 My name is Rebecca, and I am the Director of Programs at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation. So I work with Dr. Sackler to provide additional programs here at the Center for Feminist Art. And I'm absolutely thrilled to be here to welcome Dr. Gail Levin as she discusses her new book, which we have right here. Lee Krasner of Biography, the first full-length account of Krasner's influential and colorful life. And as you can see, there is a book signing that will follow, and we're really excited that Dr. Levin has agreed to do that. The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, which opened in 2007, is an exhibition and education facility dedicated to the past, present, and future of feminist art. As the permanent home to the iconic work, The Dinner Party, by Judy Chicago, the Center also strives to raise awareness of feminism's cultural contributions to educate new generations about the meaning of feminist art and to maintain a dynamic and learning facility, as well as to present feminism in an approachable and relevant way. The Feminist Gallery with the Lorna Simpson exhibition up right now, I hope you have all had a chance to take a look at that. The gallery is only one piece of the puzzle at its core. The center is a space for discourse, conversation, and the exchange of ideas. So to have Dr. Levin here and have her share her book and research with us is a perfect and lovely fit. Dr. Sackler could not be here today, but she asked me to relay the following message. It is a pleasure and a privilege to have Gail Levin at the Sackler Center today to share her research and insights on Lee Krasner. Unfortunately, an immediate health issue keeps me from being here with you. Gail has been a friend and colleague for more than a decade. Her scholarship on Judy Chicago has added enormously to our understanding of feminist art. The great Judy Chicago and appreciation for our iconic masterpiece, The Dinner Party. So I couldn't agree more with Dr. Sackler's words. Gail Levin's comprehensive biography weaves her rigorous research and knowledge of the history of art with personal anecdotes to present Krasner as an independent, resourceful, dynamic, intelligent woman and a gifted artist of uncompromising talent and remarkable energy. Levin debunks the previous portrayals that depict Krasner solely as the long-suffering wife of Jackson Pollock and allows Krasner to emerge as a significant artist in her own right, a painter who deserves a place in the 20th century's cultural history and artistic pantheon. Gail Levin is the author of 12 books and is an expert on the lives and work of Edward Hopper and Lee Krasner and Judy Chicago, I would like to add. She is currently a distinguished professor of art history at Baruch College and the Graduate School of the City of New York. She has lectured all over the world, curated exhibits in New York City, Valencia and Tokyo and has photographs and public collections in New York and in Georgia. And personally, I'd like to add that she's been a supporter of the Center for Feminist Art since day one and I'm overjoyed that she's here today to share her scholarship. So please help me in welcoming Dr. Levin. Thank you very much. I don't worry, I'm not going to read, but I have maybe teensy something to read. It's such a pleasure to be speaking about Lee Krasner in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Lee Krasner has, everybody can hear well, right? Lee Krasner has been too long overshadowed by her husband for 14 years, Jackson Pollock. She had another long relationship, 10-year long relationship with a different artist. Igor Pantehoff before she was with Jackson Pollock and she had a long life after his death, untimely death at age 44 in 1956. She lived on until the age of 75 and passed away in 1984. I was privileged to know her as you see me here with her in front of her, the house she shared with Pollock in Springs in East Hampton, New York in 1977. I hope you can still recognize me, but I was then a young curator at the Whitney Museum. Krasner was really a mentor to me and I thought that the moment was right for a biography of Krasner and I think it was, but I have to say that there are still a few old timers around who buy the old male chauvinist line and even some who have said, well you know she wasn't an important artist because she was too busy being Jackson Pollock's wife and supporting his career. But there's really no reason that that should take away from her career. She continued to paint and to show and so some people are writers that left Krasner out of the books they published on abstract expressionism since 1970. I don't want to give up the ghost and let her into the pantheon. But I'd like to open up the canon for many, many more women artists, not just Lee Krasner and level the playing field. So this is kind of ground zero for doing that here at the Sackler Center. So I felt that I wanted to really say how far we've come but how far we have still to go for women artists. And I want to mention, well I think I'll share with you that I actually maybe 17 or so years ago, I first just went out to Springs on Long Island. I'm from far away and I'd never been out to Eastern Long Island. I went out because I met Krasner when I was a graduate student, a beginning graduate student in 1971. I was 22 and I arranged to have an interview with her at the Marlboro Gallery. And a colleague who recently, a few years ago edited an article by me about Lee Krasner. She said, how could you have had an interview with Lee Krasner when you're only 22 years old? And I thought, wow, it was easy. She wasn't that famous. I just had a course on abstract expressionism. There were no women artists in the course. This is at Rutgers University, a doctoral course. And a new book, Abstract Expressionism, The Triumph of American Painting, had just come out. There were no women in that book. Although Lee Krasner Pollock was acknowledged for giving her copyright permission to