In 1957, Lee Krasner moved her painting tools and set up her studio in the barn on the property of her home in Springs, New York, a hamlet in eastern Long Island. The barn—a single-light-filled space measuring roughly 20 by 20 feet—had previously been the studio of her late husband, Jackson Pollock. But from 1957 until Krasner’s death in 1984, the barn was her domain, and there she took full advantage of the space and freedom finally afforded her, producing the most brilliant works of her career.
A dazzling new exhibition, “Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, brings together the works of husband and wife, tracing the trajectory of their careers. The show begins with Krasner, opening with a series of abstract collage paintings from the mid-1950s made from cut-up fragments of her old canvases and drawings. It concludes with Krasner, too, closing with Past Continuous (1976), a monumental collage Krasner made from her own Cubist-inspired drawings from the 1930s from which the show takes its name. Pollock’s breathtaking drip paintings appear in the middle like a storm, a force of nature that tore through Krasner’s life.
In his lifetime, Pollock had become synonymous with the barn. There, he had flung, dripped, and poured paint onto canvases unrolled across its floors. In 1949, Life magazine immortalized Pollock and his studio with a profile entitled “Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?” The editorial featured photographer Martha Holmes’s now-iconic images of Pollock at work, dripping paint from a brush with a cigarette dangling from his lips.
Pollock and Krasner had moved to Springs from New York City in 1945, using a loan from gallerist and collector Peggy Guggenheim for the down payment on a two-story home. They had come to the bucolic seaside town seeking an escape from the distractions and demands of city life so they could focus on their work. Pollock first worked in an upstairs bedroom and Krasner in the cramped kitchen. Later, Pollock moved his studio into the property’s barn, and Krasner took the upstairs bedroom he had vacated.
In August 1956, Pollock crashed his car on the side of the road after a night of heavy drinking, killing himself and his passenger, Edith Metzger, a friend of his mistress, Ruth Kligman. Kligman, who was also in the car, survived.
Krasner, who had been traveling in Europe at the time of the crash, returned immediately to plan his funeral. Slowly, in the months that followed, she returned to her practice, eventually moving her tools into the barn, close to a year after his death. For many years, the barn had smelled of the kerosene used to heat a stove, but Pollock had winterized it in 1953, insulating the walls and covering the floor with Masonite squares left over from a printing job by his brother, Sanford. When Krasner entered the studio in 1957, she walked on tiles that hid Pollock’s paint splatters covering the wood floor beneath.
Often, stories of Krasner’s life seem to end with Pollock’s death, but in reality, she was just embarking on the most fruitful years of her artistic career.
Krasner, a rising star
She was born Lena Krassner in Brooklyn in 1908, the fourth of six children in a working-class, Orthodox Jewish household where English, Russian, and Yiddish mingled. Krasner rebelled early and leaned into art. She studied at the Woman’s Art School of Cooper Union, the National Academy of Design (which suspended her for entering a basement off-limits to women), and City College, before she enrolled in 1937 at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts. There, as The Met’s exhibition catalogue notes, she “imbibed the tenets of Cubism and came to revere Henri Matisse.”
In late 1941, the painter John Graham invited her to show in “American and French Paintings” at McMillen Inc. Krasner, who had cultivated friendships with many in the New York art world, knew every name on the list except Pollock’s. She found his address and called on him at his Eighth Street studio. “I was overwhelmed, bowled over, that’s all,” she later said. “I felt as if the floor was sinking when I saw those paintings.” By 1942, they were dating.
“Krasner held the more prominent artistic reputation of the two. She was better educated and more firmly entrenched in the close-knit and pugnacious New York art world,” write curators David Breslin and Brinda Kumar in the introduction to the exhibition catalogue. Her paintings of the period “articulated still-life forms and figures in thick paint, fusing geometric shapes with organic forms in overlapping planes over flat backgrounds of white or gray,” with primary blues, reds, and yellows “knit together by strong black lines.” Mondrian was an influence, and she often recalled with pride that he admired these works.
