ELEVEN

Triumphs and Challenges, 1948–50

Lee Krasner in Jackson Pollock’s studio, April 1949, photographed by Harry Bowden. Pollock renewed his contract with Betty Parsons at the end of June 1949 to run through January 1, 1952. They told Pollock’s mother that the sales from his show had been “very good” and that they wanted to make a trip to the West Coast.

IN DECEMBER 1947 POLLOCK SIGNED A CONTRACT WITH BETTY Parsons, effective through June 1949, and began to focus on preparing for his first show at her gallery. Stella Pollock noted her son and daughter-in-law’s happiness after a Thanksgiving visit, attributing this improvement to their move out of the city. She reported that Lee was also painting.¹

With the chill of winter, since they had only enough money to heat one floor of their house at a time, Krasner began working on mosaic tables downstairs in the back parlor, through which everyone who entered the house had to walk, making privacy to paint impossible. She tried her hand at making a piece of furniture, which they really needed. Pollock had already moved his work into the barn, eventually heating it with a kerosene stove.

Some have tried to attribute Krasner’s two mosaic tables to Pollock, who suggested she “try a mosaic” and provided her with some glass tesserae left over from his work with the WPA.² Yet Krasner had already attended lectures on mosaics while at the National Academy and had worked on preparing Harry Bowden’s design for a mosaic while on the WPA. Thus she hardly needed Pollock’s WPA mosaic design to get ideas about the technique. Indeed, her originality went far beyond his tesserae, improvising with shells, pebbles, broken glass, keys, coins, and bits of costume jewelry. For the tables’ frames, Krasner used two old iron rims of wagon wheels they found abandoned in the barn. As the child of impoverished immigrants, she hardly needed to find precedents for making do with what was on hand.

When Pollock’s show opened at Betty Parsons Gallery on January 5, 1948, the event gave Krasner reasons for hope. It prompted responses from younger artists such as Harry Jackson and Grace Hartigan, who recalled, “We had just seen the first drip show of Pollock. We were fascinated. I’d seen it, I think, fifteen times.” When they told this to Sonja Sekula, another of the gallery’s artists, she said, “Why don’t you call him and tell him? He’s moved to the country and Peggy Guggenheim’s gone back to Europe and he’s lonely, broke, and no younger people have said they liked his work.”³ Harry phoned and Pollock invited the couple out to Springs for a visit. Harry did not want Grace, to whom he was not yet married, to let it be known that she was also a painter. “It was only when Harry and Pollock went out to a bar and I was alone with Lee,” Hartigan, who was fourteen years younger than Krasner, recounted, “and she said, ‘Confess. You’re a painter, aren’t you?’ So we two women painters sat and talked about my work.”⁴

Hartigan remembered: “Lee had a beautiful body with a perfect hour-glass figure. She wore Rider jeans that looked as though they had been made for her.”⁵ Hartigan recalled that Pollock was terribly shy—like “a clam without a shell,” while Harry has often been quoted as saying that Jackson put Lee down by calling her “the little woman,” or “you goddamn cunt.”⁶ But Grace disagreed with her former husband and insisted that “Jackson had a great love for Lee. He was never cruel to her.”⁷ Grace’s insistence is supported by the fact that Harry Jackson inveterately mythologized himself.⁸ Born Harry Aaron Shapiro, Jr., he goes by his mother’s maiden name after his father deserted the family. Much later on, he fulfilled his artistic fantasies and his desire to be a cowboy by settling in Cody, Wyoming, to make bronze sculptures with western themes in the tradition of Frederic Remington. Telling colorful yarns, he has captivated a coterie of male biographers and scholars, who still flock to Wyoming eager to hear about his connections to Pollock.

Despite visits from enthusiastic young people and other positive responses to Jackson’s work, by April 1948 the Pollocks were again facing trouble covering their expenses. Parsons wrote to Guggenheim in Venice, telling her of the “terrible financial condition of the Pollocks.”⁹ Evidently others noted the problem. MoMA curator James Johnson Sweeney tried to secure financial assistance for Pollock by getting him $1,500 from the Eben Demarest Trust Fund for the advancement of art and archaeology. The money was to be paid out in quarterly installments from July 1948 through July 1949.

