John Graham not only influenced Pollock’s work. He was the first to organize an exhibition that brought together avant-garde American and French painting—to hang work by figures such as Pollock and Lee Krasner in the company of work by Picasso and Matisse. To be sure, at the time, January of 1942, it would have been easy to miss the event. McMillen & Co., where the show occurred, was not so much an art dealer as a decorating firm; the show did not generate great sales or great publicity; and the quality of the examples was frankly somewhat uneven. The dangers of being an art critic are suggested by the fact that one of the few writers who took note of the display at all, James Lane, declared that a now completely obscure painter, Virginia Diaz, “walked off with the show.” Pollock’s contribution, Birth, received not a word of critical comment, although today it hangs in London’s greatest museum of modern art, the Tate Gallery, and is universally regarded as a masterpiece. Hastily pulled together, the show was uneven and not very well focused. But for all its shortcomings, Graham’s exhibition introduced a theme that has since become canonical in histories of modern art—that the Americans were the true heirs of the accomplishments of the French.
The show also brought Pollock into contact with a figure who would play a central role in his life, Lee Krasner. The Krassners (Lee later took one of the s’s out of her name) were Russian Jews who, like hundreds of thousands of others, came to the United States in the early years of the twentieth century to escape economic hardship, military conscription, pogroms, and religious persecution. Perhaps because of its background, the family was suspicious of outsiders. At the same time, the atmosphere inside the family was also not harmonious or friendly, and Lee grew up thinking of herself as “an outcast” and “an oddball.” Her father was remote, spending more time at the synagogue than at home or at work, while her mother, who handled most practical affairs, was argumentative and superstitious. The girls were viewed as less important than Lee’s older brother, Irving, the only male in the family, who treated her rather sadistically, with contemptuous superiority, and Lee was treated less fondly than her younger sister, Ruth, the baby of the family, who was regarded as prettier. Not surprisingly, Ruth and Lee did not like each other; in fact, they barely communicated. “We had nothing in common,” Ruth later commented.
Lee Krasner, about 1938. (Photographer unknown. Lee Krasner Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.)
Later in life, Lee often spoke of “colliding” with people, and she developed an approach to relationships that was at once combative and insecure. Afraid of criticism, she responded by going on the attack. “You couldn’t just have a conversation with Lee,” Ruth remembered. “Oh, no! She’d bite your head off even before you had a chance to say hello.” Throughout her life she formed relationships with men who were at both remote and abusive, and she was always ambivalent about her role as a woman, fiercely struggling to assert her identity as an artist at a time when women were not taken seriously, and at the same time fearful that a woman alone, not a wife and not a mother, had no existence. Insistent on independence, she was curiously lacking in basic practical skills. When Pollock met her she did not know how to turn on the stove to make a cup of coffee, and she did not learn to drive until she was over forty.
One of the mysteries about Lee Krasner is why she became an artist, since she received no encouragement from her family or anyone else, and she seemingly showed little talent. In some complex way the decision doubtless reflected an early desire to escape the confines of her culture and her family. Traditional Jewish culture was bound by the biblical injunction against graven images, but in American culture, by the turn of the century, the arts were widely viewed as a realm in which women could achieve self-expression and even pursue a professional career. At some visceral level, Krasner seems to have sensed that art provided a means of escape.
At the age of fourteen she applied to Manhattan’s Washington Irving High School, the only high school in the city that allowed girls to major in art. Her application was rejected, but she reapplied and was accepted. Once enrolled in the school, not only did she get poor grades, but art was her worst subject. Nonetheless, she persisted. After graduating she attended the Women’s Art School of Cooper Union, on the edge of Greenwich Village, where she was trained in a thoroughly traditional way, including much copying of plaster casts, and also took some classes at the Art Students League. Ambitious to get better training, she applied to the National Academy of Design and was accepted although her academic record was far from exemplary. But she did not submit gracefully to the regime of copying plaster casts and painting photographic likenesses of the model, instead becoming a rebel who painted Impressionist studies outdoors and visited shows of modern French painting.
Krasner’s first serious relationship was with a dashing fellow student at the National Academy, Igor Pantuhoff, a six-footer with a golden baritone, a slight Russian accent, and movie-star good looks, who claimed to be a White Russian of noble ancestry. He was also an alcoholic. For several years she set aside her painting career to cater to his needs, but in 1937 she decided to go back to painting and enrolled in Hans Hofmann’s school at 38 West Ninth Street. In 1939 Pantuhoff walked out, leaving Lee devastated.
