TWELVE

First Solo Show, 1951–52

Lee Krasner with her painting Stop and Go, c. 1950, photographer unknown. Ever frugal, she created this tondo of 1949–50 by reusing the round wooden base that had served her while making the two mosaic tables. She invented repeated hieroglyphic-like symbols that were reminiscent of some of the rhythmic forms on the tables.

POLLOCK’S RELAPSE SUBJECTED KRASNER TO INCREASED STRESS. “As Jackson’s fame grew, he became more and more tortured,” she reflected. “My help, assistance, and encouragement seemed insufficient. His feelings towards me became somewhat ambiguous. Of course, he had many other supporters. Tony Smith, then an architect (later a sculptor), was among the strongest, as was [the abstract painter] Clyfford Still, whose letters and comments meant a great deal to Jackson. He adored Franz Kline [another abstract painter]—whom he could talk to. And of course there was Clement Greenberg, who from the very first was one of his most avid supporters.”¹ Fritz Bultman blamed Lee for Jackson’s problems, claiming, “In a way Jackson was Lee’s creation, her Frankenstein; she set him going. And she saw where he was going, aside from the talent and all that, but he was devastated by fame coming to him.”²

Pollock began to deteriorate rapidly. Nothing seemed to go right for him. He wrote to Ossorio and Dragon in January 1951, “I found New York terribly depressing after my show—and nearly impossible—but I am coming out of it now.”³ In late January 1951, Ossorio offered Pollock $200 a month “towards the next painting of yours that we acquire.” Yet other anticipated sales did not materialize. A few weeks later, he wrote Ossorio, “I really hit an all time low—with depression and drinking—NYC is brutal.”⁴ Pollock tried seeing his regular homeopathic doctor, Elizabeth Hubbard, but nothing mitigated his depression.

Ossorio also lent Jackson and Lee his New York town house so Jackson could be in the city to see a new therapist, Ruth Fox, M.D., beginning in March 1951. Fox served as president of the New York City Medical Society on Alcoholism and vice president of the National Committee on Alcoholism. Lee had learned about the doctor through Elizabeth Hubbard. Fox treated alcoholism through psychoanalytic therapy combined with participation in Alcoholics Anonymous, which meant that Jackson had to adhere to total abstinence.⁵ Fox prescribed a drug called Antabuse, which makes the patient sick if he or she drinks alcohol. In 1948 Fox had helped bring the drug to the United States from Denmark, where it was developed.⁶ Pollock resisted both taking Antabuse and going to meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous in Southampton, which he did not like, perhaps because of its group interaction and its religious invocations.

Fox also insisted that alcoholics realize how much their families suffered. Sober partners had to deal with an alcoholic’s mood changes and their demands for “exclusive attention,” and they became exposed to ostracism and shame in the community.⁷ For Krasner, Pollock’s behavior when drunk was so outrageous that their marriage and their social life withered. Their friends were amazed at the extent of Krasner’s devotion under such trying circumstances. Linda Lindeberg, a painter who had been a Hofmann student, recalled that Lee “was like his left hand and though she lived with an alcoholic, never, never did I hear her say anything against Jackson.”⁸

In an essay, “The Alcoholic Spouse,” published in 1956, Fox wrote: “The wives of alcoholic men…will make almost any sacrifice to help their husbands once they have learned to look upon them as sick individuals. This is partly because of their greater tendency to mother and sympathize with the husband, sensing that he cannot help himself.”⁹ Fox also defined three types of alcoholics, of which she would have placed Pollock among the “primary addicts…persons who have been psychoneurotic throughout their lives, with alcoholism starting at an early age, often in their teens. These individuals were obviously maladjusted on an emotional level prior to their compulsive drinking. They might have been introverted or insecure with respect to interpersonal relations, or excessively dependent.”¹⁰

Years later Krasner told a journalist who inquired about Pollock’s drinking, “Who knows why people drink? With all that’s been written about alcoholism, we still don’t know what really causes it. In all the years I knew him, he drank off and on except for one two-year period. He tried every known way to stop, except for AA, which for some reason he couldn’t accept, and I still have all the bills to prove it. He never drank when he was working; it was two different cycles of his life.”¹¹ Another time she commented that Pollock’s heavy drinking related to the macho image that “originated as far back as [his teacher] Benton, where it was he-man stuff to do.”¹²

