FOURTEEN

Dual Identities: Artist and Widow, 1956–59

Lee Krasner in her studio, August 30, 1956, two weeks after Jackson Pollock’s death. Visible are her Prophecy (CR 302, right) and Cauldron (CR 300, unfinished, behind), photographed by Waintrob-Budd.

YOU FELT THAT IT WAS PART OF HER DESTINY TO BE SUPPORTIVE of this person with a recognizable continuity. But then his death gave her freedom to become a creative being,” wrote John Cole, a journalist who knew Jackson and Lee in East Hampton.¹ “The marriage couldn’t have been more rough,” Krasner admitted. “Sure it was rough. Big deal. I was in love with Pollock and he was in love with me. He gave an enormous amount, Pollock. Of course, he took too.”² Stanley William Hayter, who had worked with Pollock in his printmaking studio on Eighth Street, and who, together with his artist wife, Helen Phillips, had partied with Pollock, Krasner, and the Kadishes in East Hampton in the summer of 1945, understood Krasner’s role well: “Most men are dependent on some women to support them, one way or another. This idea of being hairy-chested men and superior to women—bugger! I don’t think we would have had much production out of Jack if it hadn’t been for Lee, or even survival.”³

One of Krasner’s first preoccupations as a widow was supporting Pollock’s projected 1956 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Once planned as the inaugural show in a series on midcareer artists, it was now a memorial retrospective. It opened on December 19, 1956, and closed on February 3, 1957. The show and its reviews kept Krasner focused on her late husband and his legacy. Having lost him, she was determined not to let the legacy get away from her.

Krasner remained in Springs for the autumn after the funeral. In October, Charlotte Park and Jim Brooks were in the process of moving their Montauk house by barge to Springs, and they stayed with a grieving Krasner in the house she had shared with Pollock.⁴ But after they left, the house was too empty, so Lee spent several months with Fritz and Jeanne Bultman in their town house on East Ninty-fifth Street and several more months living with Bob (B. H.) and Abby Friedman.⁵ Lee stayed there through New Year’s, shared with Helen Frankenthaler, Betty and Bob Motherwell, and Musa and Philip Guston. “Jackson’s ghost was more real,”⁶ Bob Friedman wrote in his journal on New Year’s Day 1957. They had all been at a party where two of Krasner’s least favorite people, Motherwell and Frankenthaler, met, evidently for the first time.⁷ Later that year, Motherwell divorced Betty Little, with whom he had two daughters, and in 1958 married Frankenthaler.

After staying with friends through the winter, Krasner then tried living on in Springs, but she disliked being alone in the house. “It was hard at first, damned hard. I’m not the country type. And the loneliness,” she complained.⁸ “After Pollock’s death I came back to New York, rented an apartment and then abandoned it after two years. I couldn’t stand it. So I went back out to Springs. The second attempt was very beautiful. I wasn’t depressed at all. Then, at a point during that time [the two years], I took over the barn. There was no point in letting it stand empty. I had difficulty trying to reestablish myself in New York.”⁹

But Krasner soon realized that she couldn’t spend all her time in Springs alone, so she also tried to get back into New York. She rented an apartment in 1957 at 147 East Seventy-second Street in Manhattan, signing a two-year lease. That summer she had tried out painting in the barn that had been Pollock’s studio. She had been able to tolerate staying in the old Springs house, however, only when she had been able to get someone to stay there with her. She depended on hired assistants, friends, and, if they lived nearby, even their teenaged children.¹⁰

As a widow, Krasner was not just moving into her late husband’s studio to paint, but rather she was also focused on how best to place Pollock’s work in museums and important private collections. At first she kept Pollock’s work with his last dealer, Sidney Janis, but she did need to raise a certain amount of money to pay estate taxes. In the year before Pollock’s death, Janis had offered Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm to the Museum of Modern Art for $8,000, but the museum rejected the price as too high. Now Alfred Barr, on behalf of the museum, made another inquiry about the painting. This time Janis, after speaking with Krasner, asked for $30,000.¹¹ Evidently Barr was so stunned by the increase that he never even responded. Janis sold the picture to the Metropolitan Museum instead—a success for Krasner, even though the deal for $20,000 included an agreement that she would buy back another one of Pollock’s canvases (Number 17, 1951) for $10,000.¹² Nonetheless, she had now set a new record for Pollock’s prices. Her skill in marketing Pollock’s work slowly and judiciously would also help to set much higher prices for other abstract expressionist works.