Krasner moved into Pollock’s East Eighth Street apartment in fall 1942, and they married in October 1945. A month later, with a $2,000 loan from Peggy Guggenheim, the couple bought a farmhouse and five acres in Springs, complete with a barn.
An era of doubt and rebirth
The move came in the middle of what Krasner called her “black-out period,” in which, as the catalogue puts it, she built up paint on her canvases but no image emerged, producing her “gray slabs.”
Pollock, long in the thrall of Picasso, had finally broken with Cubism, but Krasner wasn’t ready. She said this rupture “took me two years to digest. Between 1943 and 1944 I tried to undo my Cubist orientation and produced very little work in a rather anxious situation.”
But her work also took a backseat to Pollock’s career, which she championed using her connections and good graces to earn the truculent Pollock opportunities, introducing him to Robert Motherwell, Roberto Matta, and Surrealist ideas, including automatic drawing.
“At the expense of her own work,” art historian Kirk Varnedoe wrote, “Krasner poured her energy and intelligence into furthering Pollock’s efforts.” Scholar Robert Hobbs reads the gray slabs of this era as Krasner grappling with news of the Holocaust, slowly emerging from Europe.
Eventually, Krasner broke through this era of artistic doubt. Working in the upstairs bedroom Pollock had vacated, she made the “Little Images,” compact, impastoed canvases of “small dabs of paint intentionally placed in even adjacency” that became “a chromatic prism through which Krasner unlocked an endless palette.”
In 1953, following a disappointing solo show in 1951, she began recycling her unsold canvases into large collages. Some of these works include scraps of Pollock’s discarded drawings and canvases, among them Bald Eagle (1955). In the fall of 1955, at the age of 46, Krasner opened a solo exhibition of her collage paintings at dealer Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery in New York, marking her second solo show in New York. While dealer Betty Parsons was the show’s only buyer, the exhibition earned strong reviews with Stuart Preston of the New York Times calling her “a good noisy colorist” and Fairfield Porter writing, in ARTnews, that her art “seems to be about nature” and makes viewers “aware of a subtle disorder greater than [they] might otherwise have thought possible.” The show marked a new era of creativity for Krasner. Pollock, in a downward spiral fueled by alcoholism, meanwhile created only one painting that year.
Krasner’s crescendo
After moving into the barn in 1957, Krasner’s scale and her palette changed. In early 1958, she exhibited 17 of her “Earth Green” paintings, large-scale bright abstractions seemingly inspired by nature, at Martha Jackson Gallery. Stuart Preston wrote in a review in the Times that “the sheer energy that Miss Krasner manages to generate on her picture surfaces.”
Her work went well beyond her canvases, however. Krasner worked tirelessly to secure Pollock’s legacy, and became a key source for critics and curators writing about him. She collaborated on the 1958 traveling retrospective of his work and placed his estate with Marlborough Gallery. When Marlborough’s director offered to represent her too, she declined, preferring to be asked on her own terms, not as his executor.
After her mother died in 1959, insomnia drove Krasner to paint at night under artificial light. The result was the “Umber” series, which the critic Cindy Nemser described as “slashing, splintered strokes of raw umber and white.” By the mid-1960s, bright colors had returned in works like Combat (year), which measures more than 5 by 13 feet, in riotous twists and folds of pink and orange color.
In 1965, Krasner took a step out of Pollock’s shadow when she opened “Lee Krasner: Paintings, Drawings, and Collages,” a retrospective of her work at the Whitechapel Gallery, her first solo exhibition outside the U.S. In 1974, the curator Bryan Robertson found a box of her 1930s drawings from Hofmann’s classes. She cut them into strips and shards, and rebuilt them as canvases named for verb tenses. “I am never free of the past,” she said. “I believe in continuity… the past is part of the present which becomes part of the future.”
At the end of her life, Krasner was looking to the future through her own past. The ailing artist donated her assets, made up mainly from her work and Pollock’s, to create a foundation that would support the work of young artists. The Pollock-Krasner Foundation has granted over $90 million to artists since it was established in 1985, and is the first successful foundation established by an artist, for artists.
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