—I suppose you’ve seen Buddha by now.” Lee complained that her time with Buddha in New York had seemed like “two seconds” because they could not really talk in the presence of Jackson and Charles Eames. “At the moment we are living most happily and I am truly gratified—P-T. is beautiful as you know and we are one block from the farm so we can stay off of the muck around center of town—We came up with Hans and Meetz [Miz]—Hans left from the hospital directly on to the Cape Coder.”

She reported how well Hofmann was doing after his hernia operation, though expressed concern that his recovery was a bit slow. Fritz and Jeanne Bultman were among those whose presence she noted, while going on to gossip about another Hofmann student, the jewelry, furniture, and interior designer Ward Bennett, who was staying at the Hofmann house, asking if he had been “‘Elsa K.’s’ l’amour—yes?” Krasner asked about how things were with “Herbert & Pundit”: “Do you think you’ll be out west much longer now that the end of the war is so close? I heard about Herbert’s show in Chicago & someone told me He is or has shown in Los Angeles. Tell me about it,” she implored.

Krasner also noted, “Howard Putzel is coming up in a few days and I understand he quit his job (with Peggy). Sounds serious but I won’t know anything until I see him.” She also wrote that she had seen a show of work by Mercedes’s father—Arthur B. Carles—and found his paintings “very wonderful.”⁵⁹

For his part, Jackson wrote to his mother and his brother Sande, and his wife, Arloie, “Provincetown looks much better to me now—we are at the west end of town and within walking distance of the beach. We get in for a dip at least once a day…. Haven’t gotten into work yet. Howard Putzel came up last nite [sic] for [a] two week stay—we had dinner with the Hofmanns. Hans still has to take it pretty easy.”⁶⁰

By September 7, 1944, Pollock had changed his mood again, writing to Herbert Matter in Los Angeles: “I have definitely decided I don’t like P-town. Perhaps Truro or Wellfleet is more sympathetic to painting,” he opined. The small town of Truro, where the much more politically conservative Edward Hopper painted realistic views of the landscape, was, however, an unlikely place for Pollock.

“Neither Lee nor I have touched a brush since we are here. Am anxious to get back to 46 E. 8th and down to work. I have a brother at 901 E Hyde Park, Inglewood. If you’re able to get around look him up and I’ll tell him to do the same—he’s a swell guy and politically left—I feel he supports me in that direction.”⁶¹

Hofmann also wrote about that summer to Mercedes Matter, observing, “neither Lee nor Jackson worked. They have been every day on the beach—well—who can blame them—he worked so hard throughout a long time and Lee was exhausted I think from being the wife of him.”⁶² Hofmann already thought of the couple as married, although they were not then.

Krasner had to leave suddenly to tend to her ailing father in Huntington, Long Island. With no one to answer to, Pollock got arrested for being drunk and disturbing the peace. Hofmann explained that Jackson’s behavior suffered when he drank excessively: “he offends everyone in his surroundings—the end is always a collapse.”⁶³ This episode perhaps exemplifies Pollock’s pathologies and why his letters to the Matters differ from Krasner’s cheery accounts.

For his part, Hofmann admired Krasner and recognized Pollock’s talent, but, as he wrote to Mercedes Matter in October 1944, he feared the change that came over Pollock when he drank to the point of collapsing: “I feel sorry for such a constitution because in the end it must be of tragic consequences. Jackson is highly sensitive, he is a wonderful artist, he is in reality good-natured, but his companionship is hard to stand when he is off the normal. Lee will have a hard time with him, but she stays with him and I respect her for this.”⁶⁴

 

KRASNER’S FATHER DIED ON NOVEMBER 17, 1944. GEORGE MERCER, who had recently visited with Krasner and Pollock in New York, sent his sympathy for her “unhappiness and discomfort” before discussing his own efforts at painting.⁶⁵ “This is the first painting that hasn’t been tortured into a Hans Hofmann format. It is delightful to be free of the restraints of the ‘old school.’ I’m sure it has its bad features and its good ones. The parts of this painting do not have to answer the question ‘Is it plastic’ but rather ‘Is it right?, Does it work?’ I’m sure Hofmann’s [sic] would be in agony if he saw the painting but I am excited because I have found things and colors (in paint, of course.).”⁶⁶ Inspired by Persian miniatures, Mercer explained, he had to paint small. The army kept him from having both enough free time and a studio in which to produce larger works.

