SEVENTEEN

The Feminist Decade, 1970–79

Gail Levin, then curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, with Lee Krasner, Springs, summer 1977.

THE POSITIVE RECEPTION IN LONDON FOR KRASNER’S 1965 RETROSPECTIVE at the Whitechapel Gallery led Barbara Rose to complain in 1972, “It remains, however, for America to acknowledge that Lee Krasner’s works share the same esthetic, the same content, the same history and are the same quality as those of her male colleagues, the ‘first generation’ New York painters.¹

“Perhaps because these painters called themselves ‘heroic,’ and because we as a people are slower to honor our heroines than our heroes, this recognition has been unnecessarily delayed. But, throughout our history, we have had brave, self-reliant American women who struck out on unknown paths. Lee Krasner is one of them.”²

Krasner was outspoken about the discrimination she experienced as an artist. Though she hadn’t been discriminated against at the Woman’s Art School at Cooper Union and on the WPA, once “the scene moves from Paris, which was the center, and shifts to New York” problems became apparent. Krasner attributed these problems to “a group of Surrealists who treated their women like well-groomed poodles and then the abstract expressionists—where we now have galleries, prices, money, attention. Up to then it’s a pretty quiet scene. That’s when I am first aware of being a woman and a situation is there.”³ That she had been insulted at the National Academy of Design, where as a female she was forbidden to paint a fish still life in the basement, now seemed less significant.

Krasner’s deeply held beliefs led her to reject the work of many artists in the feminist movement. During the second half of the 1950s, Krasner met the artists Miriam Schapiro and her husband, Paul Brach, who had purchased a barn in East Hampton as their summer home. Both Schapiro and Brach were then working in an abstract expressionist style. Later Schapiro moved to California, following her husband’s new job as dean in the new California Institute of the Arts, funded by the Walt Disney Company. There Schapiro got to know another artist, Judy Chicago, who was sixteen years younger than Schapiro and who pioneered new ways of educating women as artists.

The two worked together to move Chicago’s innovative education plan for women artists from California State College at Fresno to Cal Arts in Valencia, where it became known as the Feminist Art Program. During the fall of 1971, they took over an abandoned house in Los Angeles. With the help of their students, they produced Womanhouse (1972), a temporary installation and performance space that examined the role of women and creativity in the setting of a house. These two feminist art pioneers were among those featured in the spring of 1972 at the Corcoran Conference for Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.⁴

Lee Krasner’s absence from the conference was notable. When asked about women “banding together, forming an old-girl network,” she demurred, “I wouldn’t become a part of that. I’m an artist not a woman artist. The pendulum is swinging to the other side. It comes a little late for me.”⁵

The feminist art that Chicago and Schapiro made was anathema to some women, among them Krasner. She recognized the need for a feminist movement, but she had no affinity for feminist art, or anything with labels for that matter. In 1972 she commented to Barbara Rose: “I don’t suppose I know what’s meant by ‘feminine’ subject matter, any more than I understand, what’s meant by ‘masculine’ subject matter. I’m sympathetic to the women’s movement, but I could never support anything called ‘American art.’”⁶ On another occasion she declared, “When I see those big labels, ‘American,’ I know someone is selling something. I get very uncomfortable with any kind of chauvinism—male, French or American.”⁷ The link that Krasner felt between chauvinism and nationalism began when as a girl she first became aware that not everyone could qualify as “American,” certainly not recent immigrants. Fanatical patriotism and the prejudiced belief in the superiority of one group over another often excluded Jews and the newly arrived. In 1929, some critics had protested that artists such as Max Weber, Jules Pascin, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi should not have been considered American for inclusion in the MoMA show “Nineteen Living Americans.” Rose published in 1972 a Vogue article, “American Great: Lee Krasner.” Beneath the title she quoted Krasner: “I’m an artist—not a ‘woman artist’ not an ‘American artist.’”⁸

Some of Krasner’s hesitation about categorizing art came from her own struggles to deal simultaneously with both anti-Semitism and antifemale prejudice. In a 1972 interview, Krasner pointed out that an article (in Art in America from August 1965) about the abstract expressionist movement included only four women—Marisol, Hedda Sterne, Alice Mason, and Louise Nevelson—out of seventy-three artists. The article had appeared the very same year as Krasner’s first retrospective—in London, not New York. When asked who else might have been named, Krasner immediately reeled off “female artists dating possibly from late 1935 to the mid-1940s that I was aware of: Loren MacIver, I. Rice Pereira, Louise Bourgeois, Jeanne Reynal, Anne Ryan, Sonia Sekula, Louise Nevelson, Alice Mason, Peter (Gertrude) Greene, [Suzy] Frelinghuysen, Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning, [Maria Helena] Vieira de Silva, Barbara Hepworth, and lastly but hardly least, Miss Georgia O’Keeffe.” She allowed that “when you restrict it to abstract expressionism, some of the names would have to be removed.”⁹

Despite her uneasiness about feminist art, Krasner benefited enormously from the feminist movement, and she embraced it without accepting the art that carried the name. “I’m glad I’m alive, now that women’s lib has brought a new consciousness,” Lee Krasner admitted to an interviewer in 1973. “Thank you, women’s lib. In that sense, [life now] is better than forty plus.”¹⁰

In 1980 she reiterated to another journalist, “Women’s liberation helped me enormously—if they have to have someone, I’m not so bad as an artist—and I’ve benefited from the opportunity.”¹¹

Later Cindy Nemser interviewed Krasner and wrote several articles about her work, including one for Artforum. Commenting from the perspective of a woman artist, Krasner noted, “It’s too bad that women’s liberation didn’t occur thirty years earlier in my life. It would have been of enormous assistance at that time.”¹²

 

DURING THE 1970S, THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT ENCOURAGED FEMALE critics, curators, and historians to focus on the achievements of women artists, and Krasner welcomed the increasing attention. She had once been reluctant, but now she joined calls on art museums to show more women, and she accepted many requests to lend work to all-female exhibitions and to make personal appearances. On April 14, 1972, Krasner joined demonstrators organized by Women in the Arts to dramatize “inequities against women pervading galleries, universities, and museums.”¹³ The group of some three hundred demanded an exhibition of women artists chosen by their own membership that would take place simultaneously at the Brooklyn, Metropolitan, Whitney, Modern, and Guggenheim museums. Among the other demonstrators who are now well known were Louise Bourgeois and Chryssa. Another demonstrator, the feminist critic Cindy Nemser, spoke to Grace Glueck, who was covering the event for the New York Times: “The demonstration also has to do with the corrupt and decadent structure of the art world. Women are leading the way to a new art world that is open and inclusive. We want a diversity of styles, not just fashion shows of this year’s trends.”¹⁴ Glueck reported that the demonstrators wore signs with statements such as MOMA PREFERS PAPA and SIGMUND, THIS IS WHAT WE WANT, AN END TO DISCRIMINATION.

The demonstrators at MoMA handed out pink leaflets that detailed discriminatory practices by museums and galleries. One claim was that MoMA had held one thousand one-artist shows in forty-three years, but only five times had the artist been a woman. Another charge was “that in ten leading New York galleries, 94.6 percent of the artists represented were men.” According to the New York Times, MoMA countered by claiming that it “had staged only 293 one-artist shows since 1929 and twenty-seven, or approximately 9 percent, were devoted to women artists.” The museum admitted that in the painting and sculpture department’s permanent collection, women represented “slightly less than 10 percent.”¹⁵ The percentages were still very low, so it’s difficult to know why the museum bothered to quibble.