Janis later commented: “After the second [Pollock] exhibition following his death [in 1958], Lee was a little discouraged by our selling quite a few at low prices and decided not to deal here. He died a little too soon, but other artists were immediately affected—began selling and raising their prices after that romantic death—like Van Gogh’s.”¹³

Krasner’s marketing strategy was bound to affect the way her own paintings were seen and shown and how she was perceived. “After Jackson died the load was far heavier on me than when he was alive,” she maintained. “He was painter number one and the whole art world turned on me. It was like I wasn’t there. It was very rocky.”¹⁴

“She didn’t get anywhere, until her husband died,” the painter Buffie Johnson told an interviewer. “We were good friends for a while, and then I showed one of my old realistic paintings in the East Hampton Guild Hall, because they’d asked me to put something in a realistic show. She stopped on the street in front of the post office and harangued at me for doing this. I said, ‘Well, I don’t deny my early work. If Picasso shows his realistic things and his abstract things side by side, I don’t know why [I shouldn’t].’ [Lee] said, ‘We’ve spent years trying to get the Guild Hall to accept abstract work, and you come along and undo all our work.’ She’s a very emphatic woman…. I felt very injured.”¹⁵

 

WITH POLLOCK’S DEATH, KRASNER HAD TO PICK UP THE PIECES AND put her life back together. What she had left was her art, and she soon returned to it. When she was asked how she managed to do this so quickly, she responded, “I don’t think I thought about it. And I don’t feel I had a choice. It was just extremely difficult to get to do it. ‘I had to’ is the only way I can put it, and it was not easy…. I was not in a position to say I will not continue painting or I will continue painting.”¹⁶ She explained her motivation this way: “I am preoccupied with trying to know myself in order to communicate with others. Painting is not separate from life. It is one. It is like asking—do I want to live? My answer is yes—and I paint.”¹⁷

Though Krasner’s abstract paintings were not usually very representational, a canvas such as Three in Two painted in 1956 begs a biographical reading. The catalogue raisonné refers to Three in Two as having a “cryptic title,” which “probably relates in some way to Pollock’s equally ambiguous There Were Seven in Eight of c. 1945.” Yet Krasner’s enigmatic canvas might be read as three vertical panels of fragments of figures inspired by her favorite painter, Matisse. His Bathers by a River of 1909–1910 was well known to her from the 1951 Matisse retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art as well as from Greenberg’s 1953 book on Matisse.¹⁸

Taking a hint from Matisse, Krasner could have painted Three in Two in order to reference Pollock’s earlier canvas, Two, of 1945, a painting that had already been compared to Bathers.¹⁹ Following this, Krasner may have inserted a third figure between the male and female figures that critics have identified in Pollock’s Two. Chances are this third figure represents Ruth Kligman, who had intervened and split up Pollock and Krasner’s relationship in the same year that Krasner produced this painting. In a very literal sense, Kligman inserted herself between the pair—a third figure wedged into two.²⁰

Another blow to Krasner came on May 1957, when Life magazine ran an article called “Women Artists in Ascendancy” featuring five women artists—“none over 35.” Naturally it omitted Krasner, who was nearly fifty. The article featured Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, Jane Wilson, Helen Frankenthaler, and Nell Blaine, touted as a “Young Group [that] Reflects Lively Virtues of U.S. Painting.” With glamour in mind, Life stressed both the youth and the physical attractiveness of these younger women artists and even exulted that Jane Wilson “works as a New York fashion model.”²¹ It made good copy, but it already relegated to the dustbin of history the older women who had labored among the male abstract expressionists of the first generation, such as Krasner, Perle Fine, and even the somewhat younger Elaine de Kooning.

The critical dismissal was premature. Krasner was now painting in Pollock’s barn studio, enjoying for the first time its excellent light and ample space. Her work’s scale soon expanded. Though her paintings appear to mirror her emotions, sometimes they are the opposite of this. For example, after Pollock’s sudden death, she painted bold and upbeat works in a series she called Earth Green. Her impulse was to reach out and boldly embrace life, which had so swiftly left Pollock. Her frequent preoccupations include an emphasis on nature, and she sometimes hints of birth, destruction, and regeneration.

At the same time, one must take into account the possibility that Krasner was actually relieved to be free of Pollock’s debilitating behavior and the constant anxiety it created not only in her but also in many others who came into contact with him. Years later, she reflected: “Look, it was a mixed blessing—our relationship. It had many, many pluses and several minuses. His drinking, for instance, was very rough on me, to put it mildly.”²²

Krasner perhaps expressed the burden Pollock represented in a memorable dream: “Jackson and I were standing on top of the world. The earth was a sphere with a pole going through the center. I was holding the pole with my left hand. Suddenly, I let go of the pole, but I kept holding on to Jackson, and we both went floating off into outer space. We were not earthbound.”²³ She had supported Pollock as long as she could, but eventually his drinking and the emotional pain that caused him to drink produced a situation that was too difficult to endure. Krasner had never, however, intended to let go of Pollock.

Though Krasner was still working, she needed to be able to show her paintings—being able to do so meant continuing to exist in the world. But she, and many of her contemporaries, were concerned about the lack of opportunity to show their work. The artists John Little and Elizabeth Parker, both of whom had also studied with Hofmann, joined with Alfonso Ossorio to open the Signa Gallery in 1957 at 53 Main Street in East Hampton in a space that was formerly a small market. Financed by Ossorio, this was the first commercial gallery in the area devoted to contemporary vanguard work. The gallery’s profile was high, and its openings became popular social events, often attracting up to five hundred people.²⁴

Signa Gallery lasted for four years. Krasner showed her painting Spring Beat (1957) in a group show from August 11 to 24, 1957, along with Paul Brach, David Hare, Franz Kline, Costantino Nivola, Charlotte Park, Elizabeth Parker, and Theodoros Stamos.²⁵ She showed fewer works than the others, but her canvas (at 98 by 124 inches) was the largest object on view. Krasner also participated in “A Review of the Season,” Signa’s September show that same year.