Mercer reported that “it was nice to see Jackson. We had a short talk but didn’t quite get our hooks entangled. I was too self conscious about my wisdom tooth which had been taken out the week before. I like his new paintings. I ‘saw’ them for the first time and should like to be painting what he is—but of course that is impossible. I think they are very important and sound—if that has any meaning as criticism of painting.”⁶⁷

Toward the end of December, Lee wrote to Mercedes, “It seems as if you’ve been away 10 years—It (California) couldn’t be that bad or you wouldn’t have stayed that long—I hate N.Y. and every body in it—Sorry to splash ice water on your firey [sic] dreams of N.Y. We’re isolated ourselves in a sense—No openings no cocktail parties as little of 57th St and all its shit as possible—Even at that some creeps through and the stench is terrific.”⁶⁸

Krasner’s desire not to mingle represents a change for her that most likely had to do with her desire to protect Pollock from too many opportunities to drink. When she was with Pantuhoff she had often gone to art openings and hung out at the Jumble Shop.

Krasner also complained about James Johnson Sweeney, “whom I must still be respectful of (at least publicly) because of his continued interest in Jackson…I might add slightly cooled interest, from time to time [he] commits outrages [sic] acts—and I must keep my mouth shut—Your Sande [sic] Calder just had a show of his recent works—And in all honesty they are dull.”⁶⁹

Krasner had an even lower opinion of “Jackson’s Peggy Guggenheim,” who, she said, “is still part of our life. But oh my isn’t she a rest less ladie [sic]—Here to-day but then there’s to-morrow—A new star loomed on the 57th St—sky—Howard Putzel—formerly with P.G. has his own Gallery—67 East 57th St—Its backed by McPherson [sic]—Remember him? He’s the man (I mean be careful how you use that word) that shares Peggy’s house and has more money than Peggy (be careful what you say about him he buys Pollocks).”⁷⁰ Kenneth Macpherson, an openly bisexual and debonair Scotsman, poet, and novelist moved into his own apartment in Peggy’s town house on East Sixty-first Street and comforted her during her divorce from Max Ernst.⁷¹

Krasner could be somewhat caustic, especially when defending Pollock. She told Mercedes, “Our Hans is painting and exhibiting all over the place—Some good some not so good—Our relationship Pollocks Mr. & Mrs. & Hofmanns Mr. & Mrs.—is a little touchy right now—It’s silly and not worth going into except to say that it was produced mainly by Meetz’s [Miz, Mrs. Hofmann] stupid tongue. She however is so much better now as a person that it seems unfair to mention it at all. Particularly don’t you mention it.”⁷² It’s notable that Krasner referred to herself as “Mrs. Pollock” though not yet married.

The reference to Mrs. Hofmann’s troubling tongue may have come from an incident that Robert Motherwell recounted years later. Motherwell described a visit he and Pollock made “to Hofmann’s studio, hung with works by Léger, Miró, Braque, etc…. We were drinking from a jug of wine when there was a phenomenon like changing gears in a car; Pollock’s whole expression changed, literally in seconds, and his eyes became glazed—a real Jekyll and Hyde.” He became either too drunk or too belligerent to walk. Motherwell complained: “Jackson and Hofmann both lived on the top floors of their buildings, so Hofmann, in his sixties, and I had to drag him down five or six flights, then along 8th Street to his building’s foyer. We buzzed his apartment but no answer.”