During the summer, the Pollocks invited Elaine and Willem de Kooning to the house. Lee was scornful that the painter Elaine Fried had taken her husband’s surname, while Krasner had refused to change hers.¹⁰ (Elaine, who was a decade younger than Lee, remained married to de Kooning through decades of his infidelity, including his fathering a child with another woman.) Like so many guests, Elaine and Bill eventually also moved to the area.¹¹

Mercedes Carles Matter and Herbert Matter had returned from California, and that summer they and a German couple, named Vita and Gustave “Peter” Petersen, who had arrived in New York before the war, shared a rented house near Pollock and Krasner. Vita, an artist, had also studied with Hofmann.¹² For the duration of the rental, the Matters, the Petersens, and the Pollocks saw a lot of each other, although Herbert and Peter came out only for weekends because they had to work in the city during the week. When the two women drove into town to shop, they passed by the Pollocks’ home and picked up Lee, who still did not know how to drive.

Vita Petersen recalled her friend Mercedes’s extraordinary beauty, as well as her intensity, and said that Mercedes only had intimate relationships with artists if she “admired” their work—then “it became personal, intense 100%.”¹³ Mercedes, whom many men found irresistible, had earlier had affairs with Zogbaum, Gorky, and Hofmann, among others.

Petersen also recalled that Mercedes was attracted to Pollock and admired his work. They may have gone to bed once or twice, but she is doubtful they had an affair. Like Krasner, Petersen thought Pollock was “adorable, gentle, poetic, a nice and kind person when not drinking.”¹⁴

For Krasner, however, the attention Pollock paid to these two attractive and slightly younger women (five and seven years Krasner’s junior) had to have been painful, especially because Mercedes had long been one of her closest friends. Even harmless teasing might have seemed sexually suggestive.

Pollock kept copies of at least two photographs of Mercedes that Herbert had taken on the beach in Provincetown in 1940. One is overtly erotic, showing Mercedes nude on the beach, her head, shoulders, and one breast visible, framed with driftwood, a cliché typical of the times. The photographs probably came from Mercedes, instead of Herbert, who was hurt by his wife’s affairs but tolerated her behavior.¹⁵ Although Krasner too had once delighted in such exhibitionism on the beach in Provincetown, by 1948 she was thinking about exhibiting her art, not her body.

Perhaps provoked by jealousy over Pollock’s flirtation with these two women, Krasner allowed Igor Pantuhoff to stay as a houseguest in Springs. As Vita Petersen recalled, he was on his way to somewhere else and was only there for a day or two.¹⁶ To Petersen, Pantuhoff seemed “sort of chic,” but his presence was disturbing for the insecure Pollock, who began drinking again.¹⁷ At one point, Jackson, Peter, Vita, and Igor went for a walk while Lee stayed at home. Jackson and Igor began to fight and had to be pulled apart by Peter, who saved Igor from anything worse than a cut lip.

 

IN THE AUTUMN OF 1948, MRS. JACKSON POLLOCK BEGAN TO BE PUBLICLY and professionally called “Lee Krasner”—for the first time spelled with only one s.¹⁸ As recently as the show at Putzel’s 67 Gallery in July 1945, the press had identified her as “Leonore Krassner,” perhaps adding the o in error. Surely she did not want to be confused with the British Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington or the Argentine Surrealist painter Leonor Fini, both of whom exhibited at Art of This Century. Krasner’s classmates at Cooper Union in the late 1920s, however, had already dropped Lena and Lenore for Lee. Now that she was facing turning forty, she inevitably thought about the significance of her life so far. She had lied about her age to the press, so she was unable to celebrate her fortieth year publicly. Nonetheless she began to focus once again on her own identity as an artist.

As “Lee Krasner,” she took part in an exhibition at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery. The show, September 20 through October 16, 1948, was billed as a collaboration between “architect, interior-designer, and artist to make the modern house come alive.”¹⁹

Schaefer showed two model living room schemes built around unique coffee tables by Krasner that Schaefer saw as meant for houses designed by contemporary architects such as Edward Durell Stone and Carl F. Brauer.

A reporter described one of Krasner’s tables as “a large round table, its metal rim taken from a wagon wheel. The center is filled with a mosaic pattern and worked into concrete by Lee Krasner. Pieces of rich blue glass plus such trivia as keys and coins form a varied pattern and give color clues for the fabrics.”²⁰ This was the first of the two tables Krasner made in the back parlor of the Springs house, begun during the winter of 1947, when money was lacking to heat the upstairs bedroom during the day.

