Broad Strokes, page 11
Regardless, the movement served Neel well. In 1970, TIME magazine asked her to create their cover on Kate Millett, the Columbia grad student whose dissertation, published as Sexual Politics, was an unlikely bestseller. Last of a dying breed, Neel of course wanted to paint from the living model, but Millett refused. Like a lead singer worried about pissing off her bandmates, she didn’t want to break ranks with the sisterhood by taking the limelight. Never one to pass up on opportunity, Neel settled for a photograph.
By painting the cover for TIME, Neel reached a bigger audience than any contemporary artist could ever dream of, and the portrait of Millett is one of her best-known works. It is, unabashedly, icon-making. Staring, unsmiling, mannish and intense, with her dark hair and white men’s shirt, Millett reminds me most of Robert Mapplethorpe’s famous cover image of Patti Smith on the album Horses a few years later. Both are working-class hotties in crisp white shirts, conveying seriousness of purpose alongside a sexy androgynous glamor. Quite a feat. Perhaps Mapplethorpe had taken note.
Mapplethorpe photographed Neel herself not long before she died of cancer in 1984. It’s a haunting picture, deliberately so. Neel knew she was dying and told Mapplethorpe she wanted to know what she’d look like dead. So she closed her eyes and opened her mouth, in imitation of innumerable nineteenth-century photographs of the recently deceased. The result is transcendent, like Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Theresa, a moment of piercing rapture and possible pain.
Neel depicted the human in all of us, including herself, the deformed, deranged, beautiful wretches that we are. “I tried to reflect innocently,” Neel once said of her work. She was wickedly good at it.
CHAPTER 10:
LEE KRASNER
I sacrificed nothing.
—LEE KRASNER
IN A PHOTOGRAPH FROM the summer of 1927 two sisters pose shoulder to shoulder on a sandy beach in their bathing suits. Nineteen-year-old Lenore stares evenly at the camera, while Ruth, seventeen, smiles but glances away. They look like any American teenagers, but are not quite.
By now Lenore (a name she’d given herself) was going by “Lee” with her art school crowd in Manhattan, where she attended The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. She’d understood her own destiny for years: “I don’t know where the word A-R-T came from; but by the time I was thirteen, I knew I wanted to be a painter.” Not exactly a predictable choice for the Brooklyn-bred daughter of an immigrant fishmonger.
She’d been born Lena Krassner, the sixth of her mother’s seven children and the first born in America, just nine months after her Russian-Jewish parents were reunited after two years apart. Ruth came two years after her. Two American girls in a traditional Jewish family that spoke Russian and Yiddish at home, Lena and Ruth were almost a family unto themselves. They shared a bed growing up and shared the dislocation of being raised in two worlds: Old and New.
By the time her picture was taken on the beach, the girl now called Lee Krasner fully intended to plant her flag firmly in the New.
The following summer, in July 1928, Krasner’s older sister Rose died of appendicitis, leaving behind two young daughters. According to Old World tradition, Krasner should now marry her brother-in-law and raise her nieces. This was not a request, but an outright expectation.
Lee Krasner. Self-Portrait. 1930.
She refused.
Ruth, just eighteen years old and perhaps more pliant, or with less grasp of her own destiny, stepped or was pushed into the breach. According to Krasner biographer Gail Levin, Ruth “never forgave her sister.”
But crucially, and quickly, Krasner forgave herself.
The September after Rose’s death, Krasner applied to the National Academy of Design, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and was accepted. Like most serious art schools, students there began by sketching from casts of Classical and Renaissance sculptures before they could enter “life drawing” classes, to which they had to apply.
Krasner’s application to life drawing was this assured self-portrait, done outside her parents’ home in rural Long Island, where they had moved (and she with them) in 1926. “I nailed a mirror to a tree, and spent the summer painting myself with trees showing in the background,” Krasner said. “It was difficult—the light in the mirror, the heat and the bugs.” It was both technically challenging and a bold choice for a school steeped in nineteenth-century Academic (read: highly traditional) painting.
Krasner depicts herself as a no-nonsense young woman in a dirty painter’s apron and short-sleeved work shirt with short hair to match. Her cool-eyed stare is familiar from the beach photo, but here she casts a cold eye on herself. Piercing and a little merciless, she doesn’t flatter herself physically: her lips, nose, and ears are big, her eyes small. But in one way she does flatter: she wholly and self-consciously presents herself as a painter. This is me.
The painting got her into life drawing class (enticingly called “Life in Full”) at the Academy, where she would be allowed to draw from the nude model, but not without a scolding from her teachers, who said, “When you paint a picture inside, don’t pretend it’s done outside.” They thought she’d made up the trees for some reason, while keeping strictly to nature when it came to the awkward planes of her own face.
That Krasner was not conventionally attractive is often remarked on. Her biographer, Levin, who knew Krasner, writes, “I never considered Lee ugly, as several of her contemporaries and some writers have emphasized since her death.” But Levin does go on at length about Krasner’s great figure, even quoting a fellow female student at the Academy describing “the extremely ugly, elegantly stylized Lee Krasner. She had a huge nose, pendulous lips, bleached hair in a long, slick bob, and a dazzlingly beautiful, luminously white body.”