Later on the Museum of Modern Art tried to play catchup and organized a show of new acquisitions of drawings in the summer of 1977 called “Extraordinary Women,” which included Krasner along with such historical artists as Hannah Höch, Sonia Delaunay, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Natalia Goncharova, and Suzanne Valadon.¹⁶ The following fall Krasner reflected that “the Modern was like a feeding machine. You attack it for everything, but finally it’s the source you have to make peace with. There are always problems between artists and an institution. Maybe that’s healthy. You need the dichotomy—artist/museum, individual/society—for the individual to be able to breathe.”¹⁷

Krasner saw both the positive and the negative aspects of the local community in East Hampton. She had not forgiven Harold Rosenberg’s support for de Kooning instead of Pollock, yet she was not that angry, because when asked in 1972 if she still saw her old friends, she answered, “Not too many of them are alive. I see Giorgio Cavallon, whom I’ve known since the academy and Pat and Clyfford Still when they visit New York. When I’m in Springs, sometimes I see Gottlieb or de Kooning, although not often, and Harold and May Rosenberg.”¹⁸ From the Hofmann School days, she could have also named Ray Kaiser and John Little, two friends with whom she stayed in touch.

Though she was genuinely grateful for Clement Greenberg’s early support of Pollock’s work, she was clear that his chauvinism bothered her. “Greenberg is very hung up on the subject of women, but he wasn’t alone, his whole generation…. In my opinion, [Harold] Rosenberg as well as Greenberg, as well as most of my fellow artists.”¹⁹ She qualified this point by conceding, “Well, it wasn’t just Greenberg and Rosenberg…. Galleries were very uncomfortable with a woman in the art world. That would go for museums. To date, look at the record of the Museum of Modern Art with regard to showing women. They don’t. Or the Guggenheim. So like, that’s New York, the center of it all, where all the pow-wow goes on, and once you leave New York, it gets worse, not better.”²⁰

Krasner continued to say negative things about the chauvinist attitudes of some of her male contemporaries, especially Newman and de Kooning. De Kooning painted a series of abstract women with violent, expressionist brushstrokes that many saw as misogynistic and Krasner rejected “them one hundred percent; I find them offensive in every possible sense; they offend every aspect of me as a woman, as a female…. It’s the hatred and hostility toward the female.”²¹ She went on to say: “And as for de Kooning, I think his problem with women is so complex and difficult that we nod to each other, we say hello and good-bye after about forty-five years, but that’s our full contact.”²²

Simultaneously Krasner attacked de Kooning’s aggressive images of women, maintained her antipathy toward feminist art, and voiced her sympathy with, and need for, the feminist movement.

Among the all-women shows Krasner participated in was “Woman as a Creator,” held in early 1973 at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks as part of the 4th Annual Writer’s Conference. The conference’s theme for the year was “Women in the Arts.” Among the conference speakers were the novelist, critic, and memoirist Mary McCarthy, the poets Gwendolyn Brooks, Carolyn Kizer, and Diane Wakoski, and the playwright Myrna Lamb. Krasner’s work was featured together with fourteen artists, including Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, Diane Arbus, and Jeanne Reynal.²³

Although Krasner did not travel to North Dakota, Judy Chicago did go and spoke during the group show. She recorded in her journal that she found the women to be passive, repressed, apathetic, isolated, and ignorant.²⁴ Perhaps Krasner would have been more understanding, but by early 1973, she was busy preparing for her next solo show on West Fifty-seventh Street at Marlborough.

Regardless, the North Dakota show was well reviewed in the college newspaper. “It’s hard to keep politics out of art when an exhibition is arranged around a political motif like blackness, or femaleness. These artists were chosen because of their art and incidentally, since it was the nature of this conference, because they were women,” wrote Jackie MacElroy in the campus newspaper, the Dakota Student. She was impressed that Krasner had “favored the University Art Gallery by sending three works, two of which are commonly reproduced and indeed are among her best canvases,” noting that Krasner “was and remains an abstract-expressionist and successful despite the odds. There are many things in the Gallery which represent a more innovative approach than Krasner’s work but few if any exceed the sureness and fluidity of her mature style.”²⁵

For Krasner’s next show at Marlborough, she showed twelve paintings from the last two years, all monumental in size, including Palingenesis (1971), Majuscule (1971), and Rising Green (1972). The show opened on April 21 to rave reviews. In the New York Times, Hilton Kramer pronounced that the show was “by far the finest exhibition of Miss Krasner’s work I have seen. Something of the sweep and the rhythm of her former expressionist style has been retained—in the bolder, flatter, hard-edged forms of the new paintings, which are lyrical celebrations of color. There is a good deal of late Matisse in these new paintings, and a happy influence it proves to be, prompting the artist to a great boldness of design and a more eloquent simplicity of form.”²⁶

Barbara Rose also applauded Krasner, writing, “In her newest paintings, however, she seems to have come to what used to be termed a ‘breakthrough’ in terms of arriving at uniquely personal statements. And significantly enough this departure from her past works has been in the direction of pure color…. It took nearly twenty years to realize the direction the collage paintings pointed to.”²⁷

At Guild Hall again in the summer of 1973, Krasner took part in a show called “Twenty-One Over Sixty.” She was sixty-four. She had suggested the idea, but by the time the show took place, she was regretful: “Now I wish I never got the idea to begin with. It’s just that one gets a little bored with the American youth image. It’s suburbia and Hollywood all in one. It started in the ’60s, which I call the Sterile ’60s. If you haven’t had a major show by the time you’re thirty-five, you’re nothing.”²⁸ Other artists in the show included current and past friends: Perle Fine, Ilya Bolotowsky, James Brooks, Costantino Nivola, Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Ibram Lassaw, and Esteban Vicente.

Krasner refused to allow her age to be printed in catalogues, and she once told a journalist, “Call me sixty plus.” Age was very important for an artist’s success in America. “If you’re an artist, you have to have a lot of mileage. You have to do a lot of painting. You can’t get by with a youth image. In Europe, artists live to be eighty or ninety. In this country, we kill them off younger.”²⁹

Krasner, a heavy smoker and a drinker, as was common in her generation, took no responsibility for her own health.

That summer the artist Hermine Freed videotaped Krasner in the Springs house for her “Herstory” project, which raised a number of topics, including stereotypes and inequity that women artists still had to endure. Krasner fiercely attacked her old friend and patron B. H. Friedman—she said she disliked his biography of Pollock because of “his Gucci-Pucci attitude towards life,” “his warped idea” of masculinity, and asked, “What chance do I have to get an objective view?” Angry at Friedman’s depictions of both herself and Pollock, Krasner rails on the video at Friedman’s inherited wealth. Her remark about his idea of masculinity probably referred to his account of Pollock’s affair with Ruth Kligman. He wrote, “how dead Pollock felt at the time, how much he needed to be told he was alive…. Perhaps Ruth Kligman told him physically—and verbally.”³⁰ At the same time, Krasner probably felt he had not paid enough attention to her as an artist. Krasner explained that in the beginning, she was less conscious of prejudice against women, but that she was annoyed with “the prejudice today, the intolerance today.”³¹

Krasner pointed Freed toward Barbara Rose’s review of the biography. Rose had branded the book as “closer to a fantasy re-creation of the artist’s personality, motivations, psychology and behavior…. The feat of transforming Pollock’s life into a novel that begs for a Hollywood translation is considerable.”³² Rose took Friedman to task for viewing Krasner as “simply the great man’s wife” and treating her that way, making her into a stereotype throughout the book, seeing her as “anything but being a creative equal as complicated and tormented as Pollock himself.”

On November 13, 1973, “Lee Krasner: Large Paintings” opened in New York at the Whitney Museum but did not go on tour. While the Whitney had continued to support the realism of artists such as Edward Hopper or Andrew Wyeth during the 1950s and 1960s, it also gave shows to vanguard abstract artists, though most of them were male. Krasner’s solo show, organized by Marcia Tucker, a dynamic thirty-three-year-old curator who had been working there since 1969, included eighteen large-scale canvases dating from 1953 to 1973. It was her first one-person show in a New York museum. Most of the work was still in Krasner’s possession and was lent courtesy of Marlborough Gallery.