reproduce the work of Jackson Pollock. And I had just done a master's thesis the year before on Henry Moore, the British sculptor, whom I had gone to visit in an interview. And then I was a year younger and he was a lot more famous at the time. So this didn't seem like such a big deal to get this interview. But in my research, I was saying I had it in December 1970, only to find out it was really in January 1971. So I was only off by a couple of weeks. And the letter setting up the interview from the Marlborough Gallery to Lee Krasner is still in Lee Krasner's papers at the Archives of American Art. And I was able to read through all of those papers, which had a lot of goodies for a biographer. And I'm reading one particular long handwritten letter. And I'm, you know, reading it and suddenly I'm realizing and I'm reading it and I realize I wrote this letter, my God. She saved absolutely everything. But anyway, when I interviewed her that day, I wanted to know if Jackson Pollock had been interested in Kandinsky and if he had any books from the Museum of Non-Objective Painting when he worked there. That was the precursor of the Guggenheim Museum where Pollock worked in the basement on frames and such and there were lots of Kandinsky's. And she said, well, I don't know, but you can come out next summer and visit me in the springs and see for yourself. So that's what I did. And I said, but I'm going first to Europe to interview Peggy Guggenheim about Pollock and she didn't get along with Peggy at all, but she didn't let on then. And so I went out and she invited me to stay in the house and I researched in the library. When I got out there, I looked around me and there were so many of her, it was all her paintings, nobody else's, no Pollock's. And I'm thinking, wow, she's really good. How come I haven't heard more about her? And this, of course, might have been her plan because it turned out when I was researching the biography that all along she'd had a written inventory made years earlier of the books in the library in springs. So she could have just said, here, have a look for yourself, but she didn't. She invited me out where I got to see her work and got to know her. And she could never have imagined that I would turn up five years later to be a curator at the Whitney Museum and able to co-organize with another museum a show called Abstract Expressionism the Formative Years in which I would put her work in the show and write about her in the catalog. And although my colleague was happy to have her in the show, it was my idea to put in her work done when she was a student with Hans Hoffman. And she said, why do you want to put in that student work? And I said, because I want to show that you were abstract and modernist before you were with Pollock, trust me, Lee, it's really important. Do her credit, she did. And the critics picked up on her in that show and pronounced that she was indeed a first-generation abstract expressionist. But all of the older critics didn't want to let her into the pantheon. So a few of them are still putting up a fuss. But we know, at least I think we know, I know that she belongs. So I was going to tell you that I was in my home that I ended up buying out in Springs. I used to have a home out there, I don't anymore. But I'm still on Eastern Long Island. But anyway, I had a house kind of around the corner, up the street and around the corner from where I visited Krasner. And I got it five years after her death. So I had very happy memories. And I had a dream when I was there. I was actually asleep next to my husband. I never have dreams like this. I almost never remember my dreams. But in this dream, there was a great thud. And through the curtain, like an Edward Hopper etching evening wind, the lace curtain we had was blowing in the second floor window. And in slipped a figure with a great thud, dressed in white, comes over, grabs me by the shoulder, shakes me and says, Gail, wake up! Wake up! Why aren't you writing about me? Why aren't you correcting all these lies? So I got the idea that Krasner wanted me to write a biography. And I thought, I can't do this. This is one of the reasons I thought I can't do this. This is her painting. I love it from 1957 called Listen. But how do you interpret it? Especially when she said, I can remember when I was painting Listen, which is so high-keyed in color. I've seen it many times since. And it looks like such a happy painting. I can remember when I was painting it. I almost didn't see it because tears were literally pouring down. So here she tells us that her seemingly happy paintings were painted in a moment of great sadness and tragedy. This is, in fact, just the year following Pollock's death that August 1956. And it's not surprising that she was feeling very sad, very bereft. But in a sense maybe the colors are a reaffirmation of life and that she was going to go on and go on painting because for her that was life. She's not the only painter for whom painting or light is the life force. But it certainly was true for her. Nature, which we can also see in this painting, is very central to Krasner's work. But having written a biography, and I was writing the biography of Edward Hopper at the time I had the dream, and his work is so figurative, it's so easy to interpret. You don't have to imagine if there's a man or a woman's body, you can just see it. So this was a greater challenge, but one that I think was a very rewarding one. Then just to show you two more paintings. Oh, thank you. Two more artworks from the same period. Oh, are they both bubbly? No, they're just two. Thank you. Okay. Two more artworks from the same period. A collage from a great show that she had in 1955 called Bald Eagle. Now, if she never decided I'm going to paint a picture of a bald eagle, she simply assigned titles after the work was finished. And you can see why she would decide to call this Bald Eagle. And she's using scraps from both her work and Pollock's work here, discards. There's