June 28, 2024 • 25 mins
Katy speaks with Eleanor Nairne, who first introduced her to Lee Kranser’s work. Back in 2019, Nairne exhibited a groundbreaking retrospective of Lee Krasner’s work while she was senior curator at the Barbican Art Gallery in London. Today she is the Keith L. and Catherine Sacks Curator and Head of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In this episode, a dive into Krasner’s artistic career.
Artwork Discussed:
Joan Miro Constellations (1940-41)
Pablo Picasso Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
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
(00:36):
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
(01:00):
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
(01:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Thank you, Katie, I.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
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,
(01:56):
as you know, But what drew you to Lee Krasner
in the first place, so much so that you staged
this major exhibition.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
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
(02:26):
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,
(02:47):
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,
(03:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
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,
(03:47):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
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
(04:24):
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
(04:47):
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
(05:07):
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
(05:30):
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
(05:51):
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,
(06:15):
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
(06:35):
them in the house. So we know that she wanted
these works to be seen.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
And she was also making mosaic tables at this time
as well well.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
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
(07:05):
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
(07:28):
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
(07:51):
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
(08:11):
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,
(08:33):
especially when seen alongside those little images.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
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
(08:57):
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?
Speaker 2 (09:07):
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
(09:29):
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
(09:50):
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,
(10:13):
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
(10:37):
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
(11:02):
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
(11:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
So, well, what do you feel when you look at
paintings like Prophecy?
Speaker 2 (11:48):
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.
(12:10):
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
(12:31):
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
(12:52):
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
(13:12):
we each know when we found ourselves caught by a
painting and unable to leave its spell.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
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
(14:03):
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.
(14:24):
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
(14:46):
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
(15:09):
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.
(15:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
So tell me about how her painting changed.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
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
(17:00):
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
(17:21):
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
(17:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
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?
Speaker 2 (18:09):
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
(18:30):
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
(18:52):
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.
(19:14):
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
(19:34):
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
(19:56):
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,
(20:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
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
(21:12):
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,
(21:34):
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?
Speaker 1 (21:50):
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,
(22:13):
not a woman artist, not an American artist. What do
you make of that?
Speaker 2 (22:18):
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
(22:39):
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
(22:59):
she understood gender to be a fiction, a powerful fiction,
but a fiction nonetheless.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
And with respect to your exhibition, what is Lee's legacy today?
How was she thought of?
Speaker 2 (23:12):
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
(23:32):
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
(23:56):
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
(24:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
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
(24:59):
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
(25:20):
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.
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
(00:36):
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
(01:00):
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
(01:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Thank you, Katie, I.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
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,
(01:56):
as you know, But what drew you to Lee Krasner
in the first place, so much so that you staged
this major exhibition.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
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
(02:26):
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,
(02:47):
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,
(03:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
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,
(03:47):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
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
(04:24):
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
(04:47):
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
(05:07):
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
(05:30):
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
(05:51):
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,
(06:15):
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
(06:35):
them in the house. So we know that she wanted
these works to be seen.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
And she was also making mosaic tables at this time
as well well.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
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
(07:05):
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
(07:28):
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
(07:51):
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
(08:11):
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,
(08:33):
especially when seen alongside those little images.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
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
(08:57):
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?
Speaker 2 (09:07):
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
(09:29):
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
(09:50):
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,
(10:13):
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
(10:37):
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
(11:02):
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
(11:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
So, well, what do you feel when you look at
paintings like Prophecy?
Speaker 2 (11:48):
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.
(12:10):
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
(12:31):
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
(12:52):
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
(13:12):
we each know when we found ourselves caught by a
painting and unable to leave its spell.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
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
(14:03):
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.
(14:24):
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
(14:46):
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
(15:09):
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.
(15:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
So tell me about how her painting changed.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
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
(17:00):
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
(17:21):
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
(17:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
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?
Speaker 2 (18:09):
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
(18:30):
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
(18:52):
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.
(19:14):
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
(19:34):
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
(19:56):
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,
(20:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
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
(21:12):
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,
(21:34):
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?
Speaker 1 (21:50):
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,
(22:13):
not a woman artist, not an American artist. What do
you make of that?
Speaker 2 (22:18):
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
(22:39):
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
(22:59):
she understood gender to be a fiction, a powerful fiction,
but a fiction nonetheless.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
And with respect to your exhibition, what is Lee's legacy today?
How was she thought of?
Speaker 2 (23:12):
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
(23:32):
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
(23:56):
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
(24:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
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
(24:59):
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
(25:20):
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.
Host
Helen Molesworth
Popular Podcasts
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.