On Art

...The piece looks as if the artist, suddenly distracted, had abandoned it...

...Still, the Pollock dou-bleheader in the October 29 issue was a special low...

...He proceeds to explore via gossip the possibility that Blue Poles may have been done in collaboration with two other notables, Barnett Newman and Tony Smith...

...The haunting might have been exorcised by now had the issue simply been one of his painting versus hers, and if art could be objectively and permanently graded...

...The purpose of the first piece is made clear early on by its author, Stanley P. Friedman, whose authority seems to depend on having given up writing a book about the artist because he found he "did not really take to Pollock as a person...

...A marriage involving only one artist is difficult enough...

...for example, she has reduced the looping image to a kind of calligraphic scrawl on bare canvas...

...Pollock's influence on Krasner is discernible, but there is no way of measuring hers on him...

...Nonetheless, Krasner's trial may well have been more arduous after her partner's death in 1956...

...A square of unpainted canvas counterbalances at the top left...

...Krasner herself has held out, both as painter and person, against unusual and heavy odds that undoubtedly have affected her development...

...Using mainly black, umbers and assorted beiges, she made handsome works whose effect is monochromatic...

...On Art CONSTANCY IN CHANGE BY VIVIEN RAYNOR AMERICANS of Russian extraction have been so visible in the arts that it sometimes seems as though every Russian immigrant to this country has either been an artist or given birth to one on arrival...

...it seems to swing back to something I was involved with earlier...

...A vertical canvas painted fuzzily in an orange-russet-brown range, it is partitioned right-of-cen-ter by a cluster of yellow stripes, most of them running from top to bottom...

...An extremely important yet also distorting experience, it will probably not be correctly estimated in her lifetime...

...two artists working in the same medium toward the same objective cannot live together without some corrosion of the spirit and...

...Loosely brushed in the colors of the title, the blocks are alternately solid and patterned—with petal-like shapes—and make a pleasing exercise in compositional balance...

...No one was surprised when this popular weekly, which is to the white collars what National Enquirer-type tabloids are to the blue, pounced on the recent sale of Blue Poles for a record $2 million...

...Still, it is a quick and effective way of keeping a major reputation alive and, besides being a fine selection from the last 20 years, it is most interesting historically...

...Having lodged that idea in the mind of the public-as-jury, Friedman then presents Lee Krasner's rebuttal with due legal unction...

...Yet this hardly explains the nearly lunatic vibrations of personal grudge emanating from a performance that, by some oversight, was not titled "Two Great Ways to Rip Off the Modern Art Phonies...

...The companion "think piece," from which editorial guidance was cruelly withheld, is by Ruth Klig-man, a former girl friend of Pollock...

...Let us hope Lee Krasner can have her next show in peace...

...The exhibition begins and ends with sharply defined abstractions that refer more to Henri Matisse than Vasili Kandinsky, Andre Mas-son or the doctrine of automatism...

...While freed from financial worry by a substantial income from the estate, which she was heavily criticized for turning over to Marlborough-Ger-son, she has suffered in other ways...

...Perhaps Krasner had this quality in mind when she commented, the same year, apropos her first large retrospective at the White-chapel Gallery in London: "My own image of my work is that 1 no sooner settle into something than a break occurs...

...Stretched Yellow (1955) also has a certain French elegance and richness to it...

...sooner or later, the world forces one of them to "take low...

...A continuous, circular arm movement covered the space with a mass of arcs and "eye" shapes, from which erupt plumes of spatter...

...Against these two must be set those that are less satisfactory for seeming incomplete...

...In the Soviet Union, wayward artists fear official condemnation or even incarceration for doctrinal reasons...

...Though Kligman's memories are a triumph of unreadability, they do contain one immortal line, awarded to Pollock when she has him say during their love-at-first-sight encounter in the Cedar Bar: "Do you come here often...

...Blue and Black (1951-53) is a horizontal canvas divided vertically into rectangular areas of varying sizes...

...Pasted on this romantic ground are three large shapes torn from a glossy black material and buttressed by a half-dozen small, thin tongues of bright blue...