One major canvas in her show, Pollination, was lent by the Dallas Museum of Art. According to Donald McKinney, then president of Marlborough, Krasner did not want to sell major works by Pollock to anyone but museums, and then only reluctantly. She did so more readily when museums also acquired her work.³³ In the case of the Dallas Museum, however, the museum purchased her Pollination the year after it bought Portrait and a Dream, Pollock’s major canvas of 1953.³⁴ If this was her strategy, it seems to have worked and benefited both the museum and the artist.

Even Time magazine covered her show, and the writer A. T. Baker defended Krasner against an earlier attack from Harold Rosenberg. “Critic Harold Rosenberg once credited her with ‘almost singlehandedly forcing up the prices for contemporary American Art.’ She lives comfortably now on Manhattan’s East Side, but beyond a weakness for fur coats, she takes little interest in her latter-day wealth. What occupies her is the determination to reassert her artistic individuality.”³⁵ Such a relic of the old journalist vice of setting woman artists apart by discussing them in the context of fashion would never have been inflicted on a male.

Baker was not wrong in asserting that Krasner wanted individuality. In Newsday art critic Amei Wallach captioned her article: “Lee Krasner, Angry Artist.” She quoted Krasner saying, “I happen to be Mrs. Jackson Pollock, and that’s a mouthful. The only thing I haven’t had against me was being black. I was a woman, Jewish, a widow, a damn good painter, thank you, and a little too independent.”³⁶

In his review for the New York Times, Hilton Kramer acknowledged that Krasner brought her own power to the abstract expressionist style that Pollock had pioneered. Kramer noted that Krasner’s work was “a less desperate and more lyrical affirmation, and there is no suggestion of anything secondhand or merely appropriated in these pictures.”³⁷ He did question why this show was such “a fragmentary view” of a career that “has remained far too obscure.” Barbara Rose reiterated Kramer’s point about Krasner’s career in New York, writing that Lee Krasner’s “show is impressive and coherent, but overlooks her historic importance as one of the seminal forces among the Abstract Expressionists.”³⁸

The curator, Marcia Tucker, wrote the show’s catalogue essay, and Pamela Adler compiled the chronology, which reflected Krasner’s direct confrontational style. For 1959, we find: “November, Clement Greenberg schedules a solo exhibition for her at French & Company. Krasner cancels show because of Greenberg’s attitude.”³⁹ The chronology also featured, for the first time, Krasner’s real birth date, a notable change from “all the other ones I’ve given in the past, on licenses and things.” Krasner reflected that she “was in analysis a long time and couldn’t handle [aging].”⁴⁰

Tucker pronounced that Krasner’s paintings were “rich, authoritative, impetuous and vibrant,” and declared, “The artist’s role as participant and contributor to what is the major, seminal art movement in the country has yet to be fully documented.” She explained that “Krasner matured in an artistic milieu to which women were admitted reluctantly, if at all. Many were the wives of other artists and played a secondary role in relation to their husbands.”⁴¹

As Tucker worked with Krasner on the exhibit, she got a feeling for Krasner’s stubbornness about art. “Even though Lee Krasner had a reputation as a tough old bird, we got along well…. When I told her she couldn’t watch while I installed the work, she reacted as though I’d stabbed her with a pitchfork.”⁴²

Tucker complained about “spending weekends alone with Lee in East Hampton, never leaving the house, while she reviewed every single aspect of her life, obsessively cataloguing the ideas that she said her husband, Jackson Pollock, had borrowed from her…. I was always hungry when we worked: either Lee couldn’t cook or she didn’t like to eat.”⁴³

Krasner may have sensed that Tucker arrived with a bias based on having heard tales about her “reputation as a tough old bird,” for Krasner seems to have offered less hospitality to her than to others. Many friends and visitors recall eating well and even some delicious home-cooked food, like her famous clam chowder or fresh local fish. Krasner’s close friend Eugene V. Thaw, who coauthored the Pollock catalogue raisonné, recalled having lavish food and drinks at her home.⁴⁴ The young photographer Mark Patiky recalled her delicious cooking. Tucker must have confused Krasner’s comments about Pollock borrowing ideas from her with statements made by another woman artist, since through her many documented interviews and encounters Krasner barely claimed to have influenced Pollock at all.

In March 1974, Miriam Schapiro’s students in the Feminist Art Program at California Institute of the Arts reached out to Krasner, requesting that she write a “Letter to a Young Woman Artist.” The letter could have been “about your experiences, or advice, or whatever feelings you might wish to express.” She responded by having Donald McKinney, Marlborough’s president, send in a quotation by her for the students’ publication:

On a questioning of my newer work being more organic and close to nature images, I think for every level you go higher, you slip down one or two levels and then come back up again. When I say slip back, I don’t mean that detrimentally. I think it is like the swing of a pendulum rather than better or back, assuming that back means going down. If you think of it in terms of time, in relation to past, present and future, and think of them all as a oneness, you will find that you swing the pendulum constantly to be with now. Part of it becomes past and the other is projection but it has got to become one to be right now. I think there is an order, but it isn’t better, better, best. I don’t believe in that kind of scaling.⁴⁵

For her statement, Krasner adapted her own response to a question Cindy Nemser had posed in an interview. Her long-standing preoccupation with time, past, present, and future would become a theme of a show of her work held in 1977.

With the help of feminists, more attention was focused on Krasner’s work. Cindy Nemser interviewed Krasner and wrote several articles about her work, including one for Artforum focused on paintings from the late 1940s. The Alumni Association of Cooper Union took notice and awarded Krasner its Augustus Saint-Gaudens Medal (named for the sculptor who studied there in 1861) for “her accomplishments as a painter and her influence on the art world.” Unfortunately that influence was a thinly veiled reference to her having been Jackson Pollock’s wife. No other women from her time as a student at Cooper Union made names for themselves.

At this time, Krasner accepted shows in obscure places in order to build her reputation. In March 1974, she sent a small show of work from the years 1946 to 1972 to the Teaching Gallery of Miami-Dade Community College. The art critic of the Miami Herald, Griffin Smith, wrote that the show offered evidence that “not only is a re-evaluation of her painting in terms of its impact on other pioneer first-generation New York abstract expressionists long over due, but that Krasner herself, far from being merely ‘Jackson Pollock’s widow who paints,’ is a major artist in her own right.”⁴⁶ In May, Smith’s review was reprinted in Art News magazine. The exposure was paying off.

The Miami Herald also sent a staff writer to interview Krasner for a feature story about the show. The writer asked Krasner about Ruth Kligman’s memoir, which was about to be published. “Pollock had many affairs that I knew about,” Krasner replied. It was a rare moment of candor. “That this pathetic and petty person should exploit him like this is…. Well, the exploitation of him has been indescribable, painful for me…. The affairs irritated the hell out of me, of course they did,” she added. “This Ruth Kligman…All right, she may have slept with him, and if she wants to make a mountain out of a molehill, that’s her problem not mine.”⁴⁷

The next month, Krasner was on the road again—this time in the Atwood Gallery at Beaver College in suburban Philadelphia. A show in a one-room gallery at a small college was a far cry from her dream—a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Yet she went. Her appearance, at the age of sixty-five, before undergraduate students prompted the following: “Lee Krasner is just herself: Dull gray hair in a Dutch-boy style, pale—if any—color on her full lips, unstylish brown plastic glasses, shapeless black and white polka-dot dress, flat shoes.”⁴⁸ A photograph of Krasner talking to a student in front of her 1972 painting Sundial was staged in the gallery. Laurel Daunis, a freshman who just happened to pass through the gallery, remembered Krasner seeming “very sweet, personable.”⁴⁹

Krasner answered questions from the audience. She described her work schedule as “a very neurotic rhythm of painting. I have a high discipline of keeping my time open to work. If I’m in a real work cycle, I’ll pretty much isolate myself and paint straight through, avoiding social engagements. After not painting for two months due to lecturing in Miami, I’m getting restless, nervous, irritable.”⁵⁰

In January 1975, “Lee Krasner: Collages and Works on Paper, 1933–1974” opened at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., organized by Gene Baro, a freelance critic. It surveyed her art from a 1933 Conté crayon nude drawn from the model through recent abstract gouaches. The list of lenders to this show offers a view of those with whom the artist had been closely associated, including her therapist Dr. Leonard Siegel, her friends Edward Albee, Hans Namuth, Alfonso Ossorio, and Edward F. Dragon, and Krasner’s old flame David Gibbs and his wife, Geraldine Stutz. B. H. Friedman was represented by his company, Uris Buildings Corporation.

