Essay from The Literary Review

A Woman Near a Door

Laurie Stone

There are times when movies are so vivid and suggestive, capturing a mood, a time, a character, that insight suffuses the viewer's body in a whoosh. That's how I was drawn to the life of Lee Krasner and her attachment to her husband, Jackson Pollock. The film Pollock, directed by Ed Harris in 2001, offeres a passageway to their relationship—and its meaning to Krasner's career—in a way that facts, alone, do not. It ushers us to the Krasner who was talented, ashamed, hungry, overlooked, relentless, a mess, accomplished, and hurt during a period that was clueless about the kind of being she was and about her aloneness.
          The movie is astute about the period it treats—the 1940s and 1950s—because it looks at that time from the perspective of thirty plus years of feminism. The lives of Pollock and Krasner are thickly documented in eyewitness accounts, biographies, and art history texts. Hardly a dish was thrown, a boast lofted, or a grope sloppily transacted that wasn’t verified by a crowd who saw and heard them. The movie—based on a screenplay by Barbara Turner and Susan Emshwiller, adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith—is true to these accounts, and I speak about them in that context. I add additional information about Krasner’s background that illuminates her choices, and I indicate when this material isn’t mentioned in the film—so there’s no confusion. This is a meditation on a woman’s choices, stirred by a film and informed by other sources.
          The movie chronicles the couple’s fourteen years together, a period during which Pollock went from obscurity to international fame and widespread acknowledgment that his innovative drip and splatter paintings were works of genius. Krasner went from centering her life around her own art to devoting herself to Pollock’s. Why would she do such a thing?
          Lee Krasner had been serious about painting her whole life and was better known than Pollock when they met. Even before Pollock, she experimented by covering canvases with a riot of markings. After Pollock’s death in 1956, she would once again make powerful, ambitious art. But during the time she was with Pollock, she shifted her focus from her work to his, a fact Krasner didn’t deny. The movie broods on her motives, though Harris doesn’t reduce her to a neurotic jelly or a social victim; rather he contemplates the forces that moved through her. Pollock is a walled-up ache who can hardly speak, much less reveal himself, so almost by default the movie ricochets off his opaque hide to circle Krasner, who is not only more permeable but talks and thinks, if not always honestly.
          We meet the two during World War II, in 1941. Pollock isn’t in the army, because he’s 4-F—for being mentally unstable. We’re shown the condition of the man to whom Krasner will be drawn in the first scene, where he’s dead drunk, looking crazed and lost, not to mention grimy and bedraggled, collapsed on the stairs of the tenement he’s sharing with his brother Sande and Sande’s pregnant wife. Harris also plays Pollock, depicting him as the painfully inarticulate, wounded brute he was. His screwed-up, unblinking eyes aren’t a window to anything but the fuzzy torment in the artist that alternately welled into chair-smashing violence, or self-annihilation, or energy for painting.
          A few scenes into the film, there’s a knock on Pollock’s apartment door, which is ajar, and the bobbing head of Krasner, played by Marcia Gay Harden, appears. She’s come to find out who Pollock is, this artist who’s in a group show with her but whose work she doesn’t know. She thought she was familiar with all the avant-garde painters around. She calls herself “cheeky” to signify her style of tanking over barriers. Harden wears her hair in a shoulder-length pageboy with bangs that stop short of her dark brows. They are arched high. Her eyes are wide but not innocent. She’s incisive, fast, shrewd. We see her sorting, thinking far ahead. She can spot talent, she thinks, even genius. She noses through Pollock’s kitchen, with its propped-up bathtub, and pushes into his studio, layered with paintings. She takes them in. It’s as if she’s inhaling them. She looks steadily, taking her time, and she has a lot to say. At this point, his paintings are abstract, though they contain symbolic figures. She talks about Surrealism and Cubism. He doesn’t care about theory, he blurts. She says she’s impressed by what he’s doing. It seems she really is. She thinks he’s original, inspired, and she can see he’s committed. Another word for it might be confident. He doesn’t doubt the rightness of his being a painter—or of his greatness—even if he’s not always sure of each canvas.