August 1957 marked a year since Pollock’s death. Krasner’s friends Giorgio Cavallon and Linda Lindeberg wrote, telling her that she was in their thoughts and how wonderful she had been in the past year, “always making something positive and clear out of the tragedy of Jackson’s death.” They said how they admired her positive attitude, her courage, and her new paintings.²⁶ Krasner spent Thanksgiving that year with Bob and Abby Friedman, Barnett and Annalee Newman, and Sheridan and Cile Lord, recorded in a snapshot probably taken by Cile.

In 1949, U.S. Representative George Dondero had denounced “the link between the Communist art of the ‘isms’ and the so-called modern art of America.”²⁷ Now, at the height of the cold war, the Federal Bureau of Investigation investigated Krasner under the names “Mrs. Jackson Pollock” and “Lee Pollock” for espionage.²⁸ Most of her FBI file, which is only two pages long, has been blacked out, but the following is visible: “Mrs. Pollock is an artist of the modern school.” The FBI continued looking into her case until December 16, 1957. It appears that someone had reported her. One explanation is that the person did it out of anger. Another possibility is that Krasner, when she was in Europe at the time of Pollock’s death, had some innocent contact with someone who had political connections that raised suspicion about her activities. One must note that the FBI also investigated a number of her contemporaries, for example, Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, to name just two. Like Krasner, both were Jewish. It has been suggested that at this time “sectors of the U.S. government were openly racist” and anti-Semitic.²⁹

Krasner was not nearly as politically engaged during the 1950s as she had been during the 1930s, when the FBI seems to have ignored her. Nothing incriminating was ever found, and it appears that Krasner never knew she was being investigated. It is difficult to imagine Krasner operating as a spy, particularly since she had no access to any secret information that anyone would want. She certainly was preoccupied during this period with marketing Pollock’s work, taking full advantage of the capitalist system.

Oblivious of the FBI, Krasner focused on exhibiting her Earth Green series at the Martha Jackson Gallery from February 24 through March 22, 1958. Located on the Upper East Side at 32 East Sixty-ninth Street, the gallery was relatively new, having opened a few blocks away in 1953. Nearly Krasner’s contemporary, Martha Kellogg Jackson was born in Buffalo, New York, where she grew up interested in art. She graduated from Smith College and attended Moore College of Art in Philadelphia.³⁰ She was said to be quite sympathetic to her artists, who, among Americans, also included Willem de Kooning, Paul Jenkins, and Louise Nevelson. She introduced some important European artists to the American public, including Antoni Tàpies from Spain and Karel Appel from the Netherlands.

Krasner’s seventeen oil paintings at Martha Jackson were large, ranging from six to about seventeen feet in length. The longest, The Seasons, she had painted in the barn studio that had been Pollock’s. Ben Heller recalls that Krasner enlisted him to help stretch her paintings at the gallery, causing his hands to be “sore.” He never bought any of her work.³¹ The show occupied two floors of the gallery. According to the gallery’s press release, “All the canvases are closely related and actually form a series along a central theme. A deeply felt personal experience is suggested by such paintings as Listen, Earth Green, Spring Beat, Upstream, Sun Woman, The Seasons, and others such as Embrace and Birth.”³² Krasner chose B. H. Friedman to write an introduction in the catalogue for her show. After discussing why she had not yet received the recognition she deserved and discussing her devotion to Pollock, he concluded, “In looking at these paintings, listening to them, feeling them, I know this work—Lee Krasner’s most mature and personal, as well as most joyous and positive, to date—was done entirely during the past year and a half, a period of profound sorrow for the artist. The paintings are a stunning affirmation of life.”³³

Among the telegrams and notes of congratulations Krasner saved was a card of the type that usually arrives with flowers. It was inscribed “To Lee—The Best and the Most—Len Siegel,” a warm greeting from her therapist. The following July, according to Bob Friedman’s journal, Krasner’s therapist “‘dismissed’ (her word)” her. Friedman commented cynically, “In this case dismissal means that he has gotten as much help from her as he can.”³⁴ She had at least begun to work through her grief.

Nearly two decades later, Krasner spoke about the paintings in this series: “I can remember when I was painting Listen, which is so highly keyed in color—I’ve seen it many times since and it looks like such a happy painting—I can remember that while I was painting it I almost didn’t see it, because tears were literally pouring down.”³⁵ The bright colors and biomorphic forms evoke a figure in a garden, an activity that she shared with Pollock after they first moved to Springs.