On March 9, 1951, Pollock signed a will, leaving everything to Krasner. In the event she predeceased him, he left everything to his brother Sande McCoy. In the event that neither survived him, he arranged to have his estate divided among his other three brothers, Frank, Jay, and Charles. Alternative executors included Sande McCoy, Clement Greenberg, and Alfonso Ossorio, in that order. In a separate letter that accompanied the will, Pollock wrote, “Lee—if you are the Executrix lend some of the paintings to my brothers then living. Remember those paintings will belong to you alone and you alone can decide which paintings are to be borrowed and for how long. This is a request which I have purposely omitted from my will because of its complicating nature.”¹³

Krasner and Pollock showed together with many other abstract artists in the Artists Club’s 9th Street Show. The show was curated by Leo Castelli and opened on May 21, 1951. The announcement for the show still spelled her name with the double s. The few other women artists in the large show included Elaine de Kooning and Grace Hartigan.¹⁴

On June 7 the Pollocks were back in Springs, and Jackson wrote to Ossorio that Krasner was preparing for her first solo exhibition in New York City.¹⁵ Pollock had persuaded his dealer, Betty Parsons, to show her work. Parsons later explained that she “didn’t believe in having husband and wife in the same gallery. Jackson knew this—he said they shouldn’t be with the same analyst either—but for Lee he could be persistent. And I felt if I didn’t show her, there would be problems.”¹⁶ So Parsons agreed to give Krasner a show to satisfy Pollock.

Though some deny that Pollock supported Krasner as an artist, Parson’s statement corroborates Krasner’s claims that he did. Certainly Pollock might have pretended otherwise on occasion, especially to please his male colleagues, but in the letter he wrote to Ossorio and Dragon and in the efforts he made with Parsons, his actions confirm Krasner’s sense of the matter.

Krasner always said that Parsons gave her a show because “Jackson asked Betty…to come and look at my work with regard to giving me a show. And so she came, and she looked, and scheduled a show. But the show was like nine months away or something. And right after she left…my image so-called broke…. A whole new thing happened and that became my first show with Betty Parsons.”¹⁷

Krasner tried to explain the concept of her art changing as “going for a certain length of time” before “the image breaks again.”¹⁸ From the time Parsons saw her work and agreed to a show, Krasner admitted, “it was a far cry from what is now known as the ‘Little Image.’”¹⁹ Krasner’s show “Paintings 1951, Lee Krasner” presented canvases that were larger than she had been making. “You could say they maybe started to blow up. For me it was only holding the vertical, though some of them move horizontally as well.” After making this comment to the critic Cindy Nemser in an interview in 1972, Krasner proudly quoted Pollock’s 1951 letter to Ossorio: “‘Lee is doing some of her best painting. It has a freshness and bigness that she didn’t get before. I think she will have a handsome show.’”²⁰ This was Krasner’s first solo show ever, and it ran for a month, starting on October 15.

Among the fourteen canvases she showed at Parsons, Krasner kept only two in their original state. She either reused the old canvases as backgrounds for the collages she made for a show in 1955 or cut them up.²¹ She later described one of the fourteen as “a vertical-horizontal measurement of space in soft color.”²² She was probably referring to the canvas known as Number 2 which survived rolled up as late as 1967, and measures 92.5 by 132 inches.²³ The geometric shapes and overlapping forms relate to Mondrian, but the more innovative palette is composed mainly of earth tones.

Along with Krasner, Parsons also showed Anne Ryan, who had been active as a writer in Greenwich Village during the 1920s. Ryan was married, the mother of three children, and a poet. In 1941 she took up painting and then joined Atelier 17, Stanley Hayter’s printmaking studio. Subsequently she produced prints and collages, the latter after being inspired by a show of Kurt Schwitters’s work.²⁴ Ryan also designed scenery for the theater and costumes for the ballet. A generation older than Krasner, Ryan must have made an impression on Krasner. When interviewed later in life about women artists, Krasner named Ryan as one who had come to her attention.²⁵

Both Ryan’s small collages and Krasner’s paintings were reviewed together, like their shows, by Stuart Preston in the New York Times. About Krasner, he wrote: “By means of their placid rectangular forms, by their discreet, limpid color and their unobtrusive handling, these paintings, large and small, emanate feelings of calm and restraint. Roughly, here is the Mondrian formula worked out with feminine acuteness and a searching for formal and chromatic harmonies rather than a delivery of water-tight solutions. Here designs are occasionally awkward, but they are ever clear and it is to her credit that the more complex they get the better they come off.” He even wrote of one work’s “majestic and thoughtful construction.”²⁶ How, one wonders, did he define “feminine acuteness,” and was it intended as a compliment?