For the first time, the press singled out Krasner’s work for praise without reservation: Ann Pringle, writing in the New York Herald Tribune, called the total effect “magnificent.” Aline B. Louchheim, the critic for the New York Times, pronounced Bertha Schaefer’s “use of abstract designs for table tops…noteworthy,” and then singled out Krasner’s work: “a mosaic table made inside a thirty-eight-inch-diameter wagon wheel…. The pinwheel bright blues and reds and the irregular shapes are arranged in a satisfying abstract pattern. The other table consists of an oil painting with a wide black frame raised several inches above the surface of the canvas and a piece of glass at this level over the whole. As this design of thickly encrusted pigment is conceived as an all-over pattern, it looks as well from one angle or direction as another.”²¹

Ann Pringle reported in the New York Herald Tribune that Bertha Schaefer was “especially proud” of a “black wood coffee table in the Brauer house [that] has an oil painting by Lee Krasner as its top, and not the least of the table’s charms is that the painting succeeds in looking at home there.”²² The New York Times reported that this was “a rectangular wood coffee table with a canvas painted by Lee Krasner set into the center and glass covered.”²³ The work is one of Krasner’s Little Image paintings, which she said she produced horizontally. This one, known as Composition, measures just twenty-one and a half by thirty-one and a half inches.²⁴ Another of Krasner’s Little Images, Abstract No. 2 (1946–48), also appeared in the show. On the canvas several numbers can be read, especially 4 and 6, which may refer to the number of the apartment she shared with Pollock at 46 East Eighth Street.²⁵

If Krasner minded having her art shown as part of a decorative ensemble, she never protested to Schaefer; nor did she actively pursue this as a marketing angle for her work. A reproduction of Krasner’s mosaic table, probably the first ever to be published of any of her work, was featured in the New York Herald Tribune; it showed her table standing on the floor beneath an oil painting of Dogtown by the late Marsden Hartley.²⁶

At Pollock’s suggestion, Krasner gave the second of her two mosaic tables to Happy and Valentine Macy, who had admired it. The couple had just sold a home, and they gave Krasner and Pollock some furniture they no longer needed—a heavy pre-Jacobean court cupboard and two long tables. When Krasner hesitated about giving away her table and asked Pollock to give one of his paintings instead, he asked, “Did you ever hear them admire it?” Admitting that she had not, she parted with one of her two tables, never to make another.²⁷

After the exhibit Krasner realized a connection between her mosaic tables and her paintings. Ever frugal, she reused the round piece of pressed wood that she had used as a base while making the two mosaic tables to create a tondo for Stop and Go (1949–50). It was a format that she chose only this once, covering the surface with hieroglyphic-like symbols that were reminiscent of some of the rhythmic forms on the tables. Like the mosaics, the images in some of her paintings would soon contain more repeated shapes, which were what she referred to as “hieroglyphics.” Because Krasner maintained her allover patterning by rhythmically repeating similar shapes from edge to edge instead of emphasizing any particular sequence of symbols, the viewer perceives the totality of the shapes working together rather than the individual shapes.

Like Krasner’s, Pollock’s artwork was getting attention from different sources. Specifically, his style of allover patterning attracted Alfonso Ossorio, heir to a Philippine sugar fortune, who bought Pollock’s Number 5 (1948) from Betty Parsons in January 1949. Ossorio saw in Pollock “a man who had gone beyond Picasso” and in whose work there was “a meeting of East and West.”²⁸ But when Parsons shipped the painting, it arrived damaged. In April, Parsons took Pollock and Krasner to have a look at it at Ossorio’s new place in Greenwich Village. Pollock offered to repair the painting in his Springs studio. The next month, Ossorio and his companion, Ted Dragon, a dancer with the New York City Ballet, drove out with the canvas, staying over with the Pollocks, and in the process becoming friends. The visit affirmed Ossorio’s high esteem for Pollock’s work. He also became interested in Krasner’s work, which he saw at the house for the first time. Like so many others, Ossorio decided to rent a place and spend the summer of 1949 living in East Hampton.