In 1979 Krasner wrote about the work April, which she related to Listen, Sun Woman, and The Seasons. “The title wouldn’t necessarily mean that I painted this work in April. I might have, but it’s too far away from me now. I think I felt the painting was April, whether the month was April or not. I paint a picture and the title follows, so there must have been something in either the color or the iconography to indicate why I chose April as this title. I’d say that this painting would be typical of the color in that show.”³⁶

Once thinking about her palette, she reflected, “I have no idea as to why I sometimes go from no color to a very high keyed color. I have no way of explaining this to myself—what makes this happen—and so I’ve ceased to try to explore it, and simply go with it. I either feel color, or I don’t, and when it doesn’t happen, I don’t feel the need to explain it to myself now, as strongly as I did in the past when I was more preoccupied with this question.”³⁷

Finally, at what the press release announced as “her third one-man show,” Krasner won over the critics. In the New York Times, Stuart Preston opened his article with: “The bravado of Lee Krasner’s recent and huge abstract paintings at the Martha Jackson Gallery presents a raw challenge to the eye whether or not we accept the symbolic intentions of her sequences of whirling shapes. What impresses the spectator is the sheer energy that Miss Krasner manages to generate on her picture surfaces. We feel that somewhere behind each picture is a spring that sets off the killing pace of her shapes like an alarm clock.”³⁸ Time magazine devoted an entire article to “Mrs. Jackson Pollock,” chronicling her early history back to the months leading up to the McMillan show of 1942. Though the article got a few details wrong, including the date, it noted the important fact that “Blue-eyed Lee Krasner, 49,” had met Pollock and “In the years that followed, the pair made art history; one with commotion—Jackson Pollock; the other with devotion—Lee Krasner, who became his wife.”³⁹

Time quoted Krasner about her work in the show: “These are special paintings to me. They come from a very trying time, a time of life and death.” The writer went on to say: “[The paintings] have haunting titles; e.g., Visitation, Listen. They mostly seem to explore death-haunted themes that, Lee Krasner says, make it ‘hard enough for me just to accept my own paintings.’ But they also strike a lonely note of hope: one of them is entitled Birth.”⁴⁰

Even women, such as the critic Anita Ventura, who reviewed Krasner’s show in Arts Magazine, felt compelled to see this art through the lens of Pollock’s work: “Her paintings stand in a relationship to Jackson Pollock’s that is similar to that of Juan Gris’s Cubist works to Picasso’s or Braque’s, or of Dufy’s Fauve paintings to Matisse’s. This is particularly true of her successes: Earth Green and Listen (related to Pollock’s totem series and Ocean Greyness—to my mind his best paintings), in which she moves his energetic forms toward a rose-beige-brown, emerald-green and fuchsia delicate beauty.”⁴¹ Ventura qualified her praise by writing, “Her less successful works, in which the energy is dissipated rather than transformed, become unintentional caricatures.”

Ventura viewed Krasner as one of the earliest to assimilate Pollock’s innovation: “It isn’t that the second [Krasner] lacks spirit; it has its own sensibility.”⁴² She then recalled how the Arensbergs, Los Angeles collectors of cubism and Dada, had cared for “the first harsh moment when something not quite comprehensible was got hold of, when nobody knew whether the work was ugly or not until somebody else came along and made it beautiful.”⁴³

Parker Tyler, writing in Art News, came to a similar conclusion, declaring though one “saw clearly, sex and the woman,” Pollock’s “motifs of flesh and fecundity are repeated by his wife in a palette that oddly suggests off-pink cosmetic and fuchsia lipstick as well as flower petal, plant leaf and the void. The scale is audacious, the derivation as legitimate as a painter might wish.”⁴⁴

Krasner readily acknowledged the importance of Pollock on her artistic development, saying, “He would have influenced me even if I hadn’t married him. So did Picasso and Matisse and Mondrian. But I think I’ve held my own identity right through.” At the same time, the influence was inevitable by virtue of their marriage: “How can you live with someone without that happening, too? We never sat down and had a big art talk together. He’d come in and say, ‘Want to look at what I’ve done?’ And I’d invite him into my studio. Maybe I’d say, ‘Want to look at what I’ve done?’ But we never talked about, say, whether the edges should go inside or out, that sort of thing.”⁴⁵ When Krasner was asked if she had an influence on Pollock, she was only willing to say, “I daresay that the only possible influence that I might have had was to bring Pollock an awareness of Matisse.”⁴⁶

At the time of Krasner’s show at Martha Jackson, the International Council of the Museum of Modern Art had, with her help and her approval, organized a circulating show of sixty of Pollock’s paintings that would travel around Europe, going from the Galleria Nazionale in Rome to museums in Basel, Amsterdam, Hamburg, and London.⁴⁷

Krasner’s own work got international attention in April 1958, when it was included in “International Art of a New Era,” an art exhibition arranged by the French curator and critic Michel Tapié at the Gallery of Takashimaya for Japan’s Osaka Art Festival. Krasner was represented by Rose Red (1958) and her monumental canvas The Seasons (1957), which features forms that make allusions to human anatomy, suggesting sexuality and regenerative life forces. Krasner feared flying, so she chose not to travel with her art to Japan and missed an opportunity to promote her work in Asia.