Krasner must have longed for the more effusive enthusiasm Preston reserved for Ryan’s collages, which he described as “abstracts made with bits of colored paper and cloth. Nothing new in the way of praise can be said about these fragments of delicacy that has not appeared in this column before. Their taste is as refined as it is unvarying and she seems to have a power of self-criticism that some of her more flamboyant colleagues lack. Free from ostentation, she stands in relation to them rather as Boudin to the great Impressionists.”²⁷

Regardless of how Krasner judged herself in relation to Ryan, the more interesting question to ask is: what had influenced Krasner’s shift in style before she showed with Ryan? One answer might be geometric abstractions by I. Rice Pereira, who was one of only three women in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1946 show “Fourteen Americans.” Then, along with Ryan, she was one of only seven women in that museum’s 1951 traveling survey, “Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America.” Opinion remains divided as to whether the geometric work Krasner showed at Parsons owed a debt to Mondrian, whom she acknowledged, or Rice Pereira, whom she did not.²⁸

The artist Robert Goodnough reviewed Krasner’s show in Art News, noting: “One comes away with the feeling of having been journeying through a vast uninhabited land of quiet color.”²⁹ Reviewing the show in Art Digest, the critic Dore Ashton also focused on her “love for delicate, closely related color tonalities,” remarking that she used “right-angle tensions related to Mondrian in structure, if more sensuous in color.”³⁰

Another review, also clipped and saved by Krasner, which appears to be written by Emily Genauer, the chief art critic at the New York Herald Tribune, linked Krasner to “a purification of Mondrian, whose rigid formalism has been purged of all harshness.”³¹ Given Krasner’s strong interest in nature, she must have cringed when this same review stated: “This art seems to demand no identification with nature, nor does it command a vital illusion.” Still, this reviewer admitted to being “touched” by Krasner’s “painted surfaces…beautifully smoothed into quietly innocuous patterns of arresting, sweetly cultivated tonal composition.”³² It was not a bad set of reviews for a solo debut in New York, but Parsons did not arrange much in the way of either sales or publicity, leading to Krasner’s disappointment. Most likely the huge fuss made over Pollock’s shows had raised her expectations beyond what was typical or likely, especially for a woman artist in 1951.

When Krasner and Pollock learned in 1951 that a seventy-acre estate on beautiful Georgica Pond in East Hampton that had once been owned by the late painter/designers Albert and Adele Herter was on the market, they recommended that Ossorio buy it and move out from the city.³³ Ossorio drove out in August, saw the mansion and its sprawling grounds, called The Creeks, and took their advice. Soon he was acting as host for many who came out to visit, among them Parsons and abstract expressionist painters like Clyfford Still and Grace Hartigan.³⁴

Pollock’s fifth show at Parsons followed later that fall, opening on November 26, 1951. Greenberg, having resigned from The Nation, wrote in Partisan Review of “achieved and monumental works of art, beyond accomplishedness, facility or taste.” He concluded, “If Pollock were a Frenchman, people would already be calling him ‘maitre’ and speculating in his pictures.” At this moment, Greenberg identified Pollock as “the best painter of a whole generation.”³⁵

Greenberg didn’t write a word about Krasner’s show, which was odd, because the three of them were close friends. Greenberg admitted that he really only conversed with Krasner, and not Pollock, about art. “Lee and I and Jackson would sit at the kitchen table and talk for hours—all day sometimes. Jackson usually wouldn’t say much—we’d drink a lot of coffee. I know that this sounds like part of a myth. We would sit for hours and go to bed at three or four in the morning.”³⁶ Krasner cannot have missed the irony in this situation. She had first introduced Greenberg to avant-garde art, to Hofmann, and continued to provide articulate intelligent art talk for him, and yet he wrote only about Pollock’s work.