          She’s on a mission. There’s something brutal about Harden’s face, with its broad nose and full mouth. Her body is meaty, on the verge of stocky. Her Krasner (like the face of the woman she plays) could be beautiful, in the way of a Picasso mask, but she doesn’t use her looks to draw people to her. She can’t wait for seduction. She’s all appetite, and she’s on the hunt for something, though we’re not sure what she wants, and she looks as if she’s not clear, either. Harris means us to see this confusion. What does this woman want? What kind of woman is this?
          If we talk about want as if there are no obstacles, then Krasner wants to be a painter, even a great painter. She wants to break ground and stand in the circle of serious contenders. The movie makes this clear, though it doesn’t offer back story that it’s useful here to consider. She’s 34 when she meets Pollock. The daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants who speaks with a blunt, adenoidal Brooklyn bark, she has studied hard. She’s fought her way into Washington Irving High School, the only public school where she could major in art. She’s attended Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design. She’s supported herself with gigs from the WPA since 1934, and from 1937 to 1940 has studied with Hans Hofmann. He’s introduced her to techniques of improvisation and guided her shift from realism to abstraction. Hofmann has said of her work around the time she started studying with him, “This is so good, you wouldn’t know it was painted by a woman.” Although the remark isn’t noted in the movie, the Krasner that Harris shows us has been stained by it.
          When, in the film, she barges into Pollock’s place, he can barely cough up ten words to say to her, so she invites him to see her work and even hunts for a piece of paper to write her address on. The next scene takes place three weeks later, when he goes to see her. She grouses about his taking that long, but he looks nonplused, unreadable, as usual. He casts his eyes over her canvases in an unemotional sweep—the way someone might run a finger along a mantle to check for dust—and says, “You’re pretty damn good for a woman painter.” She’s upstage when he delivers the line, and the camera catches her wince and notes the slight downward jut of her head, the reflexive cringe of an animal who’s many times heard the whistle of rolled up newspaper before it makes angry contact. In a later scene, after she’s moved in with Pollock and arranged to have the art patron Peggy Guggenheim come to their place, Guggenheim first darts into the room where Krasner paints and huffs, “I didn’t come all this way to see LK.” LK is how Krasner signs her canvases.
          Again the camera picks up her flinch and catches as well the speed with which she transforms her body not quite into a doormat but a red carpet that guides the others to Pollock’s room. At this time, all the major players who will have a role in the fates of Pollock and Krasner as artists—Pollock and Krasner themselves, the critic Clement Greenberg with whom Krasner curries favor on Pollock’s behalf, Guggenheim, Tony Smith, Willem de Kooning, and the rest of the art boy comers who nightly drink themselves into oblivion at the Cedar Bar—have agreed on something: Pollock may not have the goods, but he is a horse to watch. He insists on this, too, while gulping his booze. Not one of these people would dream of watching Krasner to see if she will cut a swath into the world. And it’s not because she lacks talent or has not worked hard up until this point. It’s because the thought is unthinkable. Whoosh.
          Other women artists—Elaine de Kooning, Dorothy Dehner, Grace Hartigan, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Louise Nevelson, and Krasner herself—will eventually mow down space for themselves in the art world thicket, but most of these women are younger than Krasner, and for all attention will be deferred far longer than for their male contemporaries, some of whom are also their spouses. Dehner won’t start sculpting professionally until, at the age of nearly fifty, she leaves her husband, sculptor David Smith. Krasner will work in great earnest after Pollock’s death and receive recognition. But if we go back to 1941, none of this eventual acknowledgment can be sniffed in the atmosphere. Women painters are not drinking in the Cedar, because they aren’t welcome. Interviewed about the bar scene years later, Krasner said that women were “treated like cattle” (quoted in Women, Art and Society, Whitney Chadwick, Thames and Hudson, 1990, p. 300).
          Whatever it costs not to be welcomed is equal to what is gained when you are one of the included. In 1941, who is Pollock and where is he headed? As the movie shows, he’s grandiose, which is a measure of his insecurity, to be sure, but there is iron, too, in his sense of himself as a painter. If he’s not good, it’s not because he’s the wrong sex. He sneers at Picasso and other Titans he considers depleted but nonetheless still hallowed. He knows something important about what he’s doing: He strives to be immediate, to document a feeling about paint and space in the moment. He thinks he’s representing impulse and that it’s close to rhythm, more like action or performance than a rendering of premeditated thought. Painting for him is a crime of passion, not a planned hit.