Baro called Krasner “an artist of natural sensations, of elemental attributes and appearances of things. Her interest isn’t to describe an experience but to reorder or reinvent it as visual feeling.”⁵¹ Paul Richard wrote for the Washington Post: “Lee Krasner is a famous artist whose fame has hurt, not helped her.” After rehearsing her life with Pollock, he concluded, “Lee Krasner is no mere imitative artist.”⁵² Additionally the reviewer Benjamin Forgey noted, in the Washington Star-News, that “Krasner is obviously a talented artist” but lamented not being able to consider her recent, large, oil-on-canvas paintings.⁵³

The Corcoran show traveled to both the Pennsylvania State University Museum of Art and the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University.⁵⁴ Reviewing the show in the Boston Globe, Robert Taylor began by pointing out that Krasner was “victimized by our inability to distinguish between the relevant aspects of an artist’s biography and an artist’s work; but then so was her husband, Jackson Pollock. He was a drunk, with all a drunk’s self-hatred, yet the least relevant aspect of his career was the boisterous romanticism that made him such a wretched custodian of his talent.”⁵⁵ He continued, however, to note: “Of course, Brandeis’s show not only indicates that she can stand on her own, but that she is a serious and highly significant American painter.”⁵⁶

In a related article, Lucille Bandes noted that Krasner was finally beginning to gain recognition “as a major figure in contemporary art,” while noting how devoted she was to her husband’s needs. “Those who knew them both well report that in addition to the necessity to earn money and to guard Pollock from the effects of his heavy drinking, she found it difficult to paint because he resented it. She herself insists that her husband encouraged her art, but she does say, ‘I would give anything to have someone giving me what I was able to give Pollock.’”⁵⁷

In 1975, Krasner produced Free Space, a serigraph on paper, for a print and sculpture portfolio and a traveling exhibition project called “An American Portrait,” timed to coincide with the bicentennial. The exhibition was produced by Alex Rosenberg under the name Transworld Art Corporation, and it featured thirty-two other artists, including Alex Katz, André Masson, Romare Bearden, and Karel Appel. Rosenberg said that working with Krasner was easy because “she was a pro, an absolute pro.”⁵⁸

Rosenberg found Krasner to be very friendly and “not as tough as she was made out to be.”

When he asked her, “What was a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn doing with Jackson Pollock?” she responded, “Who said I was a nice girl?”⁵⁹

There was a brief statement about the project that read: “Krasner, who risked a depth of exploration of the psyche, gained by it; ‘We shall not cease from exploration’ is a T. S. Eliot line that Krasner likes to quote.”⁶⁰

That summer Ruth Appelhof, then a graduate student at Syracuse University, arranged to spend time with Krasner in Springs. She drove Krasner out from the city—Lee no longer drove anywhere herself. While Appelhof served Krasner’s need not to be alone in the house, she got to conduct research for her master’s thesis. Appelhof recalled an excursion to swim at Louse Point, the bay beach after which de Kooning named one of his canvases. There, they ran into Harold and May Rosenberg, who had a cordial exchange with Krasner. Appelhof observed that Krasner “had a sexual demeanor about her. She was very aware of her body and apt to show it off.”⁶¹ The young scholar could hardly have known of those long past sensual scenes with Pantuhoff on the beach.

In July 1975, Krasner accepted an invitation to be artist in residence at Marge Schilling’s artists’ conference at Dune Hame Cottage in Watch Hill, Rhode Island. The invitation offered a pleasant setting and a chance for a change of pace.⁶² Marge Schilling was a New York portrait painter who worked on commissions, mainly of children. She also supported herself organizing this annual conference for women artists at her Rhode Island summer home. None of the women who attended were famous, but they were thrilled to have Krasner present.⁶³

One of the artists who attended the conference was Majorie Michael, whose sculpture was the subject of a book, A Woman’s Journey, published the previous year.⁶⁴ She found Krasner to be “a remarkable woman” and considered her an “excellent painter” the two got along well.⁶⁵ Michael made many sketches and took photographs of Krasner during the week at Watch Hill so that she could start making a portrait bust. Krasner liked the project enough that she traveled that October to the suburbs north of New York City to sit for Michael in her Chappaqua, New York, studio.⁶⁶ Krasner inspired Michael, who wrote in her journal in 1977, “Like Lee Krasner says, ‘It is a big wide canvas but I can reach it all with a little jump!’”⁶⁷ Michael kept in touch with Krasner, visiting her in East Hampton in 1981.

Schilling hired Dyne Benner to be the cook at the conference. Benner had studied painting at the Art Students League with Morris Kantor and Theodoros Stamos, and she photographed some of the group in Rhode Island, including Krasner, who was wearing a fashionable brown strapless bra under a see-through brown tunic of Indian muslin.

That fall Krasner invited Benner to Long Island for a couple of days, but Benner found Krasner too bossy and felt uneasy, so she departed. When Krasner asked Benner, “What do you want from me?,”⁶⁸ Benner was unable to respond. Others, like Ronald Stein, Clement Greenberg, or David Gibbs, usually wanted something from her.

Later that summer Krasner turned down an invitation to take part in a group show at Ashawagh Hall, just down the road from her home, where she had often been in the annual exhibitions. This time, however, the organizers, Joan Semmel and Joyce Kozloff, had just arrived on the scene and proposed a new theme for the familiar venue: “Women Artists Here and Now.”⁶⁹ It’s possible that Krasner didn’t want to associate with feminist artists. She knew that Semmel and Kozloff made feminist art, as did some of the artists in the show—Miriam Schapiro, Audrey Flack, and Carolee Schneemann. And though Krasner curtly refused, Perle Fine, Elaine de Kooning, Betty Parsons, and Hedda Sterne all accepted, and none of them made feminist art. During the show on August 29, 1975, Schneemann staged a now-legendary performance nude before the audience, in which she read from a script on a scroll that she slowly pulled out of her vagina.⁷⁰ Perhaps Krasner’s posing for nude photographs on the beach had faded from memory, but she could not conceive of the new feminist performance as art.

In June 1976, Krasner left Marlborough for Pace Gallery, which was on the same street. She would be the third woman at Pace, joining Louise Nevelson and Agnes Martin. Denying that the move had anything to do with Marlborough’s notorious abuse of the Mark Rothko estate, the New York Times quoted Krasner: “All good things come to an end. It’s the longest time I’ve been with any dealer, and it’s time for a change.”⁷¹ She also removed Pollock’s work from Marlborough, perhaps to protect his estate from a fate similar to Rothko’s, although that motive was not acknowledged.