“I saw a good deal of Lee and Jackson,” Ossorio recalled. “I met him just after he had stopped drinking and so I knew him for two years as a teetotaler.²⁹…With Jackson one didn’t sit and have a long connected conversation. He would show the work, he would make very perceptive comments. His vocabulary was psychoanalytical in the sense that he had been in analysis and his intellectual vocabulary was based on that rather than on aesthetics or art history or philosophy.”³⁰

Ossorio was stimulated by the Pollocks and was also a sophisticated influence on them. He was able to respond to and support Pollock’s work because of his grasp of modernism in the context of international art, philosophy, and culture. By this time, Ossorio had already lived in the Philippines, England, and the United States, having gone to boarding schools in England and Rhode Island, before studying art history at Harvard for both undergraduate and graduate studies. At Harvard, Ossorio had developed a deep interest in Asian as well as European and American art. He knew such scholars of Asian art as Benjamin Rowland and the important Ceylonese philosopher and art historian Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. At Harvard’s Peabody Museum, Ossorio had studied objects from the Pacific Islands as well as exhibits about the history of indigenous peoples of North America, whose art had long interested both Krasner and Pollock. He became a friend and a patron to the couple, whose work influenced Ossorio’s own paintings and abstract sculpture.

Pollock was then seeing Dr. Edwin H. Heller, a local general practitioner in East Hampton, who had managed to get him to stop drinking. Heller told Pollock that he had to forgo all alcohol, because even a small amount would provoke him to drink to excess. He also understood the role of alcohol to numb threatening feelings and anxieties. Krasner, perhaps unwilling to accept the idea that Pollock’s psyche was damaged, said she never understood what Heller did that others could not. She only heard from Pollock that Heller was “an honest man; I can believe in him.”³¹

While in Heller’s care, Pollock was able to remain “on the wagon.”

In January 1949, Stella Pollock wrote to Charles Pollock from her son Sande’s house in Deep River, Connecticut: “Jack and Lee were here and we had a very nice Christmas…and there was no drinking. We were all so happy. Jack has been going to a Dr. in Hampton and hadn’t drunk anything for over three weeks at Christmas. Hope he will stay with it. He says he wants to quit and went to the Dr. on his own. The Dr. told him he would have to leave it alone. Everything wine to beer for they were poison to him.”³²

Pollock’s second solo show with Betty Parsons opened on January 24, 1949. Among those present were Grace Hartigan and Harry Jackson, who would marry in March. Lee and Jackson agreed to act as hosts, matron of honor, and best man; they were also the only two witnesses for an intimate ceremony conducted by their neighbor Judge William Schellinger.

During this time Krasner made a breakthrough in the imagery of her painting. “I have to go with it,” she explained of the change of direction, “so in that sense I find it a little off-beat compared to a great many of my contemporaries.”³³ She referred to artists such as Rothko, Motherwell, or Gottlieb, who developed themes or signature images that they continued to explore over and over again. Her new direction employed a thinner paint application, a much larger scale, and, as she described it, “a vertical and horizontal distribution.”³⁴

In mid-April, Stella Pollock visited Jackson and Lee again. She reported to Charles how happy she had been to find that Jackson was still not drinking and was getting ready to put in a garden. “They have good soil. Lee loves to dig in the dirt and she has green fingers. Jack is going to shingle his studio. Prices have dropped enough that he feels he can he will do it himself.”³⁵

Pollock renewed his contract with Betty Parsons at the end of June 1949 to run through January 1, 1952. They told Pollock’s mother that the sales from his show had been “very good” and that they wanted to make a trip to the West Coast.³⁶

That July Krasner and Pollock were both in a show called “17 Eastern Long Island Artists,” held at East Hampton’s Guild Hall. John Little, Lee’s old chum from the Hofmann School, who was now living in Springs, organized the show, and the potter Roseanne Larkin and Enez Whipple, the cultural center’s director, sponsored it against the protests of the conservative coterie of traditional artists who had been patronized by the Maidstone, a posh exclusive country club on the Atlantic Ocean in the village of East Hampton. These artists had dominated the local scene with their timid watercolors of seascapes and still lifes.