At this same time, Pollock, still seeing Dr. Ruth Fox, was going for intensive “biochemical” treatment for alcoholism that he had begun in September 1951, some six months after beginning with Fox. Discouraged by Pollock’s refusal to go to Alcoholics Anonymous and to take Antabuse, she eventually objected to these concurrent treatments, causing Pollock to cease seeing her in June 1952. For these “biochemical” treatments that continued through the fall of 1953, Pollock traveled to Park Avenue in New York to see Grant Mark, who was not a physician but had been recommended by Pollock and Krasner’s homeopathic doctor, Elizabeth Hubbard, who worked with Mark for a time. One of Pollock’s friends later characterized Mark as “a biochemist with a Svengali air,” likening his excessive control over Pollock to the villainous hypnotist in George du Maurier’s 1894 novel, Trilby.³⁷ Krasner, who was herself prey to medical charlatanism, also received treatments from Mark, who accepted two of her paintings for his fees.³⁸

Mark prescribed for Pollock a regimen of salt baths, a highly restricted diet, injections of copper and zinc, followed by analysis of his urine and blood samples. Against Mark’s instructions, Pollock continued to drink alcohol, but he also consumed Mark’s own soy-based emulsion at a cost of $200 a month.³⁹ Pollock responded badly to these treatments, exclaiming: “It’s like being skinned alive. And instead of putting lead in my pencil, he must have taken some out.”⁴⁰

From the beginning of their relationship, Krasner had filled in for Pollock’s brother Sande as Jackson’s caretaker and protector. Yet in dealing with Pollock’s emotional problems, she gradually slipped into behavior that is now often termed “codependency.” Though initially their needs had seemed compatible, as Pollock put her under growing pressure, her health began to break. She suffered from colitis and other painful digestive problems that stress exacerbated. She had become so enmeshed in his addiction that everything he did affected her. As he turned increasingly to greater and greater amounts of alcohol, her life became more and more about trying to stop his drinking. As his caregiver, she was constantly tied into his destructive behavior. His needs, which may have initially appealed to her wish to be maternal, had by now become suffocating.

In the early-morning hours on December 29, 1951, after a night of drinking, Pollock was driving home alone in his Cadillac, going down the dark roads toward his house in Springs. At the Louse Point intersection on Old Stone Highway, he lost control of the big car and veered off the road, catching several mailboxes and continuing onto the other side, hitting a utility pole and a tree. The accident destroyed the car, but Pollock was able to walk away from the wreckage.⁴¹ Now his drinking was compromising his safety. On March 30, 1952, Pollock wrote to Ossorio, “My experience with Dr. Mark which got more involved each weak [sic] until a crisis last week—I’m still a little dazed by the whole experience.”⁴²

Ossorio recalled Pollock telling him that Mark said “he should eat no fowl that can’t take off at fifty miles an hour, such as wild duck, and his range of understanding was enough to see the humor in it.”⁴³ In Paris Ossorio had befriended the avant-garde painter and sculptor Jean Dubuffet and amassed a collection of his work. Meanwhile he was actively pursuing his interest in Asian culture, including Japanese art and Zen, and it’s possible he discussed Zen concepts of “action” with Pollock.

Among the books Ossorio acquired that year was Langdon Warner’s new The Enduring Art of Japan.⁴⁴ Warner was a Harvard professor, Asian art expert, and onetime student of Okakura Tenshin, a Japanese scholar who became the first head of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ Asian art division in 1910.⁴⁵ Warner was a raconteur, and he taught art history at Harvard when Ossorio was a student.⁴⁶ Ossorio found Warner’s book and his teachings very valuable because they introduced him to Zen and to Daisetz T. Suzuki’s 1934 book, Introduction to Zen Buddhism, a book much read in art circles in New York during the 1950s.⁴⁷ In his book Warner wrote, “In the practice of putting down their paintings in ink on paper Zen artists discovered that the principle of muga (it is not I that am doing this) opens the gate for the necessary essential truth to flow in. When the self does not control the drawing, meaning must. The principle runs all through Zen teachings especially where action is involved.”⁴⁸

The concept of action also surfaces in Harold Rosenberg’s article “The American Action Painters,” which appeared in Art News in December 1952. Rosenberg wrote, “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined.”⁴⁹ Rosenberg’s work on this landmark article, in which he first coined the term “action painting,” appears to coincide with the publication of Warner’s new book.