Krasner continued to see friends in East Hampton, including Patsy Southgate, then divorced, who met her future husband, the artist Michael Goldberg at Krasner’s home over Memorial Day weekend, which opened the 1958 season.⁴⁸ During that summer, Krasner again showed her work at the Signa Gallery in East Hampton. She participated in the second year’s first show called “The Artists’ Vision—1948–1958,” which featured the work of Hans Hofmann, who was “among the artists from outside this area who have been invited to participate.” Krasner showed Continuum (1949, a canvas on loan from Ossorio and not for sale), a collage called The City (1953, not for sale), and Four, a canvas from 1957, for which she asked one thousand dollars. Krasner’s price was small compared to Hofmann’s; his works were priced at three to six thousand dollars.⁴⁹ Some of Krasner’s old friends showed, including Perle Fine, Balcomb Greene, Ibram Lassaw, and the gallery’s three founders.⁵⁰

Krasner’s friendship with Perle Fine was beginning to blossom again after their days together in Hofmann’s class. Four years earlier, Krasner had convinced Fine to give up her Tenth Street studio and move out to Springs. “It was through Lee that we decided to come out here on the East End,” Fine explained. “Lee was always talking about how wonderful it was, how much she and Jackson enjoyed it.”⁵¹ That same summer Fine posed for a photograph taken by her husband, Maurice Berezov. The photo depicts de Kooning grinning in the center, flanked by Fine and, on the other side, a smiling Ruth Kligman, who had moved on after Pollock’s death to have an affair with de Kooning. Though still technically married to Elaine, he had also fathered a daughter with Joan Ward just a few years before.⁵² It is not known if Krasner knew that Fine was spending time with de Kooning; but living in the small town, she did hear about Kligman’s relationship with the artist who was still seen as Pollock’s chief rival.

David Slivka recalled that Krasner invited him and his wife, Rose, to come out from the city for a weekend. Early in the morning, while the women were still asleep, Slivka went for a walk and ran right into de Kooning pushing Kligman on a bicycle. Bill invited him over for coffee. While there Slivka saw some of Ruth’s paintings and thought it bizarre that she was trying to imitate de Kooning’s style. When he returned to Krasner’s, Rose asked where he had been, and he said he’d been having coffee. But when he asked indiscreetly what Lee thought of Kligman and de Kooning renting Conrad Marca-Relli’s cottage next door to her, she replied, “She’s suing me!”⁵³ Indeed Kligman had sued Krasner to force her insurance to pay her medical expenses from the crash that killed Pollock.

The gossip and posturing around Krasner must have made things difficult for her. She was not one to cower in a corner, however, and so she just kept trying to be Lee Krasner, the artist, which meant participating in a third show that season, called “The Human Image.” Thanks to Ossorio, the show projected an international perspective, including, among others, Dubuffet and Karel Appel, as well as sculpture by David Smith and James Rosati. Additionally there was the work of Pollock and Grace Hartigan, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, and the gallery’s founders.

Krasner showed Prophecy, which was the canvas that had remained on her easel when she left for Europe in 1956. Ossorio had reserved it, so it was not for sale, but Krasner’s agreement to have it in this particular show marks her public acknowledgment of its “human” or figurative image. “I got back from Europe and this painting—once more I had to look at it and deal with it; Prophecy still frightened me enormously. I couldn’t read why it frightened me so, and even now would be hard put to do so. And so in that sense the painting becomes an element of the unconscious—as one might bring forth a dream.”⁵⁴ Ossorio paid $720 to Martha Jackson Gallery for Prophecy, of which $120 went to Signa Gallery for its commission.⁵⁵

That summer Lee had two young men live in what was little more than a shed on the Fireplace Road property—Bob Friedman’s brother, Sanford (Sandy), a novelist, and his partner, Richard Howard, a poet. Krasner became close to the men, who returned to live in the little house for the next two summers as well. Krasner and Pollock had acquired the building to serve as her studio, but since she began to work in the barn that had been Pollock’s studio, she later gave this one to her nephew Ronald Stein and his wife to use as a house, surely hoping that their presence would allay her fears of living alone.

Howard recalled, “If there was no houseguest, if Sanford or I were unavailable, then a neighbor’s daughter, a child would do, but there had to be someone there. And if she could not sleep, even less could she concentrate on a book.”⁵⁶ Richard and Sandy not only read aloud to Krasner, but they also helped her name her paintings. Their friendship with Krasner lasted until her death.

In autumn 1958, It is, the avant-garde journal, reproduced seventeen signature plates of work by contemporary artists, including Krasner’s and Perle Fine’s. Many of the others were much younger.⁵⁷ That same year Bob Friedman, then vice president of Uris Brothers, a real estate company, commissioned Krasner to create two large mosaic panels for the exterior of their corporate headquarters, a thirty-story building at 2 Broadway, near the southern tip of Manhattan.⁵⁸ The architects for this building, Emery Roth & Sons, had suggested, in the preliminary renderings, that a mural, made of durable glass mosaic set in cement, be placed between the second and third floors at the main Broadway entrance. The larger of the two murals was to be eighty-six feet long and twelve feet high, and a second, smaller mural was commissioned for the building’s facade on Broad Street.