The drunken Pollock teased them, refusing to give them his key so that they could help him upstairs. In the midst of his antics, Pollock fell, hitting his head against a marble surface, which knocked him out cold. At first they were frantic, thinking that he was dead. When they realized that Pollock was still alive, they retrieved the key and struggled to drag his limp body up the stairs. “We were trying to open the apartment door when Lee opened it; she’d been there all the time but wasn’t answering. I was so enraged by that, we just dropped him. And to this day I have no idea what was going on in her mind.”⁷³

Then only in his twenties, Motherwell seems to have assumed that Lee actually heard the buzzer. In the heat of the moment, he did not stop to consider that she might have been in the bath, listening to loud music, or sound asleep—or that the buzzer was not even working. Much better off economically than Lee or Jackson, Motherwell might not have imagined living in a walk-up apartment on the top floor without a working buzzer. Nor did he show the least bit of concern for a woman confronting her live-in companion’s inert body dumped on the floor in front of her.

This incident may also shed some light on his dislike of Krasner. Perhaps Motherwell resented Krasner’s closeness to Pollock—the energy she expended on promoting him, or her resentment of being viewed by Motherwell and other male artists as just one of the “wives.”⁷⁴ Ironically, given their long mutual antipathy, Krasner and Motherwell were both enthusiasts of Matisse, Rimbaud, Poe, Meyer Schapiro, medieval manuscripts, and internationalism.⁷⁵ Though both searched for universal modern principles in art, perhaps gender bias, rivalry over Pollock, and personality kept them against each other.

Though she claimed not to hear who was sleeping with whom, Lee shared some gossip with Mercedes, covering the tales of Peggy Guggenheim’s daughter, Pegeen, and the French modernist painter Jean Hélion, whom Pegeen would marry, and of Matta, the Chilean Surrealist who had run off and left his wife and two small children. Krasner had heard these stories from Laura Sweeney, the curator’s wife.

Lee also told Mercedes about a dinner she had given for Peggy and the critic Clem Greenberg and noted that he reviewed painting for The Nation, an influential position that he had assumed in early 1942. Having heard that Mercedes had run into Arshile Gorky’s ex-lover reminded Lee to comment on what she had heard about Gorky: that there had been “this terrific change that took place in his work. Sweeney in his Harper’s Bazaar article & much talk here & there. I had the opportunity to see a gigantic canvas & I mean huge even in relation to Jacksons [sic] paintings. It is at the Janis show…. He has unquestionably opened up in his painting but the main change is that its [sic] now Kandinsky instead of Matta, Miro, Picasso, etc. Still not enough Gorky.”⁷⁶

Among other news, Lee told Mercedes that she had not seen Sara Johns more than a couple of times since she had returned from Provincetown, which she regretted, because she considered Sara “so wonderful.” Upbeat about Jackson, Lee noted that he was still working with Dr. Hubbard and wrote, “Some wonderful painting has come into existence since you & Herbert left N.Y. He is having a show in a month or so at the San Francisco Museum & Dr. Morley—is going to send it from there to several other places in California. Don’t know where yet. Try & See it.”⁷⁷ She still exuded optimism.

On March 19, 1945, Pollock’s solo show opened to a large crowd at Art of This Century. Guggenheim later wrote that she had “acute infectious mononucleosis…during the annual Pollock show and had to stay in bed. This distressed Lee Krasner very much, as she said no one could sell anything in the gallery except me, and Putzel had left to set up his gallery in New York. Poor man, this proved to be a great tragedy, as it ended in his suicide.”⁷⁸

Mercer, then stationed in Los Angeles, wrote to Krasner on April 24, 1945, telling her, “I have the note you wrote. You refer to the Miro show and to the paintings—‘each painting is a little miracle.’ That is a wonderful description. I have stored it and remembered it. I shant forget it.”⁷⁹ He proudly reported doing “a terrific analytic cubist painting for the picture and was fun—a tank covered with rubble-like boards and plaster and burned wood and only the slim line of the grain and one of the caterpillar tracks showing. No one knew what I was doing but I suppose I was almost having a camouflaged orgasm due to the fact I haven’t painted for so long and because I told them that…the way to camouflage a tank is burned-out ruins and it is.”⁸⁰ He promised to show her a photograph of this work.