a whole story in the biography about how she came to do collage. But in any event, she didn't name all her paintings herself. That's another problem. Sometimes the painting names are by her and sometimes they're not. So are they clues to the meaning or aren't they? But they basically are clues because even if someone else helped her name it, she rejected a lot of the names and we have evidence of that. One dealer from Detroit sent her all these titles for the works that were going to be in her show and she rejected most of them. So we know that even though she took suggestions, she didn't accept everything. Now, this painting on the right, three in two in 1956, when Pollock died, Krasner was in Europe and she had gone to Europe because she wanted Pollock to go with her. He didn't. And then she wanted him to make up his mind whether he was going to stay in the marriage or stay with the woman he was having an affair with. Ruth Kliegman who died recently and wrote a memoir called Love Affair. And I think that this is influenced by Matisse's bathers. That's not so unusual to say that. But you can see forms of human figures here. And three in two, I think the twosome, the dyad of Pollock and Krasner was interfered with by a third wheel, Ruth Kliegman. I think that's what this painting is about. But can I prove it? No. So this is the issue in writing a biography of an abstract artist. Well, to give you an idea of Krasner's background, and I have to keep an eye on time. She comes from, well, she's born in Brooklyn in Brownsville. Then the family moved to East New York, not so far from here. But the parents came from what was the pale of settlement in the Russian Empire is today the Ukraine, right where that little asterisk is. A small town known as a shtetl, which actually they had to flee pogroms. A government-sponsored attacks on Jews. So many, many Jews immigrated to the United States from the 1890s until the immigration quota in 1924. This is the family before Krasner was born. Anna and Joseph Krasner, her older brother Irving and her sisters, three surviving sisters, one died as a child in Ukraine. And these are my photographs taken last summer while visiting Shpekov. I just had to see it. And there are still Jews living there. There's still somebody named Krasner in the town. And it's written in Slavic with the double S, which is how they spelled it when the family first came. She in fact was spelling it that way until she changed it later in life. And there's still a Jewish cemetery. And you can see it's not in too bad a shape compared to others in Ukraine. And while I was there I went to visit Tarnovka, my great-grandparent shtetl, which is very close as the crow flies to Shpekov, Krasner's family shtetl. So I found out why she reminded me of my grandmother so much. This is Glee, the older of the two children with her younger sister Ruth. They were both born in Brooklyn and both spoke mainly English, although the family spoke Russian and Yiddish. She could understand a little Yiddish, never really learned Russian. Languages were not her forte. She loved to hear Joseph, her father, tell her stories. She said they were marvelous tales about forests, beautiful stories, always like grim, scary things. And she was afraid of sort of the unknown ever since she was a child. We don't know what happened. Her older brother Irving was very doting as an older brother. Now if you read the polygraphy, you read that he didn't like her at all, but I say hokam. The source for that was her younger sister Ruth, who was very jealous. And she survived Lee Krasner so she could tell any story she wanted. Ask yourselves, have you ever known a jealous sibling? Or been one. Anyway, Irving used to read to Lee. Her name was Lena, her given name. So she was Lena Krasner with two Ss. And he used to read the great Russian author Sundoy Stoyevsky to Turgenev. And she remembered this and spoke about it. And I interviewed a lot of surviving family members, including two, three of her favorite nieces, one of whom has since died. Another Brooklynite, maybe some of you knew, Rusty Kanakogi, who became an Olympic, well, a judo star and attributed great influence to her aunt Lee. Anyway, another author that Irving read to her was the Belgian poet and playwright and S.A.S. Maurice Matrelink. And he wrote the famous play The Bluebird and lots of nature studies. And I think that her engagement with nature certainly, and she spoke about flowers that she loved as a child and those are exactly the ones Matrelink wrote about. And she said that when she grew up in East New York it was rural in those days and she spoke of going to this farm, which I even found, this Dutch farm, to bring home a pail of milk for her family. Which she didn't like, but they did, so she went and got it. Anyway, this is her wonderful large canvas, bigger than the screen, right bird, left bird from 1962. And another one of those collages related to the Bald Eagle I showed you called Bird Talk of the same year, 1955. I'm not going to go into it here, but there's also evidence that Krasnir was dyslexic, which wasn't even known back then. But she was very intellectual, loved to be read to, including by me, but by many of her friends, or all of her friends, anyone that would. And she really couldn't deal with driving. She learned late and gave it up. She had left-right confusion, which is common to dyslexics. So right bird left, maybe the only painting about it. But there's another one that reveals it. And I would like to quote, she said, I would like to soar in a canvas. She told that to the Brooklyn art critic, Cindy Nimzer, feminist art critic. And today I would like to pay homage to Cindy, I'm sorry she's not here. And to the late Hermine Freed, I'm going to show you a video clip of her 1972 early video interview with Krasnir. And to Barbara Rose as well. I'll show you a clip from her film on Lee Krasnir called Lee Krasnir, The Long View. Well, Krasnir's love of nature can be seen