00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hello everyone. For those who've listened to the show, you'll know that Lee Krasner started painting at around aged fourteen until her death in nineteen eighty four. That's six decades of work. One thing I love about Lee's art is how it was constantly changing in style in scale, from seventeen feet wide paintings to small mosaic tables. We didn't really have time to get properly stuck into Lee's art in the show, but we're going to do that now because for me, there's some of the greatest masterpieces of the twentieth century. And we're going to do that with my friend Elena Nahir, who knows all about Lee. In fact, she he's the person who introduced me to Lee Krasner's work in the first place. And a quick note that all of the paintings will be discussing are linked to in our show notes, so if you'd like to take a look as we go, please do. Hi. Elena, thank you so much for making time to chat with me about all things Lee Krasner.
00:01:34
Speaker 2: Thank you, Katie, I.
00:01:35
Speaker 1: Know you're pretty busy these days because of your new job as the Keith el and Katherine Sachs, curator and head of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. But back in twenty nineteen you were working at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, where you created a groundbreaking retrospective of Lee's work. It blew me away, as you know, But what drew you to Lee Krasner in the first place, so much so that you staged this major exhibition.
00:02:04
Speaker 2: I think in a way as a curator, you're you're always looking for something that's intriguing, a story that just doesn't feel like it's quite yet been told in full or been told in a way that is compelling. So you're looking for a space between how something appears and how it could be. So I would look at one of Lee Krasner's works, say Gaia, which is in the Museum of Modern Arts collection, and extraordinary paintings with those amazing, sum assaulting arcs of purple and pink, and it would really do something to me. In the simplest of terms, artists are always saying that, you know, well, as Krasner said, they want the work to breathe and be alive. But for anyone who's ever wrestled with the mere materials of cotton, duck, canvas and some pigment. It's not so easy to make a thing breathe and be alive, and her work did just that. It felt invigorating, it felt disturbing in certain ways, and yet I felt I just didn't really know anything about her. And so sometimes you begin on an exhibition project because you want to know more, and you feel like other people are probably going to want to know more too. Totally.
00:03:26
Speaker 1: Well, it was electric in London when you did stage it. But in the winter of nineteen forty five, Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock moved to Springs in Long Island. So I went to the house, which is obviously still there, and I saw the spare bedroom where Lee painted, and it is tiny, with low, cramped ceilings and just two small, thin windows on each side. Hardly conditions for an ambitious artists, especially when we compare it to where Jackson was working in the barn. Can you describe the kind of painting that Lee's making while she's working in the spare bedroom.
00:04:02
Speaker 2: So they say you should never meet your heroes because it's always a bit underwhelming. I mean, there's something similar about when you go and visit a historic house or esteemed property of that kind, that you can be quite struck by the modesty of a place. And that is definitely true of the cottage that Pollock and Krasner moved out to in nineteen forty five. It's a fisherman's home. It's small, it's modest, and Krasner has the upstairs bedroom to work in until, of course, it gets too cold and Pollock kicks her out and she's downstairs in the living room. So she also only has that upstairs guest bedroom for when the winters aren't so harsh, because they can only afford to heat one floor of the house at a time, which is I think another detail that people often forget. They look at the prices of these paintings today and they imagine that these were two artists who were living relatively wealthy lives, and it's far from it. You know, they were digging clams out from the creek and hoping they could afford a loaf of bread. So it's a very meager time for both of them. Krasner is working predominantly on what she calls her gray slabs. You know, she has this real creative impass in this period in the nineteen forties, she is painting gray slab upon gray slab, and then after they move, something happens, something shifts, and she begins around nineteen forty six what become known as her little image paintings. And she's seen, of course, I think about this moment a lot, that she's gone to see some of Miro's constellations, and she writes in a letter she says, each one is a little miracle. And you know Miro was also making those constellations in times of extreme adversity. And there's a sense these these little images have this very jewel like quality to them. They almost seem like the colors are sort of scintillating on the surface. They feel encrusted with paint, but also effervescent. I mean, there's something so dynamic about them. On such a small scale, we might look at them and think that they are about the size of her Torso they're just what a ribcage might be able to contain. And she must be proud of them because she hangs them in the house. So we know that she wanted these works to be seen.