Bob Friedman had long admired Krasner’s mosaic table in her house.⁵⁹ She had also worked on immense murals while on the WPA, so she felt up to the challenge for the Uris Brothers project. “By the time I came to do a mosaic in the Uris Brothers building in downtown Manhattan, eighty-six feet long, that scale was nothing new to me. Long before I met Pollock, too, I had been working that large.”⁶⁰

Krasner also saw this commission as an opportunity to help her nephew’s career. It was a poignant decision. When her mother died in 1959, Krasner’s siblings and nieces and nephews were the only family she had left. Among all her relatives that she had taken under her wing, Ronald Stein, the son of her sister Ruth, became an artist. Having influenced him, she felt responsible for his future.

The artist Will Barnet still recalls that Krasner sent Stein to study with him at Cooper Union, where she had begun her own education, and that Stein had talent but “kept getting into fights in bars.”⁶¹ After his study at Cooper, Stein earned an MFA at Yale. Stein, then in his late twenties, had already done some mosaics of his own, including a commission for a series of panels representing the Stations of the Cross.⁶² For the Uris Brothers mural, the aunt and nephew team produced both a scaled study in collage format and studies of the mural’s details.

Bob Friedman was both the impresario commissioning the project and the mural’s promoter. He wrote about it for Craft Horizon and compared Krasner and Stein’s efforts to those of Gaudí in Spain.⁶³ The two artists, in an attempt to avoid “rigidity,” elected to have the glass plates of the mural broken into free-form or random shapes, rather than have the Italian glass cut into the typical “tesserae” pattern. Rules of union labor in New York City prohibited the artists from doing the physical work themselves, and they were not even able to touch the materials without fear of provoking a strike. Instead Krasner and Stein closely supervised the work, even to the mixing of the cement, so they achieved the dark color they envisioned. Even being allowed to watch while the craftsmen worked was itself a concession on the part of the union.

Krasner accepted the union’s control, but she believed it made it impossible to produce inventive mosaics in New York.⁶⁴ Union workers expected to work with a sketch and evenly spaced tesserae and ordered directional patterns. The union workers ignored the idea, understood during antiquity and the Middle Ages, that mosaic could modulate light. They couldn’t understand murals as abstract as Krasner’s.

Krasner’s loss of her mother, following closely on Pollock’s death, disturbed her so much that she was not able to sleep. Years later she told an interviewer, “I wasn’t allowed to mourn at my own tempo—which might have seemed sluggish to some people.”⁶⁵

Krasner had also stopped living in East Hampton year-round, and the move to Manhattan was a major change. She finally acknowledged to herself that she was suffering from chronic insomnia and took to painting at night in the city. Because she had to work under artificial light, she reduced her palette to umber and white. The poet Richard Howard recalled how startled he and Sandy Friedman were “that all the new paintings were coming out, as we used to say, Ahab-colored.” Ahab was the brown poodle Ossorio and Dragon had given Krasner and Pollock.

Howard asked Krasner if this color “represented a descent into a new crucible of emotions…a specific registration of grief. Were these not mourning paintings.”⁶⁶ Krasner demurred, “I was going down deep into something which wasn’t easy or pleasant…. Well, there was so much taking place. My mother dies at this time. A lot happens aside from my grief for Jackson. There are many elements. I cancel my show with Greenberg—a show scheduled at French and Co. And these paintings are already under way.”⁶⁷ It was as if some deep-seated depression had finally caught up with her, and she turned to making large, somber canvases that cried out with emotional chaos. She renounced color, explaining, “I like daylight. Those were the only paintings done by artificial light. Those paintings [were] done in deep turmoil.”⁶⁸

One of the first paintings of this type is The Gate, a monumental canvas that she was working on during the summer of 1959 after her move into the barn studio. During its creation, Halley Erskine photographed Krasner while she worked. With The Gate, “There was a demand to abstract it to this point. The imagery is much clearer in the early version, however you’re going to read it. The title The Gate is much connected with my mother’s death, at least on a conscious level when it was painted.”⁶⁹ In its early stages, The Gate had many recognizable shapes, but in its final version, it was filled with energetic lines and splashes of white paint. Describing this canvas and its series, she explained, “These are physical paintings. The gesture is a thrust—I don’t generally do that.”⁷⁰ In fact her gesture makes one think of Pollock.

Krasner’s depression was exacerbated by an upsetting falling-out with Clement Greenberg, which aborted plans for her show at the gallery French & Company in 1959. Greenberg had recently started working for the gallery, and accounts differ over what happened between him and Krasner. At the time of the clash, Greenberg was still in therapy with Ralph Klein, who by then had joined with Saul Newton and Jane Pearce in the Sullivanian Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis. Greenberg, who was not normally an early riser, was reporting for 9:30 A.M. appointments with Klein several days a week. He was reputed to be taking prescription sleep medication and drinking martinis in the afternoon.⁷¹ Klein notoriously was not wont to help his patients control their intake of alcohol and drugs.

