Photo Credit: "Banana" on Photobucket
Back in the 90s, I was often in D.C., but not so much anymore; and I miss the museums where I spent many happy hours taking in the latest exhibits, often with friends Carolyn or Marilyn or both. (Good times.) We favored the African Art Museum and the Arthur M. Sackler and Freer Gallery of Asian Art (all part of the Smithsonian) but made memorable forays into the National Gallery of Art where we took in the sublime Vermeer exhibit and I really saw light on canvas. Dutifully, we also paid homage at the National Museum of Women in Art where I recall seeing only one truly impressive exhibition, “Carr, O’Keefe and Kahlo: Places of Their Own”, featuring the paintings of Emily Carr, Georgia O’Keefe and Friday Kahlo.
Otherwise, though we never said so to one another, the regular collection and the exhibitions were simply nice.
I was reminded of that while reading two new books on women, art, muses and a little bit of madness. In Art and Madness: A Memoir of Lust Without Reason (Nan Talese/Doubleday), author Anne Roiphe writes about being a young woman in the 1950s when her heart’s desire was to play muse to a Great Male Writer.
She writes:
“This sudden and overwhelming desire to bring coffee to the side of a writer, to wash his socks, to stare down his enemies, internal or external, seems inexplicable in the light of the following turns of history.”
In pursuit of that goal, she was briefly married to a playwright who fulfilled one part of her imagined great male talent: He drank a lot. (“I believed in the drunkenness of artists the way I believed in the elephant’s love for peanuts.”) While he fulfilled his drunken destiny, she waited alone in the Park Avenue apartment her mother bought for the young couple. Perhaps if they had lived a downtown Bohemian life and he’d taken her with him to the parties and pubs, she—given as she was to wearing black leotards—might have found that lifestyle glamorous and stayed married to him longer. But she had a child with the playwright before divorcing him, a daughter whom she neglected somewhat in the search for another, greater man. One reviewer describes all these men with the word: “semi-famous.”
In her unhappiness, she considered suicide “like Virginia Woolf” but realized she needed to write something worthwhile before she could honorably walk into a river with stones in her pocket as Woolf did. She saw the feminist light. Her life as a muse was over. It’s a fascinating read while it lasted—and begs the question, How many of the women who devoted themselves to the care and nurturing of writers, musicians and artists had similar talents of their own that they neglected?
Artist Lee Krasner, wife of the painter Jackson Pollack, struggled more with her roles. On the one hand, she played muse, nursemaid to his drunk, business agent and social coordinator and finally, after his death in a drunken car crash, manager of his estate, the keeper of his flame. On the other hand, she created her own art—and after meeting Pollack, did so under the shadow of the leading Abstract Expressionist painter of his time.
In a 1973 interview, she said:
"I happen to be Mrs. Jackson Pollock, and that's a mouthful. The only thing I haven't had against me was being black. I was a woman, Jewish, a widow, a damn good painter, thank you, and a little too independent."
In Gail Levin’s new biography, Lee Krasner: A Biography, (William Morrow), we get the most fully developed literary portrait of Krasner, the artist, ever written. The story of her marriage to Pollack—(“He was drunk when they met at a party.”)—her role in his career, his untimely death in a car crash in the Hamptons, and her devotion to preserving his legacy is well-known to readers of artists’ biographies. But Krasner herself has remained fairly neglected, given her stature as an artist.
She didn’t have her first solo exhibition until she was 65 years old when 18 of her abstract paintings were shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Thanks to feminist advocates, she was recognized as a Modernist master by the time of her death in 1984. Some of my favorites of her paintings are reproduced in Levin’s book. (Frankly, I prefer her to Pollack, but, of course, I am no art critic, merely a woman who likes what she likes.)
Krasner’s life makes compelling reading. She was living as a Bohemian before meeting Pollack and even shared an apartment, sans benefit of marriage, with Igor Pantuhoff, another painter who eventually made his name as a society portraitist. Her work had been shown and well-reviewed by critics, including one who said it “was so good, it’s hard to believe it was done by a woman.” Yet when she and Pollack displayed paintings in an exhibition of husband and wife artists, critics noted that the men were typically bolder, more daring and creative than the women. (Alas, they were right.)
Perhaps the tame and tidy nature of the art in the National Women’s Museum of Art can be partially explained by this: There seems to be, and always was, a dearth of male muses.
Even today when Beta males pick up the domestic slack for their Alpha wives, the men are hardly muses. Their women are corporate executives, professionals, big wage-earners. The Beta men, in fact, are more likely to be artists, writers, musicians, entrepreneurs—working without muse.
So I have to wonder what would Pollack have been without Krasner—and vice versa?
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