          The breakthrough of the drip paintings comes in 1947, when he’s off alcohol and living with Krasner in East Hampton. Three scenes in the movie contemplate the sources of this advance. In the first, Guggenheim has given him a commission to paint an enormous mural that will fill one wall in her townhouse. He can do anything he wants, and she will mount it. He gets stuck with fear. Doubt and nerves seem visibly to impale him, but tension is actually mounting, ready to erupt, and when it does it comes through as a concentrated stream of energy, and the painting he delivers in fifteen nonstop hours is wondrously raw and kinetic. Under certain circumstances, he can make controlled art from the heaving spasms raking through him.
          Two other scenes show what happens when the tension isn’t channeled into painting. At a party in Guggenheim’s place celebrating the mural, he’s falling down drunk and stumbles over to her fireplace, filled with burning logs, and pisses into it. Earlier in the movie, in one of the most gripping scenes—it takes place before Krasner has moved in with Pollock—the two are at a family dinner, at which Pollock’s mother is present, and no one talks. The silence is deadly, in the way of Midwestern, clenched-jawed, repressed whatever, until Sande speaks. Pollock has been living with Sande and feels a lock-grip dependence on his brother. Sande announces that he and his wife are moving to Connecticut, and Pollock starts to vibrate. Gene Krupa is playing drums on the radio, and Pollock pounds the table with his knife and fork, but drumming isn’t painting—isn’t a space where he can discharge the feelings in a way that will transform them—so he just heaves and sputters in a fit, all ejaculation and no orgasm.
          The vibrating paintings he ultimately produces in the East Hampton barn studio are earned from the earlier work and from a combination of intention and accident. He harnesses beauty and violence in a way not seen before. The paintings are brilliant and rapturous and qualify Pollock as an original. He wouldn’t have lived long enough to make them had not Krasner picked him up practically by the scruff of his neck and removed him from the hard drinking life that was leaving him rolled up in a filthy ball, sleeping out on the streets. Would he have found Guggenheim and Greenberg without her? Who knows. Would he have gained the calm that sobriety afforded and that allowed him to make his artistic discoveries? Unlikely. In a diary entry the novelist Dawn Powell, bemoaning the absence of a champion in her life, wrote, “For a genius to be a genius, he must have a selfless slave between himself and the world.” Pollock had one in Krasner.
          If you’re a borderline autistic wreck of a human being like Pollock was, you probably do need a slave to keep you standing. But all most people need to do their work steadily enough to learn if there’s a there, there is permission. They need a context in which there is curiosity about what they produce. They need to feel unashamed by their ambition. In 1941, although Krasner is in a group show with Pollock and although very little of what he is to become can be gleaned by what she sees in his studio and feels rising off him in conversation, she trades her life as an artist to have a subordinate role in his life as an artist. Why would someone do that? She’s in her mid-thirties and wants a mate, but Pollock doesn’t demand that she abandon her art. The movie vividly shows the way he quickly becomes dependent on her, but it doesn’t seem she mistakes this dependency for love. She seizes it anyway. She wants a way into the world, and she thinks his art, not hers, is her best chance of getting it.
          It will turn out to be a bad ride and if a way into the world at all a back-of-the-bus trip. There is no glory in it. Pollock devours every shred of acclaim, not thanking her, but there is never any real glory for the one who rides coat tails, even if there wouldn’t be any coat tails without the manager. Krasner has no sooner bedded Pollock than she’s on the phone organizing his career. She’s like a horse let loose to run, but the run is away from her own studio, her struggle. She doesn’t admit this to herself. Harden shows Krasner’s lying. Pollock flirts with other women in front of her. In many scenes Krasner cleans up after Pollock destroys furniture, upends tables of food, and throws things at her—in one scene a bottle of beer. Even after this tantrum, she declares she is living the life she most desires, piloting the barge on which he can make his art. She says she doesn’t want to be anywhere else in the world, and Harden shows—her shoulders slumped and her voice robotic—that Krasner has to say these things, or the enterprise will blow up in her face. She’ll be back with the problem of living her own life.