Mercer was happy to receive an invitation to Jackson’s show, which he wanted to see, though it was impossible. He said he hoped to visit them on a leave in either July or August. He wrote that his sister and her husband, Elizabeth and Whit, “wrote that they saw Jackson’s show and were tempted to buy. That is a great conversion! Kandinsky has had his effect on them since he has been hanging in their living room. Dad mentioned the favorable review in the New Republic—which impressed him. Krasner—are you painting?”⁸¹

The question was a sore point. This was a frustrating period for Krasner. Nothing seemed to work. Unlike her friend, she did not have the army to blame for her inability to realize paintings that just seemed to turn into gray slabs. She later attributed this period of transition to the impact of Pollock on her work. “I went through a kind of black-out period or a painting of nothing but gray building up, because the big transition there is that up to that point, and including Hofmann, I had worked from nature…. as I had worked so-called, from nature, that is, I am here and Nature is out there, whether it be in the form of a woman or an apple or anything else, the concept was broken.”⁸²

She discussed the trauma of facing a blank canvas “with the knowledge that I am nature and try to make something happen on that canvas, now this is the real transition that took place. And it took me some three years.”⁸³ Krasner explained the change in her way of working: “If Hofmann broke up the Academy, then Pollock broke up Hofmann, and by Hofmann, I mean working from the cubist, bearing in mind that Hofmann was teaching the principles of cubism. And Pollock once more broke that up.”⁸⁴

Regardless of her frustration, Krasner described Pollock’s attitude toward her own artwork as “very supportive…I don’t know how I would have felt if he’d said ‘I don’t want you to paint,’ or acted it out in some way. The issue, of course, never arose; but it’s inconceivable to me that I would have stopped painting if my husband hadn’t approved. Since Pollock was a turbulent man, life with him was never very calm. But the question—should I paint, shouldn’t I paint—never arose. I didn’t hide my paintings in a closet; they hung on the wall next to his.”⁸⁵

On May 14, 1945, Howard Putzel’s first show—“A Problem for Critics”—at his new Gallery 67 opened in New York, and it included work by both Lee and Jackson. Putzel maintained close ties to the couple after leaving Peggy Guggenheim’s employ. They were in excellent company, since Putzel had included work by Jean Arp, Miró, and Picasso, whom he considered forerunners of the new movement. Besides Lee and Jackson, the other artists included Hans Hofmann, André Masson, Mark Rothko, Charles Seliger, Rufino Tamayo, R. W. [Richard] Pousette-Dart, Arshile Gorky, and Adolph Gottlieb. Although “Lenore Krasner” was the only woman in the show, the critic for the New York Times, Edward Alden Jewell, did not comment on her work, nor did he identify her ties to Jackson Pollock, whom he called “a vigorous new talent that could advantageously bend its wild will to a lot more discipline.”⁸⁶ Jewell understood that the title of the show referred to the need “to supply the first syllable for a new ‘ism,’ which, Mr. Putzel believes, has been developing since around 1940.”⁸⁷

At this time, Krasner went to work in studio space rented from Reuben Kadish. He recalled that she and Jackson needed to be apart: “They were so competitive then, so much so that Lee couldn’t work in the same space as Jackson, and I rented her a room in my studio.”⁸⁸ Krasner produced a few works such as Image Surfacing, where forms were beginning to emerge from her thick gray foundation that had previously threatened to absorb all her imagery as she sought to escape cubism. The shapes, though familiar, appeared to be more crudely rendered than usual, which attests to the powerful impact of Pollock on her work. Likewise, a primitive figure suggests both Krasner’s and Pollock’s mutual appreciation of the work of Miró. A small palettelike shape on the right side may represent a studio still life setup, which hearkens back to her time with Hofmann. She has drawn marks in wet paint with the handle of her brush instead of painting the clean black outlines that she had used while under the influence of Mondrian. Her continuing interest in the idea of the “primitive” reflects the influence of both Graham and Pollock.

