SIXTEEN

Recognition, 1965–69

Lee Krasner with her sister-in-law, Arloie McCoy; her nephew Jason McCoy; her great-nephew, Christopher Stewart; and his mother, Krasner’s niece Rena Glickman Stewart (later Rusty Kanokogi), 1965, Springs. She invited her visitors into the barn studio to see new work and asked ten-year-old Chris what he would call her latest painting. He burst out, “Combat,” and she accepted the name at once.

KRASNER MUST HAVE BEEN SURPRISED WHEN BARNETT NEW-MAN took up her cause in September 1965. He objected to a large exhibition called “New York School, First Generation: Paintings of the 1940s and 1950s,” which had been organized for the Los Angeles County Museum by its modern art curator, Maurice Tuchman, whom many came to dislike because of his repeated failure to include women or minority artists in the shows he organized.¹ Newman criticized both the use of the term “New York School” and the inclusion of Clyfford Still and Ad Reinhardt in the show. Newman argued that both men were “on record more than once as being anti–New York school…. If this show truly represents the New York school, it is surprising to find them in and to find artists missing such as [James] Brooks, [Theodoros] Stamos, [Giorgio] Cavallon, [Conrad] Marca-Relli, [Jack] Tworkov, [Alfonso] Ossorio, [Esteban] Vicente, [Fritz] Glarner, [Ludwig] Sander, etc. and the ladies Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Hedda Sterne. All were active in New York during those important years.”² Of course, Krasner would have taken exception to Newman’s categorization of “the ladies” as a separate group.

As for “New York school,” Newman declared, “This was never a movement in the conventional sense of a ‘style,’ but a collection of individual voices…. The only common ground we all had is in the creation of a new, free, plastic language.”³ For her part, Krasner insisted on individuality: “My painting is so autobiographical, if anyone can take the trouble to read it.”⁴ Along the same lines, she penned in 1965 a dismissal of “problems in aesthetic, having only to do with the outer man. But the painting I have in mind, painting in which inner & outer are inseparable, transcends technique, transcends subject and moves into the realm of the inevitable.”⁵

Given her aesthetic ideal of moving into the realm of the inevitable, Krasner relished the directness of children, who often seemed to understand her art. When, during the summer of 1965, she invited into the barn studio to see new work Christopher Stewart, her ten-year-old great-nephew, and his mother (her niece Rusty Kanokogi), she asked the boy what he would call her latest painting (70 by 161 inches). When he burst out, “Combat,” she accepted it at once.⁶ It was the last painting she finished before her first show in London opened in the fall.

To name her pictures, Krasner often preferred the intuition of children, poets, and novelists over that of dealers or critics. When Krasner’s Detroit dealer, Frank Siden, supplied her with names for the new work, all gouache on paper, that she was including in her solo show at his gallery there in 1965, she rejected almost all of them, even though his choices alluded to forms in nature. For example, Siden’s Pertaining to Fauna became her Ahab.⁷ Krasner and Pollock had named their brown poodle Ahab after Captain Ahab in Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick—the book was read by many of their abstract expressionist acquaintances.⁸ (Ahab’s mission to get even with Moby Dick, the ferocious white whale that bit off his leg, must have appealed to Krasner’s sense of tragic strife.) One of Siden’s titles that she kept was Night Creatures. However, she did reject titles like Bathsheba’s Garden, now known as Summer Play, and First Step into Eden, now known as Autumnal.⁹ Either Krasner rejected these latter two names because of their references to the Hebrew Bible and her long discomfort with the attitude toward the female in traditional Jewish culture or she just found them too pretentious.

According to Sanford Friedman, Krasner once rejected Entering Jerusalem as a title for a painting that evoked a palm. “What are you crazy?” he exclaimed. “She didn’t want anything Christian [Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday]; not that she had so much love for the Jews’ Old Testament.”¹⁰

Terry Netter remembers the time when Krasner came with Josephine Little to hear Netter preach at the Catholic church in East Hampton, then known as St. Philomena, even wearing a hat for the occasion.¹¹ When Netter decided in 1968 to leave the Jesuits and marry Therese Franzese, “the pretty sister of one of his students,” Krasner was supportive.¹² Apparently, “Therese loved her.”¹³

Despite her skepticism about organized Judaism, Krasner saw herself as Jewish. “She made a point of making everybody know she was Jewish,” Netter recalls. And she remained fascinated with the appearance of Hebrew and other exotic writing. She continued her interest in the visual form of writing systems in a painting of 1965 that she called Kufic, which is an ancient form of Arabic. Though painted on an ochre background, this large canvas continues the themes of her more hieroglyphic Little Image paintings during the late 1940s.