00:06:41
Speaker 1: And she was also making mosaic tables at this time as well well.
00:06:44
Speaker 2: The mosaic tables are again a fantastic example of Krasner's tenacity. She is somebody who is going to make work come what may. And when Pollock decides that it's too cold for him to work in the barn and he's going to go upstairs and take that guest room, she is forced downstairs into the living room, and like many artists, feels self conscious about painting in those spaces. She is probably also aware of not wanting to get paint all over this white house. So there's a question about materials and muk, but also a thing about it would have been a relatively public space. Friends and neighbors would have come and gone through that living room downstairs. And so what she decides to do is to make a mosaic. So she cuts a circular board which later becomes the painting stop and Go, because everything is somehow recycled in that house into another artwork. And she lays out, you know, there had been some tessarie from a mosaic that Pollock was working on. She grabs those. She takes lost keys, bits of rusted glass that she's found in the garden. I like to think that she's a kind of magpie in these moments, and that she's got this eye and anything that glints she gass it up and she turns it into these fabulous mosaic tables that are then set in cement and this circle that sort of enshrines them as an old wagon wheel that they pull out of the barn. So they're very, very kind of make do and mend post war projects, but they are also remarkable things, especially when seen alongside those little images.
00:08:37
Speaker 1: So for me, one of Lee's most electrifying paintings is one she started in nineteen fifty six, just a few months before Jackson died. It's a dramatic turn from her earlier work and is a strange, haunting, abstract arrangement of distorted body parts in raw, fleshy pinks, with what looks like an eye, limbs and feet just visible. It's tall, about four feet by two feet, and Lee called it prophecy. Can you tell us the story behind this?
00:09:07
Speaker 2: So Krausling is in ourartist who worked in these cycles, as you know. So she would begin a series, she might feel very frustrated with it. She might destroy it, she might tear it up and turn it into a new body of work. But she had these kinds of created guts that would blow through her studio, and when a new one came, she didn't always know where it was carrying her, and that could be an incredibly disconcerting experience. So we have to remember she doesn't at this point have secure gallery representation. You know, she doesn't have significant commercial success. She sold a few of the collage paintings, but how does she know that she's moving in the right direction. It's a difficult thing for her to do. And Krasner and Pollock, of course, had this great relationship whereby they entered one another's studio by invitation only, and she invites him to come and look at the new painting, and he's encouraging, you know. She would ask the question, is at a painting? And he said, yes, keep going, and she was disturbed by it. And I think a detail that's kind of interesting for me is that when we showed this work at the Barbicane, we presented it alongside the three other paintings that she made following And of course what had happened in between Prophecy and its three siblings was that Pollock had crashed his car and killed himself and also another passenger in the car, and she had been in Paris, she'd received the news she'd flown back the same night. I mean, it was an incredibly traumatic period of time for her, and almost immediately she gets back to painting and continues this series with work such as Birth and three and two. Like you say, they're fleshy, they're violent, they're difficult paintings, and we had members of our vigilation team who were saying that they found it emotionally overwhelming to be in that space for too long. We made a kind of chapel for them because the charge that they omitted was so powerful, and it's so rare for an artist to be able to articulate that interior state.
00:11:42
Speaker 1: So, well, what do you feel when you look at paintings like Prophecy?
00:11:48
Speaker 2: I feel almost like I've transgressed a scene that I wasn't really meant to see. There's something uncomfortable about what feels like a total excess of emotions spilling out of them. Now, some of that we might put down to painting effect. She's using some interesting techniques. She's thinning down some of the paint so that it dribbles across the canvas. She's using these very dramatic dark lines to kind of edge these figures. She is working off a precedent like Picasso's Demoiselle, but she's remaking it in a way that the bodies appear dismembered. It's like we're seeing parts of bodies but never whole. So there's an implication of violence there. So some of this we can put down to technique, and some of it is that something of the state she was in at the point at which she makes these works has transmuted into them, and when we stand in front of them, perhaps it is our own empathetic imagination, but we can very easily find ourselves moved powerfully. And it's this sensation that's hard to describe, but I think we each know when we found ourselves caught by a painting and unable to leave its spell.