Around the time Rosenberg released his article, Pollock decided to leave Parsons’s gallery as soon as his contract expired at the end of 1951. He had become disappointed by her failure to sell his paintings. Nonetheless, Parsons asked Pollock to remain until May 1952 so that she could try to get some business from his last show. That spring he moved to Sidney Janis’s gallery, which was planning to give Pollock a solo show. Janis wrote Pollock that Greenberg had “reacted very nicely to your new things.”⁵⁰

Pollock’s move to Janis proved traumatic for Krasner, who lost Parsons as her dealer. Parsons recollected, “I know that Lee…was upset when I decided not to continue showing her work. But, as I told Lee, it had nothing to do with thinking she wasn’t a very fine painter, it was that the association was too painful.”⁵¹ As for Krasner, she later reported that these words from Parsons “put me into such as state of shock. I couldn’t paint for nine months.”⁵²

This loss for Krasner cannot have helped her relations with her troubled husband.

Pollock’s conflicts, his disappointment with his dealer, and his frustrated desire to have a child, despite his total disregard for the responsibilities involved in parenthood, fueled his anger at Krasner, who seemed to deny him his wishes. Hence he displaced some of his resentment by flirting in public with other women in their circle, especially those younger and more attractive, such as Mercedes Carles Matter. Often this behavior, then escalating, occurred in front of Lee.

Mercedes was a woman so desired that sleeping with her conveyed status among New York artists. Mercedes was no ingénue—she liked to drink with the boys at the Cedar Bar (aka the Cedar Tavern) and to flirt with them at the Club, where liquor flowed freely and dancing was wild.⁵³ Cynthia Navaretta, who also frequented the Club, recalled Mercedes as very striking, self-confident, and “a pirate with everyone’s husband.”⁵⁴ Though Krasner chose to avoid the Club and the Cedar, she could not keep Pollock away from either place.

The possibility that Jackson not only had flirted but had become sexually involved with Mercedes has been dismissed along with the indiscreet boasts he made about his sexual escapades. Though discounted as mere bravado, some of Pollock’s claims appear to have been true. Rita Benton, the wife of Pollock’s favorite teacher, Thomas Hart Benton, told Gene Thaw (coauthor of the Pollock catalogue raisonné) that she gave the young Pollock “his baptism of fire in bed.”⁵⁵

By 1951, Mercedes was having an intense affair with Harold Rosenberg. Both Mercedes and Rosenberg had histories of multiple lovers and were married to long-suffering partners. She had already had well-known liaisons with Gorky, Hofmann, George McNeil, and Philip Guston. Though Mercedes usually went for a man because she admired his art, Harold was an exception.⁵⁶ Rosenberg, for his part, usually had affairs with women art writers, but he was not opposed to propositioning young women artists.⁵⁷

Harold and Mercedes, both dexterous and experienced at deceiving their paramours, had met each other’s match. Mercedes was able to tease Rosenberg with her other liaisons in the art world, but none would have had the same impact on him as her admiration for and public flirtation with Pollock, whom Life magazine had already turned into a celebrity and who was on his way to becoming a cultural icon.

In surviving fragments of Rosenberg’s journal for May 1951, he wrote about his affair with Mercedes, while fending off her “rage”: “She believes that I do not love her and cannot be cured of the pain of having read in my notebook that an affair is the conquest of the strange & that one wills to return to his wife as to himself.”⁵⁸

In these same pages, he remarks how much he admired the fiction his wife was then writing; he repeatedly documents his own heavy drinking and the resulting hangovers; he comments on his friendship with Bill de Kooning, which was then so close that Rosenberg could stop by unannounced at all times of the day and night, inviting himself to join Bill and Elaine at parties to which he had not been invited.⁵⁹

At the time of the journal, Rosenberg was about to depart for Paris, where his wife, May, had taken their daughter, Patia, to get away from his too-conspicuous affair with Mercedes. In June Rosenberg noted that he “had felt disturbed after leaving M [Mercedes] but today I hardly thought of her except very distantly. May’s letters are very cheerful & discerning.”

On June 16, Rosenberg reported that Herbert Matter was uttering nonsense when he said that Clement Greenberg “had a high opinion of me, liked me, etc.” Though Herbert Matter described Greenberg as “pathological” and attributed his problems to alcoholism, Rosenberg still concluded “that C [Clement] never had an idea under any condition & is essentially empty & rattle-brained.”⁶⁰

Greenberg and Rosenberg were competing with each other to be the greatest art critic of their time. Because Greenberg had premised his own authority on discovering and promoting Pollock, Rosenberg saw that he could take Greenberg down a peg by denigrating Pollock. Whether or not Lee believed that Mercedes’s flirtation with Jackson had concluded in a sexual encounter, she must have felt betrayed by her friend’s intimate involvement with Rosenberg, whom she saw as trying to subvert Pollock’s status. In any case, the two former friends had become estranged.

