Lee Krasner – Untitled (1953)

I’m not in a very good place mental health wise right now. And I don’t know whether it’s in spite of this fact or because of it that–for once–I’m going to walk you through my thought process upon encountering this image for the first time and subsequently engaging with it.

I guess, we need to start with the fact that I’d never seen it before and I have no idea who Lee Krasner is but it reminds me of Jackson Pollock if he’d spent ten years obsessively studying the futurists.

As it turns out, Krasner was not only familiar with Pollock, they dated.

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My Survey of Western Art I & II professor was enamored with Pollock. I never saw it but I am the type of person where if I respect someone and that person consistently raves about an artist I don’t give two shits about, I’m inclined to give said artist a great many chances than someone without that sort of reference attached.

Thus, shortly after moving to NYC–I spent a Saturday roaming around in The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I spent a good half an hour each with the three Vermeer’s–and wrenching my attention from them felt disorienting, like waking from an afternoon nap and finding it’s well after sunset.

I ended up in the Modern Art wing towards the end of the day and spent a half an hour examining Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm (Number 30).

It did not have anything like the effect on me of the Vermeer’s; studying the lines felt tedious and unpleasant–as if I was doing something not for the pleasure of it but for the edification it might contribute to me.

I walked away nonplussed.

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In the course of my third and final old college try, I found both praise and criticism of Pollock to be startling half-assed.

And here I really need to bring in reinforcements. Consider this write-up on a 1999 Pollock retrospective at The Tate in the Socialist Review. (I don’t necessarily agree with anything in this piece; however, it does–in broad and clumsy strokes–address the criticisms with regard to Pollock; namely: the fetishization of the drip method of his paintings.

A second piece goes on to excoriate art history for something mentioned in passing in the first piece: the notion that Pollock never intended there to be any nationalistic fervor in his work but we’ve come to attribute it to the work unfairly.

This second piece hinges upon the notion that our appreciation of Ernest Hemingway has fuck all to do with knowing he operated his type writer standing up.

I find this comparison to be incredible disingenuous and intellectually dishonest. (And I suspect the author of this piece went out of his way to avoid literature classes in college–’cause if he’d taken them he’d know that posture is not technique and that an understanding of technique is integral to coming to terms with both Hemingway and Pollock–who are both incidentally cishet white men (and as such as much as the piece vamps it up when summarizing feminist criticisms of Pollock “[that look] askance at the machismo of the ‘hero in the studio’ and
tends to see the whole drip and flick performance as the acting out of
the phallocentric male fantasy on the symbolically supine canvas,” is at least a good faith engagement with the fundamentals of culture in context).

The other problem with the second piece is that it says that the cult of celebrity has been unfair to Pollock. Arguing that we view his Life Magazine photo of him painting as more central than the work itself. I have a really difficult time with that proposition. I mean did someone hold a gun to Pollock’s head and make him do the interview and allow a photographer into his studio? It’s sort of saying that history acted unfairly against him because of his greatness–and isn’t that the biggest load of bullshit white man claptrap you’ve ever heard.

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There’s the argument that a Ukrainian woman (Janet Sobal) was the progenitor of the drip painting style. I don’t know if it’s a straw man argument–it certainly operates like one–that feminists feel that a white male appropriated the work of a woman and got accolades for it. (And although this has happened all throughout history–Sobal’s work, although not uninteresting lacks the depth and dynamism of some but definitely not all of Pollock’s work.)

(For example: I’ve become rather fond of Blue poles (Number 11), less as a result of the drip method than the use of color and line to draw attention to the use of color and line.)

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But back to Krasner, because I have regretably spent most of this article talking about the person she dated instead of her.

Consider the work above. Now consider these paintings Pollock made during 1953–where he noticeably diverges from the drip method:

Portrait and a Dream, Easter and the Totem, Ocean Grayness, and The Deep.

The Deep is exquisite but the rest are blase, at best. And I feel objectively that Krasner’s image above is just objectively better than most of Pollock’s work. Yet, I know who Pollock is and I’m comparing Krasner’s work to his when really the comparison is probably closer to the truth to say that when his work worked it was taking after hers.