Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner: The Fraught Marriage Behind the Art

The painters Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock never had children together over the course of their 11-year marriage. But the formidable fruits of their union now fill what appears to be an endless sequence of galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous” gathers more than 120 works by the Abstract Expressionists who formed one of the premier power couples in the history of Western art. Krasner’s and Pollock’s canvases converged, but their backgrounds were opposed. Krasner was the daughter of Orthodox Jews who came to Brooklyn from Ukraine. She was an institutionalist, moving through the Women’s Art School of Cooper Union, the National Academy of Design, and the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project. By the 1940s, she’d established herself as a peer of the likes of Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning.The generous helping of Krasner’s early work on display here testifies to her encounters with the European avant-garde. Picasso, Matisse, and Mondrian all flex their influence — at times overwhelming the young Krasner. She studied with Hans Hofmann, who had known Picasso and Braque at Paris and whose other students at New York City included Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, and Larry Rivers. Krasner inherited a rich brew.Pollock was more roughly hewn. He was born in Cody, Wyoming, in 1912, and his influences were drawn from the American West, Mexican murals, and a sprinkling of Surrealism. He and Krasner met in 1941, and by 1945 they were married. After that, things moved quickly. Almost immediately, they moved to Springs, Long Island, and Pollock innovated his extraordinary “drip paintings.” In 1956, he was killed in an alcohol-fueled car crash.‘Bald Eagle’ by Lee Krasner, 1955. ASOM Collection via Metropolitan Museum of ArtA feature on Pollock in a 1949 edition of LIFE magazine asked if he was the “greatest living painter in the United States.” Krasner was never so acclaimed, but “Past Continuous” strenuously makes the case for her as a protean artist who eschewed a single style or “voice” in favor of experimentation. Take her “Bald Eagle,” from 1955. The work is busy and vibrant, and seems a touch less committed to abstraction than Pollock at his peak.A closer look, though, discloses that the work is a collage pieced together from salvaged, cut-up, discarded drawings of her husband’s, making the painting a participant in a strange kind of artistic ecosystem. Krasner said in respect of “The Seasons,” painted in 1957, a year after Pollock’s death, that “the question came up whether one would continue painting at all, and I guess this was my answer.” She would go on painting for another 28 years.“The Seasons,” which takes up one of the most ancient of mythological motifs, also harkens back to Pollock’s “Guardians of the Secret,” from 1943. “Guardians” is a pre-drip masterpiece, dense with mythology, hieroglyphs, and canine figures that recall nothing so much as Pharaonic Egypt. Pollock’s “The Key,” from 1946, emerges from a more intimate landscape. Its subject is a creek near the couple’s house on Long Island, as seen from the bedroom.In retrospect, “The Key” unlocked something in Pollock, because the next year brought Pollock’s first drip painting — “Free Form,” now held at the Museum of Modern Art. The Met, though, has here united two of the greatest works of that genre. “Lavender Mist: Number 1, 1950,” on loan from the National Gallery of Art, was created by Pollock’s signature method of dancing and dripping over sprawling canvases. The painting contains no lavender.‘The Key,’ by Jackson Pollock, 1946. The Art Institute of Chicago via the Metropolitan Museum of ArtPollock’s black, blue, white, silver, russet, and orange paint creates what the Big Bang might look like if it were a young woman. The sinewy drip style yields an effect that is feminine, even flirtatious. In 1950 he also painted “Autumn Rhythm,” making it an annus mirabilis of Abstract Expressionism. Years earlier, Mondrian told Krasner, “You have a very strong inner rhythm. Never lose it.” Pollock painted nothing better than “Autumn Rhythm.”The painting, part of the Met’s permanent collection, was acquired by the museum after Pollock’s death. It is simply enormous, standing almost nine feet tall and stretching 17 feet wide. Here gravity, choreography, and paint meet in an explosion of spidery fractals and swaggering stains. It was Pollock, though, who was coming undone. His alcoholism steadily worsened, and his infidelities mounted. His death haunted Krasner, and freed her.Not far from “Autumn Rhythm” sits a group of paintings Krasner called her “Little Images.” The contrast with the scale of her husband’s work and his dancing, straining, and unspooled method could not be starker. These are reclusive works that seem to come from a deep interior. One caught your critic’s eye. It features abstract representations of Hebrew characters, undoubtedly retrieved from a half-forgotten grammar of Krasner’s childhood. She never lost it.

Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner: The Fraught Marriage Behind the Art

Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner: The Fraught Marriage Behind the Art

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