Out of the Shade

By A. T. Baker

Lee Krasner has been a painter for 40 years--not a woman meant to live in the shadow of anybody else. But by an accident of love, she fell into such a shade when she married a great artist, Jackson Pollock.

Krasner accepted the traditional burdens of a genius' wife, supporting, protecting and at times nursing. At the time her own work seemed to her "irrelevant." That she maintained the germ of independence as a painter is only now becoming apparent, some 17 years after Pollock's death. In recognition of her separate stature, Manhattan's Whitney Museum this week has mounted a show of her largest and latest work.

The long subjugation to Pollock's spirit began in 1940. Manhattan's McMillan Gallery was putting on a show of Picasso, Matisse and Braque, and proposed to have three unknown Americans exhibited with them. One was Willem de Kooning, another was Jackson Pollock, the third was Lee Krasner. At the time, Krasner was 32 and totally absorbed in the bohemian life.

She knew De Kooning, but had not heard of Pollock. She looked up his address, found he was living only a block away. "Being of an impulsive nature," she recalls, "I lunged right over. I walked up five floors, knocked, and I realized that I had met this man four years earlier at a party--he was a lousy dancer." Then she looked at his paintings. "I almost died," she remembers.

Deadly Cycle. Instead she moved in. They lived together at the Greenwich Village apartment until 1945, when they married and bought an old farmhouse in Springs, Long Island.

It was in many ways a curious partnership. Pollock was the son of a Nevada rancher who had moved on to California. Lee's father was a Jewish emigrant from Poland who owned a food store in Brooklyn. Pollock sweated out lonely struggles with himself. Krasner was more suggestible. Sometimes her work echoed Mark Tobey, other times Mondrian, most often De Kooning.

Success began to come to Pollock; and the deadly cycle that can afflict suddenly famous artists started. Pollock fell into drinking bouts and took up with girls; Krasner began to commute to Manhattan to see a psychiatrist.

On an August night in 1956, with two girls in his car, Pollock drove into a tree. Only 44, he was killed instantly. So was one of the girls. The other, Ruth Kligman, has written a pathetic, petty account of the tragedy in a recent issue of New York magazine.

For months Lee was rigid with despair. Then, in a sudden blossoming--or release--she began painting again. She also became the art world's most formidable "art widow." As heir to all of Pollock's work, she doled out paintings at a careful pace, consulted endlessly with lawyers and galleries. 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. True, she went through a spell of working in Pollock's manner, and even adopted a variant of his famous drip technique (a quick flip of the wrist that produces a delicate staccato of paint). More recently, she has struck loose not only in color but in shape. Pollination (1968) derives from childhood memories and the vacant lots she used to walk across to school, bright with dandelions and buttercups.

Her latest work is totally free of Pollock's tortured line. Peacock (1973) is as emphatic as a subway ad, authoritative as a Matisse chasuble. The splintered fan, the quizzical black beak have nothing much to do with peacocks--Krasner's titles are afterthoughts--but they have an irresistible gaiety.

Essentially, Lee Krasner at 65 is a woman in search of (and finding) a self that she gave away for a tune for her husband's sake--a sacrifice she does not regret. These days she likes to quote from T.S. Eliot's Quartets:

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

qed A.T. Baker

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