Among the books Krasner owned is the American edition of G. Baldwin Brown’s The Art of the Cave Dweller, which features schematic drawings of animals from cave paintings that relate to Image Surfacing, particularly in its evocation of a large eye.⁸⁹ Brown wrote: “The earliest stages in the evolution of representative art have been already traced—the casual finger mark, the accidental resemblance, the resemblance worked out, the mental image materialized till the original is re-created as a thing of life.”⁹⁰ Krasner may have meant to call upon just such an accidental process in her title Image Surfacing.

Mercer wrote to Krasner on June 24, 1945, “There have been many times since 1940 that I have thought of our talks and have relied on them as one of the few things I could trust and wanted to renew. (I might as well shear myself of formality and say that I have sometimes wondered what I would do if I couldn’t look forward to talking with you again and benefiting from your sound logic.)”⁹¹ He told of his “regeneration after college” but admitted that “the bubble burst, with a weak, ridiculous little noise…. That left no one except Krasner and I thanked someone (not God I’m afraid) for Krasner. I thanked her, too, for ‘The Cosmological Eye’—which I have been reading.”⁹²

Mercer, who never saw actual battle, lamented that “the war has carried me away from the things which were important to me in 1940…. After three years of telling lies and playing a weak game of politics, I wonder whether I’ll be able to get ‘back.’…What painting I have done seems to me to be a very feeble protest against Army routine. It is so different an undertaking that it requires a different mind and a different attitude.” He was not able to achieve the separation from the army that he needed in order to paint. “Besides, the painting must be turned off and on—like water,” he explained. “Thereby it becomes a hobby and Christ knows painting is no hobby.”⁹³

Whatever Krasner wrote to Mercer about her spiritual struggle provoked a response that suggests what Krasner had been writing to him: “Your admission that you need religion is one that I have never made. I salute your courage. Of course, it can be difficult to find once the admission is made. That’s in the way of warning but not discouragement. You also speak of a /\/\/\/\ ‘fever chart’ existence—from ecstasy to horrible despair. It ain’t good, I know. But I’m afraid the despair is the price you pay for the ecstasy.”⁹⁴

The search for something to replace the beliefs that she had jettisoned as a teenager would continue for Krasner, who would later befriend a number of Catholic priests.⁹⁵

Mercer tried to console her: “I don’t believe that everyone experiences ecstasy as strongly as the artist or poet. And perhaps he creates the desperation in his mind at times when he is struggling unsuccessfully to reach a pinnacle of great excitement, love and insight. Those few people who are able to reach the pinnacle should regard it as a gift—because the ability is certainly not acquired, although a struggle is required for them to reach it—even occasionally.” From his point of view, “the struggle is worth it except when you hit the bottom of the barrel with a bang—and wonder.” That was the painful place Krasner’s own painting had reached as she sought to respond to Pollock’s new kind of painting.

Mercer brought up “the gray mass,” referring to her unresolved paintings: “Can you imagine living the part of the gray mass (or straight horizontal line) and at the same time realizing that you have voluntarily and irrevocably given up an attempt to reach the heights of great inspiration? No, that would be the worst miserable condition in existence.”⁹⁶ He attempted to encourage her as she struggled to deal with the huge impact of Pollock’s new way of painting and to free herself from the constraints of cubism.

