Art: Mrs. Jackson Pollock

One day in 1938, when abstract expressionism was a skinny creature starving in cold-water flats, a New York gallery invited three promising American artists to fill out a show of Picasso, Matisse and Braque. Elated at the opportunity, the woman member of the trio set out curiously to track down the other two. The first was Willem de Kooning, the second an artist with an unfamiliar name who lived just a block away from her Greenwich Village studio. "I lunged right over," she remembers, "and when I saw his paintings I almost died. They bowled me over. Then I met him, and that was it." In the years that followed, the pair made art history: one with commotion—Jackson Pollock; the other with devotion—Lee Krasner, who became his wife.

This week, in Rome's spacious National Gallery of Modern Art, a show of the work of bearded, tormented Jackson Pollock is still creating a commotion, though he has been dead for a year and a half. But even as the dead artist scores abroad, Manhattan is getting an exciting look (in the Martha Jackson Gallery) at seventeen oils painted by Lee Krasner after her husband's death.

Blue-eyed Lee Krasner, 49, was born in Brooklyn, got an academic training (Cooper Union, National Academy of Design), went on to study with Painter Hans Hofmann, who still cherishes her as "one of the best students I ever had." After she married the tempestuous Pollock, Lee became first of all a wife; she withdrew into the background, managed her husband's affairs, boosted his ego, heralded his triumphs. Hofmann recalls that "she gave in all the time. She was very feminine." The childless Pollocks bought a house in East Hampton, L.I., and he made the barn into his studio. But Lee had her own studio in the house and never stopped painting. Says she: "I respected and understood his painting as he did mine. There was never any cause for rivalry." In 1954 Pollock began to drink more and more, paint less and less. On Aug. 11, 1956, zooming along a Long Island highway, he smashed his convertible into an embankment and died.

"These are special paintings to me," says Lee Krasner of her current show. "They come from a very trying time, a time of life and death." The canvases are huge—up to 17 ft. long—and show somber blacks and greys on white, shades of fuchsia and ochre in thinly applied paint. The designs are utterly abstract: looping, recurving spirals and disturbed, bulbous forms. They have haunting titles: e.g., Visitation, Listen. They mostly seem to express death-haunted themes that, Lee Krasner says, make it "hard enough for me just to accept my own paintings." But they also strike a lonely note of hope: one of them is entitled Birth.