Krasner’s interest in the forms of letters and the looks of different languages led her to attend lectures at the Morgan Library by the art historian Meyer Schapiro about the Book of Kells, a manuscript she revered.¹⁴ In 1967, Krasner painted Uncial, a canvas named for the Latin term for the hooked medieval handwriting that she admired when she visited the Morgan Library to look at illuminated manuscripts.

Krasner’s love of illuminated books and her admiration for the poet and critic Frank O’Hara led her to accept the Museum of Modern Art’s invitation to participate in their publication In Memory of My Feelings: A Selection of Poems by Frank O’Hara, for which she produced a two-part drawing. O’Hara had written the first monograph about Pollock, which was published in 1959 by George Braziller. Krasner had been very positive about this book, preferring a poet’s impressions over those of art critics.¹⁵

On September 21, Krasner’s first ever retrospective opened at London’s Whitechapel Gallery. The organizer and gallery’s director, Bryan Robertson, had already achieved what he had wanted with Pollock seven years earlier, so he clearly chose to organize Krasner’s first retrospective with no hidden agenda. White chapel Gallery exhibited but did not collect art. From 1952 to 1968, when Robertson was in charge, he staged many other important shows, from the major American artists such as Mark Rothko and Robert Rauschenberg, to many emerging British artists, including Anthony Caro, David Hockney, and Bridget Riley.

In a brief preface for the show’s catalogue, Robertson wrote, “[Krasner’s] contribution to American painting has yet to be properly recorded or assessed: the present large exhibition represents a fraction only of the total work.”¹⁶ He also wrote, “In 1955 Lee Krasner held an exhibition of collages in New York which Clement Greenberg has described as a major addition to the American art scene of that era.”¹⁷ Robertson’s report seems likely to be accurate, because it was never repudiated by Greenberg, who notoriously wrote caustic letters denouncing material he considered false. In fact in a 1975 interview, Greenberg told Ruth Appelhof, then a graduate student, “I have always considered Lee’s best period to have been in 1955. She developed a quality of humanness, an expansiveness, which could be seen not only in her personality but in her paintings as well.”¹⁸

The catalogue also featured a much more substantial introduction by B. H. Friedman, who had earlier commissioned her mosaic murals for his company’s building: “First, it must be said that Lee Krasner is a woman—in a field which still, even now in 1965, barely tolerates women, condescends to them with the phrase ‘woman painter,’ as odious and pejorative as ‘woman writer’ or ‘woman driver.’ In her work, Lee Krasner wants to be judged—or, better, experienced—as a painter. She wants no special categories. It may even be, whether consciously or unconsciously, that this is why she took the sexually anonymous name ‘Lee.’”¹⁹

Friedman showed cultural sensitivity in noting the androgynous character of the name, which others too have remarked on. Ironically, the nickname was used, if not coined, by her classmates at the Woman’s Art School at Cooper Union and appeared in the student newspaper in the 1920s—at that time and in that place she surely had no reason to pretend to be male.

Robertson’s young assistant, Tejas Englesmith, described the show at Whitechapel as “quite beautiful” and said that he “loved Lee.”²⁰ He remembered that “the Snowdons” (Princess Margaret and her husband, the photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones, who was created Earl of Snowdon by the queen) came to see the show. Sir Kenneth Clark, whom she had met when she visited London for the Pollock show in 1961, was supposed to take her to dinner but “rang the gallery to say that he had to cancel because Lady Clark drank a bit too much.”

Englesmith recalled that Krasner said to him, “I’m free. Are you free? So let’s do something.” Krasner then changed a hundred dollars for pounds, which was “a lot of money in those days,” especially for a poorly paid assistant curator. Krasner handed him the money to take charge of and said, “Let’s have a good time.” They went to dinner and then to see the Beatles’ new film, Help!, with very good seats. For Krasner the film must have epitomized the youthful energy she felt in London, liberated from the constraints on her career that she had felt in New York. With her interest in primitive art, she must have loved the film’s scene of exotic sacrifice. The evening ended with drinks at her hotel and her giving Englesmith money and urging him to take a cab home. He accepted her invitation to stay with her in New York. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

The show attracted a good deal of attention in the British press, but it was not initially about Krasner as an artist. Instead Krasner was heralded as “the widow of probably the most important artist that America has produced, Jackson Pollock.” Krasner told one reporter: “Things have been loaded against me in New York. Here I should get a fighting chance of some unprejudiced criticism.”²¹