Rosenberg was also able to build his own authority by promoting Bill de Kooning over Pollock. After all, Rosenberg had already been sleeping with de Kooning’s wife before he got together with Mercedes. Though she loyally promoted Bill, Elaine de Kooning was as spirited and as sexually active as Mercedes. And Bill paid no attention, because he was preoccupied with loves of his own.

Ultimately for Rosenberg, his weapon against Greenberg was his pen. His agenda did not escape the young artist and critic Paul Brach, who accused him of trying to bring Jackson down. Rosenberg implicitly confirmed Brach’s accusation, replying, “You’re a smart kid.”⁶¹ What escaped Brach and Pollock’s biographers alike was that Rosenberg’s strike at Pollock was inevitably colored by his emotions over his affairs with both Mercedes and Elaine.

Mercedes was jealous of Elaine. Rosenberg noted in his journal, “I was quite drunk & reluctant to go to bed tho she [Mercedes] was hoping I would not go to the Club, since Elaine was there.”⁶²

He went instead to the Cedar Bar and the next day reported, “M [Mercedes] was in a terrifying state this morning because I had ‘gone to E [Elaine de Kooning]’ at the Cedar.”⁶³ Mercedes, venting her jealousy of Elaine to Harold, had to have realized that her own high regard for Pollock, as well as her history with both Pollock and Krasner, provoked Rosenberg, even while he tried to undermine Greenberg. It is not clear if Mercedes saw Rosenberg’s swipe at Pollock as collateral damage in her affair, or as something that added value to the power of her own conquests.

In the meantime, as Krasner and many others were well aware, Elaine had begun a long-term affair with Thomas Hess, the powerful critic and editor of Art News, though she continued to see Rosenberg long into the late 1950s and 1960s.⁶⁴ In their biography of de Kooning, Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan state: “Many, in fact, believed that [Elaine] chose to sleep with the two critics in order to promote her husband’s career. That act of devotion was, however, unnecessary; they were already committed to de Kooning.”⁶⁵ It should be noted that these biographers fail to account for the fickleness of critics, whose loyalties do not necessarily last forever.

Krasner was among those who believed that Elaine slept with the two powerful critics as part of her strategy to promote her husband’s work.⁶⁶ Krasner not only disapproved of the kind of marriage Elaine and Bill had, in which both partners pursued sexual relations with others, but she was especially offended by Elaine’s sexual liaisons with the two critics because they came to favor Bill’s work over Jackson’s.⁶⁷

If the gossip about all these infidelities was not enough for Krasner to bear, she also had to be hospitable to another beautiful and much younger woman painter—Helen Frankenthaler, who was Clement Greenberg’s new girlfriend. The couple arrived as the Pollocks’ houseguests in the summer of 1952. At the time, Frankenthaler was in her early twenties, literally a generation younger than Krasner and Greenberg. She was the daughter of a New York superior court judge from a well-established German-Jewish family, the kind that often looked down on poor Russian-Jewish immigrants like Krasner’s parents and older siblings or, for that matter, Greenberg’s parents. A photograph of the foursome on the beach in East Hampton documents the visit and shows a slender Krasner looking tiny next to Frankenthaler’s more buxom figure.⁶⁸ Frankenthaler’s threat to Krasner, however, was not as a glamorous younger woman artist who might try to take her famous husband away from her, but as one who would respond to Pollock’s example and method, then enjoy the status afforded by her brief acquaintance with him. Frankenthaler became linked to Pollock’s celebrity and style, but Greenberg, not Pollock, was her ticket to fame. By 1961, the artist Morris Louis, a Greenberg disciple, remarked that Frankenthaler served as “a bridge between Pollock and what was possible.”⁶⁹

Krasner, however, took these challenges in stride and kept her focus on helping Pollock get ahead. She was responsible for arranging his first solo show at the Janis Gallery (located across the hall from Betty Parsons at 15 East Fifty-seventh Street) from November 10 to 29, 1952. Janis, who had known Krasner since before he published his 1944 book, Abstract and Surrealist Art, recalled that Pollock had dropped by his new gallery in 1948. “At the time he was showing with Betty Parsons, so I didn’t say anything. Finally he left. Then, almost five years later, Lee Krasner came to us and said that Jackson was no longer with Betty Parsons and he was looking for a new gallery.”

