Expressionism at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center

Helen A. Harrison, the Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton, is a former New York Times art critic and National Public Radio arts commentator. She has been the curator of the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton and Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton, and a guest curator at the Queens Museum in Flushing, New York. Her articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous scholarly and popular publications, and she’s the author of several books, including Hamptons Bohemia: Two Centuries of Artists and Writers on the Beach (with Constance Ayers Denne), monographs on Larry Rivers and Jackson Pollock, and three mystery novels set in the New York art world. Abstract Expressionism in an international context at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, East Hampton, New York.

What is the art movement known as Abstract Expressionism?

Abstract Expressionism is thought of as an American art movement that arose after World War II and spread globally in the 1950s. In fact, the impulse to purge painting of concrete references to observed reality and instead express inner reality originated in Germany during and immediately after the First World War. Artists like Vasily Kandinsky and Hans Hofmann promoted art devoted to “the spiritual translation of inner concepts into form.” In 1919, the German artist Oswald Herzog, the first person to use the term abstract expressionism in print, defined it as “the purity of formation, a physical creation of the spiritual.” Ten years later, Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, used it to describe Kandinsky’s work. In 1946, the critic Robert Coates, writing in The New Yorker, applied it to Hofmann’s work, taking it full circle from Munich, where Hofmann had promoted it back in 1915! 

By the time of Coates’s review, artists in New York had long been exposed to the work of European abstractionists at the Modern, where they saw Picasso, Matisse, Miró and others in depth; at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, forerunner of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, with its major representation of Kandinsky; and the Museum of Living Art at New York University. They had also encountered some of the artist personally, as New York was a haven for those fleeing Nazi persecution. That’s why Hofmann was there, as well as Surrealists and Dadaists like Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Roberto Matta, Marcel Duchamp and Fernand Léger, and Piet Mondrian, whose De Stijl movement inspired several young Americans to experiment with geometric abstraction. It was in this artistic melting pot that Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and their contemporaries took what they needed from European precedents and created their own approach to subjective, expressive abstraction. 

What is the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, and how does it figure in the story of Abstract Expressionism?

While abstract expressionism’s American iteration started in New York City and soon spread to the West Coast, there were two East Coast outposts where it also flourished. Provincetown, on Cape Cod, where Hans Hofmann had established a summer art school in 1934, attracted many young painters eager to learn the principles he espoused. Following World War II, however, the center of gravity shifted to East Hampton, on Long Island, after Pollock and Krasner married and moved there in 1945. The region had attracted artists since the late 19th century, but the art colony had declined during the Depression and wartime, when travel was restricted. But when Pollock and Krasner became full-time residents, they brought friends who soon established studios and revitalized the area—especially in their neighborhood, the hamlet of Springs, a working-class community where artists could buy a fixer-upper, hang out with each other in pleasant surroundings, and not be too isolated from the city, a three-hour train ride away.

Pollock painted his most famous canvases in his Springs studio, a converted storage barn, between 1946 and 1956, when he was killed in an automobile accident. After his death, Krasner used the studio from 1957 until her own death in 1984. Her estate deeded the property to the Stony Brook Foundation, a non-profit affiliate of Stony Brook University, which opened it as a museum and study center in 1988. The home and studio are interpreted as the two artists’ living and working environment, and the library and research collections are available for the study of modern American art in a global context. The property is a National Historic Landmark and a member of the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Historic Artist’ Homes & Studios program. More information is available on the website, pkhouse.org

How did Jackson Pollock’s innovative approach to abstract painting influence international modernism in the mid-twentieth century?

Pollock, Krasner, and their fellow American modernists assimilated European influences, but to be taken seriously they had to surpass those sources. Pollock’s breakthrough in late 1946—no doubt stimulated by his move to the country, where he could focus more intently without distractions—was the creation of a personal language of form to express intangible subject matter, which he described as “energy and motion made visible,” and “memories arrested in space.” He found that liquid paint, rather than artists’ oil colors, was the ideal medium for that approach. Having experimented with it on and off for some ten years, in 1947 it became his primary material. 