...To the visual side alone, their contributions have been outstanding, through the work of such individuals as John Graham, Louise Nevelson and Mark Rothko—to name just three who come immediately to mind—and Lee Krasner, some of whose paintings are now on display at the Whitney (through January 6...

...The article is illustrated by an enlarged snapshot, the last picture taken of Pollock: Looking suitably porcine, he is playfully grabbing the thigh of his mistress, who is dressed in a bathing suit...

...Though not historically extraordinary, its skill, color and nervous energy are most attractive...

...The change begins around 1965: The designs are still all-over, but the small shapes are opening up, becoming larger and freer, and bright color has returned...

...Her claim to fame is based mainly on having survived the car crash that killed another friend of hers as well as the artist...

...For, if the survey is telling the chronological truth, the movement was no more than an interlude for Krasner, of about 10 years' duration...

...But the real problem has been the weird prurience that Pollock's life and death, not really all that sensational anyway, arouse in the public breast...

...Impasto has disappeared, but brushstrokes are visible...

...If this is perhaps not literally true—Krasner has exhibited her work on more than a dozen occasions since 1958—it conveys the right impression...

...Intervening white spaces modify the dazzle of the color combination...

...These breaks are always painful and depressing but despite them I see that there's a consistency that holds out, but is hard to define...

...She was the last but one of seven children and the first to be born here—in Brooklyn in 1908...

...In Kufi (1965...

...A story about the spending of $2 million on a 20-year-old painting is an easy circulation booster...

...Today there is a gigantic crowd of artists, or MFAs, whose struggle consists of not much more than waiting for their "15 minutes of fame," as Warhol put it so eloquently...

...IT TAKES a publication like New York to really milk such a situation...

...As a Hofmann student, though, she must have brought a valuable dowry of big-time ideas...

...The impression that museum exposure is a pie beinr, cut into ever smaller pieces becomes quite strong at this show: 18 pictures by a first-generation Abstract Expressionist is, as other critics have noted, more a memorandum than a retrospective...

...For me, I suppose that change is the only constant...

...in the Free World, artists must cope with journalistic innuendo, but the motivation can only be guessed at...

...The arc theme continues through the late works, but is now expressed in a few generous forms, consciously composed...

...In this respect, it does no good to take a gung-ho feminist viewpoint and belittle her other incarnation as the wife of Jackson Pollock...

...Kxasner's parents came from Odessa, part of the great influx during the opening decade of this century...

...Her friends say Pollock's spirit returns in one form or another every time she has a show...

...All my work keeps going like a pendulum...

...This and Mediterranean, another long piece where curving slivers of white, light yellows and blue zigzag up and down, are in my opinion the best of her recent paintings...

...In her nearly 12-foot-long Palingenesis (1971) irregular ovals, rough hemispheres and notched crescents—all done in two tones of green—are laid on a field of two reds...

...Ending on the upbeat, he opines that it's one hell of a painting anyway, no matter who did what to it, and rounds the whole thing off with some down-home avarice: Just think—the Australian buyers might be getting the work "of three American masters for the price of one...

...Certainly, a picture does not have to be heavily worked to make its point, but the marks in this schematic design lack the necessary strength and resolution—in short, the authority—of her indisputable experience...

...In her expressionist period, Krasner, like her contemporaries, devised a rhythm that created a basic shape...

...The presence of her work at the Whitney is another reminder of how art has become a growth stock since the '30s...

...Seen in this context, however, they look a little mechanical, as if automatism was not, for her, a total release...

...Krasner was one of a small crowd of WPA artists who had to struggle to stay alive, but ultimately created a national art of international significance...

...The production of art is a monstrous ego trip, no matter how decent the protagonists may be, so it is safe to assume that even the early, happier days of the union had their hairy moments...

...Its eminent cultural columnists notwithstanding, the magazine is after all the Kamasutra of consumerism, featuring articles like "A Hundred Ways to Spend $60,000" (or Hail a Cab) and "Where to Buy an Iguana in New York City After Midnight...

...No matter how much she gave to him—and it must have been plenty, since she was by all accounts the more advanced painter at the time of their meeting—we are conditioned to assume that the man calls the creative shots...