She exulted in the fact that she had arrived on the Queen Elizabeth, and that she was staying at the Ritz, which was a much fancier address than the apartment she then rented in New York at 70 East End Avenue. It was a remarkable contrast to the poverty she and Pollock had suffered. “In the 1930s and in New York, there were no galleries, no audience and nobody buying abstract paintings. We were pioneers. It was like trying to get up a mountain made of porcelain. There were just no finger holds.”²²

The reporter for the London Sunday Times mentioned that a good painting by Pollock “could fetch £100,000,” but that Pollock never got more than £1,000 for any of his paintings.²³ Krasner even told how she had quickly and unsuccessfully tried to resolve the Pollock estate: “I looked around for somebody to give the collection to, but nobody would take them unless I paid for the upkeep.”²⁴ When the reporter asked if it was not particularly tragic that Pollock was not around to reap the financial benefit of his work, she replied, “He had a high awareness of his own talent. The money would not have made much difference. It’s just the way things are. When somebody comes along and opens a door, you can’t expect everyone to see it. The next genius that comes along is not likely to be recognized in his own time.”²⁵ She claimed that despite the money, “she would still consider giving all her husband’s paintings away, if they were properly housed.”²⁶

However, she reflected: “I know that having them [Pollock’s paintings] means I am very rich. I can stay at the Ritz. That’s the fun thing. But I could give it up. Caring for the paintings is a lot of worry.”²⁷

When a reporter asked Krasner how the exhibition happened, she responded: “I cannot say I chose to come here, as I was invited. But had I been able to choose, this is where I would have wanted to come.”²⁸ It was a good strategy. The reporter pronounced her “an important figure in American abstract painting” and noted that “a strong independent streak runs throughout her work…. Her own talents as a painter, which are considerable as anyone who goes to the Whitechapel Gallery can see, have been overlooked.”²⁹

The London Times reviewer declared that “while participating in a general trend which places her in relation with other American abstract painters, Miss Krasner, it can be appreciated, has preserved an individuality of her own. A strong, decorative rhythm, very attractive in its expansion on a large scale, a sense of colour, sometimes employed with a deliberate restraint but on occasion rich and intricate and a capacity for bold design, exemplified in a number of collages, are the qualities that appear.”³⁰ Writing in the Observer, Nigel Gosling declared, “I doubt whether anybody would guess from the paintings that they are by a woman. On the other hand, they are unmistakably American. The free, confident handling, the relaxed bigness of scale, and the driving vigour which runs through the largest composition like sap, are enviable birthmarks of her time and place.”³¹

John Russell, in the Sunday Times, pronounced the show “exhilarating.”³² Sheldon Williams, writing for the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune, declared Krasner “a prime mover in the abstract-expressionist revolution that fired the first shot in the battle to put U.S. modern artists into the front line of world appreciation.”³³ At least three of Krasner’s London reviewers saw the influence of Mark Tobey on her work, especially the last of her Little Images. This was an inaccurate judgment based on the journalists’ greater and earlier familiarity with Tobey’s work from his living, teaching, and exhibiting in England.³⁴ Norbert Lynton, writing in Art International, made the boldest claim by stating that “Tobey’s influence appears to have been disastrous and dominates her work round about 1948–9.” Nevertheless, Lynton still viewed Krasner as “a considerable and enjoyable follower, synthesizer, adapter and recreator of elements that have been presented by others. This is more than I should say of a great many artists who are more widely admired than she.”³⁵ Despite such quibbles, most of the press was very positive, and Krasner was no doubt quite pleased.

When asked by Andrew Forge about the stylistic break from brown earth tones, which she had painted under artificial light, to the bold forms and bright colors in her recent work, Krasner admitted, “It used to frighten me, you know, work and then this break would happen and I would have to be the first to deal with the break and accept it.” She then commented that her show at Whitechapel was “the first opportunity I have to see a period of work from about ’46 and the rewarding thing to see for me is that the break isn’t quite so violent as it seems at the time it’s taking place, and in that sense I think every painter should have an opportunity to put up a ten-year period of work some place so that the painter can see what’s taking place.”³⁶

Included in the Whitechapel show was Right Bird Left, a canvas of 1965, painted in bright rich colors with biomorphic shapes repeated across the wide canvas. It is possible to see what could be a bird form, however abstract, on the left side of the painting. The title is noteworthy, though it is not known whether Krasner chose it herself or accepted a suggestion from one of her friends. This is the only painting in which she alludes to her difficulty in telling right from left.