As she aged, Krasner began to take up some of the activities of her youth. She joined a political protest against the French government’s release of the suspected Palestinian terrorist Abu Daoud, who was the alleged mastermind of the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre. Krasner lent her name to an advertisement in the New York Times that announced that the petition’s signers were boycotting the opening of the government-sponsored museum le Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou (also known as le Centre Beaubourg). The campaign was organized by her dealer, Arnold Glimcher of Pace Gallery, and her fellow gallery artist Louise Nevelson. Many artists joined the list of protesters, including Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, James Rosenquist, and Lucas Samaras, as well as critics Dore Ashton, Barbara Rose, and Robert Hughes.⁷²

At the end of the year, she told Newsday that the best thing that happened to her during 1976 was that she “started to dance again…. John Bernard Meyers [an art dealer] asked me to dance at a party. At first I refused, but then I said, ‘If you go very, very easy or very slowly,’ because I hadn’t danced for years. I used to be mad for it. Well, after a few numbers, it was he who had to be walked away.”⁷³

When Gaby Rodgers, an interviewer for the Women Artists Newsletter, asked Krasner in 1977 if she felt the women’s movement had made errors, she responded, “Every revolution makes errors. The women’s movement is the major revolution of our time; it’s natural for them to make errors. I don’t kid myself. Women are not yet equal—we are still second-class citizens.”⁷⁴ Rodgers, editorialized, “I am sure glad [Krasner] is around. Today, when the feminist movement looks for role models and young people flock to gurus for wisdom, we would do well to pay attention to the wise women amongst us, to keep a dialogue with the accomplished women of Lee Krasner’s generation. Aside from her extraordinary gifts as an artist, she can tell us what it was like out there during a lifetime of struggle and dedication.”⁷⁵ Krasner told art historian Cassandra Langer in 1981 that she realized the recognition she had received recently was “entirely due to the women’s movement,” repeating her oft-spoken pronouncement: “The raising of women’s consciousness is one of the major revolutions of our time.”⁷⁶

Krasner always maintained that she had benefited from the efforts of some men, especially John Graham and Jackson Pollock. But she loved to repeat the story of her teacher, Hans Hofmann, who in examining her work in class, had commented, “This is so good you would not believe it was done by a woman.” When an interviewer commented that this was “a kind of a mixed compliment,” Krasner responded, “Well, yes. You know, you get a cold shower before you’ve had a chance to receive the warmth of the compliment.”⁷⁷

Krasner’s intensity could be intimidating to male artists. Bill King, who was seeing Cile Downs in the late 1970s, recalled parties at which the guests were drinking heavily, where he felt “chilled” by “a certain kind of women’s laughter” that made him think of “maenads that tore Orpheus apart. My hair stood on end. I was scared of Krasner, especially when she laughed.”⁷⁸ In a time of feminist activism, such perceptions and their consequences cannot be discounted.

In January 1977, the exhibition “Women Artists: 1550–1950,” organized by feminist art historians Linda Nochlin and Ann Sutherland Harris, which had just opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, was reviewed by Robert Hughes in Time. He asserted that “an area of great consequence for art history has now been opened up” and argued that “the last section, spanning about 1900 to 1950 makes the contribution of women to modern art seem less than it actually was. Painters of large and unquestionable talent, like Lee Krasner, are not seen at their best.”⁷⁹

That fall the show opened at the Brooklyn Museum. Among those who came to see it was Joan Mondale, the wife of Vice President Walter Mondale. She stayed to meet with twenty-five women artists and art historians, including three living artists who were in the show: Krasner, and the representational painters Isabel Bishop and Alice Neel.

Mondale spoke to the select audience: “The present administration is interested in discrimination against women.” She had brought along Midge Costanza, the director of the Office of Public Liaison in the White House, who read a letter she had sent to the General Services Administration, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Smithsonian Institution advising them “to initiate remedial procedures” to correct discrimination against women artists.⁸⁰ The letter was written in response to a protest the previous March by the New York group called Women in the Arts against President Carter’s choice of ten artists—all male—for a series of prints connected to his inauguration. Krasner had picketed MoMA with the group five years earlier.

When asked in 1977 if she felt that women artists have an easier time being an artist than in the past, she exclaimed that “the next generation, [Grace] Hartigan, [Joan] Mitchell, [Helen] Frankenthaler had an easier time of it. Galleries existed, dealers. We didn’t have that. We had to create all this. The next generation had an open door. This has all happened in a short passage of time.”⁸¹

“But you see,” Krasner reflected, “I can rattle off right away three names of women artists without stopping to think. During other periods in history, you couldn’t think right away of women painters. That’s a little bit of progress.”⁸²

In February 1977, in Arts Magazine, Barbara Rose published “Lee Krasner and the Origins of Abstract Expressionism,” seeking to expand the perception of Krasner to “a broader historical perspective, to acknowledge her importance not as the wife and greatest supporter of Jackson Pollock, but as a modernist painter of the first rank, whose name belongs on any list of first-generation Abstract Expressionists…. It is particularly ironic that Krasner is excluded from standard histories of the New York School such as Irving Sandler’s The Triumph of American Painting, since she and she alone had contact with all of the major forces that shaped its evolution.”⁸³ Rose concluded, “Her ability to embody conceptual ideas within a concrete work of art exposes the vacuity of current abstraction devoid of mental content. Ignored by the canonizers of the pantheon of Abstract Expressionism, Krasner emerges as a survivor with history now on her side.”⁸⁴

The insult of being omitted from standard histories of the New York School only strengthened Krasner’s determination. “‘Survivor,’ she called herself. ‘Yes, I think that’s what counts in the end. If you can live long enough…. I say, Betty Friedan—great. But I didn’t need The Feminine Mystique to get me off the ground…. Let me say the women’s revolution is the only real revolution of our time,’” proclaimed Krasner to Jerry Tallmer, a genial male reporter from the New York Post.⁸⁵

Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, had helped to ignite a renewed interest in feminism that came to be called the “second wave,” taking up where the suffrage campaigns of the previous century had left off. Friedan had brought attention to the limited career prospects for women and to the myth that the suburban housewife had found fulfillment.⁸⁶ But Krasner never envisioned being a housewife or accepted the restraint society imposed on women.

The art critic David Bourdon noted that Krasner said, “As a painter, I never thought of myself as anything but LEE KRASNER,” with a certain satisfaction. “I’m always going to be Mrs. Jackson Pollock—that’s a matter of fact—but I’ve never used the name Pollock in connection with my work. I painted before Pollock, during Pollock, after Pollock.” Bourdon found Krasner “unpretentious” and “uncommonly openminded…. Krasner belongs chronologically and contextually to the Abstract Expressionist generation—and is usually ignored in annals of the New York School. Some contemporary critics, mainly women, now assert that Krasner is ‘a modernist painter of the first rank’ whose achievement is on a par with other ‘first generation’ Abstract Expressionists. I agree that Krasner, at her best, is a first-rate painter, but I question whether she needs to be elevated to this particular pantheon,” argued Bourdon.⁸⁷ He tried to support this position by claiming that Krasner was “an atypical modernist insofar as she is not eager to relinquish the past. She is by no means a reductive artist who steadily eliminates everything inessential. To the contrary, she is a synthesizer.”⁸⁸

Her collages made with cut fragments of charcoal drawings from her Hofmann School days in the late 1930s were then on view in a solo show at Pace Gallery. “She audaciously recycles her own past to concoct new works that seemingly summarize modern art from Cubism to Abstract Expressionism,” concluded Bourdon.⁸⁹ Regardless of Bourdon’s categorizations, the fact that Krasner’s aesthetic had begun to reach beyond her earlier abstract expressionist work anticipated the definition of her later work as part of postmodernism.⁹⁰

The title of Krasner’s 1977 show at Pace was “11 Ways to Use the Words ‘To See.’” She had created a series of collages the year before from her old figure drawings and the rubbed-off ghost images that the charcoal sketches made while forgotten in storage. Krasner had only discovered the portfolios of her old drawings during a visit from Bryan Robertson years after he organized her 1965 Whitechapel show. He spotted the portfolios in the barn and inquired what was in them. He “pulled them out and saw there was no fixative on them, so the charcoal had blurred and even made some mirror images. He said, ‘Get them into New York and get fixative on them.’ I did that, and brought them to this apartment. The first time I’d looked at them in almost 30 years.”⁹¹ She went through her old drawings and picked out some to be framed, while setting others aside to be discarded.