here where she allows Kaka, Jackson's pet crow, to land on her head in their spring's house in the yard in 1947. And their dog, Jip. They had another one, Ahab. This is a major painting in the Dallas Museum from 1968. It's huge, bigger than the screen, called Pollination. And Matterlink, lo and behold, wrote a whole book very popular, translated into English called The Life of the Bee. And another one, The Life of Flowers. So Pollination's very essential to that. And how many of you know an artist who includes lettuce in the major statement about their art? And Matterlink had written about the remarkable ability of a lettuce leaf to defend itself against attacks from slugs. You can take that as a metaphor for attacks by Mel Chauvinus. But anyway, she wrote at the time of her retrospective at White Chapel Art Gallery, her first retrospective exhibition in 1965. She made this statement, painting for me when it really happens is as miraculous as any natural phenomena as say a lettuce leaf. By happens, I mean the painting in which the inner aspect of man and his outer aspect interlock. By the way, when I first met Lee, but when I got to the gallery, the Marlboro was early, I sat down, the director handed me this catalog with this statement from the White Chapel Art Gallery and said, here, you'd better read this. She's an artist too. Because I was of course interviewing her about Pollock and she was as nice as she could be about it. In the Bluebird, the fairy sends out two children to look for a visionary diamond to cure her sick daughter. One turn you see the inside of things, one more you behold the past, another you behold the future, and subsequent adventures take the children in search of the Bluebird, the land of memory, the palace of the night, the kingdom of the future. And we can see these themes in Krasner's mature painting. In her painting, Spring Memory, the land of memory, right? Memory of Love from 1966. And I'll let you read about who the post Pollock lover was. A man named David Gibbs, but he's a very colorful character. You can read about him in the book. And Night is a very central theme. Night Life, one of her little image paintings from 1947. Night Watch from 1960. Lots of eyes there. Whoops. Night Bloom and Cobalt Night from 1962. And Night Creatures. And this I couldn't resist. One of the creatures of the night on the eastern end of Long Island is of course the great horned owl. And I see the owl eyes in Krasner's painting. I don't know if she put them there intentionally or afterwards she saw they were there and said Night Creatures. And her engagement with time is very important with the future. She had this painting on the easel when she left for Europe, and it's called Prophecy. And it is figurative. It was very disturbing to her. She saw the eye on the black upper right corner and kind of like the evil eye. And there she is right after Pollock's death when she's returned to find she'd left that painting on her easel. And it's right here in this photograph. Also in her 1977 show, Eleven Ways to Use the Words to See, she dealt with past, present, and future as in Future Perfect, the one on the bottom from 1976. And this is a one, there's a really fun story about her running into the, or the young artist Deborah Kass running into Krasner at that show and their little encounter, which Deborah related to me and is in the book. This, if we take Lee back to her childhood in PS72 in Brooklyn, her favorite teacher was Mr. Walrath, because he thought that it was great for the girls to play on the softball team with the boys. And she said that was my kind of guy and she really wanted to be a player. She wanted to be one of the boys. What she didn't like was when she went to the synagogue with her father and she was told to go upstairs to sit with the women because the men and women were separated in the Orthodox synagogue. And yet she said, I went to the services partly because it was expected of me, but there must have been something beyond because I wasn't forced to go and my younger sister did not. What she and her younger sister were so different. And in previous books, it's been alleged, this is because of the younger sister, for example, that Lee refused to marry the widower of their older sister Rose, who died suddenly, turns out of appendicitis and left two small girls, little nieces, a mural and Bernice, whom I was able to interview, mural at least. Ruth claimed that since Lee wouldn't marry William Stein, she had to and she was only 14 years old. Can you imagine a cruel sister making her 14-year-old sister marry the widower? Trouble was she was almost 19. She lied about her age. So I went and got the death certificate of the sister Rose and the marriage certificate of sister Ruth and the truth comes out. So Lee just simply had other plans. She was already 20 and she wasn't about to marry this guy, but she was a very doting aunt as her two nieces. She preferred to her as their other mother and murals told me so many stories about how great, not only Aunt Lee, but they loved her boyfriend Igor Pajahoff. It was the one that followed Jackson Park. They weren't so crazy about it anyway. So when she graduated, she didn't know why, but she decided she wanted to go and become an artist. She already knew it at age 13 and she found the only school where you could become study art and that was Washington Irving in Manhattan, but they were full, so she had to go to Girls High here in Brooklyn for a half a year and she was going to study law. She hated it and a low and all the place opened up at Washington Irving and the subway had just opened so it was easy for her to get to Manhattan right on Irving Place and schools filled with murals. Even today it looks just the same. And here is Lee as she was in high school. This is her on the far right with her two nieces and her sister Rose and her mother. So those are the ones I'm referring to that were orphaned when the woman in the middle rose passed away. And when Lee