During the festivities in London, Krasner did not see David Gibbs, who had been so central to her first London visit in 1961. The very week her show was opening in London, Gibbs, at age forty-three, had divorced his wife and was in New York marrying Geraldine Stutz, forty-one, described as “a 5'6", 110-pound, perfect size 6.” She was president of Henri Bendel, the chic Manhattan shop. The wedding notice identified him as an “abstract painter.”³⁷

Before Gibbs’s marriage to Stutz ended in 1976, New York featured them as a couple, stating, “Her elegant and erudite English husband discarded his lucrative career as a London art dealer when he decided he wanted to paint.”³⁸ His decision was no doubt helped by Stutz’s success, which was so great that she eventually bought Henri Bendel for a reputed eight million dollars.

Gibbs’s actions may have affected Lee’s work over the next year, 1966. Much is discernible from the titles of her paintings then—Memory of Love, Courtship, and Siren. Siren refers to the female Sirens in Homer’s Odyssey who promise to sing of all history and nature to seafarers passing by their island. However, those who approach the Sirens die at their feet. Another title besides Siren was Gaea (“Earth”), which recalls another layered myth: primordial Earth gave virgin birth to Sky (Uranos), who promptly cohabited with his mother to produce offspring called Titans. When Sky blocked his mother, Gaea, from giving birth to monsters, she conspired with their son, Kronos, who castrated his father. The painting’s agitated biomorphic forms in bright magenta suggested the violence of the title.

Krasner defended her nomenclature, stating, “I wouldn’t call it monstrous or underworld. You use the word monstrous as though it were relegated to a realm other than man. I would call it basic, insofar as I am drawing from sources that are basic.”³⁹ Krasner herself named Courtship, which was most likely an allusion to David Gibbs. To Krasner, Gibbs was “a charming cad,” in the words of her friend the art dealer Nancy Schwartz.⁴⁰ Yet Krasner had not lost out. Gibbs had given Krasner what she wanted—access to an international market for Pollock’s work and a chance for her to exhibit in Europe—and she remained on friendly terms with him, even inviting him and his new wife to her events.

News of Krasner’s success prompted her old beau Igor Pantuhoff to write to her in the late spring of 1965: “I want to congratulate you for making a jerk out of Peggy…. Good for you! Igor.”⁴¹ He alluded to press reports that Krasner had prevailed against Guggenheim’s lawsuit claiming that she contractually owned more of the works in the Pollock estate from the years 1946 and 1947. Guggenheim had been forced to drop her claim for damages of more than $122,000, “retract all charges of wrongdoing on the part of the defendant,” and settle for only two small works by Pollock then said to be worth only $400.⁴² It has been said that Guggenheim lost her case because of a sentence she wrote in her book Confessions of an Art Addict, describing the unsold pictures in the aftermath of Pollock’s first show with Parsons: “All the rest were sent to me, according to the contract, at Venice, where I had gone to live.”⁴³

Krasner had won out over Guggenheim in another sense—here was Krasner’s revenge against someone who had asked Pollock, “Who is this L.K.? I didn’t come to see work by LK,” at his studio in New York. Now Krasner was having a retrospective in London, where Guggenheim had opened her first art gallery.

By January 1966, Krasner was again thinking about getting an apartment in the city and had taken a room at the Elysée Hotel.⁴⁴ By the summer, she was back in Springs, where she was the most prominent of six artists featured in a show at East Hampton’s Guild Hall called “Artists of the Region.”⁴⁵ The East Hampton Star wrote effusively that her Whitechapel Gallery show had been chosen by the British Arts Council to tour museums of the British Isles, then the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

That same summer, Francis V. O’Connor, a thirty-year-old art historian, visited Krasner after sending her his recently completed doctoral dissertation on Jackson Pollock. She arranged for Alfonso Ossorio to pick up O’Connor at the East Hampton train station. O’Connor learned from Ossorio that Krasner had asked him to read the dissertation aloud to her and that the two of them had wept at learning so much about Pollock’s young life.⁴⁶ The dissertation research became the basis of O’Connor’s work in the catalogue of the 1967 Pollock show at the Museum of Modern Art.

In 1967 Krasner moved to 180 East Seventy-ninth Street, a building with a twenty-four-hour doorman. She took a spacious apartment with a large master bedroom that she used as her studio, because, as she said, “the light is magnificent.”⁴⁷ She slept in the smaller bedroom and used the tiny maid’s room off the kitchen for guests. This arrangement was ideal for someone who lived alone and had wanted to have twenty-four-hour access to her studio, enabling her to go in at night if her insomnia returned. She rented secure storage for her paintings just one block away. The apartment studio, though atypical, fit her need to feel safe and complemented her use of the barn studio in Springs for the summers.