00:13:22
Speaker 1: After Jackson dies, her art really transforms like never before. I mean, can you describe to us what happens to her painting after she decides to move into Jackson's barn and what says to her, I'm going to stay here and I'm going to paint in this barn.
00:13:42
Speaker 2: I think it's such an important moment actually to just acknowledge what it will have taken to decide to move into that space. She speaks about it very frankly, of course, because that was Krasner's way, you know, and it was for sure, it was the largest space with the best natural light. And she says, you know, it would have been foolish to let it stand empty. Well, that may be the case, but many artists have, Many people have suffered a loss in their family and have never gone back into that area, their bedroom, their room, their study. Often that becomes a kind of enshrined space. So to not just reimagine that studio, but to reimagine it as her own is a sort of extraordinary thing to do, and it's an act of incredible courage. And I think one of the reasons she's able to do it is because of this very humble thing that had happened, which was that he had had this period where he was creatively really struggling. He had a kind of painter's block, and as we all sometimes do, he procrastinated with some domestic projects, and so he'd been meaning forever to kind of insulate the barn a bit, and his my brother had sent him all these ball games that he'd come up with that hadn't been successful, and he lays down the boards over the floor what had become this mythological floor that you know, hands Namath and others had photographed all of those incredible the filigree sprays. They're covered up and Pollock barely makes another painting in the barn after that. So Krasner when she goes into this space, she doesn't have those visible traces around her, and then she's working on a different orientation. He was working on the floor, she works on the wall. So it's like their whole lives. They find a way to be adjacent to each other without being on top of one another.
00:15:54
Speaker 1: It's so interesting you say that, because when I went to the house, it was extraordinary because they've now taken the boards off the floor, and it's almost like it's a shrine to both Krasna and Pollock because it's her on the walls. You can see those paint splatters and those greens and pinks, and then you see his work on the floor.
00:16:11
Speaker 2: And he could never have known that that's what he was doing. But from a conservation perspective, he protected his own remnants in the space, while at the same time facilitating for her to be able to come in and at one point make it her own.
00:16:34
Speaker 1: So tell me about how her painting changed.
00:16:37
Speaker 2: The paintings are remarkably high keyed that she makes in this period after Prophecy, what become known as her Earth Green Theories. She shows them that Martha Jackson, they have this kind of almost ecstatically vibrant color palette to them, and it's hard to correlate with the period that she's going through. She finds it hard to correlate, and she describes how at times when she was making these paintings, she says, it's weird to me because they look like really happy paintings and at times my face was just aw wash with tears while I was making them. And I think there is a sort of feeling of release in them. And perhaps it's worth remembering that life with Pollock was never easy, you know. Her favorite way of describing that marriage was that she felt she had caught a comet by the tail. So perhaps there was some sense that for the first time in her life, she was on her own, and that that was troubling and challenging but also exhilarating, and she was day by day confronting what it meant to be a woman thrown into this new chapter of her life.
00:17:59
Speaker 1: In an interview in the seventies, Lee complained that she was always being compared to Jackson Pollock. Is her work still haunted by Jackson Pollock shadow?
00:18:09
Speaker 2: It's a really good question, and we might start by maybe thinking about a detail like her name. You know, this is a woman who is born Lena Krasner, who rebrands herself Lenore because it sounds more American, and then when she's at art school she becomes Lee, which is kind of androgynous, and then after she's with Pollock, she becomes Lee Krasner Pollock. I mean she used to use his surname as well. And after he dies and she becomes the sole executor of his estate, which is an enormous weighty responsibility at that time. As if it's not enough to be contending with her personal grief and the questions around her own future career, she now, on top of that, needs to be responsible for all of the administration and creative thinking around his legacy. And so of course she becomes burdened with this moniker of missus Jackson Pollock. And when she writes to museums to say to them they should be acquiring an important Pollock work for their collection. She writes, as missus Jackson Pollock. It's in that capacity. So what becomes complicated for her is then how to untether herself from that, because she had been her own woman before she met him. You know, they meet as fellow artists, very much as peers, and if anything, Krasner is the one with the more secure reputation and more kind of significant standing in the American art world at that point. So that process of untethering took decades in her lifetime. It took a huge amount of work from the feminist movement, and it has continued right up until today. And I think one of the things that's challenging about it is, of course he was important to her. You know, she said Matisse was her most central influence until this guy, Jackson Pollack came along. You know, he was a breakthrough for her. So she would never want to deny his significance on her practice or hers on his, while at the same time wanting to be able to be appreciated in her own life.
