Barbara Rose
JACKSON POLLOCK AT WORK:
AN INTERVIEW WITH LEE KRASNER
As Jackson Pollock's paintings are slowly beginning to be
understood as works of art belonging to a tradition of modernist
painting, as opposed to scandalous personal acts that created the
Pollock myth, any information regarding Pollock's own intention and
methods becomes critical in defining the actual historical context
within which the unprecedented masterpieces-the mural-sized, so–
called "drip" paintings he began in 1947-were created.
In
the follow–
ing interview with Pollock's widow, painter Lee Krasner, the circum–
stances leading up to Pollock's discovery of a new style that involved
pouring diluted paint onto an unstretched piece of canvas on the floor,
rather than applying paint to the conventional stretched painting on
the easel or wall, are clarified. The interview, inspired by the forthcom–
ing publication of Hans Namuth's celebrated action photographs in a
book called
Pollock Painting,
reveals Krasner's intimate relationship
as a colleague with her husband whose principal champion and
greatest supporter she was.
Recent interest in Krasner's own career as a pioneer Abstract
Expressionist, overshadowed by Pollock's celebrity, has raised the
question of why her reputation suffered in relation to those of her male
contemporaries. The interview makes it clear for the first time why
Krasner was prohibited from painting the big pictures that were
essential to the creation of the major reputations of the New York
School until after Pollock's death in 1956. For, although she was an
abstract artist earlier than any of the first generation New York School
painters, except Reinhardt and Gorky (she was painting abstractly
while her teacher Hans Hofmann was still a figurative artist), her
development as a painter of large-scale, monumental works was
artificially postponed as the result of the primacy both she and Pollock
gave to his career. Pollock's large "drip" paintings date from the move
of his studio from the bedroom in the house the couple purchased in
1945, when they moved from Greenwich Village to Springs, East