In February 1967, a solo show of twenty paintings by Krasner opened as the first show ever at the University of Alabama’s new Garland Hall Gallery. Donald McKinney of Marlborough-Gerson Gallery accompanied her to Tuscaloosa for the week.⁴⁸ Though she did not lecture, she did visit several art classes, spoke informally with students, and was the sole juror of a student art show. She spoke to a reporter there about how she had “succeeded in combining my career with the role of wife. It can certainly be done,” she explained, “if a woman wants to work hard enough.”⁴⁹ She insisted: “There is absolutely no truth in the rumor that our painting interests clashed; he offered me a lot of encouragement about my paintings.”⁵⁰

Krasner sounded more like a feminist with a female reporter at the University News Bureau. “It can never be said that painting is a man’s field; traditionally women have not produced great art, but this is because of social views rather than any in-born ability. A woman must face prejudice in this field, and must be perhaps one and a half times as good as her male counterpart to gain recognition.”⁵¹ Theodore Klitze, the head of the university’s art department, told Krasner about a new cooperative of African American women who made remarkable patchwork quilts. She insisted that she and McKinney visit these women in Gee’s Bend, the small town where they worked. Krasner was deeply moved by the work and arranged to purchase some of the quilts, encouraging the women by her comments and actions.

She later recalled the experience: “Finally, we arrived at someone’s house and went in. I shall never forget it. We went into this room where there was a stretcher [quilt frame] the full space of the room. The women were seated against the walls of the room, working on a quilt. It was quite a sight to behold: to have the door opened and to be confronted with I don’t know how many women sitting around and working on this quilt…. I was very taken with what I had seen. I asked about this and that and ordered three quilts…. Gee’s Bend is very implanted in my mind.”⁵²

Back in New York, the second Pollock retrospective opened on April 5, 1967, at the Museum of Modern Art, and Krasner was interviewed extensively about it. The show caught the attention of critics, the general public, and many prominent contemporary artists, among them Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Jasper Johns, and Richard Lindner, who were moved to praise Pollock’s work.⁵³ The art historian William Rubin (who later became the museum’s director of painting and sculpture) also began publishing his serial essay on Pollock and European modernism in Artforum. Clement Greenberg joined the outpouring with an article in Vogue, in which he wrote that Pollock “saw more in art and knew more of it than almost anybody (with the exception of his wife, the painter Lenore Krasner) who talked to him about it.”⁵⁴

Harold Rosenberg weighed in on the show with an essay, “The Mythic Act,” in The New Yorker in which he referred to Krasner, but not by name: “Pollock’s wife quotes him as saying in reply to an observation about working from nature, ‘I am Nature.’” Rosenberg then conflated Krasner’s intellect with Pollock’s, claiming that Rimbaud was among his favorite reading and, again without identifying her, noted “a quotation from (if my memory is correct) A Season in Hell appeared in large letters on the wall of his wife’s studio in the early forties.”⁵⁵

Despite her irritation at Rosenberg’s repeated attempts to obscure her identity as an artist, she was no doubt pleased to see the attention he paid Pollock. Krasner’s continuing success in promoting Pollock’s work was satisfying to her. Her dedication to taking care of him both in life and after his death was indicative of both the love she felt for him and of the awe and respect that she had for his art. Painful memories of Pollock’s affair with a younger woman and Krasner’s failed relationship with David Gibbs seem to have convinced her neither to seek nor to accept any more attention from heterosexual men. She must have realized that she had lost her previous asset of a fabulous figure and that her facial features matched nobody’s idea of beauty. Despite her abundant humor and her quick wit (which often threatened men of her generation), it seems she decided that she no longer wanted to compete with younger women.

In one sense, Krasner could not focus on another heterosexual man, for she remained “Mrs. Jackson Pollock.” Her devotion to Pollock in their married life continued, even though he was dead. In fact she could work more efficiently to promote his work because she no longer had to deal with his dysfunctional behavior. When she traveled to the West Coast opening of the Museum of Modern Art’s Pollock retrospective, the Los Angeles Times featured her as “The Artist Leading a Double Life.” She told the female reporter that she was preparing for a spring show in New York City, “which is why I can’t stay in Los Angeles. I have to return home to paint pictures,”⁵⁶ adding with regard to the constant demands about Pollock’s work: “Nonetheless, I’ve learned to deal with it, even though it means being separated from my own work at times. Being Lee Krasner Pollock is a full-time job.”⁵⁷

Instead of vying to attract straight men, Krasner was drawn to openly gay men or to one, like Terry Netter, who was a Catholic priest when they first met, which precluded any sexual issues. She cultivated gay male friends. They satisfied her interest in handsome, often younger men, and could be bright, attentive, unthreatening, and loyal, sometimes serving, in Donald McKinney’s account of his role, as “her walker.”⁵⁸ Those to whom she was closest included McKinney, John Bernard Myers, Bill Lieberman, Richard Howard, Sanford Friedman, Bryan Robertson, Alfonso Ossorio, Ted Dragon, and Edward Albee.