Little put himself in the show alongside a number of Krasner’s and Pollock’s friends, including James Brooks, Wilfrid Zogbaum, and Balcomb Greene, who were working abstractly, as well as more traditional figurative painters such as Alexander Brook and Raphael Soyer³⁷. The New York Times critic Stuart Preston reviewed the show, describing it as a balance “between conservative and advanced art.” He made a special note of “Jackson Pollock’s chromatic explosions, those free of instinct” and wrote that “Lee Krasner’s rigidly patterned abstracts sound a call to order.”³⁸

Preston’s opinion held little weight for East Hampton’s uptight, “white-gloved hostesses pouring tea and serving punch” who found abstract art in general and Pollock’s work in particular shocking.³⁹

Unlike the Guild Hall show, which didn’t acknowledge Pollock and Krasner’s marriage, Lee and Jackson showed in the Sidney Janis Gallery’s exhibition “Husband and Wife” that September. The show also included eight other artist-couples, such as the de Koonings, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, and Picasso and Françoise Gilot.⁴⁰ Stuart Preston covered this show too and wrote, “On the whole the husbands are the more adventurous, giving ideas their heads, whereas the wives are apt to hold them back by the short reins of the particular scheme of design or color on which they are based. This is noticeably true of the Jackson Pollock as opposed to Lee Krasner’s conglomeration of little forms that are both fastened and divided by a honeycomb of white line. In exactly the same relationship are Willem and Elaine de Kooning.”⁴¹

Krasner reflected later that she thought the “title of the show is rather gimmicky, but for some reason Mr. Janis wanted to put on a show of husbands and wives who painted. And as a matter of fact, he had a curious accumulation there. I don’t know whatever motive there was. It was sort of a catchy thing, I think.”⁴² She later told a reporter for Time, “I respected and understood his [Pollock’s] painting as he did mine. There was never any cause for rivalry.”⁴³

A third solo show for Pollock opened at Betty Parsons on November 21, 1949. Afterward Lee and Jackson again spent Christmas in Deep River, Connecticut, with Stella, who reported to Frank that the couple was “so tired from being in the City just worn out. Had the best show he has ever had and sold well eighteen paintings and prospects of others. They both are fine and he is still on the wagon.”⁴⁴

During the winter of 1950, Lee and Jackson went to stay in Alfonso Ossorio’s house at 9 MacDougal Alley while he and Dragon were abroad. As Lee wrote them, the couple took advantage of their time in the city to visit lots of artists’ exhibitions. She liked the ones of Gorky and Buffie Johnson, found acceptable those of Pousette-Dart and Jim Brooks, and rejected those of Herbert Ferber and Mary Callery.⁴⁵

That winter a group of artists, including de Kooning, Franz Kline, and the sculptor Philip Pavia, rented a loft and held meetings at 39 East Eighth Street. They called themselves the Club and later the Artists Club. Pavia recalled that Pollock “would come and stand in the back—later sometimes drunk—then Bill and Franz would take care of him.” Pavia’s comments about women artists, however, are especially revealing: “The women’s movement was born in the Club. They would get up there and tell us off—aggressive, and the joke was that we’d make monsters out of these women and got even the wives to talk. They did, too—like Lee, wanting to compete against Jackson.”⁴⁶

Clearly the level of sexism at the Club had grown since the more egalitarian days of the WPA and the Artists Union, where Lee was able to speak out and be respected. Hedda Sterne recalled: “I went to the Club only once or twice. People were incredibly hostile to each other. Insults would fly…. But the Club changed my image of Pollock. I was influenced by those stories of his violence at parties, etc., and to see this gentle, quiet, moving person was such a contrast. He was even proud of being inarticulate…. Jackson was a social outsider and his gestures were that, defending himself against people. He needed affection—who doesn’t?—but didn’t know how to find it.”⁴⁷

The Pollocks returned to East Hampton in the early spring. As the weather warmed, their friends began appearing. It was clearly a time when they enjoyed socializing in the local community.

Krasner was one of the thirty-three artists, along with Pollock and Bradley Walker Tomlin, whom Betty Parsons included in her review show of painters and sculptors in June 1950. In the New York Times, Stuart Preston reviewed the show, asking, “What meaning or value beyond themselves do these contrivances possess?” He also referred to the “impetuously handled, rather turgid colored forms of the painting of Lee Krasner,” noting that “of course Jackson Pollock’s seething canvas, the furious shaking of a lion’s mane of color, is the climax of this direction.”⁴⁸