entered high school, Lena entered high school, she changed her name from Lena to Lenore. Now where did she get Lenore? And she told one interviewer how much she loved reading Edgar Allan Poe at this time and I thought, aha, the Raven. It turns out Lenore is in more poems than just the Raven for the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore. Nameless here, forevermore. So her name came right out of Poe and she kept it as her legal name for the rest of her life. But she goes on to Cooper Union and of course there's all kinds of literature. You can read feminist writing, how she had a male identity and how she changed her name to Lee to pretend that she was, so you couldn't tell her gender. But it turns out when she was at this all girls, then all girls school, Cooper Union, in the school newspaper they talked about Will Lee Krasner with two S's, Will Lee, L-E-E, Krasner put up her hair and talked about Lee Krasner's eyelashes and that was her nickname. And by 1930 in the U.S. census she listed herself as Lee Krasner and she had only, well this was an all girls school, the boys that went there to study architecture even had a separate entrance. There was absolutely no mixing. So I don't really think she changed her name to hide her gender. It simply was a nickname and yes it probably became convenient. But you know there's even a myth about Grace Hardigan changing her name. She exhibited as George and it turns out that she, if you read the real interview where she says the real reason I did it I had so many gay male friends and they all had female pseudonyms so I took George. But anyway, because nobody was really fooled you know artists would show up at their opening people knew the gender of the artists. Well her teachers at Cooper Union were mostly male although Ethel Trapegan who taught costume design was of course a woman and made her own school of fashion design. But Charles Hinton was impossible for Lee. He told her he was very academic and conservative he said her work was far too messy and she had to work in alcoves where you had to do the hands and feet in the first alcove then if you were good enough you had to do the torso. And finally if you were good enough you got passed to the full figure and only then could you get into life drawing and work from a live model of the past of antique sculpture. She was stuck somewhere in torso. Finally he said that the teacher Mr. Hinton said to her look I'm sick of you you're sick of me I'm just passing you on. So then she got to study anatomy with Victor Perard and he liked her so much that he had her do a page of hands blocked hands for his book anatomy and drawing this is still at Cooper Union and Lee told me about this way back in the 70s I went out in the use book market before the internet found her a copy showed it to her I said which one did you do and she turned right to this and I inscribed it to her and it's still there at the Pollock Krasner house. So it's a nice memory. This is Krasner's self-portrait that she used I was able to predate it two years earlier than the catalog race in A full records at the National Academy of Design. She'd been very clear she did it in the summer before she she got more ambitious and she applied to the National Academy of Design got in and she wanted to get right into life class so she did this painting out of drawers where her parents had moved out to Greenlawn near Huntington on Long Island she said I nailed it mirror to a tree and spent the summer painting myself with trees showing in the background it was difficult the light in the mirror the heat in the bugs and I even found a letter where one of her nieces Muriel remembered seeing Aunt Lee painting this picture out of doors in Greenlawn so that really documented it and if you notice she's painting with her left arm but she was right handed another example of her right left confusion so she's looking in a mirror but she's confused about what she's seeing not her identity I don't really think she looks male there that's been written but she was confused between right and left anyway these are her parents and then Joseph out in Huntington Station and her sister doing the laundry there was no running water just like in Shbikov and in the little shtetl I went from my grandparents still no indoor running water so this was not a hardship on Long Island it was normal and when the committee saw Krasner's portrait they accused her of merely pretending to have painted it out of doors when she really had and when people ask Krasner who was she in art school with she always named the men and she named people like Byron Brown Boris Gorilik and Ilya Bolotovsky who's Muriel you see right downstairs here in the Brooklyn Museum from the Williamsburg Housing Project actually Lee was in the WPA and she was going to do an abstract mural but the war came and ended the WPA before she got a chance to realize her mural she did enlarge one of Dukunin's murals for the WPA after it was he was thrown off the project because he wasn't a native born American he wasn't an American citizen but if you read the biography of Dukunin you'll read a lot of nonsense like the fact that that was Igor Pangeov's studio that's Lee's boyfriend that she was living with for ten years and the references to Irving Sandler's interview with what's his name I'm going to forget the name anyway with George the guy that's sharing the studio George McNeil, thank you sharing the studio with Igor George kept saying but Igor Pangeov that was Lee Krasner's boyfriend anyway in the Dukunin biography and Sandler's books it becomes that Dukunin was in that building which he wasn't Krasner had his drawing because she was assigned to enlarge it and turn it into a mural and she talked about it in interviews but the male art historians or historians of male artists whatever their gender didn't bother to look at the interviews of Lee Krasner and find out that was her project she was working on that so what I've done in this biography