The rejected drawings languished in her New York studio, only to be rediscovered in 1975, when they inspired her to collage once again. “At first I did have some nostalgia about the drawings,” she reflected. “But then I began to look at them as if they weren’t done by me—simply pieces of material for making new work. Of course I had shaky moments after I’d started—I thought, what the hell’s happening here? What am I doing? Is it valid? Whenever work breaks or changes I go through that process. But the idea that I’d done the drawings 30 years ago and could use them now, excites me.”⁹²

Krasner compared her use of her own earlier work to her collages of the 1950s. The difference between the two sets of work was that with the first set, she had torn up her canvases. Now she cut her early drawings with scissors: “I wanted precise incision, no torn edges.”⁹³ When asked if she would call the new collaged works “an extension of cubism,” she replied, “Oh no. God no. It’s like taking Cubism and carrying it to a totally new dimension. I think it’s called Conceptualism. I don’t call it that, but I think they do. I hate those titles.”⁹⁴ What she was referring to was an aesthetic, propounded by artists like Sol LeWitt: “In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”⁹⁵

One of the visitors to the Pace show that winter was the young artist Deborah Kass, who ran into Krasner going in the building on West Fifty-seventh Street. Kass was only twenty-four and she thought Krasner “looked exactly like Maureen Stapleton in Bye Bye Birdie,” since she was wearing a long fur coat, sensible, perhaps orthopedic, shoes, and was carrying shopping bags from Bergdorf’s in each hand. Kass recalled that Krasner “looked just as formidable as one would imagine she would, but I gathered my wits and stepped into the elevator with her. As the doors opened and we both stepped out I screwed up my courage and asked, ‘This is your show, isn’t it?’

“And she looked me up and down and said, ‘Are you a painter?’

“‘Am I leaking?’ I replied. ‘Yes, I love your work. You are a hero.’ I couldn’t believe I spoke to Lee Krasner. In that moment I so loved New York and I loved my life.”⁹⁶

Krasner disappeared into the office, and Kass spent time looking at Krasner’s work. Afterward Krasner came out and gave her own show “a good long look.” Kass, who once again followed Krasner into the elevator, asked if she could walk with her a bit. Kass recalled that she and Krasner “discussed her new work literally cut from the old, which brought up time and history, women and painting, Pollock, New York. I was in heaven. At one point looking south there was a reflection in a high-rise glass building of other buildings and glass that looked exactly like her collages. Pointing to the reflections in the gridded glass, I said, ‘Look at that! That’s amazing!’ I didn’t have to say why it was so obvious.

“‘It is!’ said she as we both stood still looking at the Krasner in the sky.”

Kass was only one of many young artists and critics who flocked to Krasner’s show. The press also took notice. The New York Times critic Hilton Kramer called Krasner’s show at Pace “a cold-blooded act of self-criticism that is also a bizarre form of artistic self-cannibalization.” He saw the new works as “late Matisse-type pictures of a sort that she has excelled at in recent years. As the drawings themselves owe much to Picasso, this ‘new work’ puts Miss Krasner in the position of conducting a kind of visual dialogue between the two great masters of the School of Paris.”⁹⁷ He also saw the work as a commentary on the relationship of the “young, aspiring artist Miss Krasner then was to the mature, more knowledgeable artist she is now.”⁹⁸

Another critic, for the SoHo Weekly News, concluded, “These are heroic paintings. The artist is working through her heritage to establish an identity which has up to now been eclipsed by Pollock’s legend. And it has a decidedly feminist bent: she is working ‘through the flower.’”⁹⁹ In referring to Krasner’s forms as “like those petals made with a compass,” the critic William Zimmer, alluded to the feminist artist Judy Chicago’s 1975 memoir, Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist, and to her series of paintings by that name. Chicago described these as “an image of a cunt/flower/formal structure, which is opening up on to a vista of blue sky and open space.”¹⁰⁰ Chicago’s metaphor appeared in The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, who wrote, “We speak of ‘taking’ a girl’s virginity, her flower, or ‘breaking’ her maidenhead…as an abrupt rupture with the past.”¹⁰¹ With this body of work, Krasner had not only broken out from Pollock’s shadow, but she had also reclaimed her independent identity as an artist from the years before she and Pollock became a couple.

The Women in the Arts Foundation published a newsletter in which the artist Jenny Tango clearly agreed with Zimmer. “I find this work very much a feminist work. It is biographical and uses oneself out of which to create the work. It has all the strength and passion usually attributed to women.” Tango went on to argue perceptively that “the kinetic quality of action painting animates under the surface but there is no macho, no self-destruct, no philosophizing—only the movement of relationships and the daring in restructuring these relationships. Collage, legitimized by feminist art, made it possible for Krasner to piece herself together in an exciting way.”¹⁰² Krasner had exhibited a body of collages at the Stable Gallery in 1955, long before the existence of feminist art, but collage became popular among feminist artists during the 1970s, in part because of its relationship to traditional women’s crafts such as quilts and Victorian collages made out of memorabilia. Miriam Schapiro even dubbed her feminist collage “femmage,” hoping to distinguish them from the great men who made collages such as Picasso and Kurt Schwitters.

The collaged works at Pace generated an enormous amount of positive press. It also gave Krasner a chance to protest repeatedly the relative lack of attention that American museums paid to her work: “But do you realize,” she asked Amei Wallach, then the Newsday critic, who described Krasner’s “arms flying as she slouched in a velvet chair in her Manhattan apartment,” “to date as you are writing this piece, no museum in New York, where I have been born and bred and am part of history—where I fought the battle—no museum has given me a retrospective. When I think of it I go into a rage!”¹⁰³ Five days later, Grace Glueck reported Krasner made the same rant to the New York Times: “Do you realize I’ve never had a retrospective here in the city where I was born, studied, and helped produce a revolution in art? But at least now they compare my work with Matisse’s rather than Pollock’s. That feels more objective. I’ve never been married to Matisse.”¹⁰⁴

 

IN 1977 I WAS WORKING AS A CURATOR AT THE WHITNEY AND WAS collaborating with Robert Hobbs from the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell on a show to be called “Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years.” I had been interested in the abstract work on paper that Krasner produced under Matisse’s influence while she was in Hans Hofmann’s class during the late 1930s. That summer Hobbs and I went to East Hampton to meet with Krasner, whom I had first met and interviewed in 1971 as a graduate student. For the forthcoming show, I was determined to include some of Krasner’s abstract works on paper from her days at the Hofmann School, as well as some of her Little Image paintings from the 1940s. Krasner was puzzled that I wanted to include what she considered “student work.”

“Trust me,” I answered. “They are important. I want to show that you were painting abstractly before you were with Pollock.”¹⁰⁵

While we were visiting Krasner at her home, Barbara Rose phoned about filming a documentary on Krasner. Rose asked us to stay over another day to interview Krasner on camera, which we did.

Rose’s film Lee Krasner: The Long View, a half-hour documentary, was screened during the exhibition at the Whitney Museum from November 14 through December 2, 1978.¹⁰⁶ Asked what she thought of the film, Krasner admitted, “I’m pleased with it,” then she added, “But if I did it again, I think I’d gripe a lot more.”¹⁰⁷ In the film, the viewer sees Krasner in her studio, at home in Springs, and at her posh New York hairdresser, Kenneth. She blames the arrival of the Surrealists in New York as the start of when women in the arts were degraded.

Commenting on the film in Women Artists News, Diana Morris wrote, “She is shown unflatteringly getting a haircut at Kenneth’s, the salon of the beautiful people; she looks awful. When Rose asks her, rather tactlessly, why she cares how she looks, Krasner laughs: ‘Why do I care? Well, I am a member of civilized society, even if I do make pictures!’ No one who wants to become an art world myth would allow herself to be filmed with her hair in rollers, especially at Kenneth’s.”¹⁰⁸

In an interview with Barbaralee Diamonstein in 1977, Krasner remarked, “The show that is being worked on now, which I think will be enormously interesting, is being done by Cornell and the Whitney, and it’s called ‘Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years,’ and it ought to be damn interesting.”¹⁰⁹ Krasner, who understood that she was finally being considered with male colleagues of her generation, had a hunch this show would be significant for her career.