William Slattery Lieberman, known as “Bill,” began at the Modern in 1945 as assistant to its founding director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. After a thirty-five-year curatorial career at the Modern, he left to direct twentieth-century art in a new wing at the Metropolitan, where the director, Philippe de Montebello, praised “his absolute professionalism and his ability to attract the best, together with the immense esteem and affection in which he’s held here.”⁵⁹

Lieberman, a self-described workaholic and a gay man identified in public as “single,” admitted that he considered the constant dinner parties he attended to be an important part of his job. Among the substantial donations for the Metropolitan Museum that he successfully wooed was a gift of forty drawings by Jackson Pollock, given by Krasner.⁶⁰

It is often written that Krasner did not get along with other women and especially with other women artists, including the painter Grace Hartigan, whose friendship survived decades, back to the time she showed up with Harry Jackson to visit the Pollocks. In the fall of 1979, Hartigan wrote to Krasner, thanking her for writing and asking if she could come down to speak with her graduate students at the Maryland Institute College of Art the following January. She offered to adjust her schedule to suit her old friend. Offered a modest honorarium of $300 plus expenses, Krasner, who never gave formal lectures, accepted the invitation and asked Hartigan to show the film made about her by Barbara Rose and then schedule an informal discussion for her with the students afterward.⁶¹

Additionally Krasner often wrote affectionately to “Buddha,” her close friend, the designer Ray Kaiser Eames, whom she continued to see whenever they were both in New York.⁶² Krasner’s other friendships with women artists at this period ranged from her contemporary Perle Fine to the younger Nancy Graves.

On August 30, 1967, Krasner’s friend Ad Reinhardt died of a heart attack. She held a wake for him at her home, and he was buried in the same Springs cemetery as Pollock. Krasner had known Reinhardt while on the WPA and as a fellow member of American Abstract Artists. She no doubt appreciated that in 1946 Reinhardt, when illustrating for P.M., included her on a “tree” of artists in one of his cartoons in his now famous “How to Look at Art” series. This was especially important because it took place when so many other men in the art world found it more convenient to ignore her painting and treat her as Pollock’s wife.

This problem continued for decades after she became a widow. In a review of a show at the Jewish Museum called “Large Scale American Paintings,” Harold Rosenberg referred to her in terms of Pollock: “At the Jewish Museum, panoramic abstraction is represented by Lee Krasner, Pollock’s widow, by Milton Resnick, and, in a restricted sense, by the pencil-marked canvas of Cy Twombley…. The replacement of action by activity, or process, also manifest in Miss Krasner’s ‘Combat,’ marks the passage from Action Painting to ‘environmental’ art.”⁶³ Nearly two years earlier, writing in Esquire, Rosenberg had lambasted the role of the artist’s widow in general for controlling prices and sabotaging shows and publications. He noted in particular that “Mrs. Jackson Pollock, besides being a painter in her own right, is often credited with having almost singlehandedly forced up prices for contemporary American abstract art after the death of her husband.”⁶⁴

Eventually Krasner began to publicly protest her situation. “I was put together with the wives, and when Rosenberg wrote his article [“The Art Establishment” in Esquire in January 1965] many years ago…the widow has become the most powerful influence…[or at least the most] powerful something in the art world. To date, a lot of the widows are acting it out. [Rosenberg] never acknowledged me as a painter, but as a widow, I was acknowledged. And, in fact, whenever he mentioned me at all following Pollock’s death, he would always say Lee Krasner, widow of Jackson Pollock, as if I needed that handle.”⁶⁵

As she was facing her sixtieth year, Krasner expressed her continuing openness to the new and unexpected: “Some things in time do clarify themselves. You do have an individual who, you know, appears on the horizon, and opens a door, wide; we all live on it, for a long time to come, ’till the next one (individual) arrives, and opens another door. In that sense, with regard to the young painter, whoever she or he may be, it’s inevitable that something will come along.”⁶⁶ Krasner made clear however that no one had yet appeared to displace for her the two greatest influences on her work—Matisse and Pollock.