is I've put Krasner back into the story where there's real evidence she belongs and this is Igor I know I've been talking about him without showing and another classmate Esfir Slavikina who left a long privately published autobiography talking with disdain about how Lee Krasner that ugly fellow student got the best looking best artist in the class Igor Pangeov is her boyfriend they were both Russian Slavikina and Pangeov but he went for Krasner Krasner was very popular and elected the offices in the art school at the National Academy of Design Eda Mersky painted this portrait of Lee Krasner you know she's wearing a cross it's in the Metropolitan Museum today and 1929 that must be the cross given to her by Pangeov who was like Bolotovsky Russian and he was very close you'll find out he's so colorful his family was very close to the Tsar and if you read the story in the biography you'll see that I couldn't have ordered up somebody better if I were a novelist or got him from Central Casting he's absolutely amazing and here's another portrait by Eda Mersky a very close friend of Krasner's also her older sister Kitty this one's from 1930 at the National Academy of Design now Krasner never won any prizes like I said she was too messy but the teachers used to twit her friend the boys about her friend Eda Mersky better watch out for that Eda Mersky she'll win the Prix de Rome but she was furious when she heard that because she knew they never gave those substantial money prizes to girls to women they only gave them to the boys in fact when her daughter Erika studied at high school of music and art in New York and went to the art students league while she was still in high school and wanted to become a painter her mother would have none of it that's why we have Erika Jong the novelist her mother had too much male chauvinism in art school and Molly Fast-Jong Molly-Jong Fast Erika's daughter also a writer so it was their father was a portraitist and that was the end of the line because of the male chauvinism here is a portrait that Krasner self-portrait Krasner did in art school and gave to Eda Mersky her friend who gave it to the Metropolitan Museum and you can see it's now owned there along with Rembrandt's Woman with a Pink which I think was Lee's model she's holding the little same flower and painting herself in Chiaroscuro well it was at the National Academy of Design that Eda and Lee were still alive she's a hundred years old she's mostly out of it but when I interviewed her about Lee Krasner and told her I knew about the story when they wanted to paint a still life of fish they were in a still life class but you had to go to the basement where they kept the fish because they would stink if it was cooler and they would last longer and no women were allowed downstairs because of the possible hanky-panky it wasn't chaperone they went down anyway they got suspended for several days from art school and I when I asked Eda about it she perked up and she said that was the only time I got into trouble but Lee said you're not being allowed to paint a fish because you're a woman it reminded me of being in the synagogue and being told to go up not downstairs that kind of thing still riles me and it still comes up and I'm gonna this is Igor with some of his paintings that won the prizes he actually did win the Prix de Rome and so he went off for a year but when he came back they moved in together and friends recalled Lee as having the kind of animal energy and voluptuousness we later came to call sex appeal so she may not have been a classic beauty but she always got the best smartest the best artist and the best looking guy and you notice that her family and she and Igor were married and so did a lot of her friends and when they applied to Yaddo for a visiting artist's residency Lee wrote the letter in her hands and it signed Igor and Lenore Pankov because the transliteration changed in 1934 but they never were married and remember as for here Slovakina she made this drawing of Lee Krasner a stride of fighting cock a comment on now here's Lee Krasner's 14th street of 1934 and my god it reminded me so much of this Edward Hopper city ruse from 1932 and of course Krasner had access to her roof on 14th street and Hopper's painting was at the Wren Gallery who'd have ever thought she'd gone there but it was there exactly the time she painted hers but she quickly became flatter and more modernist and I'm comparing her Ganservort one and two at the top from 34 and 35 to Archill Gorky's painting from around the same time we don't know which was first but if you look at the lines I don't know if you can see them very well they're very similar in the round yellow ball and even the red line very similar to Gorky's organization they were good friends Krasner and Gorky and de Kooning Krasner's family thought she and Igor were married and he painted this marvelous portrait of Joseph Krasner with his Yiddish book he used to come out and visit Muriel the niece remembered sitting on his niece sipping wine and that he would visit the family often Lee living in the house in East New York this is Igor's portrait of Lee about whom Fritz Bultmann commented with Igor Lee about a sparkle and a gait and then just quickly to show you her painting Bathroom Door which was hanging in the house when I went out there and it's very Matissean with a view into a second space and the figure in the bathtub of course reminds one of Matisse's Blue Nude on the lower left with the arm up and the sculpture Matisse painted so often and the table in the foreground is also like Cézanne and if this were the 18th century we could think of the broken pottery like the broken eggs in Gros painting in the Metropolitan Museum which refers to the lost virginity and although we're after the roaring 20s Lee is living quote in sin or in a companionate marriage which is not a real marriage with Igor for 10 years also makes you think of the bride and bachelor and both Igor and Lee were on