Art: Bursting Out of the Shadows

Pollock's widow, Lee Krasner, stuns with controlled anger

At 75, Lee Krasner is finally getting her due, and the power of received ideas in American taste is so strong that not too many people sense what the due is. Everyone, of course, has heard of her late husband, Jackson Pollock, the mythic hero (one still reads such inflationary phrases) of abstract expressionism. But Krasner's painting is less well known, the proof being that she is only now getting her first full retrospective. Curated by Art Historian Barbara Rose, it opened late last month at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts: 152 paintings and drawings, the distillation of a 50-year working life. The show will travel to San Francisco and New York City and will also be seen at the Pompidou Center in Paris. It deserves the audience. Anyone who thinks that all the major American artists have been locked into their historical profile should see it, and repent. Krasner has never been a trivial painter, and sometimes her work, as Rose convincingly argues, has been touched with real grandeur.

So what hid her? The vicissitudes of life with Pollock, whom she married in 1945, do not explain that. It was a match easily caricatured: the growing fame of the male painter overwhelms the more vulnerable mate, his penumbra dims her light, his demands blot out her needs. This scenario is a fiction. Pollock's talent did not use up all the oxygen in the room. If he had married someone with a less acerbic and combative temper than

Krasner's, his demands, his egotism and his fondness for the bottle might have done her in. Yet they did not, and their marriage turned into a remarkable working partnership that was truncated only by the car wreck in 1956 on Long Island that killed him. Pollock respected Krasner's work, and episodically tried to promote it. But the art world was not listening.

Women artists through the '40s and into the '50s in New York City were the victims of a sort of cultural apartheid, and the ruling assumptions about the inherent weakness, derivativeness and silly femininity of women painters were almost unbelievably phallocentric. Thus Peggy Guggenheim, the first major collector of Pollock's work, seems to have been so jealous of Krasner's place in his life that she refused to acknowledge her as an artist. And a poll in the Cedar Bar or any other watering place of the New York avant-garde would simply have echoed Picasso's dictum that women were always "goddesses or door mats," never painters. Add to this Krasner's prickly contempt for diplomacy with critics, and one can see why for most of her life her work was scanted as "minor," an appendage to Pollock's. Yet though she had to contend with bigotry, her dislike of groups always stopped her from presenting herself as a "feminist" artist. Hence by the '70s there was no lack of denigrators on both sides of the sex war tacitly writing her off as an art widow first, a painter second. Certainly, Krasner has earned the irony with which she now looks back on the past 40 years of American art.