Krasner finally arranged to have Lloyd’s New York gallery represent her. In March 1968, her first solo show at Marlborough-Gerson Gallery garnered significant articles. Artforum published Emily Wasserman’s “Lee Krasner in Mid-Career” Art News brought out Lawrence Campbell’s “Of Lilith and Lettuce” and Grace Glueck wrote a feature for the New York Times. The cover of Artforum for March 1968 featured Krasner’s canvas Pollination, about which she once commented, “I can remember walking across vacant lots, on my way to school and my enchantment at seeing and picking clover, buttercups, and dandelions. I’m sure that this memory among other things is in Pollination…. Yellow has always been a difficult color for me.”⁶⁷

Emily Wasserman insightfully acknowledged the albatross in Krasner’s connection to Pollock. “That Lee Krasner was the wife of Jackson Pollock has been at once the greatest single advantage and the greatest handicap to her career as an independent painter: an advantage, because the experience of living and working intimately with Pollock served as a crucial catalyst to her own work—a disadvantage, especially since his death in 1956, because in one sense, she has had to labor against her relationship to Pollock.”⁶⁸

Campbell took the title for his article in part from Krasner’s statement in the catalogue of her Whitechapel retrospective: “Painting, for me, when it really ‘happens’ is as miraculous as, say, a lettuce leaf. By ‘happens,’ I mean the painting in which the inner aspect of man and his outer aspect interlock.”⁶⁹ Evidently mindful that Lee Krasner was Jewish, Campbell added the reference to Lilith, a night demon in Jewish lore, appearing in the Bible as a screech owl or “night monster” (Isaiah 34:14). Campbell wrote, “The daimons are there, and also Lilith who, it will be recalled, chose to leave Eden of her own free will.”⁷⁰

Around the time of Campbell’s article, feminists had taken up an interest in Lilith, as she appeared in an anonymous medieval text, “The Alphabet of Ben Sira,” which describes her as Adam’s first wife. After Adam rejected her demand for equality in sexual positions, she deserted him and went on to mate and procreate with demons.⁷¹ The parallels between this fable and Krasner’s life are uncanny—Campbell could have very well been referencing Krasner’s intimate relationship with Pollock before he left her to have sex with “demons.”

Campbell was clearly on Krasner’s side when he concluded: “It is not always realized by those who see her work today that she was already a formed painter when she met Pollock and that her work remained quite independent of his through much of their married life. Her influence on him, however, seems to have been important…. Lee Krasner is a strong woman. She sails bravely into the teeth of whatever gale is blowing, and the handsome paintings in this current show demonstrate her continued strength and vitality.”⁷²

For the New York Times, the caption to Grace Glueck’s piece read “And Mr. Kenneth Does Her Hair,” in the slightly condescending manner that too often characterized Glueck’s observations about women artists in the early years of the second wave of the feminist movement.⁷³ Glueck quoted Krasner as saying, “I’m bad fashion, but I think there are signs that the tastemakers’ rule in the art world is breaking up. Maybe my work will be visible again.”

When Glueck interviewed Krasner for the article, it’s clear she asked her about Campbell’s interpretation of the Lilith myth in relation to Krasner. “‘Lilith!’ [Krasner] snorts, objecting to a current characterization of her by a leading art magazine. ‘I want you to know that this Lilith’s furs are by Ritter Brothers and Mr. Kenneth does her hair.’” Lee’s hairstyle, cut with Mamie Eisenhower bangs, was visible in an accompanying photograph. The caption and the article’s placement typified a long tradition at the Times of reducing women artists to fashion.

Among the other large canvases in the Marlborough show were Kufic (1965), Siren (1966), Gaea (1966), Jungle Lattice (1967), Uncial (1967), The Green Fuse (1968), Towards One (1967). As a result, the installation was quite colorful. Yet Glueck dismissed the work as “very superficial,” with the exception of Kufic, described as the “one notable painting” with its “improvised shapes (with a distinct echo of Matisse)…drawn in ocher against the brownish raw canvas surface. No other color obtrudes; no forms are filled in; the close-valued resonance of the ocher drawing and the brown canvas carries the entire picture.”⁷⁴

Other reviews were more positive. In The Nation, Max Kozloff quibbled and criticized Krasner’s earlier work from 1962 but concluded that “the burgeoning of a mature artist has resulted in an incredibly bright and calamitous vision as well.”⁷⁵ Cindy Nemser wrote for Arts Magazine, “Between 1963 and 1968, the basic elements of Lee Krasner’s paintings have burst their original tight bounds, and they are now boldly headed beyond the confines of the canvas.”⁷⁶

While she commanded attention in the city, Krasner continued to show in East Hampton. She participated with a large group of artists who joined in a group show at Ashawagh Hall in Springs in August 1968, along with such friends as Perle Fine, Esteban Vicente, Ibram Lassaw, John Little, James Brooks, Tino Nivola, Alfonso Ossorio, and her nephew Ronald Stein. This was the first annual exhibition of what would become a series called “Artists of the Springs.”