00:20:34
Speaker 1: And because she was this super nova in the nineteen thirties. I mean, do you think it frustratedly that she was originally the successful one in the modern art scene and two had ambitions to be a successful painter.
00:20:48
Speaker 2: I mean, when we look at some of the photographs that were taken at the time of Pollock in his studio, and you can sometimes see in the background a scowling Lee Krasner smoking on a stool looking on I think we get some degree of answer to that question, which was, of course, like every artist spout ever, she was there thinking to herself, might I persuade this journalist to venture into my studio after they've spent several hours talking to him about his work in his studio? Of course, she wanted her place to be recognized, not just in terms of the scale of significance that she'd had on his practice, but also, you know, on others in the abstract expressionist scene as well. She was incredibly connected across that field. So it must have been frustrating for her. How could it have not been?
00:21:50
Speaker 1: And something I think I struggled with during this series is that to me, Lee is a feminist icon. She's a trailblazer. Like she said to Cyndi Lemser, she broke the ground, but in interviews she didn't want any labels woman, American feminists. She just wanted to be thought of, was a capital a artist. She actually said, I'm an artist, not a woman artist, not an American artist. What do you make of that?
00:22:18
Speaker 2: I cheer for her to be honest. When we look at so many contemporary artists working today, they rile at the same things. They feel like, don't include me in your exhibition as a compensatory gesture. Include me in your exhibition because I'm a terrific artist and this work needs to be seen. And she was kind of before her time in that regard, so I think she was friends with many who consider themselves to be feminists. She deep down was sympathetic to the cause. But if she was at times prickly when questioned about it, it was because she understood gender to be a fiction, a powerful fiction, but a fiction nonetheless.
00:23:06
Speaker 1: And with respect to your exhibition, what is Lee's legacy today? How was she thought of?
00:23:12
Speaker 2: Well, when we staged an exhibition of that kind, we hope that it's a moment for people to reassess. And when Krasner traveled over to London for her retrospective, at the Whitechapel Gallery that Brian Robertson did, and you know, she persuaded assistant curators to go and see the Beatles film and you know, she had a great time. But one of the things that was fascinating was she was like, people forget what it means for the artists themselves to be able to kind of review their work. And she felt you could see that the breaks in each different period and series weren't as severe as she had thought. And I felt something similar happen when we staged the show at the Barbicane and it's other European venues, that people had an idea of Krasner in their head that didn't necessarily marry with what they were then being presented with in the space. We're very quick to draw a conclusion about an artist and think that we have a sense of who they were and their significance, and then you see a hundred or so works by them and it allows you to really draw breath and think again. And I think many people had the opportunity to do that in the exhibition, which has been hugely important in terms of her legacy.
00:24:35
Speaker 1: Eleanor, thank you so much for speaking to me about all things Lee Krasner. And just to add again that if you'd like to check out any of the paintings we've been discussing, we've linked them on our show notes, so please do take a look, and thank you all again so much for listening, Bye for now. Death of an Artist Krasner and Pollend is produced by Pushkin Industries and Samasdat Audio. Clem Hitchcock is our producer. Story editing by Dasherlitz at Sina, Sophie Crane and Karen Shakerji from Pushkin. The executive producer is Jacob Smith from Sammersdat Audio. The executive producers are Dasherlitz at Sina and Joe Sykes. Sound design by Peregrine Andrews. Original scoring and our theme were composed by Martin Ustwick. The fact checking by Arthur Gompertz. Special thanks to Jacob Weissberg. I'm Katie Hessel.
Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hello everyone. For those who've listened to the show, you'll know that Lee Krasner started painting at around aged fourteen until her death in nineteen eighty four. That's six decades of work. One thing I love about Lee's art is how it was constantly changing in style in scale, from seventeen feet wide paintings to small mosaic tables. We didn't really have time to get properly stuck into Lee's art in the show, but we're going to do that now because for me, there's some of the greatest masterpieces of the twentieth century. And we're going to do that with my friend Elena Nahir, who knows all about Lee. In fact, she he's the person who introduced me to Lee Krasner's work in the first place. And a quick note that all of the paintings will be discussing are linked to in our show notes, so if you'd like to take a look as we go, please do. Hi. Elena, thank you so much for making time to chat with me about all things Lee Krasner.
00:01:34
Speaker 2: Thank you, Katie, I.
00:01:35
Speaker 1: Know you're pretty busy these days because of your new job as the Keith el and Katherine Sachs, curator and head of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. But back in twenty nineteen you were working at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, where you created a groundbreaking retrospective of Lee's work. It blew me away, as you know, But what drew you to Lee Krasner in the first place, so much so that you staged this major exhibition.
00:02:04
Speaker 2: I think in a way as a curator, you're you're always looking for something that's intriguing, a story that just doesn't feel like it's quite yet been told in full or been told in a way that is compelling. So you're looking for a space between how something appears and how it could be. So I would look at one of Lee Krasner's works, say Gaia, which is in the Museum of Modern Arts collection, and extraordinary paintings with those amazing, sum assaulting arcs of purple and pink, and it would really do something to me. In the simplest of terms, artists are always saying that, you know, well, as Krasner said, they want the work to breathe and be alive. But for anyone who's ever wrestled with the mere materials of cotton, duck, canvas and some pigment. It's not so easy to make a thing breathe and be alive, and her work did just that. It felt invigorating, it felt disturbing in certain ways, and yet I felt I just didn't really know anything about her. And so sometimes you begin on an exhibition project because you want to know more, and you feel like other people are probably going to want to know more too. Totally.
00:03:26
Speaker 1: Well, it was electric in London when you did stage it. But in the winter of nineteen forty five, Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock moved to Springs in Long Island. So I went to the house, which is obviously still there, and I saw the spare bedroom where Lee painted, and it is tiny, with low, cramped ceilings and just two small, thin windows on each side. Hardly conditions for an ambitious artists, especially when we compare it to where Jackson was working in the barn. Can you describe the kind of painting that Lee's making while she's working in the spare bedroom.
00:04:02
Speaker 2: So they say you should never meet your heroes because it's always a bit underwhelming. I mean, there's something similar about when you go and visit a historic house or esteemed property of that kind, that you can be quite struck by the modesty of a place. And that is definitely true of the cottage that Pollock and Krasner moved out to in nineteen forty five. It's a fisherman's home. It's small, it's modest, and Krasner has the upstairs bedroom to work in until, of course, it gets too cold and Pollock kicks her out and she's downstairs in the living room. So she also only has that upstairs guest bedroom for when the winters aren't so harsh, because they can only afford to heat one floor of the house at a time, which is I think another detail that people often forget. They look at the prices of these paintings today and they imagine that these were two artists who were living relatively wealthy lives, and it's far from it. You know, they were digging clams out from the creek and hoping they could afford a loaf of bread. So it's a very meager time for both of them. Krasner is working predominantly on what she calls her gray slabs. You know, she has this real creative impass in this period in the nineteen forties, she is painting gray slab upon gray slab, and then after they move, something happens, something shifts, and she begins around nineteen forty six what become known as her little image paintings. And she's seen, of course, I think about this moment a lot, that she's gone to see some of Miro's constellations, and she writes in a letter she says, each one is a little miracle. And you know Miro was also making those constellations in times of extreme adversity. And there's a sense these these little images have this very jewel like quality to them. They almost seem like the colors are sort of scintillating on the surface. They feel encrusted with paint, but also effervescent. I mean, there's something so dynamic about them. On such a small scale, we might look at them and think that they are about the size of her Torso they're just what a ribcage might be able to contain. And she must be proud of them because she hangs them in the house. So we know that she wanted these works to be seen.