Ever notice how no one ever talks about how Picasso wasn’t good-looking? He wasn’t. And he was short (5 ft 4 in/162 cm). Why does this never enter into accounts of his life and work? Because it doesn’t matter.
Right?
And never, that I can recall, has anyone begun a discussion of Jackson Pollock’s work with a phrase such as, “The bald but still virile painter . . .”
The first time I saw a picture of Krasner I was an undergraduate and she was my research paper subject. The photo showed her glancing up at Pollock with him looking back at her, a scraggly bunch of daisies held between them. They’re a matched set those three, rough but serviceable. She is not hot; neither is he; the daisies are just okay. Awesome. I liked Krasner even more now that I’d caught sight of her, and liked Pollock, too, for liking her. It was, I’m sorry to say, a kind of revelation to me at age nineteen that a man might want a woman for reasons other than looks (the opposite was all too obvious). For the right kind of man—even in this case, a volatile genius—attraction might lie in talent, passion, brains, and commitment.
There were bands I loved then with women in them, but no matter how punk rock, the women seemed up for display in a way their male counterparts didn’t. Krasner—who was once tickled when a critic called her use of color “punk rock”—confirmed what I should already have known: looks don’t mean shit; it’s all about the licks.
If you know anything about Lee Krasner, you know she was married to Jackson Pollock, martyred saint of America’s first home-grown church of Modernism, the cult of Abstract Expressionism. Ab Ex (as it’s affectionately known) was the sublime coming together of cultivated European philosophy and brute “can-do” American action. Ab Ex as perfected by Pollock was all about doing. According to influential critic Harold Rosenberg, “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.”
Ab Ex canvases were gestural and sprawling—slashes or spills of paint all over the canvas—and tended to the large (read: heroic). For the Abstract Expressionist, the canvas was a rectangle of cultivated battle, no less than the boxing ring or wrestling mat. It tended to attract men. Or actually, no. It tended to recognize men, those brawling, “heroic” action figures.
But this is not about Jackson Pollock. This is about Lee Krasner, married to him for eleven years, but a painter for three decades after he died and painting for nearly twenty years before they met. If one of the great aims of Modernism was to “make it new” (to quote Ezra Pound, who was, somewhat confoundingly, quoting an eighteenth-century Chinese king), then it was Krasner who got there first. She beat Pollock in the first round.
Lee Krasner. Seated Nude. 1940.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Krasner left the Academy in 1932 with a handsome White Russian émigré boyfriend named Igor Pantuhoff and a desire to pursue the new. One Academy instructor, Leon Kroll, had once told her to “go home and take a mental bath.” Instead, she took off and immersed herself in the avant-garde.
She and Pantuhoff moved in together (they never married, possibly because Pantuhoff’s anti-Semitic Russian family were the very sort whose pogroms caused Krasner’s family to flee the Old Country in the first place). Together they frequented an eatery called the Jumble Shop, a gathering place for serious artists from Arshile Gorky to Willem de Kooning, where “you didn’t get a seat at the table unless you thought Picasso was a god,” according to Krasner.
Like de Kooning and Gorky—and like Picasso himself—Krasner had not yet taken up total abstraction. But as her Seated Nude demonstrates, she was working through the complex lessons of Cubism under the tutelage of German painter Hans Hofmann, a legendary teacher who taught a “push pull” aesthetic of puncturing the two-dimensional picture plane and reordering it using the tension of relationships between simplified parts (color, form) rather than “illustrating” a given scene.
Eh?
If that sounds like nonsense, maybe Hofmann’s words are clearer: “The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” After three years of taking classes with Hofmann, uncovering the simple and the necessary, Krasner broke through—she called it a “physical break in my work”—to abstraction.
Speaking of nonsense, it is, alas, a word sometimes (often?) associated with abstract artworks, and it occurs to me that we should tackle the elephant (or non-objective rectangle) in the room straight off. There is, no question, a pervasive sense that abstract art is some trick played on a gullible public, that artists and critics are laughing behind their silk hankies at the fools they’ve duped into taking this crap seriously. But you’ll have to take my word for it: artists, critics, art historians, and gallery owners are all quite earnest in their regard for abstract art. I promise.
Still, even fairly highbrow pundits (e.g., Tom Wolfe in The Painted Word) have contended that abstraction is nothing less than charlatanism, practiced by lazy, greedy artists and a complicit art world on a naive public. Yet the birth of abstraction—why it came into being—is as far from mean-spirited as possible. In fact, it was all about spirit. A new spiritual imagination for a new age.
After so many revolutionary nineteenth-century developments—railroads, photography, Darwinism, feminism—how could traditional Western art, whether a nude Greek god or a savior on a cross, express the modern spiritual condition? Impressionism tackled the problem by being a-spiritual, concerning itself solely with the material world. Post-Impressionists sought some symbolic meaning within the world itself (think of van Gogh’s sunflowers or his roiling night sky). By the early twentieth century artists wanted to go even further, looking for ways to lift the veil of the known world and peek at what lies beyond.