It was Mercer’s turn in their reciprocal exchange. Her efforts to pull him up when he had been depressed had helped. By now he had adapted to the constraints imposed by the army. Mercer told how he painted in his room, taking care to hide it from others. He wanted to blend into the army and did not want to mix that life up with what he called “the real life.” He asked Krasner if he was wrong to take such an attitude and, if so, what a good solution would be. Clearly he valued what he viewed as her clearheaded logic. He looked forward to his next visit with her. Mercer also wrote that he was delighted with the print that she sent of Martin Schöngauer’s Temptation of St. Anthony, which, he said, gave him a “good solid belly laugh to realize that Saint ‘Tony’ went through Hell, too.”⁹⁷

Renouncing all worldly pleasures, Anthony, the Egyptian, went off to live as a hermit in the desert. In the midst of his prayers, Anthony often saw visions of Satan. The appeal to Krasner of both the devil theme and of Schöngauer’s imaginative portrayal, must have been the powerfully rendered collection of devils, demons, and winged monsters that spoke to her own fear of the dark and the supernatural.

Krasner’s decision to send Mercer a reproduction of Schöngauer’s Temptation of St. Anthony suggests that the image appealed to her as well. It is a very interesting selection because the theme of supernatural temptation occurs in old masters such as Schöngauer, Hieronymus Bosch, and Matthias Grünwald, and also in the work of modern artists, especially Surrealists like Max Ernst, who produced a painting on the theme in 1945.

Krasner had probably heard about Hollywood’s Loew-Lewin motion picture productions that had just held a contest among twelve well-known modern artists to paint what St. Anthony saw. That the producers paid each invited contestant $500 and that the announced prize (which ultimately went to Ernst) was $3,000 would have caught Krasner’s attention. The judges were Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Marcel Duchamp, and Sidney Janis, in whose book Krasner’s own work had appeared.⁹⁸ Besides Max Ernst, with whom Krasner was familiar through both Peggy Guggenheim and Max’s son Jimmy, the invited artists included such notables as the Surrealists Paul Delvaux, Salvador Dalí, Dorothea Tanning, and Leonora Carrington, and the Americans Abraham Rattner, Louis Guglielmi, and Ivan Le Lorraine Albright.⁹⁹

Krasner’s own struggle to change her mode of painting may explain why she declined to take part in a June 1945 group show titled “The Women,” held at Art of This Century. Jewell reported in the New York Times, “Although Gypsy Rose Lee, Loren McIver [sic] and Lenore Krasner are listed as participants in this vehement June gambado, work by them could not be secured, so their names must, with regret, be crossed off.”¹⁰⁰ The show also featured a number of women artists, who, like Krasner, were closely associated with male artists, including Kay Sage, the French Surrealist Yves Tanguy’s American wife; Hedda Sterne, wife of the artist-illustrator Saul Steinberg; and Jacqueline Lamba, who divorced the Surrealist André Breton and married the American sculptor David Hare. Krasner no doubt resented being segregated into a show of only women and already disliked Peggy intensely. She admitted years later that she “hated her attitude toward women. I didn’t want to show. She wasn’t friendly to women. She didn’t like women.”¹⁰¹

Because Guggenheim was constantly supporting needy friends, it seems less likely that she resented Krasner merely for asking her to renew Pollock’s contract or to raise his stipend enough so that they could live on it. In retrospect, the antipathy between Krasner and Guggenheim seems inevitable. Guggenheim, the descendant of an earlier migration of Swiss and German Jews, came from inherited wealth. Many German Jews viewed Russian Jews like Krasner with condescension and considered themselves respectable in contrast to the “uncouth, unwashed Russians,” creating much resentment.¹⁰² Peggy had descended from two well-established families—the Guggenheims, but also the Seligmans on her mother’s side—and she must have viewed Krasner as true to stereotype: irksome, loud, pushy, and aggressive. Indeed, she was forceful and intense in her promotion of Pollock’s art.