A year later Krasner participated in a panel discussion on the topic “Is American Art Chauvinistic?” at Guild Hall on August 24, 1969, along with Adolph Gottlieb, Jimmy Ernst, John Little, Warren Brandt, and Hedda Sterne. Harold Rosenberg was the moderator. Krasner had never even approved of the category “American art”—she found it too nationalistic—so it is not surprising that she applauded the efforts of those who playfully demonstrated outside Guild Hall as the speakers and the audience arrived. As for the demonstrators, they questioned whether a discussion of the supposed superior attitude of American art was even worth having in a time when they opposed the Vietnam War. By demonstrating, they emulated the student radicals of the era.

One of the ringleaders, the sculptor Bill King, poked fun at the panel. “It was such an idiotic subject and panels are a blight! [The pacifist writer] Dwight and Gloria [Mcdonald], my wife, Annie, and I got all dressed up. I wore my Greek silk suit and the girls wore evening gowns. I went to Dreesen’s and got a whole bologna and a knife. Then I printed up paper napkins in red that said, ‘This is the real boloney.’ So we stood outside Guild Hall and, as the people were filing in, we’d put the bologna on a napkin and hand it to them, saying ‘This is just a sample of what you’re gonna get inside, folks.’”⁷⁷

As expected, people laughed at their protest, but King noted with surprise, “Lee Krasner ate hers like a real [trouper].”⁷⁸ King was unaware either that Krasner had a history of demonstrating during her formative years or that she bristled at the notion of “American art.” To him, she seemed like a forbidding widow of a powerful artist.⁷⁹

That same summer of 1969, Krasner needed a poster for an upcoming show in San Francisco. She asked Mark Patiky, the younger brother of Frances Stein, to come out to Springs and take her photograph. Already experienced in the world of fashion and advertising, Patiky, then just twenty-five, looked around for places for take the photograph. When Krasner took him out to the studio, he photographed her. Then she commented that she felt like painting, and he asked to photograph her as she worked. She readily agreed, and he captured her painting what became Portrait in Green.⁸⁰

Patiky watched as Krasner became very focused, standing back some fifteen feet with her arms folded, then running up and making “these slashing strokes,” a very active process. She worked on unstretched canvas tacked to the studio wall. As he watched her attack the canvas, he kept shooting until she said, “It’s finished.”

“How can you tell?” he asked.

“I know,” she said, though he says that she reworked it a couple of years later.⁸¹

When Krasner’s show of works on paper traveled from New York to Reese Palley Gallery in San Francisco, the local critic, Alfred Frankenstein, observed that her work resembled Pollock’s, “but it has such force, richness, and individuality as to set one wondering just who, in this instance, influenced whom.” The poster featured Mark Patiky’s photograph of her.

Krasner told Patiky that he was the first person to photograph her in the process of painting. He stayed for the weekend and enjoyed the dinner Krasner made, especially the fettucini with fresh dill and cottage cheese, and the chocolate nut sundae for dessert.

What Patiky observed was Krasner’s avowed preference for having her canvas “within my physical scope including jumping up to hit the top of the canvas”: “What I don’t want to do is get up on a ladder and hit the top. I want it to be within my body experience. I don’t want assistants working for me. I don’t experience it that way. I want to be in contact with my body and the work.”⁸²

Krasner had another New York solo show at Marlborough in October 1969. John Gruen reviewed the work, praising her series of small abstract gouaches as echoing her monumental oils, “but whose reduced scale produces a singular delicacy of design. There is all manner of invention and all manner of sensitivity at work here.”⁸³ The reviewer for Art News was less clear, writing that “each work is its own adventure.”⁸⁴

The following month Krasner’s show of works on paper traveled from New York to Reese Palley Gallery in San Francisco, advertised there by a poster with Patiky’s photograph of her. The local critic, Alfred Frankenstein, opined, “Her work strongly resembles Pollock’s, but it has such force, richness and individuality as to set one wondering just who, in this instance, influenced whom.”⁸⁵