Around this time Krasner’s work began to evolve away from the Little Image series. “I cannot make any connection why this happens,” she insisted over and over again.⁴⁹ Krasner and Pollock both appeared in another show at Guild Hall of “Ten East Hampton Abstractionists” that opened on July 1. Among the other artists were friends and local acquaintances, including Motherwell, Linda Lindeberg, John Little, Wilfrid Zogbaum, James Brooks, and Buffie Johnson.⁵⁰ The local newspaper reported that “Pollock, a prominent figure in American modern art, was one of the seven American painters chosen to represent this country in the world-renowned Biennale, which opened recently in Venice.”⁵¹

Like Buffie Johnson, who was identified as “Mrs. George [actually Gerald] Sykes,” Lee Krasner was identified as “Mrs. Jackson Pollock.” The practice of linking women’s identities to their husbands’ was common at this time in East Hampton society. Again Preston praised Pollock’s big canvas, writing that it “dominates the North Gallery.” He was less harsh about Krasner’s work than previously, noting that she drew from Pollock’s influence.

At the opening of the East Hampton show, Pollock met Hans Namuth, a young German-born photographer whose teacher Alexey Brodovitch had told him that Pollock was preeminent among contemporary artists. Namuth was spending the summer in Water Mill, not far from East Hampton, and asked Pollock if he could photograph him while he was painting. Pollock agreed, offering to start a new picture for the session. Namuth spent many hours taking photographs of Pollock that summer, a project Krasner thought would benefit Pollock’s stature.

While at their house Namuth also photographed Krasner in her studio. She posed with two large paintings (now destroyed) that depicted large stick figures, painted light on dark grounds. These presumably were in her studio when Betty Parsons visited and agreed to give her a show. These canvases are a far cry from Krasner’s Little Image paintings, but they also appear to be unrelated to the geometric pictures she eventually put in her show at Parsons. Instead Krasner’s stick figures recall those in Miró’s work as well as in Pollock’s mural for Peggy Guggenheim and his Guardians of the Secret, both of 1943. Krasner appeared to be playing catch-up to Pollock’s invention, and when she realized this, she destroyed the new work and went off in a geometric direction that veered sharply away from her husband’s work.⁵²

Many factors suggest that Pollock’s star was on the rise, though he lacked the confidence to comprehend that. Pollock got a taste of widespread fame in August 1949 when Life magazine featured an article titled “Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?”⁵³ The newfound celebrity, however, soon became difficult for Jackson to digest. His friend Jim Brooks recalled how the Life issue made Jackson “self-conscious.” Brooks continued to observe: “You know you’re expected to do a hell of a lot, being famous, and it made him self-conscious…. I think right then Jackson saw what was coming and was scared to death.”⁵⁴

In May 1950, Barnett Newman phoned to invite Pollock to sign an open letter of protest to the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art alongside other vanguard painters. The protest was over the museum’s director, Francis Henry Taylor, publicly declaring “his contempt for modern painting.” The letter, published in both the New York Times and the Herald Tribune, said that the protestors refused to participate in the museum’s national juried exhibition of contemporary American painting because the “choice of jurors…does not warrant any hope that a just proportion of advanced art will be included.”⁵⁵

Lee had answered Newman’s phone call, only to have him ignore her and ask to speak to Jackson, who agreed to lend his name. Hedda Sterne became the only woman to participate in the protest and in the now-notorious publicity photograph of the group, which was published in Life magazine on January 15, 1951, as “The Irascibles.”⁵⁶ Krasner believed that the only reason one woman—Hedda Sterne—made the list is that Betty Parsons saw to it that she was. “She was [showing] in Betty’s gallery and Betty said, ‘you’ve got to put Hedda Sterne in,’ and so they put Hedda Sterne in.”⁵⁷ The photograph was shot for Life by Nina Leen on November 24, 1950, in a room rented for the occasion.