00:06:41
Speaker 1: And she was also making mosaic tables at this time as well well.
00:06:44
Speaker 2: The mosaic tables are again a fantastic example of Krasner's tenacity. She is somebody who is going to make work come what may. And when Pollock decides that it's too cold for him to work in the barn and he's going to go upstairs and take that guest room, she is forced downstairs into the living room, and like many artists, feels self conscious about painting in those spaces. She is probably also aware of not wanting to get paint all over this white house. So there's a question about materials and muk, but also a thing about it would have been a relatively public space. Friends and neighbors would have come and gone through that living room downstairs. And so what she decides to do is to make a mosaic. So she cuts a circular board which later becomes the painting stop and Go, because everything is somehow recycled in that house into another artwork. And she lays out, you know, there had been some tessarie from a mosaic that Pollock was working on. She grabs those. She takes lost keys, bits of rusted glass that she's found in the garden. I like to think that she's a kind of magpie in these moments, and that she's got this eye and anything that glints she gass it up and she turns it into these fabulous mosaic tables that are then set in cement and this circle that sort of enshrines them as an old wagon wheel that they pull out of the barn. So they're very, very kind of make do and mend post war projects, but they are also remarkable things, especially when seen alongside those little images.
00:08:37
Speaker 1: So for me, one of Lee's most electrifying paintings is one she started in nineteen fifty six, just a few months before Jackson died. It's a dramatic turn from her earlier work and is a strange, haunting, abstract arrangement of distorted body parts in raw, fleshy pinks, with what looks like an eye, limbs and feet just visible. It's tall, about four feet by two feet, and Lee called it prophecy. Can you tell us the story behind this?
00:09:07
Speaker 2: So Krausling is in ourartist who worked in these cycles, as you know. So she would begin a series, she might feel very frustrated with it. She might destroy it, she might tear it up and turn it into a new body of work. But she had these kinds of created guts that would blow through her studio, and when a new one came, she didn't always know where it was carrying her, and that could be an incredibly disconcerting experience. So we have to remember she doesn't at this point have secure gallery representation. You know, she doesn't have significant commercial success. She sold a few of the collage paintings, but how does she know that she's moving in the right direction. It's a difficult thing for her to do. And Krasner and Pollock, of course, had this great relationship whereby they entered one another's studio by invitation only, and she invites him to come and look at the new painting, and he's encouraging, you know. She would ask the question, is at a painting? And he said, yes, keep going, and she was disturbed by it. And I think a detail that's kind of interesting for me is that when we showed this work at the Barbicane, we presented it alongside the three other paintings that she made following And of course what had happened in between Prophecy and its three siblings was that Pollock had crashed his car and killed himself and also another passenger in the car, and she had been in Paris, she'd received the news she'd flown back the same night. I mean, it was an incredibly traumatic period of time for her, and almost immediately she gets back to painting and continues this series with work such as Birth and three and two. Like you say, they're fleshy, they're violent, they're difficult paintings, and we had members of our vigilation team who were saying that they found it emotionally overwhelming to be in that space for too long. We made a kind of chapel for them because the charge that they omitted was so powerful, and it's so rare for an artist to be able to articulate that interior state.
00:11:42
Speaker 1: So, well, what do you feel when you look at paintings like Prophecy?
00:11:48
Speaker 2: I feel almost like I've transgressed a scene that I wasn't really meant to see. There's something uncomfortable about what feels like a total excess of emotions spilling out of them. Now, some of that we might put down to painting effect. She's using some interesting techniques. She's thinning down some of the paint so that it dribbles across the canvas. She's using these very dramatic dark lines to kind of edge these figures. She is working off a precedent like Picasso's Demoiselle, but she's remaking it in a way that the bodies appear dismembered. It's like we're seeing parts of bodies but never whole. So there's an implication of violence there. So some of this we can put down to technique, and some of it is that something of the state she was in at the point at which she makes these works has transmuted into them, and when we stand in front of them, perhaps it is our own empathetic imagination, but we can very easily find ourselves moved powerfully. And it's this sensation that's hard to describe, but I think we each know when we found ourselves caught by a painting and unable to leave its spell.