Guggenheim’s supposed prejudices do not account for her friendship with the anarchist Emma Goldman, whom she knew well in France during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Peggy financially supported Emma, who helped her separate from her abusive husband, the artist Laurence Vail, which allowed her to regain her “lost self-respect.”¹⁰³ Eventually, however, Peggy turned on Emma (who declined to mention Peggy’s support in her memoir) after deciding she was an “awful fake.”¹⁰⁴

In the case of Krasner, it is also possible that Guggenheim was jealous of Pollock’s wife. After all, she was aging and was twice divorced. Guggenheim wrote, “My relationship with Pollock was purely that of artist and patron, and Lee was the intermediary. Pollock himself was rather difficult; he drank too much and became so unpleasant, one might say devilish, on these occasions.”¹⁰⁵

Despite her personal feelings about Guggenheim, Krasner always made sure to credit her accomplishments: “Art of This Century was of the utmost importance as the first place where the New York School could be seen. That can never be minimized, and Peggy’s achievement should not be underestimated; she did major things for the so-called Abstract Expressionist group. Her gallery was the foundation, it’s where it all started to happen…. Peggy was invaluable…. That must be kept in history.”¹⁰⁶

And even though the couple met such art world luminaries as Duchamp, Matta, Sweeney, Soby, and Barr at Peggy’s parties at her home, these events were taxing for Krasner—she always had to keep her eye on Pollock, his drinking, and the resulting behavior.¹⁰⁷ It was a time when he should have been making contacts to help promote his work and she did as much as she could to help him.

Even Krasner needed a break from her constant efforts to promote Pollock. In August 1945, she and Pollock joined Barbara and Reuben Kadish, who were looking to purchase a house in Amagansett, in eastern Long Island. They were able to use a small shack at Louse Point on the bay in Springs, a small hamlet, about three miles outside of East Hampton village.¹⁰⁸ The printmaker Stanley William Hayter, who knew Pollock, had originally rented the shack, but he found it too remote to bike to the train in town. Hayter needed to make regular trips to the city to supervise Atelier 17, his graphic workshop, so he and his wife, the sculptor Helen Phillips, preferred to live in Amagansett, which was more of a village, less isolated than Louse Point, and had its own train station for easy access to the city.

The sculptor David Slivka, just released from the Merchant Marines, was another link among the Kadishes, Krasner and Pollock, and Hayter. He had gone to school with Phillips in San Francisco before the war and had been invited by Phillips and Hayter to Amagansett as their guest. Since Slivka also knew Kadish from their WPA days in San Francisco, he brought out his bicycle on the train and biked back and forth between Louse Point and Amagansett, visiting both sets of friends. Slivka recalled that when he arrived at Louse Point, he did not yet know Krasner was an artist. He remembered her as “an attractive, Eastern-European-Jewish type.”¹⁰⁹

For Lee and Jackson, the time at Louse Point was just a splendid vacation, though she was always anxious that his drinking would turn excessive. Pollock found instead less temptation and a lot of distraction in the bicycle trips, clamming expeditions, and relaxed atmosphere. The beaches were spectacular and the experience was surprisingly therapeutic.

On August 3, 1945, Mercer wrote to Krasner in East Hampton, telling her how he longed for the days of Provincetown and painting “those beautiful broad beaches” and “that perfectly clear sky, clear water and the vast stretches of sand.” Mercer’s glowing description must have helped Krasner realize that Eastern Long Island equaled the Cape in beauty but was much closer to the art scene in New York City. “I remember liking the ‘vie boheme,’” Mercer noted, “and finding it quite a natural expression. But now, I’m afraid I would look on it differently, wondering if it wasn’t all right for youth but not for adulthood. The great thing that I have lost is my optimism. I am even pessimistic about the possibilities of being a painter.”¹¹⁰ Mercer told how he longed to talk with her and Jackson and anticipated his return to the East.