On August 5, 1950, The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” featured an interview with Jackson and Lee that some critics have interpreted as pushing a sexist stereotype.⁵⁸ Pollock is described as “watching his wife, the former Lee Krasner, a slim auburn-haired young woman who also is an artist, as she bent over a hot stove, making currant jelly.” In all likelihood, however, Krasner was putting on a show of domestic creative activity for the New Yorker writer. Perhaps she wanted to make their home life seem idyllic and justify their residence far from the center of New York’s art world. In fact she had already bragged to Mercedes of having developed cooking skills worthy of “Cordon Bleu,” which she had been using to promote Pollock.⁵⁹

Pollock told the writer that “I’ve got the old Eighth Street habit of sleeping all day and working all night pretty well licked. So has Lee. We had to, or lose the respect of the neighbors. I can’t deny, though, that it’s taken a little while…. It’s marvelous the way Lee’s adjusted herself…. She’s a native New Yorker, but she’s turned into a hell of a good gardener, and she’s always up by nine. Ten at the latest. I’m way behind her in orientation.”⁶⁰

Jackson spoke of his childhood on his father’s farm near Cody, Wyoming, to which Krasner added, “Jackson’s work is full of the West. That’s what gives it that feeling of spaciousness. It’s what makes it so American.” From someone like Krasner, who repeatedly decried nationalism, this was a ploy at creating a niche for Pollock and eliciting good press.

Pollock recounted his journey from study with Benton to patronage from Peggy Guggenheim to the move out to Springs. “Somebody had bought one of my pictures. We lived for a year on that picture and a few clams I dug out of the bay with my toes. Since then things have been a little easier.” The writer noted that “Mrs. Pollock smiled. ‘Quite a little,’ she said. ‘Jackson showed thirty pictures last fall and sold all but five. And his collectors are nibbling at those.’ Pollock grunted. ‘Be nice if it lasts,’ he said.”⁶¹

The writer then asked to see Pollock’s work. On the wall of the living room was Number Two, 1949. The writer noted that he had forgotten the title and Krasner piped up, “Jackson used to give his pictures conventional titles—‘Eyes in the Heat’ and ‘The Blue Unconscious’ and so on—but now he simply numbers them. Numbers are neutral. They make people look at a picture for what it is—pure painting.” Pollock averred, “I decided to stop adding to the confusion. Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was. Only he didn’t know it.” Looking for another public relations angle, Krasner redoubled, “That’s exactly what Jackson’s work is…sort of unframed space.”⁶²

Even though Krasner did enjoy cooking, she understood that by presenting herself to the New Yorker reporter in the stereotypical role of homemaker, she would appear less threatening and Pollock would appear more conventional. The low status of women at this time is also behind Barnett Newman’s failure to invite Krasner to join the men in making their protest to the Metropolitan Museum and to be in the photograph known as “The Irascibles.” Naturally, male artists were reluctant to share their privileged status with women in a profession where success was already so elusive.

It was Krasner’s threat that Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, the well-known architect and painter known as Le Corbusier, saw that summer when he paid a visit to the Pollocks with their friend and Springs neighbor, the sculptor Costantino Nivola. “I took Le Corbusier to see Jackson—he was suspicious of Abstract Expressionists, calling them noisy and trying to get away from discipline—but he was pleased Jackson had his book,” recalled Nivola. Le Corbusier, he reported, said of Jackson’s work, “This man is like a hunter who shoots without aiming. But his wife, she has talent—women always have too much talent.”⁶³

In the fall, Pollock’s works were on view in Venice in both the XXV Biennale and as part of Peggy Guggenheim’s collection at the Museo Correr. On November 20, Time published an article, “Chaos, Damn It!,” which claimed that Pollock had “followed his canvases to Italy.” Yet Time took remarks made by the Italian critic Bruno Alfieri in L’Arte Moderna (and reprinted in Guggenheim’s catalogue) out of context, and Pollock became distressed over the emphasis on “chaos” in the Time article. In response, Krasner helped Pollock draft a telegram to Time: “NO CHAOS DAMN IT. DAMNED BUSY PAINTING AS YOU CAN SEE BY MY SHOW COMING UP NOV. 28 I’VE NEVER BEEN TO EUROPE. THINK YOU LEFT OUT MOST EXCITING PART OF MR. ALFIERI’S PIECE.”⁶⁴

“What they want is to stop modern art,” Pollock exclaimed to his friend Jeffrey Potter. “It’s not just me they’re after, but taking me as a symbol sure works.”⁶⁵ When the painter Gina Knee ran into Pollock on the street in Amagansett, she sensed that he was “very upset” about the piece in Time: “I didn’t try to console him but reasoned with him; how good he was and how wonderful that he was in that show. He brightened a bit but I thought, ‘Oh—there’s more than that churning inside of him.’”⁶⁶ Sensing a storm brewing in Jackson, she decided to decline the Pollocks’ invitation to a dinner the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Years later, she claimed that her husband, Alexander Brook, the academic portraitist, was not fond of Lee, implying that he preferred prettier women, since he was always looking for new subjects to paint.