          It’s not just a private problem but one inflamed by an environment in which art experts routinely make wilting cracks about what women can and cannot do. Again some background that informs the film but isn’t specifically chronicled in it: In 1949, New York School painters found the Club and the Eighth Street Club as meeting places to talk with art critics and curators about avant-garde work. Women are mostly admitted as audience, and even those accepted as members—Krasner among them—aren’t included on the board or in policy discussions. In 1949, Sidney Janis organizes the group show “Man and Wife,” its condescension to the women included pointed to by the title. Krasner participates, though the withering reviews she receives shrivel her, and she doesn’t show again until 1951.
          The film shows her during this period painting in a small bedroom in the upstairs of the couple’s East Hampton farmhouse. She begins a series of “little image” paintings, measuring usually 24” by 30” and filled with forms that look like hieroglyphs repeated with variations across the canvas. They are beautiful and obsessive, but she doesn’t mount them in ’51 at her first one-woman show at the Betty Parsons Gallery. Parsons is Pollock’s dealer at the time. He urges Parsons to show Krasner, but when he leaves the gallery, Parsons summarily dumps Krasner. It triggers another depression. Her tendency during this time is to cut up her paintings or to rub off images until almost none of the original paint is left. She shows again in 1955 at Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery, mounting big collage works she’s created from her cut up paintings, pieces from Pollock’s discarded canvases, and black paper. Greenberg highly praises the show.
          During the years she’s with Pollock, she learns from him but doesn’t adopt his style, continuing to feel kinship with Matisse and Mondrian. She paints but does almost nothing to advance her career. After 1956, when Pollock drunkenly drives his car into a tree, killing himself and one of his female passengers, Krasner will produce a great many new paintings, some abstract, some including figures, and she’ll create an important body of large collages. She’ll have a show at the Whitney in 1973, and in 1984, the year she dies of internal bleeding from diverticulitis, the first full retrospective of her work in the United States will be shown at the Museum of Modern Art.
          Like every woman of her generation and those that follow, Krasner will benefit from feminism—from the way it names and redresses the trivialization of women. In the early days of the women’s movement, newly organized young women will look at figures like Krasner and wonder why they didn’t resist more, why they sold themselves short and seemingly conspired in their own belittlement. Women who made the kinds of choices Krasner did will offer several responses: They will ask themselves why they acted as they did, or they will feel attacked and defend themselves, or they will cleave to the romance they formed with viewing females as less important than males. Or, like Krasner, they will flit helter-skelter to all of these perches.
          In 1970 she will join a protest picket of the Museum of Modern Art for ignoring women artists, but she will say she’s not a feminist. When asked why she didn’t promote her work the way she did her husband’s, she will tell the interviewer: “I couldn’t run out and do a one-woman job on the sexist aspects of the art world, continue my painting and stay in the role I was in as Mrs. Pollock. I just couldn’t do that much. What I considered important was that I was able to work and other things would have to take their turn. Now rightly or wrongly, I made my decisions” (quoted in “The Indomitable Lee Krasner,” Cindy Nemser, Feminist Art Journal, Spring 1975, p. 7). Even after she gains recognition for her work, Krasner never loosens her vice hold on being Mrs. Pollock—of managing and promoting his work.
          But in 1941, none of this—not Krasner’s eventual flowering, nor the vast changes in consciousness about women that are advancing just over the horizon—can be glimpsed by Krasner, and even if she does from time to time allow herself to see this vision, she doesn’t trust it. Everything in her experience of the world—her sense of how she’s viewed, valued, and understood—tells her not to trust it, and so she doesn’t. She wants to be in touch with reality, gain what she can in the realm she senses, not imagine the world giving her a wider, more loving berth. What she consists of isn’t loved. Not her talent, intelligence, analytic powers, appetite, shrewdness. She has taken this in. That’s the person Harris shows us onscreen.
          Which brings us to the scene that went through me, the first violent whoosh early in the film, where Harden/Krasner stands in a doorway on the same day that Pollock has come to see her work. Everything about the world inside and outside these people spirals out from this scene, at once explosive and compressed. Even if it really happened the way it’s portrayed in the film and even if we could know how the actual Krasner and Pollock remembered feeling it, it would still be a scene in a movie created by a different artistic collaboration. But the scene encapsulates Krasner’s decision to place Pollock’s career ahead of her own. It asks us to contemplate the reasons why. In this woman’s mind, she cannot be a winner. She can’t hold onto herself any more than she is wanted by the world.