When Greenberg began his association with the contemporary art gallery French & Company in March 1959, it was already experiencing serious financial problems, though he didn’t know it at the time. He was expected to turn a profit. In a letter dated August 1, 1959, to “Mrs. Lee Pollock,” Spencer Samuels, whose family owned the gallery, thanked Lee for her warm hospitality during a delightful weekend in Springs and mentioned that he had also thanked Alfonso [Ossorio] with whom he enjoyed a provocative conversation. He told Krasner that her show was excellent and that he felt certain that “Clem will go along with the idea of a ‘semi-retrospective’ show unless he has something particular in mind in regard to your work.”⁷² He also assured Krasner that he was making an effort to “rough out” an agreement about some of the issues that they had covered during the weekend.

Greenberg’s most recent biographer claims that the critic wanted to show Pollock’s work, but that Krasner “insisted that he also give her a show. Greenberg agreed, but his evident reluctance so angered her that she canceled both her and Pollock’s shows.”⁷³

On May 20, 1973, Greenberg wrote an angry response to the editor of Arts Magazine regarding a published conversation between Cindy Nemser and Krasner. Greenberg’s letter, which was published in the November issue, claimed that Krasner erred in describing him as French & Company’s director, stating that all he did was serve as “adviser” to its contemporary art department.⁷⁴ In the letter, Greenberg had crossed out nearly two lines from his original typescript that can still be deciphered. Perhaps his anger no longer allowed him to express his early regard for Krasner’s work.

In his effort to contradict Krasner, Greenberg wrote, “When in the spring of 1959, Miss Krasner proposed to me, out of the blue, that she have a show at French & Co. I agreed immediately.” He then stated that Krasner also asked for a show of Pollock’s black and white paintings. “To this I didn’t agree so readily; I was afraid it would look like a tie-in. But Miss Krasner overcame my qualms, & in the end I agreed to the Pollock show too.”⁷⁵ Greenberg agreed that Krasner had canceled her show because of his negative “response” to her new work. He claimed, however, that he had scheduled the show “out of my personal & professional regard for her,” rather than out of admiration for her work.⁷⁶

He followed this amended passage by asserting that after he had visited Krasner’s studio, discussion about the Pollock show ceased. Not having access to the Pollock estate was a source of great bitterness for Greenberg, who saw himself as having promoted Pollock from the beginning.

It is difficult to know whether or not Greenberg’s account above is legitimate, because he later contradicted himself about Krasner in a lengthy interview with Florence Rubenfeld, his first biographer:

When I became an advisor to French and Co., ’59…[Krasner] wanted me to tell French to put on a show of Jackson’s black and white pictures from before ’51 (when he’d done a whole series of black and whites that had been exhibited). These were antecedent to those. And I said sure that’d be great. And then she said, “and a show for me.” And I said—I was being so pure and I was showing off to myself which I’ve done in the past—and I said no. It looks too much like a tie [in]. A show for you but not for Pollock. This in front of Porter [Macray of MoMA] and Jenny [Greenberg’s wife]…. And finally I said, OK I’m being too pure. A show for both of you. I’ll tell French. And that was that. And then we went to Europe. And when we came back we went out to see Lee and her studio and socially.⁷⁷

When Greenberg and his wife went to Springs as Lee’s houseguests, her show was still on his mind. Lee’s friend Patsy Southgate was there. “So after this woman left, and the moment the door shut. What came first I don’t know, but I’d gone to see Lee’s studio and I’d seen the pictures and I didn’t like them. Lee was not a good painter. [Greenberg struck this line out of the transcript sent to him by Rubenfeld.] She was so accomplished but it was hollow. And first Lee got mad at Jenny because Jenny had [said] something critical about the lady who had been there…. I [had] seen her pictures and I had and I didn’t like them.”⁷⁸ In her biography, Rubenfeld highlighted the fact that the Greenbergs were staying with Lee. In her interview, she asked Greenberg, “God, and you had to tell her you didn’t like her paintings?”

Greenberg responded:

Yah. And Lee wasn’t large-souled. She wasn’t magnanimous. And Jenny said to me, let’s go. Let’s go. And I—with my newly found analytic piety [his handwritten correction of views] said no, we can’t leave angry. We’ll sweat this out. Don’t leave angry. We’re friends and all that. And so, somehow we got thru dinner and I got up the next morning and Lee’s face was swollen. You know there are people, and I’ve noticed this before who when they sleep on their rage when they get up their faces are swollen. And she drove us to the train station [twenty minutes away] and I said some pious thing like we’re still friends and so forth. No, she was angry, angry, angry. With her swollen face. And so we told her, don’t wait for the train with us. We didn’t want her to wait.⁷⁹

Later in the same interview—held nearly six years after Krasner’s death—Rubenfeld skillfully questioned Greenberg about his estimate of Krasner’s painting, asking if he had seen her painting since this last acrimonious encounter. He admitted:

I hadn’t paid enough attention to it. It was better when I saw it in the Museum of Modern Art retrospective [held after Krasner’s death]. And some of the allover things—I thought they had come straight out of Jackson. I didn’t pay enough attention. She was a better painter back then—she was a better painter before she met Jackson. Not that he hurt her paintings. It was just another one of my mistakes. She wasn’t that good but she was a good painter. I remember at the retrospective there was only one really good picture. Incandescent. Smallish one.