That hunch was right. The show opened to praise, especially for Krasner, who was finally recognized as a pioneer and first-generation abstract expressionist. Barbara Cavaliere wrote that “the recent ‘Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years’ was the first time a number of Krasner’s Little Image series of 1945–50 were seen in relationship with her peers’ work of the period. They are among her most powerful works, the achievements of a mature artist who had internalized the ideas behind Abstract Expressionism.”¹¹⁰ Hilton Kramer praised Krasner in the New York Times, noting the revision of the early history of Abstract Expressionism: “The exhibition, called ‘Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years,’ which opened last fall, was one of the first surveys of the subject to accord her an honored place in its history.”¹¹¹

Just as her own work was beginning to win public acclaim, Krasner realized a longtime goal when Yale University Press published in October 1978 a four-volume catalogue raisonné for all of Pollock’s authentic works. Krasner had required the project in her contracts with both Sidney Janis and Marlborough galleries, but although Marlborough did make a substantial financial contribution, the complicated project never got off the ground. It needed the help of Eugene V. Thaw, the New York dealer and also her friend. Thaw took over the demanding and complex project and established a committee to determine the authenticity of the works going into it. He hired the scholar Francis V. O’Connor to be his coauthor and paid for the rest of the costs himself. The committee consisted of Thaw, O’Connor, Krasner, William Lieberman (then director of the Museum of Modern Art’s department of drawings), and Donald McKinney, the former president of Marlborough, with whom Krasner had developed a close relationship.

Krasner said she had demanded the creation of a catalogue because “there were so many fakes that…I began to feel the pressure.”¹¹² She was prescient, since controversies over fake Pollocks have continued with greater frequency and audacity as prices for his work have soared.¹¹³ At the time, there were few such definitive catalogues of American painters, and Krasner was very proud of having pushed this one into being.

The publication of the Pollock catalogue raisonné was celebrated with an exhibition of his “New-Found Works,” which opened at the Yale University Art Gallery and then traveled to other towns. A week before the show opened at the National Collection of Fine Arts in Washington (NCFA; now called the Smithsonian Museum of American Art), the curator Harry Rand (who had just run into Krasner at the Whitney) wrote to her that he admired her work and would like to organize “a project of significant historical scope and depth.” He never called it what she longed for—a retrospective.¹¹⁴

Rand indicated that he and Ellen Landau, then a research fellow at the museum who was preparing a dissertation on Krasner’s early work, had been discussing this project. Landau recalled that Krasner asked her to propose an exhibition, which she did through Rand, who was the sponsor for her fellowship at the museum.¹¹⁵ On the same day that Rand wrote his letter, Landau wrote to Krasner as well, mentioning her discussions with Rand about a show that would be focused on her art before and including the Little Images of the 1940s—the exact topic of her dissertation. She indicated that the decision to focus on her earlier work was made based on her success in the show “Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years,” which Landau cited as demonstrating that Krasner was on a par with her peers. Despite the focus, Landau noted that she and Rand would be open to considering a show of broader scope.¹¹⁶

At the opening of the Pollock show in Washington, Rand told Krasner that he would like to organize a retrospective exhibition for which Landau would write most of the catalogue.¹¹⁷ Krasner replied that she would agree only if the show could go to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. By February 16, 1979, Landau wrote to Krasner that the NCFA had placed her retrospective exhibition on its schedule of proposed future shows and that she would be writing the catalogue, with the exception of a forward by Rand and a preface by the museum’s director, Joshua Taylor.¹¹⁸ Krasner soon telephoned Rand to insist that Barbara Rose write an essay in the catalogue.¹¹⁹ This was hardly surprising, given Rose’s extraordinary long-term commitment to promoting Krasner’s work and the friendship between the two that went back to the early 1960s. Not only had Rose made a documentary film about Krasner, but she had also included Krasner in her book on American art in 1967, when few in America paid Krasner serious attention.

The Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation in Houston, which had purchased Krasner’s 1957 canvas April, asked her for a statement for a catalogue it planned to publish. In a rare gesture, Krasner produced two pages. She began, “I certainly was there through the formative years of Abstract Expressionism, and I have been treated like I wasn’t. So, I’d say the fact that this is being brought to light today by Barbara Rose, Gail Levin and others makes me feel pretty good. The fact that I was Mrs. Jackson Pollock has complicated matters. I want to be very clear about this. Because Jackson Pollock was in the forefront, a difficult light was thrown on the role that I had.”¹²⁰ She included an asterisk by Rose’s name to indicate both Rose’s February 1977 article in Arts Magazine and her film. The double asterisk by my name referred to my essay in the catalogue Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years. She continued, “I have never denied that Pollock had an influence on my work. But then, so did Mondrian, Picasso, and Matisse. I never dripped that I was aware of and I never worked on the floor as Pollock worked. I always used brushes, which Pollock sometimes did and sometimes didn’t. We are all influenced by other artists. Art brings about art.”¹²¹ She did not consider the very controlled dripping that she did do in some of her Little Images as the same process that Pollock employed.

Krasner continued to speak out about the attitudes of some of her male peers, noting that “Jackson always treated me as an artist. His ego was so colossal. I didn’t threaten him. He always acknowledged what I was doing. I was working, and that was that. I couldn’t have lived with him for one minute if this weren’t so. Franz Kline spoke about my work, but quietly, just he and I in the room. Bradley Walker Tomlin would talk to me. But egos like Newman, Rothko, Motherwell…Baziotes was angelic; he didn’t say no and he didn’t say yes.”¹²² Krasner reserved her scorn for de Kooning, whom she often accused of having a difficult “problem with women.” She recalled fighting with Gorky, “but at least, I had a level to fight on. It was more than I was given later on.”¹²³

On February 3, 1979, the Pace Gallery opened “Lee Krasner Paintings 1959–1962,” featuring her umber and white work, which had been shown twice in the early 1960s by the Howard Wise Gallery. Hilton Kramer lamented the lack of color in these canvases and attributed this to an “act of homage to Pollock’s memory.”¹²⁴ Eleanor Munro found these works to be “full of tragedy and storm.”¹²⁵ Barbara Cavaliere asserted that these works were “autobiographical,” and that Krasner was repeating themes Richard Howard had written about after interviewing Krasner for the catalogue. Howard’s article cited Greenberg’s dislike of her work, which led her to cancel her show at French & Company; her mother’s death; and her grief over Pollock’s death.¹²⁶

In November 1979, Daniel Wildenstein of the New York gallery Wildenstein & Company wrote to Krasner to request the honor of inaugurating his gallery’s new program with a show of both her work and Pollock’s. Wildenstein suggested that he would borrow work from European museums and produce a scholarly catalogue that would get rid of the “American pejorative,” allowing her work and Pollock’s to be ranked with Rembrandt, Velázquez, and Cézanne.¹²⁷ He was already discussing a merger with Krasner’s dealer, Arnold Glimcher. (This merger did not materialize until much later, in October 1993, when Wildenstein & Company purchased 49 percent of the Pace Gallery.) Wildenstein had hoped to add the Pollock estate to its roster, but Krasner, as always, did not want to cede control of it and trusted few dealers with it. By now she had an aversion to dealers who used showing her work as a means of getting hold of the Pollock estate. Since this is what she sensed, she declined the offer.