Knowing that in recent years Pollock had had a show every year, Janis asked her, “Don’t you think, Lee, that the market is rather saturated with Pollock’s work?”

She responded, “Sidney, the surface hasn’t even been scratched.”

“And how right she was!” he recalled. “Anyway, we got together, Lee and I, and we had a verbal contract, and we gave Jackson his first show…a magnificent show. He had changed from his ‘drip’ image to a kind of impasto, pigment surface, and it was more figurative, but still had the Jackson Pollock bite. The show wasn’t too successful.”⁷⁰

Janis did point out that later he was able to sell some of these same paintings to museums. Greenberg, who by now felt Pollock’s “inspiration was flagging,” declined to review the show at Janis.⁷¹ In the New York Times, however, Howard Devree was more positive about Pollock than he had ever been before, comparing some of his new work to that of Kandinsky. He saw what he called a “source of inspiration with a use of deep space instead of obsession with mere surface.”⁷² Devree’s opinion meant much less to Pollock and Krasner than Greenberg’s silence, which really pained both of them.

A week after the Janis exhibition, Pollock’s “first retrospective show” took place at Bennington College in Vermont, organized by Greenberg, who had handpicked eight paintings for the show. He had also written a note for the catalogue (a folder). His belief in Pollock is clear, though he had his own idea of Pollock’s strengths: “Most of the paintings on view are major works, major in a way that very little American art has been up to now. That is, they determine the main tradition of painting at their point in time.”⁷³

Krasner and Pollock borrowed Ossorio’s station wagon to drive up to Bennington for the opening, accompanied in the car by Greenberg and Frankenthaler. They planned to make an unhurried trip, stopping at the home of the sculptor David Smith and Jean Freas in Bolton’s Landing, New York, on Lake George. Greenberg later told a biographer that Krasner had a “tantrum” after he, Pollock, Smith, and Frankenthaler spent a long time in Smith’s studio having drinks and looking at his new work.⁷⁴ Krasner must have panicked, fearing that Pollock would be too drunk to show up at his own opening. She insisted that they leave at once for Bennington without touching the carefully prepared supper.⁷⁵

According to Freas, the Pollocks stopped in Bolton’s Landing because a reporter for “the March of Time was coming” and expected to film both artists. Freas also described Krasner’s arrival “wearing a fur coat—because by then they were getting some recognition—and I had made this really nice meal and so forth. And she said, ‘Oh, we couldn’t possibly eat here.’ Pollock was—if you even spoke to him he’d turn red. He just—and he looked thoroughly miserable, he was sober.”⁷⁶ If, however, as Greenberg recalled, Pollock had already been drinking, Freas might have been wrong.

Krasner’s insistence that Pollock stop drinking in Bolton’s Landing offended Freas, who in retrospect appears to have been naive: “At this point they were like—she was calling every shot, and he stayed wherever Mama said. She was very ambitious, which I don’t—I’m not rebuking her for that—but she was very nasty, to me—and I know why she was nasty: because I was young and pretty, and she was—I think she may have been the ugliest woman I’ve ever seen. The god that made her was not kind to her. She was behind the door when the looks—she had this quivering upper lip, like this, and—I don’t know what she became later on, but I know she had this trembling, thick upper lip.”⁷⁷

Freas said that Krasner was “very tough. You talk about tough. Whoa! She was the toughest woman in the art world. No question about that.”⁷⁸ A generation younger than Krasner, Freas had just graduated from Sarah Lawrence two years earlier. Freas married Smith, bore him two daughters, and then divorced.⁷⁹ As “Jean Smith,” she later became a TV journalist and writer, but she never competed as an artist with David Smith, even working in the same arena, as Krasner did with Pollock.

Interviewed years later, Freas was critical of Krasner, whom she believed ordered Pollock around. She had little sympathy for being the wife of a troubled alcoholic: “He had to pay for every time he’d ever misbehaved, by her. And she was uncouth, she was mean—that’s the only side of her—she may have had wonderful sides to her, I never saw them.”⁸⁰ Freas recalled that Pollock was the most diffident person she’d ever met when he was sober. “But when he was drunk he was horrible. He was like a gargoyle. He was very handsome, you know, until he drank, and then his whole face underwent change. Ugh! I’ve never known an alcoholic to change so entirely as he did.”⁸¹ According to Freas, she and Smith saw Pollock mainly at the Cedar Bar, “usually not with her [Krasner], because they would have these fights, and they wouldn’t be together.”⁸² She seems not to have understood that Krasner detested the Cedar Bar. Thus Krasner not only had to deal with Pollock’s alcoholic unraveling before his show opened, but she also had to struggle to extricate him from their “friends” who were indifferent, even hostile, to her trials.