With the canvas lying flat on the floor, Pollock would walk around it and apply the paint with sticks, hardened brushes, and sometimes basting syringes, without touching the painting’s surface. He called this improvisational method “direct painting,” with no preliminary plans or sketches. The composition developed as he progressed, as each layer suggested how the next one should complement the previous one. As he put it, “the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it live.” Unlike a representational painting, in which the material is used to describe a subject or object, a classic Pollock represents nothing but itself; it’s up to the viewer to respond intuitively to its inherent dynamics and underlying emotional impetus—sometimes lyrical, sometimes agitated, sometimes both at once. 

This form of abstract expressionism struck a chord in the postwar world, in which artists were struggling to adjust to new social and political realities in the wake of global upheaval. From Tachisme and L’art Informel in France to Spatialism in Italy and Gutai in Japan, spontaneous gestural painting was embraced as an alternative to outmoded traditions. Although some have argued that it was aggressively promoted abroad during the Cold War to counter the influence of Soviet Socialist Realism—that is, free expression versus totalitarian official art—the fact is that the avant-garde had already responded to it by the time of the 1958 Osaka Art Festival’s “The International Art of a New Era: USA, Japan, Europe,” and the Museum of Modern Art’s traveling exhibition, “The New American Painting,” which visited eight European countries in 1958-59. By then it wasn’t so new.

How did Lee Krasner’s art develop before, during, and after her relationship with Jackson Pollock?

Like her husband, Lee Krasner was searching for a personal form of abstract painting. During the Great Depression, she, Pollock, and many of their contemporaries were supported by the WPA Federal Art Project, which paid them a living wage to produce their work under government auspices. This unprecedented program not only provided them with gainful employment but also allowed them to develop and experiment without commercial pressure. All of those who would become the leading abstract expressionists owed their survival as artists in the 1930s to the WPA. 

From 1937-40, while she was working on the Federal Art Project, Krasner studied with Hans Hofmann and developed a neo-cubist style that didn’t stray too far from its Parisian roots. When she met Pollock in late 1941 and saw his work for the first time, she said she felt he was “ahead” of her. In other words, his art was moving in a more original direction, while hers was too reliant on European precedents. Pollock’s example helped her to become more intuitive, to work from the inside out. Also, like Pollock’s, her move to the country was soon followed by a creative breakthrough to allover abstract compositions, later known as her Little Image paintings, which were formally innovative and deeply expressive in content. Never satisfied with a so-called signature style, she continued to evolve through various approaches to abstraction, but always with the subjectivity and spontaneity intrinsic to abstract expressionism.

As outlined in Mary Gabriel’s book, Ninth Street Women, Krasner, and her female contemporaries struggled for recognition in the postwar art world, a marketplace where dealers, critics, and collectors often overlooked them in favor of their male colleagues. It was a rude awakening for those who came up during the WPA days, when men and women got equal pay for equal work. But it should be remembered that, whether male or female, the abstract expressionists were devoted to pursuing their calling regardless of acknowledgment or financial reward. As one of Krasner’s friends remarked, for her being an artist was like taking holy vows. And there were also men who were under-appreciated at the time and who, like the women, are now receiving renewed interest from museums, scholars, and private collectors. In the end, the work’s quality, rather than the artist’s sex, will determine its place in the abstract expressionist canon.

What inspired you to write mystery novels set in the 20th century New York art world? 

As a native New Yorker, trained sculptor, art historian, and journalist immersed in the art world since childhood, it struck me as a natural setting for murderous intrigue. Lord knows there are enough colorful characters, pun intended. I’ve always enjoyed reading mystery novels, from the Nancy Drew series in my youth to modern authors like Walter Mosley, Rennie Airth, and Jonathan Santlofer, and a few years ago I got an idea for one of my own. Unlike those writers, I decided to use a mixture of fictional and real characters—the expat Surrealists, whose parlor game, exquisite corpse, was easily transposed into a real corpse. Part of the fun is figuring out what’s true and what’s invented. After I finished An Exquisite Corpse, I dreamed up a second mystery, An Accidental Corpse, which re-imagines Pollock’s fatal car crash in August 1956. There are now three books in the series, each set in a different decade, from the 1940s to the 1960s. You can read about them, and my non-fiction books, on my website, helenharrison.net.