Not long afterward she took up with Pollock, apparently picking him out as an achievable target and then establishing a relationship despite his passivity and reluctance. While not a White Russian like Pantuhoff, to Lee he undoubtedly seemed exotic—a 100 percent American whose ancestors had lived in this country for five generations or more.
In later life, Lee Krasner often related the story of how she first met Jackson Pollock, describing how when she stepped into his studio and saw his paintings the sight “overwhelmed her,” how she felt the floor beneath her sinking and “felt the presence of a living force that [she] hadn’t witnessed before.” In actual fact, as we know from her friends at the time, there wasn’t much electricity to their first meeting. Jackson was sitting in the front room, head in hands, recovering from a binge the night before, and their conversation was minimal. Nor did she particularly like his work. Nonetheless, something about his looks and character impressed her. Lee apparently got Pollock to promise to visit her studio, but it was weeks before he showed up. She asked if he wanted a cup of coffee, and when he said yes she headed back to the hall to get her coat. When he looked confused, she explained that she didn’t know how to make it—they needed to go to the local drugstore.
She came into his life just at the right moment to fill a gap. For six years Jackson had been cared for by his brother Sande, but on November 9, 1941, Sande’s wife, Arloie, had a daughter, Karen, and having Jackson around, getting drunk, became untenable. Sande’s son Jason believes that Arloie got pregnant to get rid of Jackson. Whether or not this was the case, at this point it became clear that Jackson needed to move out. In early 1942 Jackson began spending the night at Lee’s studio, and when he returned to Eighth Street during the day to paint or sit around, the common door was kept locked. Shortly afterward, Sande left New York, leaving Lee to take care of Jackson.
Once Jackson moved in, Lee threw herself into the role of perfect wife, learning to cook, shifting from bohemian attire to that of a proper housewife, making his phone calls, handling his correspondence, and, since he was so silent, even speaking his thoughts. “He couldn’t do anything for himself,” Clement Greenberg once observed of Pollock. “If he went to the train station to buy himself a ticket, he’d get drunk along the way.” For the second time in her life she largely stopped painting. Lee would later refer to this as her “blackout period.” She talked about his paintings but not about her own. There was one painter who mattered, and that was Jackson. Intensely possessive, Lee took steps to eliminate any possible competition. For example, in the summer of 1942, shortly after Jackson had started living with her, he ended his sessions with the Jungian therapist who had succeeded Joseph Henderson, Violet de Laszlo, on Lee’s insistence.
Krasner’s artistic influence on Pollock was by no means straightforward, since their relationship was far from harmonious. Indeed, on fundamental issues of artistic expression they were completely out of sync. Pollock didn’t care for Cubism, which Krasner revered, regarding it as the foundation of modern art; Krasner had no interest in Jung, who provided practically the foundation for Pollock’s sense of self. Pollock was not much interested in Matisse and Mondrian, whom Krasner admired; she reviled Siqueiros and did not understand how anyone “could take Benton seriously as a painter.” While they both admired Picasso’s Guernica, Lee admired its formal properties, Jackson its emotional intensity. Once when she had the temerity to pick up a brush to show him how to paint something, he became so angry that he stormed out of the room and remained sullen and resentful for months afterward. Eventually, on visits to museums and galleries, they learned to avoid conversation and communicate through brief nods and grunts. “I practically had to hit him to make him say anything at all,” she once commented. “We didn’t talk art. We didn’t have that kind of relationship at all.”
Yet in some subliminal way, Krasner had great influence. At the time that Pollock met Krasner, he was surprisingly naïve, since to a large degree he had absorbed his ideas from a single source: most of his views about art were still those he had absorbed from Benton. Krasner quickly straightened this out and gave him a new canon of whom to admire and whom to dislike.
The art critic Barbara Rose, reflecting a widely held view, has declared that Krasner helped Pollock escape “Benton’s narrow provincialism” and develop “a more international, sophisticated view of art.” In many ways this is getting things backward. Benton, for all his gruff pretensions, was a thoroughly cosmopolitan figure. He could read books in foreign languages; he had lived in Europe; he had traveled widely in the United States; his friends included leading intellectuals and artists, not only painters but poets and musicians; he read philosophy and aesthetics; and he had studied art history from top to bottom, including things that are often left out, such as Persian miniatures and Hindu sculpture.