Soon after Knee’s encounter with Pollock, Hans Namuth filmed him painting on glass. He shot from below, catching the action through the glass surface of Jackson laying down the paint. What was usually the act of painting privately in one’s studio suddenly was recorded for all to see. In a sense this was a psychic violation. Yet Pollock had not only acceded in advance, but also actually performed by painting while being filmed for the first time. The film was finished late on the cold and windy Saturday following Thanksgiving. Pollock and Namuth came into the house just as Lee had finished preparing an elaborate dinner party. The other guests included the photographer’s wife, Carmen, Alfonso Ossorio and Ted Dragon, Josephine and John Little, Penny and Jeffrey Potter, Betsy and Wilfrid Zogbaum, and the architect and critic, Peter Blake.⁶⁷

But Lee had made a mistake in not removing all alcohol from the house, and soon she was stunned to see Pollock pull a bottle of whiskey from under the sink and fill two large glasses as he said to Namuth: “This is the first drink I’ve had in two years. Dammit, we need it!”⁶⁸ Lee was horrified at the tragedy of Pollock’s act. In fact, Pollock got so drunk that he turned the dinner table over onto the laps of their guests, destroying both the food and the evening. Pollock didn’t even try to justify himself. A few days later, he told a concerned Jeffrey Potter: “Shit, I wasn’t upset! The table was.”⁶⁹

And Pollock’s doctor, Edwin H. Heller, had been killed in a car crash six months earlier. The death was devastating, and sudden. He had been the only doctor who succeeded in keeping Pollock away from alcohol. The nasty comment published in Time and the disturbance Namuth caused by filming the insecure artist in the process of painting combined to wear away Pollock’s resolve to stay on the wagon.

Pollock’s fourth solo show with Betty Parsons opened on the evening of November 28 and remained on view through December 16, 1950. Among the thirty-two works were several now considered his best: Autumn Rhythm, Lavender Mist, and One, which, ironically, given the show’s failure to sell, are now in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art.⁷⁰ Only Lavender Mist did sell, to Ossorio for $1,500.⁷¹

Parsons had crammed Pollock’s monumental paintings into an inadequate space that didn’t do them justice. “The show was a disaster,” Parsons recalled. “For me it was heartbreaking, those big paintings at a mere $1200. For Jackson it was ghastly; here was beauty, but instead of admiration it brought contempt.”⁷²

Pollock’s brother Marvin Jay wrote from New York to their brother Frank in Los Angeles: “The big thing right now is Jack’s show. Alma and I were there and it was bigger than ever this year and many important people in the art world were present. Lee seemed very happy and greeted every one with a big smile.”⁷³

Among those whom she could not have been pleased to see was Elaine de Kooning, still married to (though estranged from) Willem de Kooning. According to Clement Greenberg, “This was Jackson’s best show, and up came Elaine de Kooning, who said the show was no good except for one painting—the only weak picture in the show, the one he painted [on glass] when they were working on the movie. The show was so good, it’s unbelievable.”⁷⁴ Elaine de Kooning’s comment can only have irritated Krasner. She must have noted that Ossorio purchased not only the Pollock but also three oils on paper from de Kooning’s women series.

Even the reviews for the show were mixed. The critic for the New York Times, Howard Devree, called Pollock one of two (with Mark Tobey) of “the most controversial figures in the field” and declared that the “content” in Pollock’s work was “almost negligible.” He trivialized the artist by asking, “But isn’t all this rather in the nature of day-dreaming we have all done while staring at a wallpaper pattern and ourselves investing it with ideas?”⁷⁵ Robert Coates of The New Yorker also professed doubt about the work, asking, “Does personal comment ever come through to us?”⁷⁶

Even though more positive notices appeared in Art News and Art Digest, they were not enough to boost Pollock’s sinking spirits.⁷⁷ Art News chose Pollock’s show as one of the three best one-man shows of the year, ranking it ahead of the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti’s, but behind the early American modernist John Marin’s.⁷⁸ When the sales that Pollock had hoped for did not materialize, it compounded his letdown.⁷⁹ His serious lack of self-esteem made things worse. Krasner had her hands full.