Nevertheless, by September 18, 1945, Mercer had been east and had missed Krasner and Pollock, who were then still on Long Island. In a letter, Mercer expressed his anxiety about life after the army, when he hoped to paint again: “I have a hunch that 4 years away from the brush don’t leave me in no good shape to become the American Picasso overnight. I got dough, but I got a little laziness too and the old question—Will I succeed if I take your course, Mr Hofmann? I.E. I am seriously thinking of painting before my money runs out.”¹¹¹ “I am directing some of my questions to you, Madam, because the parents suggested it when I saw them in New York and because I have always considered you my technical advisor.”¹¹²

Mercer talked about studying with a teacher again to get “back into the groove and save some time” and mentioned the possibility of “Arthur Carles, particularly if he is still alive. I saw a painting of his at the Chicago Art Institute on my way to Calif. and thought it was a good painting. Not a Picasso, but a Redon, perhaps or perhaps better…. I trust Carles, so is he living, so should I let him teach me?”¹¹³

He also expressed his existential fear about the state of the world. “And what do you think of the atomic bomb, my little ones. (It’s the fastest-acting bedtime story ever told.) I am a little less concerned about it than I was at first. Perhaps it is another poison gas and the protection against it will be easy to find. We can always burrow under the ground, even if it has to be hundreds of feet. That will protect us at present, as far as I can see.”¹¹⁴

Now a seasoned pessimist, Mercer maintained that the bomb had “answered quite to the point that question that Lewis Mumford asked when he titled one of his books, ‘Can The City Survive?’ I never did take much stock in those literary characters who proposed colossal questions and solved them by wagging the finger.”¹¹⁵ “This is the way the world ends,” he concluded, “not with a bang but with an atomic bomb. (I always knew that T. S. Eliot was fighting a losing game, but was surprised to see the score announced so early).”¹¹⁶

Despite Mercer’s cynicism, Krasner and Pollock enjoyed their time at the beach. There were artists showing that summer in East Hampton’s Guild Hall, a local museum and theater in the center of town. According to Francis Newton, who had worked with the illustrator Howard Pyle, it was “often difficult to locate all the artists living in the community.”¹¹⁷ Among those groups of artists showing at Guild Hall that summer was the conservative American Watercolor Society. Pollock and Krasner would have no part of such an academic tradition.¹¹⁸

Lee Krasner holding brushes and cigarette, c. 1941, photographed by Maurice Berezov. She recommended to George Mercer that he read Henry Miller’s The Cosmological Eye, where she found a similar world view: “The times are permanently bad,” but she made the best of the hand that she was dealt.

It is curious that Newton had so much trouble finding artists in the community. Remarkably he seemed to have no awareness that so many artists interested in Surrealism were then summering on the East End of Long Island. One wonders how he missed some of the tiny, hand-woven bikinis that some of the women wore on the beach, those who went nude in violation of local codes, or the bare feet pattering down Main Street.¹¹⁹

Many artists Krasner knew from New York were staying on the East End of Long Island that summer—Max Ernst, his son Jimmy, Dorothea Tanning (who would marry Max Ernst the following year), and Jean Hélion and his wife, Pegeen Vail (Peggy Guggenheim’s daughter), were also staying at the Ernsts’ rented summer home in Amagansett, when he was not in his own studio in nearby Hampton Bays. Léger had come out with the painter Lucia Christofanetti, and Robert Motherwell was renting nearby, since his new East Hampton house was being designed by French émigré and architect Pierre Chareau. The sculptor Isamu Noguchi, and Chilean Surrealist Matta, whom Pollock had met in New York in 1942, also frequented the area.

Many in the area were shocked by the news of Howard Putzel’s death from a heart attack at the age of just forty-six, on August 7, 1945. Peggy Guggenheim insisted his death was a suicide. Putzel, whom Macpherson had backed, had not been able to manage finances well and had been reduced to living in his gallery, where he died.¹²⁰ For Krasner, Putzel had been an enthusiastic supporter, gallerist, and friend—unusual because he did not overlook or trivialize artists because they happened to be women or wives. There weren’t many out there like him.