Krasner, on the other hand, had read little and had hardly been outside New York; she did not know how to drive a car or even
how to turn on a stove; her group of friends was narrow. What she introduced Pol-lock to was not so much a range of ideas
as a limited set of them, an ideological stance. Krasner’s strength, in fact, was that she was willing to disregard and plow
through so many things that others held dear—things like history, or the figural tradition of Western art, or good manners,
or other people’s feelings. One can call this intelligence in the sense that the strategy in many ways was remarkably effective.
But if we look to nature for insight, we learn that the creature most dangerous to man is not some reasonably brainy primate
but the slithering crocodile, with a brain the size of a poker chip, which because it has few thoughts is singularly successful
in turning thought into action. Krasner’s strength—and one could say this of Pollock as well—was not sophistication but a
more primitive instinct.
Hans Hofmann
To the extent that Krasner influenced Pollock’s artistic style, it was to expose him to the theories of her teacher Hans Hofmann, who (largely through Krasner) was also to greatly influence the art theories of Pol-lock’s critical supporter Clement Greenberg. Hofmann had gone to Paris in 1904 and stayed there for ten years, associating at least casually with the major figures of French art, such as Picasso, Braque, Matisse, and Derain. When war broke out in 1914 he went back to Munich and opened a school based on the one Matisse had established in Paris. Shortly before the start of World War II, he came to the United States and quickly established a reputation as a leading teacher of modernist ideas, a figure who could answer the great questions of modern art.
He was an effusive, garrulous, enthusiastic teacher, who took on the role of a guru of modern art and basked in the admiration of his mostly female students. Steve Wheeler, who studied with him, recalled Hof-mann as “pompous, blustering, and egocentric,” but others adored him. Lee Krasner had a love-hate relationship with him, at once deeply resenting when he took the charcoal from her hand and marked up one of her drawings, or even tore a drawing she particularly liked into four pieces and rearranged it on her easel, but at the same time loving the attention and the sense of mystery that surrounded association with a guru, a master.
Pollock’s relationship with Hofmann was strained by several episodes in which Jackson behaved with drunken violence. But Hofmann
was quick to recognize that there seemed to be two very different Jackson Pollocks trapped in one body, one sweet and the
other quite menacing. As Hofmann noted in the fall of 1944, in a postcard to Mercedes Matter (written in English accented
with traces of his native German):
Jackson is highly sensitive, he is a wonderful artist, he is in reality good natured, but his companionship is hard to stand
when he is off the normal. Lee will have a hard time with him, but she stays with him and I respect her for this. Lee says
over: it is easier to have 5 children as to be married with an artist. When he is talented then you can dopple [sic] or triple this number.
While Jackson never formally studied with Hofmann (he seems to have largely absorbed his ideas through Krasner and Greenberg), Hof-mann certainly contributed to a loosening of his approach and a move to a greater sense of weightlessness.
Until the development of photography, the goal of painting had been to imitate nature as closely as possible. After the invention of the camera, however, it came to seem rather pointless to devote great effort to do something that could be done better by a machine. Rather than killing painting, this challenge ended up giving it a new life: to a large degree, this battle with the camera produced modern art, which abandoned illusionism and perspective and increasingly acknowledged the fundamental character of painting as the application of color on a flat surface. The challenge of modern art, however, was to create a new set of standards and rules. What should a painting set out to do? What was the connection between one brushstroke and the next? How should brushstrokes relate to each other? How could one tell when a painting was finished or whether it was good or bad?
In somewhat murky language, Hofmann had an answer to all these questions. As a child, Hofmann had played with electrical inventions, and perhaps in part because of this experience, his art theories abandon the usual Re naissance space, in which forms have weight and gravity, and posit a free-floating electrical field. Essentially, Hofmann posited painting as a field of interactions, ruled by the dynamic push-pull of opposing forces. He proposed that force-field tensions are created from the moment of the first brushstroke: tensions between the stroke and the empty canvas, tensions between one brushstroke and the next. He was particularly fascinated by the oppositions of color: warm color and cool color, advancing color and receding color, luminous, translucent color and solid, weighty color. Similarly, he saw tensions that are created by line: tension between inside and outside, solid and void, direction and stability.
How should one put these things together? Part of the fascination of Hofmann’s theories is that they were not quite logical. He insisted on creating dynamic tensions of spatial push and pull and at the same time argued that a painting should be flat, that the forms should float toward the surface, and that the space should contain no holes. If it was just flat it didn’t have “push and pull,” but if it had too much push and pull it didn’t harmonize and the space had holes. “Do not make it flat! But it must stay flat!” he exhorted, to the bewilderment of some of his students, to the delighted wonder of others.