          After Pollock says, “You’re damned good for a woman painter” and after she absorbs the jab, she does what the injured do: she invites her antagonist to have coffee. Pointedly she says she’s not going to make it, that they have to go out, the message being that he has come to a place where art is made and maybe other Bohemian entertainments can be enjoyed, but she can’t be expected to use her time to serve coffee. So they sit face to face in a café, the camera watching them in profile, and we see her several times restrain herself from touching his arm or hand. She reigns herself in. What does she want from him?           Lots of people find Ed Harris sexy. He’s been compared to Brando in his testosterone-pumped intensity. Women found Pollock sexy. Anyone can find anyone sexy, and that’s just it: Harris’s Pollock is sexy to Harden’s Krasner because of what she makes of him in her head. In this scene, Harris doesn’t play Pollock as sexy in the taciturn, aloof style of Cary Cooper, Robert Redford, or Clint Eastwood. He plays Pollock as a walking advertisement for infantile self-absorption. He looks haunted. He can barely mumble out a few words. He gives her no encouragement whatsoever about finding her charming or attractive. There is the opposite of a spark between the two. He just sits there, radiating passivity and a fill-in-the-blank involvement elsewhere. What would be in it for her to want such a creature? He looks familiar. He looks at her the way the world looks at her.
          So they go back to her place. She doesn’t turn on the lights, and there’s no conversation. She can’t converse with a void, and she’s probably exhausted from the effort of trying to. There’s a long hallway; at one end is Krasner’s bedroom, at the other her studio. Harris/Pollock stands in the studio, as far from the bedroom as he can, and Harris as director keeps the camera on Pollock’s face, the expression pained and somewhat trapped looking. Maybe he has a right to feel caught. Maybe he’s afraid he won’t be sexually adequate, given his drinking and low level of desire. The camera follows his eyes, as he watches Harden/Krasner walk toward the bedroom, peeling off items of clothing, not in the manner of a stripper but of a worker about to get a job done. A farmhand who has duties, chores.
          And then comes the scene that tears at the heart for this woman who makes a contract with absence—with a man, the future, the world as she knows it that doesn’t want her and probably will never love her, because it can’t understand or value her. Harris sees the desperation Krasner shows in this scene. The movie feels for her unloved flesh and the awkwardness with which she carries it. It feels for her wanting to get some reaction—any kind of rise out of the inertness, the lack of response to her. The movie understands her sympathy for Pollock’s woundedness, even though he can’t soothe hers. It shows her becoming both characters, speaking for him in her mind, telling herself a story that she is okay with what she is doing, so she can at least be some place. Does a part of her know that no place is better than this place, or is that the sort of question that can only be asked by someone who’s had sixty more years on the planet to contemplate such scenes?
          The camera stays in the studio, far from the bedroom, as Harris/Pollock looks at Harden/Krasner move about in the frame of the open door. He stands there as we see her remove her blouse and bra and free her large breasts. We see her pose in silhouette, a bit like a patient hooker in a brothel window in Amsterdam, except there’s no sensuality in this woman, no twinkle. For that she would need encouragement, someone to awaken her. At last he lumbers toward her, an animal trudging into the barn, and it is to the barn that he does go—the barn where he will eventually make his great works.
          He stands in silhouette, too, but the camera doesn’t join them, preserving for them a modicum of privacy as they endure each other. Other scenes in the movie show Pollock as a gross lover—at best a drunken groper, more commonly too toxified to get it up at all. His tenderest scenes are with a stray dog he befriends in East Hampton and a strangely tame crow. Planting a vegetable garden, he sticks his fingers into the soil with more care than he ever touches Krasner. At his angriest, he screams, “I never loved you, never.” People say such things all the time, but the first sexual encounter of this couple hovers like a harbinger over everything else that unfolds.
          Even standing near her in the bedroom, he still makes no move. She turns to him, waiting. Finally she moves toward him, puts her hands on his shoulders, leans into him, and only then, slowly, with an expression we can’t see and with emotion we couldn’t fathom even if we were closer to his tense body, he inches his mouth toward hers and their lips make contact. And that is all we see in this scene, but we have seen enough.