the WPA and she would call if you had to qualify for relief first you had to prove you had no means of visible support that's one of her paintings after Matisse she joined the Artist Union which published Art Front magazine because they protected artist rights but they were always getting laid off they didn't make very much money but it was a way to survive in the Great Depression where artists could get jobs or sell work of art simply there wasn't collecting maybe if you were Edward Hopper you became famous by then you could sell a picture but it was even rough in the middle of the 30s for him this is Max Bevac who was Lee's supervisor she was on the WPA with our future art critic Harold Rosenberg some people think she taught him everything about art I don't think she taught him everything but what he didn't learn from Lee he learned from other female art critics with whom he had affairs he didn't have one with Lee here he is he was married all his life despite being a womanizer and there he is with his delightful daughter and May Tabak a marvelous writer that he was married to and I hope you'll read about the backstory of his very famous almost biblical text and painters because you'll never read it again the same after you hear what was going on so Lee joined the Hoffman school as I mentioned I'm wondering if this is her what do you think in the back in profile I think it may be it's a different hairdo this is her work after seeing the Fantastic Art Dada and Surrealism show at MoMA organized by Alfred Barr and her work is on the left and it's clearly influenced by Dikiriko's classicism and those big eyeballs oh also see the little cross in the background on the horizon I'll show you where it comes from right out of this catalog Fantastic Art Dada and Surrealism but the Fantastic Art is the but the big eye is also in the catalog, Odolol Redol The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mouths Toward Infinity so she was mining that exhibition Pat Joff's work you can see what it looked like he was once modernist and there they are having fun on the beach in Provincetown again in Provincetown together with Pearl Fine and George Mercer anyway he left but you can see where this note which he sent her later, they got back in touch says to hell with Christianity and his parents you'll read were so close to the Zara they were quite anti-semitic so there he is painting her father holding the Yiddish and the parents refused to meet Lee because she was Jewish so they never got married I think that's the reason and there he is he was also something of a womanizer he instead takes up with Jackson Paula whom she meets before Igor departs in 1936 at an artist union dance she didn't know his name then supposedly he stepped on her feet he was in the Sikeros workshop learning new memes working with industrial paint which he would later do in his famous drip paintings Krasner did it too I'm going to skip ahead I want to they used to hang out at the Jumble Shop in Greenwich Village she said you could with Gorky and de Kooning you had to believe because it was a God she said to get a seat at the table and here you can see Krasner de Kooning and Gorky all in a row with their paintings they're all very similar in the 30s and this is when she's studying with Hans Hoffman Igor's study with Hans Hoffman also before Krasner and he was too avant-garde for him but she got curious and went there Hoffman loved her work he said my God this is so good you would never know it's by a woman she said before you could enjoy the warmth of the compliment like that he threw on the cold water there she is on the Hoffman summer school in Provincetown I don't know if you see her on the lower right second row so we have we have the moment when they're bread lines everywhere it's the Great Depression everybody feel very hungry they're laid off Igor can draw like amazing representational portraits here's a self portrait in one of Lee but he leaves his parents entice him to leave her to go to Florida where he can become earn money because they have no money they sell their phonograph they can't eat they've been thrown off the WPA everybody got thrown off if you've been on 18 months you were unemployed and there was no other employment no jobs at all so he makes he leaves in the dark of night he leaves everything behind he sends her this note and this drawing of himself reclining in Florida with the pelican under a palm tree look at the palm tree that's Igor but he came back she writes meanwhile she moves to a smaller studio writes from rambos a season in hell to whom shall I hire myself out what beast must want a door what holy image attack what hearts must I break what lie must I maintain in what blood must I walk she had actually George I'm sorry Byron Brown write this on her studio wall because she liked his handwriting she told me that there she is at this time she decides to start showing with American Abstract Artist with people like George L.K. Morris and Suzie Froilinghausen there were many artist couples the so-called Park Avenue Cubists so they weren't so chauvinistic and that's when she meets an honorary member who arrives in New York Pete Mondrian with whom she went dancing about her work when they were showing together he said in front of her painting you have a strong inner rhythm never lose it she loved to tell that story and you can see her Mosaic collage which I think is related to his Broadway boogie woogie Igor though comes back this is his portrait of Jean Lawson who married Fritz Bouldman whom I interviewed she died about a year ago and that's Lee's portrait another one by Igor and Jean said that all Igor wanted to talk about was Lee and he eventually introduced Jean to Fritz Bouldman and there is Lee with Fritz talking to Fritz Bouldman at Martha Jackson's home here is another one of her pursuers Iris Tudimas called us another good-looking guy writing to her I hope that during the coming year 1941 you'll descend cosmos into our prosaic