To Rubenfeld, Greenberg also complained about “Lee’s self-centeredness…. Lee had a lot of character but she didn’t have the essence of character…. She’s so self-centered. And Jackson was so self-centered too. The two of them.”⁸⁰ He also admitted, “I still admire Lee. How she intimidated me, that’s what I admired.” Greenberg acknowledged that Krasner was the only one who could always intimidate him. For Greenberg, it was her “force of character…and boy she had it.”⁸¹ In Greenberg’s view, he let Lee know that he did not like her work and she canceled both her show and Pollock’s show scheduled for French & Company.

Krasner told her friend the critic and art historian Barbara Rose that “we had words and he exited.” Rose commented, “I imagine the words and the exit. I also realize it was her last chance to become part of the official avant-garde and that she deliberately refuses to conform.”⁸² But Krasner explained more than once that Greenberg canceled the show that he had promised her at French & Company because she refused to give him access to the Pollock estate and let him show it there.⁸³

In 1981 Krasner told another interviewer, “People treated me as Pollock’s wife, not as a painter…. Someone like Greenberg, because I didn’t hand over to him the Pollock estate, did his job well to make sure I didn’t come through as a painter. He had power.”⁸⁴

It is clear that at this particular moment Greenberg was under pressure to produce sales for French & Company, and Pollock was then, after his death, a very “hot” artist with escalating prices.

Instead of the prestigious show she had anticipated at French & Company, Krasner had a solo show, “Lee Krasner, Paintings 1947–59,” in East Hampton with the Signa Gallery from July 24 to August 20, 1959. The show ranged from her Little Images to recent works like Cornucopia (1958) or Breath (1959). There were a total of fifteen pictures, of which two canvases, Noon and Yes & No, were not for sale. The prices went from $600 for the collage, Forest I (1954), to $1,800 for the canvases, Birth (1956), The Bull (1958), and Cornucopia.

Meanwhile, helped by her relationship with the French critic Michel Tapié, Krasner managed to take part in several group shows in Europe, such as the “Arte Nuova” show that took place at the Circolo degli Artisti at Palazzo Granieri della Roccia in Turin, Italy, during the spring of 1959. Both Spring Memory (1959), an oil on canvas, and Broken Gray, an oil and collage on Masonite, were shown, though the latter was misdated as 1958, when it was actually from 1955.⁸⁵ As when she had work on view in Japan, Krasner made no effort to travel to Turin for the opening. Had she done so, her international recognition would surely have expanded.

Krasner’s association with Tapié came from her long and close friendship with Ossorio and his companion, Ted Dragon. In February 1959, the East Hampton police apprehended Dragon while he was burglarizing a house and carrying a chair out of a second-floor bedroom window. For four years, while he was left to guard The Creeks house, Dragon had been “rescuing” antiques and art from homes and estates left vacant over the winter.⁸⁶ He never sold anything but, without Ossorio’s knowledge, stored most of his booty in their attic, telling Ossorio that he got these things from his relatives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

After he was caught, Dragon’s only explanation was that he “just loved beautiful things so much, and sometimes I was appalled at how badly the furniture was being kept.”⁸⁷ In fact Dragon restored and reupholstered some of the furniture he took, even eliciting thank-you notes from a few of the victims when they got their antiques back in better condition. Among Dragon’s targets was the art dealer Leo Castelli, whose home Ossorio and Dragon had visited together on several occasions. Instead of prison, Dragon was sent for two years to West Hill, a private sanitarium in Connecticut, where he produced needlepoint and taught the other patients ballet. While there, he received a note from Grace Hartigan, saying, “Thank God we have a Robin Hood out on Long Island.”⁸⁸

Some rejected Dragon for his criminal activity and referred to The Creeks as “the Creeps.”⁸⁹ To the contrary, Krasner loyally stood by Dragon, saying she thought his rescues were “terrific.” She enjoyed his tales of acquisition and his taste for antiques. As she began to have more disposable income, Dragon began to help her shop for antiques to redecorate. Krasner’s stance also helped to cement her relationship with Ossorio.

Dragon later commented that, except for Lee Krasner, “most of the people who passed in and out of the house weren’t interested in me in the least.”⁹⁰ Krasner instead empathized with anyone who had to play the role of spouse to a famous artist. Despite her compassion, Dragon could be critical of Krasner: “Lee knew how to manipulate. From the moment I met that woman, her mind had one channel: Art, the making of Pollock, and the making of herself.”⁹¹ Dragon recalled Krasner’s sessions of calculating who in the art world could do what she needed for her. She even spread out small papers with their names on a table to study: “It was stepping stone after stepping stone. And if they didn’t come through, the relationship ended—like opening a trap door.”