Dean of Art
“I’ve got a long way to go yet toward my development – much that needs working on – doing everything with a definite purpose. Without purpose with each move then chaos.”[43]
To help readers picture the young, rebellious Jackson, biographers have suggested thinking of characters played in movies starring James Dean, or characters played by Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Steve McQueen, or Martin Sheen when they were young. Many soap operas, for example, include a character that is an angry young man archetype. The myth of the cowboy-artist Pollock probably satisfied a similar popular need in his day.
Of course, those actors were generations after Pollock. Moreover, the actors were fortunately less rebellious in their real lives than in the troubled lives of the characters they played. Pollock was, in reality, truly at least as moody and non-conformist as those fictional characters. However, comparisons at the time, especially to James Dean, who also died in a fatal car crash, are inevitable. Dean’s last movie was Giant, the giant of motion pictures released in 1956, the year of Pollock’s fatal crash. Film critic Leslie Halliwell said Dean’s death set off “astonishing world-wide outbursts of emotional necrophilia.”[44] A retrospective bio-pic, The James Dean Story, was compiled in 1957, the same year as Pollock’s retrospective at MoMA.
That atmosphere and those comparisons, along with the unique but widely-circulated photo of Pollock in Western gear, help to keep the myth alive to this day. Jackson’s brother, Charles, had a very similar photo in the Western work gear, but he didn’t perpetuate into adulthood a corresponding cocky attitude, as did Jackson. It might be that Pollock’s inner child was always that of a rebellious and independent cowboy.
Lee Krasner
In several references, the birth year of Lee Krasner is given as 1912, the same as Pollock’s. However, it is given as 1908 in Gabor and other authoritative sources. At the least, oral biographies sometimes mention she was older than Pollock. Krasner’s parents were Orthodox Jews from Brooklyn. She was the fifth of six children, and apparently her talent was overlooked in her youth. However, she later became a favourite student of the noted artist and mentor, Hans Hofmann, from 1937 to 1940. She lived with an artist, Igor Pantuhoff, in the early 1930s. She led her relatives to think they were married[45]. He was in so many ways the opposite of Lee; in his appearance, background, and philosophy[46]. Yet, they shared an apartment in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, with Harold Rosenberg and Harold’s wife, May Tabak. Rosenberg had Pollock’s evolving technique in mind when he later coined the phrase, action painting. Pantuhoff’s profile portrait of Krasner seems to be a caricature, yet it is oddly flattering. It is one of the many details carefully incorporated into the Harris movie. Pantuhoff said, “How much you get paid (for a portrait of a society lady) depends on how well you sleep with her.”[47] He was an admirer of de Kooning.
Pollock’s biographers suggest Pollock and Pantuhoff “were drawn to Krasner not so much by lust as by their alcoholism, eccentricity, and a latent homosexual’s attraction to a maternal figure.”[48] After Pollock’s death, Pantuhoff inexplicably wanted to resume their love affair (23).
Even brief biographies of Pollock need to profile Krasner. Critics and art historians acknowledge her importance in the history of American art. Even just socially, she always had an important male artist in her life. However, each of those men had a love/hate relationship with her.
One of her biographers observes, “To these men, an incisive mind, a sharp wit, luxuriant hair, a stunning figure, and beautiful hands couldn’t militate against a face that evoked cubism in the flesh.”[49] Pollock derisively referred to Lee in public and in her presence as ‘that face’. One neighbour described her as ‘shrewishly unattractive.’[50]
A classmate of Krasner’s said, “She was not a handsome woman… My impression was that most men, like me, were rather repelled by her.”[51].
Hofmann did at least two portraits of Krasner, probably between 1935 and 1940. Each seems to seek both her strength and grace while acknowledging her prominent physical features and his apparent interest in her shapely lips. The portrait, with the odd double-lined outline of the nose, is the property of the Jason McCoy Gallery, from the collection of a former Hofmann student, Lillian Kiesler. It is oil on board, 25 × 21 1/4 inches (63.5 × 54 cm). Hofmann expert, Tina Dickey, believes, “(Hofmann) may have been using two brushes at once in those double strokes.” About the theory that Hofmann was showing the process of his work, Dickey adds, “It seems unlikely that he would, or could, draw a line so closely parallel to the line of an earlier stage.”[52] (Note Jason McCoy is Sande McCoy’s son, a nephew of Pollock).
Number 32, 1950, 1950. Enamel on canvas, 269 × 457.5 cm, Kunstammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.
“Well, method is, it seems to me, a natural growth out of a need, and from a need the modern artist has found new ways of expressing the world about him.”[53]
Pollock’s portraits of Krasner were also unflattering, in contrast to her self-portraits in which she showed herself as young and even glamorous. Her biographer, Gabor, describes how the young girl, Lena Krassner (sic), hung a mirror from a tree in her backyard and then painted her own portrait: “Those who knew Krasner would easily recognise the pose of defiance… scepticism and intensity.”[54]
Krasner was not alone in being the artist-wife of a more famous husband, and thus put her career on hold during his artistically productive years. De Kooning’s wife, Elaine, was another. Ann Rower makes a fascinating comparison between the two artist wives (97). Other outstanding women who often stood behind their famous men are studied in Andrea Gabor’s, Einstein’s Wife (28).
Concerning Krasner’s politics, Gabor comments, “She believed in the new aesthetic and in a divine, Platonic ideal of the artist that she found embodied by Pollock.”[55]
Even after years of life in the shadows of Pollock, Krasner would become, as biographer Gabor expresses it “the most powerful wife and widow in the artistic firmament.”[56] Another woman would be essential to the process – Peggy Guggenheim.
The art education of Krasner was exceptional. Robert Hughes notes,
“No American could have had a better one in the ‘30s. First, there was rigorous academic grounding under the atelier system at the Art Students League in New York. Then the large-scale practical experience on the WPA murals in the ‘30s; finally, three years (1937–1940) under the great émigré teacher, Hans Hofmann, who knew… Matisse, Kandinsky, Mondrian… and could share their ideas with students.”[57]
Most critics today would