Liberation and Lee

There's a painting I visit nearly every week because for me, it demonstrates the potential scale of a woman’s containment and the glory of her liberation.

It’s “The Seasons” by Lee Krasner, displayed prominently at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and I take every opportunity I have in its presence to evangelize the backstory to anyone willing to listen. Some days, it is my generous friends who tag along to help me feel restored by the interaction with great art. Other times, it is a stranger who gets to hear my soliloquy. It is an important piece in telling the story of American abstractionists.

The particular brush strokes of this painting are less important to me than the story behind it. It’s the first painting Krasner did in the large studio that had previously been used exclusively by her husband, Jackson Pollock — until he bent his car around a tree with his mistress at his side. It took Pollock’s death for Krasner to have equal space at her own home to create large-scale paintings and The Seasons, at 17 feet wide, is enormous in scale.

Though Krasner’s devotion to her husband was genuine, The Seasons doesn’t visually reflect grief at all, actually. It is an explosion of feminine form and authority.

In Gail Levin’s biography of Krasner, she writes that critic B.H. Friedman said her work immediately post-Pollock was her “most mature and personal, as well as most joyous and positive to date.

“Done entirely during the last year and a half, a period of profound sorrow for the artist, the paintings are a stunning affirmation of life.”

Levin herself describes Krasner’s work in this period as “an impulse to reach out and boldly embrace life, which so swiftly left Pollock.”

I find it provocative and revealing that in the wake of her husband’s death, Lee — who may or may not have shortened her name from ‘Lenore’ to disguise her femininity — felt moved to create an enormous piece of art that is, let’s say, for da girls. It is a celebration of female form, deconstructed and lightly obscured through abstraction. She threw years of repression onto this enormous canvas. It is catharsis by oil paint.

This low-level but continuous anger I feel on behalf of Lee Krasner began on the day I visited the Pollock-Krasner house out in East Hampton. I drove out there from Brooklyn in the final days of that year’s tour season a few years ago. It’s a great, unique tour and worth the trip if you can swing it.

It was incredible to stand (in surgical booties!) in the barn where Pollock created his enormous action paintings that defied the rules he learned as a draftsman. Buoyed by his inventiveness and supported directly by Peggy Guggenheim, he moved from dramatic brushstrokes in a piece like “Mural” to the dripping of his paint stirrers and flicking of his paintbrushes. (Despite the topic of this essay, I have a deep love for Pollock’s own work.)

The floor in the studio — a barn — is covered in paint droplets (hence the booties), which demonstrate that his artistic expression didn’t end where the canvas did. It was unrestrained.

A deep sadness, then frustration, washed over me as we entered the home where Pollock and Krasner actually lived. Krasner’s subjugation in her own marriage became overwhelmingly evident when we reached the upstairs portion of the home. This is where Pollock and Krasner had their bedroom — and also, where Krasner had a tiny studio room of her own.

I was stunned. It was hardly a creatively inspiring little room — obviously designed as a nursery that mercifully, Krasner and Pollock never needed — and I pictured her making her small scale art in that room while her husband sprayed paint on the walls of his studio in an effort to portray his emotional angst. She used an easel, she made collages on the floor, but she was inherently restrained.

It insulted me, and it did NOT make me think of Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” with some look-how-far-we’ve-come arc of history. It was a room of her own that materially impacted how she created her own work while Pollock was still alive. She made a series called “Little Images” in this room. Because honestly, what was her other option?

Krasner had some level of power in her marriage, though. She wasn’t driven into an institution and was generally respected as an artist and member of that 1950s coterie in her own right. But much of the time she could have spent on her own work and artistic legacy was spent helping support her husband create his. Even in the wake of his death — a relief — she focused a significant portion of her time and energy on cementing Pollock’s legacy.

It is only now, really, that female abstractionists are routinely being pulled out of (literally) the archives of museums and put on display. No one cared about their legacies, though that tide is starting to turn.

Krasner was ready and able to make her own impact on the canon of American abstraction once she was no longer preoccupied by her mercurial, drunk, and philandering husband. The day she claimed his studio as her own and began creating her own paintings unrestrained by the size of the canvas or the size of Pollock’s needs was the day she began building her own legacy.

In person, The Seasons is honestly a little vulgar. It uses the shapes of a woman’s body in ways that are obvious to adults but seemingly imperceptible to children (“I see a peach!” one child said to her grandmother during one of my recent visits)

But when you look at The Seasons, it is undeniable that its creation was an act of liberation. Of the freedom that came mixed with grief. And the unharnessed life she suddenly had in front of her and the art she had pent up inside after a protracted giving of her energy to her husband’s success instead of her own.

The Seasons is like a sanctuary to me now. It is a place where I get to feel in direct connection with a woman who had to obtain her right to unencumbered artistic expression. I wish the Whitney had laminated explanations of the provenance of this work so that all who visit it understand its context and what it represents. Until then, I’ll probably be on the bench in front of it, ready and way-too-eager to portray the miracle of this painting.