world our Risto and it's a postcard of an Aztec goddess of flowing water so she was kind of a goddess to them and John Graham then puts her into a show Miss Lenora Krasner on East 9th street together with an artist she says she hadn't heard of she goes to visit him it's Jackson Pollock that stepped on her toes a few years earlier at the artist union dance and he puts birth in a painting like the one on the left but already they start to become a couple and she moves in with him by 1942 but Igor comes back and Pollock drives Igor out throwing crockery at him to get him to go because he wasn't over Lee at all he realized what he'd given up but Lee had moved on and so she paints this painting which is ahead of a rooster and it has the sign that she's gone on and I think the iconography a girl who went to a farm to fetch a pail of milk and whose parents had chickens on Long Island understood that the rooster is not monogamous but he doesn't let other roosters come to his hens and so Igor transgressed he came back but Pollock drove him away and so Igor is the errant rooster and she's moved on and maybe she remembered Lee Krasner writing a rooster I don't know if she knew this but the rooster imagery must have been the cock imagery must have been popular then and so there's lots more in the book but I'll let you read it I can't of course Pollock becomes perhaps America's greatest living painter by 1949 Life Magazine and we know that without Lee Jackson Pollock we would not know about oh I'll just leave you her good friend Mercedes Matter posed on the beach with this driftwood for her husband Herbert Matter in 1940 and it reminds us of Stieglitz portraits of O'Keeffe but in Harold Rosenberg's famous American Action Painters he writes about a piece of wood found on the beach becomes art modern art does not have to be new it only has to be new to somebody to the last lady who found out about the driftwood and he left diaries documenting his simultaneous affair at this moment with Mercedes Matter and Elaine de Kooning Bill's a strange wife while married to Natalie Tayback and father of a daughter so Lee was pretty resentful about this article I don't think she knew the drift, well maybe she did know the driftwood reference because this photograph turned up a copy of it in the Pollock Krasner house but we don't know who gave it to whom whether Herbert gave it to Pollock I doubt it because he was a long suffering husband or whether Mercedes gave it in her a flirtation which is documented to Pollock we don't know how much more than a flirtation it was but anyway she and Jackson posed with this little Rayfield Gribbets in 1952 he turned out to become an artist they never had any children of their own but it's not true that Lee didn't like children she just had one in Jackson and he was more than a brood to take care of so the rest is history that thank you very much oh I could answer a couple questions to show, I'll show that little clip I certainly, I didn't know if my voice would hold up and I totally forgot, I'll show you two clips two conscious this is Hermione Freed this as a younger artist though in the earlier days of your career were you conscious of the fact that there was some kind of prejudicial view to warn you because you were a woman well, not in the very beginning it seemed natural enough for me to want to major in art and stay with art along you know there are series of incidents in early studies but it never presented itself as a really serious threat there were always other women around I was never isolated or freakish in that sense that I was the only woman in a given situation it was also pretty firmly established aren't you kicking up against a black wall insofar as the history of art has never produced great women painters okay one is confronted with that and somehow didn't seem to stop me I agree that the history of art cannot bring up exact examples in the female role that can hold to the male nothing I can do about it I proceed anyway that was a question of social consciousness many things come into question more than just social consciousness here it's a whole evaluation of the role of female and all western thought for heaven's dear Christianity her role in it there's nothing I can do about those 5000 years or so but like I'm alive now I'm going about my business so my annoyance is with the not the fact that in the past it was so but today's annoyance you know the prejudice today the intolerance today is something that one begins to lose patience right exactly okay now I'm going to play another one this is from Barbara Roses Lee Krasner the long view yes she felt this is this is this is before she knew about feminist scholarship so when she yeah when she got arrested all the artists for demonstrating during the WP all the artists the men artists would give male names and in court they'd all look around to see who was Picasso she said I had only that she gave the name Mary Cassatt she said I only had to choice between Rosa Boner and Mary Cassatt she didn't know about her artist from history and I don't know why this is an opening there it is okay someone just you're very different from that of any of the other dimension this is Marsha Tucker I had lots of jobs to support my art before WPA I was a waitress I had to wear silk pajamas I remember Harold Großenberg because he never tipped later I modeled I'll put it here did it come out? yeah I do I don't know you don't need that it's not on that I finished it yeah I do where's my computer I want to work out the drawing there it is I know I want to pull it over I don't want to play the whole thing that was too long that she is at ease in that heroic or monumental dimension and then it was like a contest when you were there about like who did it fast I think Barbara is going to re-release her film next fall that's Barbara Rose the long view I hope you'll read the book for those of you that want to buy it or already have it I'll be happy to sign them now thank you