In Bennington, the painter Paul Feeley and his wife, Helen, hosted a party following the show’s opening. Feeley was the chair of the art department where Frankenthaler had studied. Krasner, still anxious, volunteered to tend the bar so that she could monitor what Pollock drank. As the party wound down, someone unaware of the situation offered Pollock a drink—in earshot of Greenberg, who told him, “Lay off,” to no avail. “Fool,” Pollock retorted as he bolted down the drink.⁸³ Nothing more needed to be said.

After breakfast the next morning, Pollock drove Greenberg and Frankenthaler to their train for New York while he and Krasner headed back to Springs. “When he called me a fool,” said Greenberg years later, “I was furious and I was off him for a couple of years. I didn’t say it but Jackson sensed it…. Besides, he had become, if not famous, at least notorious, and I suppose the battle had been won.”⁸⁴ Another time, Greenberg said that he was “dissatisfied” with most of Pollock’s work after 1952.⁸⁵

Immediately following the Bennington fiasco and Pollock’s show at Janis, gossip circuits buzzed when Rosenberg’s “The American Action Painters” appeared in the December Art News. The article created a stir that pained Pollock, who felt personally attacked by Rosenberg’s thesis on “action painting,” even though Rosenberg did not identify him by name. Pollock claimed that in conversation with Rosenberg, he had referred to his canvas as an “arena” he did not approve of the subsequent use Rosenberg made of the term.⁸⁶ Lee made notes on the article in her copy of Art News and carefully examined Rosenberg’s main point.⁸⁷ She commented on the attitudes of other artists she knew who read the piece, noting that Clyfford Still stopped by and “had a fit about it” then de Kooning and Philip Pavia stopped by and said that they liked the piece. “So there was a good deal of screaming on the subject,” she recounted.⁸⁸

When Rosenberg poked fun at an unnamed artist who claimed that another was not modern because “he works from sketches,” he was describing an attitude held by both Krasner and Pollock, neither of whom worked from sketches in making paintings.⁸⁹ Rosenberg wrote, “A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist. The painting itself is a ‘moment’ in the adulterated mixture of his life…. The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life.”⁹⁰ This statement implicitly attacked Pollock, whose public behavior was too often dysfunctional, while his paintings had gained him both admiring and derisive attention. Rosenberg argued that “what gives the canvas its meaning” is “the way the artist organizes his emotional and intellectual energy as if he were in a living situation.”⁹¹

Rosenberg taunted Pollock even more directly by discussing artists who, “lacking verbal flexibility…speak in a jargon” among the examples he gave of an artist describing his work was “It doesn’t reproduce Nature; it is Nature,” which was Pollock’s notorious retort to Hofmann’s advice.⁹² Rosenberg may have revealed more than he intended when he stated “a piece of wood found on the beach becomes Art…. Modern Art does not have to be actually new; it only has to be new to somebody—to the last lady who found out about the driftwood.”⁹³

Driftwood would have been on his mind if he had seen Herbert Matter’s photograph of Mercedes nude on the beach. Matter had used driftwood to frame Mercedes’s breast. Pollock had a copy of the photo in his studio. In this regard, Rosenberg’s apparently dismissive reference “to the last lady” may be an erotic wink to his mistress.

Hurt by gossip, Pollock told Jeffrey Potter, “The corner they got me in is more like what Harold Rosenberg wrote about Action Painters…. How does it go? Vanguard painters have a zero audience; the work gets used and traded but not wanted.”⁹⁴ Rosenberg later wrote: “Art in the service of politics declined after the war, but ideology has by no means relaxed its hold on American painting. Zen, psychoanalysis, Action art, purism, anti-art—and their dogmas and programs—have replaced the Marxism and regionalism of the thirties. It is still the rare artist who trusts his work to the intuitions that arise in the course of creating it.”⁹⁵

Yet Clement Greenberg wrote that Pollock mocked the very notion of “Action Painting,” which he understood, when sober, to be “a purely rhetorical fabrication.” Greenberg viewed Pollock as “the most intelligent painter” that he had ever known, “one of the most learned & truly sophisticated; without his intelligence, he would not have become the artist he was.”⁹⁶