On November 28, 1979, Lee Anne Miller, the president of the Women’s Caucus for Art, wrote to Krasner to tell her that the Awards Selection Committee had named her as “a recipient of the 2nd Annual Awards for Outstanding Achievement in the Visual Arts” for her “extraordinary contributions as a painter.”¹²⁸

The other recipients that year were the graphic artist Caroline Durieux; the painter Ida Kohlmeyer, who, like Krasner, had studied with Hofmann; weaver and designer Anni Albers; and the sculptor Louise Bourgeois. The selection committee was composed of Ann Sutherland Harris (the chair, then an art historian working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art), Lucy R. Lippard (art critic), Linda Nochlin (art historian, then teaching at Vassar College), Athena Tacha (artist and art historian, then teaching at Oberlin College), Eleanor Tufts (art historian, then teaching at Southern Methodist University), and Ruth Weisberg (artist, then teaching at the University of Southern California). All of the committee members were known as strong feminists. The award was going to be presented at the annual meeting of the College Art Association, which was in New Orleans that year.

Krasner agreed to receive the award but asked me to accept it for her because I was already planning to go to the meeting. She dictated an acceptance speech to me, which, after saying a few words of my own, I read at the ceremony in New Orleans: “I am really very pleased—honored—to receive this award from the Women’s Caucus for Art. However, I hope for the day when such an award could be a joint acknowledgment from men and women. The belated recognition that I have recently received is largely due to consciousness raising by the feminist movement, which I consider the major revolution of our time. Thank you.”¹²⁹

Wendy Slatkin echoed Krasner’s speech in 1993, writing, “Feminist revisionism has helped us reevaluate the art of this major creator.”¹³⁰ Slatkin noted that “Krasner’s restoration into the pantheon of Abstract Expressionists began in 1978 with her inclusion in an exhibition curated by Gail Levin and Robert Hobbs for the Whitney Museum’s ‘Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years’ (1978). Her reputation so consistently overshadowed by her position as the wife of Jackson Pollock, began to emerge independently when the artist was over 70.”

Krasner declared, “Some part of me must have had an enormous confidence. No matter how hard the thing was, I sustained and kept going…. Tough position, tough place, and a hell of a lot of resentment…. A suicide I’m not. So, that’s that. You know, you stay with it. You keep going. I might say thank God, thank women’s lib.”¹³¹

Much of Krasner’s resentment about sexism stemmed from the problem women faced with religion. “All Christian, Judaic and, for that matter, Moslem and Eastern civilization has a male image as God. So you’re going to have to eliminate all of history if you’re going to break it down. At what point do you stop? Now that’s a fact, and culturally, we are a part of this civilization. You can’t eliminate five thousand years even if you’re a women’s libber.”¹³²

In 1979 Krasner told an interviewer who asked about feminism that she had “very little patience with clubby attitudes towards it and I can’t devote time towards that kind of thing.”¹³³ Another time, while recounting a story of discrimination early in her life, she said: “Well you don’t just have a few feminist meetings and resolve the issue. It takes slow patient years. It’s not a political revolution fought once and then it’s over. I think it will take a long time for woman to find her proper place.”¹³⁴

Lee frequently spoke with me and others about what it meant to be a woman artist. “There is discrimination against women artists, and it’s going to take quite a while before it gets ironed out. Western culture is old, and the role of women has always had a specific place in it. That’s changing now, but these things don’t happen overnight. I agree that in a sense we older artists paved the way for the younger women. It’s better now than it was ten or twenty years ago, but that doesn’t mean that the problem doesn’t still exist.”¹³⁵

At the same time, Krasner felt her case had become complicated because she also functioned as the widow: “In my case it’s doubly complicated by being the wife and now the widow of Jackson Pollock. Thinking about it, I wonder whether the situation is discriminatory because I’m Pollock’s widow or because I’m a woman. In both roles I’m a woman, but who I am makes it a little more difficult.”¹³⁶

Krasner continued to await a retrospective of her work at an American museum. She wanted that museum to be the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Harry Rand wrote to Bill Rubin on August 23, 1979, telling him that the National Collection of Fine Arts had committed to organizing a retrospective for Krasner, and that she had committed to working with them. He informed Rubin that Ellen Landau would be working on the project.¹³⁷

In October 1979, Krasner traveled to the University of Virginia to attend a symposium entitled “Abstract Expressionism: Idea and Symbol,” organized by the art historian Elizabeth Langhorne. Although I was a participant, I was not there to talk about Krasner, but instead to speak about Richard Pousette-Dart, another of the lesser-known artists in “Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years.”¹³⁸

At the time Ellen Landau was working on her doctoral dissertation, and Barbara Rose had just finished her film on Krasner.¹³⁹ Because I was quite busy with work on my upcoming show (1980) and catalogue raisonné of Edward Hopper, I was content to keep Krasner as a friend and mentor. She and I saw a lot of each other, but our friendship made writing about her much more complicated, so I was not contemplating any project about her at that time.

For the symposium in Virginia, Krasner, accompanied by Barbara Rose and Bill Rubin, the director of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, traveled by train to Washington, where they had arranged for Landau to drive them to Charlottesville. Rand had already written to Rubin to say that he and Landau had met with Krasner in New York and discussed the possibility of the retrospective organized by the NCFA. Rubin, however, had not responded to the letter Rand had sent about having MoMA share the Krasner retrospective. Not only did Krasner have an intense desire to have a retrospective in the United States, but she also strongly preferred having it at a museum with a more cosmopolitan, global perspective, like the Museum of Modern Art, rather than in a parochial museum limited to American art. And she wanted Barbara Rose to be the curator.

Landau recalls a scheme that would go into effect on the drive to Charlottesville. The car would stop at a restaurant en route, and Krasner and Rose would go to the ladies’ room, giving Landau an opportunity to propose that Rubin give Krasner a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art to mark her seventy-fifth birthday in 1983.¹⁴⁰

At the two-day symposium, Krasner, along with Richard Pousette-Dart, participated in an artists’ panel, which was supposed to respond to the scholars’ papers. A third participant, Robert Motherwell, had been announced but dropped out at the last minute and did not attend. A reporter for the local paper found that Krasner “managed to say more with a raised eyebrow and a gesture of the hand than some of the more bombastic orators. Somewhat dazed by all the rhetoric that read psychological meaning into every brushstroke, she announced, ‘After a session like this today, I wonder if I’ll be able to paint another picture.’”¹⁴¹

A week after this encounter, Landau sent Rubin a copy of Rand’s letter from August 23, 1979, asking him to reply to Rand directly.¹⁴² A while later, Landau sent Krasner a letter stating that Rubin said in the restaurant that he would be interested in holding the retrospective. It is remarkable that such intrigue was employed to obtain a retrospective exhibition for an artist with unquestionable merits. However, it’s not unusual, since women artists were so neglected in museums at that time and scheduling a major show often involves powerful players and large egos.

The sculptor Marjorie Michael sketched and took photographs of Krasner so that she could start making a portrait bust of her after they returned from the artists’ conference where they met at Watch Hill, Rhode Island, in July 1975.

Though women artists still struggle, they experience and often appreciate the small improvements since the days when Krasner worked. The artist and feminist Helene Aylon recounted a chance encounter she had with Krasner in 1972, at the Museum of Modern Art cafeteria when she was with her sixteen-year-old nephew: “There was Lee Krasner sitting at the next table. My nephew was already an art lover, and had related to her work and he was in awe at being so close. He said hello. They got to speaking about art, and she told him to go to Marlborough [just four blocks away] and ask the gallery dealer to give him a poster of hers, which she would then sign. He still has it in his house.”¹⁴³

“Krasner in life and death was put into the inferior position,” complained Aylon. “Like the biblical quote to Eve: ‘Thy desire shall be for thy husband but he shall rule over thee.’ The treatment at Betty Parsons alone could have made her a feminist. In life, she talked about her inner rhythm, an inner voice she listened to closely. And Pollock was about an outward gesture that he threw around flamboyantly, even allowing his cigarettes to drop down in the torrent. In death, he has the larger stone in the Cemetery.”¹⁴⁴ Aylon concluded, “[Krasner’s] influence on me, as she had been [like me] in the [Betty Parsons] gallery and was a role model for sure, was her speaking about how she wanted to be surprised. How she wanted the work to breathe and become alive.”¹⁴⁵