Abstract art is sometimes described as a departure from reality, but a better way to say it might be that it seeks to express a different reality. The reality behind our visible world. Whether we’re woo-woo wingnuts or utter rationalists, I think we can all agree such reality exists. Music, for example.
You wouldn’t think of a jazz musician as a fraud trying to trick you into thinking noise was really music. No, because you feel music intuitively: your soul and spirit (and even body) understand its message. The same is true of abstract art if you give it time and attention. It will work on you, if it’s good. And of course there’s also no accounting for taste. You might far prefer John Coltrane to John Cage. You may prefer some abstract paintings to others—I have strong opinions I won’t bore you with here—but you can still know that those paintings were made with earnest goodwill and hope for conveying some true meaning.
But I digress.
In November 1941, influential Ukrainian artist and impresario John Graham (emphatically not his given name) invited Krasner to take part in a group show with big names like Matisse, Braque, Picasso, and some painter she didn’t know, named Pollock. When they met soon after, she recognized him as a guy she’d danced with at an Artists Union party back in 1926. Legend has it (legendarily suppressed by Krasner) that Pollock asked her back then, “Do you like to fuck?” If she hadn’t been charmed by him in ’26, she was now bowled over by seeing his work, a feeling she later described as “wild enthusiasm.” They were soon a couple.
Conveniently, by the time Krasner met Pollock, her White Russian had wandered away to Florida, where he left any lingering Modernist tendencies behind, becoming a society portraitist and faithful escort to rich Southern ladies. For her part, Krasner was working in the WPA’s mural division (she later became Pollock’s boss for a while) and clubbing with her hero Piet Mondrian—“We were both mad for jazz”—who, along with so many other eminent European artists, had fled Hitler for New York.
Pollock’s work showed Krasner a totally new way to approach abstraction: not formally from without as with European Modernism, but from within. In turn, she gave him support and connections. After Krasner discovered Pollock (yep, I mean it like that), she introduced him, and his work, to prominent artists and critics, such as Clement Greenberg, who more than anyone christened Pollock the savior of American painting.
She also brought Hofmann to meet Pollock. Hofmann’s classes always used a model: witness Krasner’s Seated Nude, a sketch done from life. He considered nature the source, an artistic imperative even for pure abstraction. The eminent instructor looked around Pollock’s studio and, seeing no evidence of models, neither still lifes nor extant sketches, asked skeptically, “Do you work from nature?”
Pollock’s reply speaks volumes: “I am nature.”
With that, the wheel turned.
In 1945 the two painters were married. With financial assistance from Peggy Guggenheim—who liked Pollock as much as she loathed Krasner, even though he was the one peeing in her fireplace at parties—they purchased a home in the Springs on Long Island. There, in a big barn that Pollock used as his studio, he developed his revolutionary drip paintings, the brilliant epitome of gesture, action, and abstraction in one mind-blowing explosion of beautifully ordered paint and canvas.
In a small upstairs bedroom of the main house that Krasner used as her studio, she too worked from within. Just, you know, a lot smaller. Like Pollock, she took to standing over her canvas rather than working on an easel, and dripping paint. But where he lunged and danced like a fencer parrying with an opponent, she worked with “controlled chaos.” Composition is one of thirty-one paintings that make up her Little Image series (1946–1950), done in the bedroom at Springs. Here Krasner layers in thick surfaces of paint, divvying up the canvas with an all-over grid of white skeins that create dozens (hundreds?) of smaller images, like hieroglyphics in an Egyptian tomb. Like Egyptian hieroglyphics, there’s a tantalizing sense that if we only had the right key, we might unlock this mysterious language. At the same time, there’s something universal in their form, something we intuitively recognize as meaningful and human and timeless. Many commentators have connected Krasner’s Little Image paintings to the Kabbalah of Jewish mysticism, and more prosaically, simply to the Hebrew language she studied as a child. Certainly, in the painful years following World War II, Judaism must have often been in her mind, and heart.
Lee Krasner. Composition. 1949.
Ah, Krasner’s heart.
She knew life with Pollock would be tumultuous. Early in their courtship, she’d gone with his brother to get him out of Bellevue, where he’d been drying out for days after a bender brought on by his mother coming to town. Pollock was an alcoholic, no doubt, and an angry, violent drunk at that. It was a lot, but Krasner was willing to take on all of it for the sake of art, and love.
Lee Krasner. Milkweed. 1955.
Critic Amei Wallach has said of Pollock and Krasner that “his energy was lyric, hers was thundering. He was Mozart to her Wagner.” I smiled when first reading this because I’ve often thought of Krasner as Salieri to Pollock’s Mozart (in the pop-culture sense, i.e., the movie). Not that Krasner was dangerously envious or conniving, but because like Salieri she was an excellent artist, close enough to genius to know it immediately when she saw it. Much has been made of Krasner’s tireless promotion of Pollock, both before and after his death, but she never stopped making art. Never. As artists they stood shoulder to shoulder, doing the work. Unlike the movie version of Salieri, Krasner did not want this Mozart dead. She very much wanted him to paint, and to live, on.