00:13:22
Speaker 1: After Jackson dies, her art really transforms like never before. I mean, can you describe to us what happens to her painting after she decides to move into Jackson's barn and what says to her, I'm going to stay here and I'm going to paint in this barn.
00:13:42
Speaker 2: I think it's such an important moment actually to just acknowledge what it will have taken to decide to move into that space. She speaks about it very frankly, of course, because that was Krasner's way, you know, and it was for sure, it was the largest space with the best natural light. And she says, you know, it would have been foolish to let it stand empty. Well, that may be the case, but many artists have, Many people have suffered a loss in their family and have never gone back into that area, their bedroom, their room, their study. Often that becomes a kind of enshrined space. So to not just reimagine that studio, but to reimagine it as her own is a sort of extraordinary thing to do, and it's an act of incredible courage. And I think one of the reasons she's able to do it is because of this very humble thing that had happened, which was that he had had this period where he was creatively really struggling. He had a kind of painter's block, and as we all sometimes do, he procrastinated with some domestic projects, and so he'd been meaning forever to kind of insulate the barn a bit, and his my brother had sent him all these ball games that he'd come up with that hadn't been successful, and he lays down the boards over the floor what had become this mythological floor that you know, hands Namath and others had photographed all of those incredible the filigree sprays. They're covered up and Pollock barely makes another painting in the barn after that. So Krasner when she goes into this space, she doesn't have those visible traces around her, and then she's working on a different orientation. He was working on the floor, she works on the wall. So it's like their whole lives. They find a way to be adjacent to each other without being on top of one another.
00:15:54
Speaker 1: It's so interesting you say that, because when I went to the house, it was extraordinary because they've now taken the boards off the floor, and it's almost like it's a shrine to both Krasna and Pollock because it's her on the walls. You can see those paint splatters and those greens and pinks, and then you see his work on the floor.
00:16:11
Speaker 2: And he could never have known that that's what he was doing. But from a conservation perspective, he protected his own remnants in the space, while at the same time facilitating for her to be able to come in and at one point make it her own.
00:16:34
Speaker 1: So tell me about how her painting changed.
00:16:37
Speaker 2: The paintings are remarkably high keyed that she makes in this period after Prophecy, what become known as her Earth Green Theories. She shows them that Martha Jackson, they have this kind of almost ecstatically vibrant color palette to them, and it's hard to correlate with the period that she's going through. She finds it hard to correlate, and she describes how at times when she was making these paintings, she says, it's weird to me because they look like really happy paintings and at times my face was just aw wash with tears while I was making them. And I think there is a sort of feeling of release in them. And perhaps it's worth remembering that life with Pollock was never easy, you know. Her favorite way of describing that marriage was that she felt she had caught a comet by the tail. So perhaps there was some sense that for the first time in her life, she was on her own, and that that was troubling and challenging but also exhilarating, and she was day by day confronting what it meant to be a woman thrown into this new chapter of her life.
00:17:59
Speaker 1: In an interview in the seventies, Lee complained that she was always being compared to Jackson Pollock. Is her work still haunted by Jackson Pollock shadow?
00:18:09
Speaker 2: It's a really good question, and we might start by maybe thinking about a detail like her name. You know, this is a woman who is born Lena Krasner, who rebrands herself Lenore because it sounds more American, and then when she's at art school she becomes Lee, which is kind of androgynous, and then after she's with Pollock, she becomes Lee Krasner Pollock. I mean she used to use his surname as well. And after he dies and she becomes the sole executor of his estate, which is an enormous weighty responsibility at that time. As if it's not enough to be contending with her personal grief and the questions around her own future career, she now, on top of that, needs to be responsible for all of the administration and creative thinking around his legacy. And so of course she becomes burdened with this moniker of missus Jackson Pollock. And when she writes to museums to say to them they should be acquiring an important Pollock work for their collection. She writes, as missus Jackson Pollock. It's in that capacity. So what becomes complicated for her is then how to untether herself from that, because she had been her own woman before she met him. You know, they meet as fellow artists, very much as peers, and if anything, Krasner is the one with the more secure reputation and more kind of significant standing in the American art world at that point. So that process of untethering took decades in her lifetime. It took a huge amount of work from the feminist movement, and it has continued right up until today. And I think one of the things that's challenging about it is, of course he was important to her. You know, she said Matisse was her most central influence until this guy, Jackson Pollack came along. You know, he was a breakthrough for her. So she would never want to deny his significance on her practice or hers on his, while at the same time wanting to be able to be appreciated in her own life.
00:20:34
Speaker 1: And because she was this super nova in the nineteen thirties. I mean, do you think it frustratedly that she was originally the successful one in the modern art scene and two had ambitions to be a successful painter.
00:20:48
Speaker 2: I mean, when we look at some of the photographs that were taken at the time of Pollock in his studio, and you can sometimes see in the background a scowling Lee Krasner smoking on a stool looking on I think we get some degree of answer to that question, which was, of course, like every artist spout ever, she was there thinking to herself, might I persuade this journalist to venture into my studio after they've spent several hours talking to him about his work in his studio? Of course, she wanted her place to be recognized, not just in terms of the scale of significance that she'd had on his practice, but also, you know, on others in the abstract expressionist scene as well. She was incredibly connected across that field. So it must have been frustrating for her. How could it have not been?
00:21:50
Speaker 1: And something I think I struggled with during this series is that to me, Lee is a feminist icon. She's a trailblazer. Like she said to Cyndi Lemser, she broke the ground, but in interviews she didn't want any labels woman, American feminists. She just wanted to be thought of, was a capital a artist. She actually said, I'm an artist, not a woman artist, not an American artist. What do you make of that?
00:22:18
Speaker 2: I cheer for her to be honest. When we look at so many contemporary artists working today, they rile at the same things. They feel like, don't include me in your exhibition as a compensatory gesture. Include me in your exhibition because I'm a terrific artist and this work needs to be seen. And she was kind of before her time in that regard, so I think she was friends with many who consider themselves to be feminists. She deep down was sympathetic to the cause. But if she was at times prickly when questioned about it, it was because she understood gender to be a fiction, a powerful fiction, but a fiction nonetheless.
00:23:06
Speaker 1: And with respect to your exhibition, what is Lee's legacy today? How was she thought of?
00:23:12
Speaker 2: Well, when we staged an exhibition of that kind, we hope that it's a moment for people to reassess. And when Krasner traveled over to London for her retrospective, at the Whitechapel Gallery that Brian Robertson did, and you know, she persuaded assistant curators to go and see the Beatles film and you know, she had a great time. But one of the things that was fascinating was she was like, people forget what it means for the artists themselves to be able to kind of review their work. And she felt you could see that the breaks in each different period and series weren't as severe as she had thought. And I felt something similar happen when we staged the show at the Barbicane and it's other European venues, that people had an idea of Krasner in their head that didn't necessarily marry with what they were then being presented with in the space. We're very quick to draw a conclusion about an artist and think that we have a sense of who they were and their significance, and then you see a hundred or so works by them and it allows you to really draw breath and think again. And I think many people had the opportunity to do that in the exhibition, which has been hugely important in terms of her legacy.
00:24:35
Speaker 1: Eleanor, thank you so much for speaking to me about all things Lee Krasner. And just to add again that if you'd like to check out any of the paintings we've been discussing, we've linked them on our show notes, so please do take a look, and thank you all again so much for listening, Bye for now. Death of an Artist Krasner and Pollend is produced by Pushkin Industries and Samasdat Audio. Clem Hitchcock is our producer. Story editing by Dasherlitz at Sina, Sophie Crane and Karen Shakerji from Pushkin. The executive producer is Jacob Smith from Sammersdat Audio. The executive producers are Dasherlitz at Sina and Joe Sykes. Sound design by Peregrine Andrews. Original scoring and our theme were composed by Martin Ustwick. The fact checking by Arthur Gompertz. Special thanks to Jacob Weissberg. I'm Katie Hessel.
