When Lee Krasner learned that she had been invited to John Graham's planned November 1941 exhibition, "Oil Paintings in America and France," she was ecstatic that her work could be hung in the same room as the works of her idols Picasso and Matisse. But she was also curious: who was Jackson Pollock, and she was proud to know everyone in the New York art scene, so why didn't she know him?
She asked all the acquaintances around her, but no one knew who Jackson Pollock was. One evening, while attending an opening at a gallery, Lee asked Louis Bunce about it. Louis Bunce, a classmate of Pollock's at the Art Student League, told Lee that Pollock was a good painter and lived on 8th Street, just on the right corner of her residence, where Lee had rented a studio on East 9th Street.
The next day, Lee went to Pollock. Jackson must have been surprised that the woman appeared at the doorway, and Lee boldly said to Pollock, "I'm Lee Krasner, and we're all in the exhibition." Lee is 33 years old, four years older than Pollock. She is 165 cm tall and looks strong, with shiny reddish-brown hair cut into the hairstyle of a male waiter.
When Lee met Pollock, he remembered that he had seen him before. Five years ago, they danced at a dance party hosted by the Artists' Federation within the Artistry Project. "He stepped on both of my feet," Lee once recalled, "and he never learned to dance." ”
Pollock invited her into the studio. Looking at the four or five Pollock's paintings hanging on the wall, Lee was full of praise and admiration for him. As she parted, she invited Pollock to visit her studio on 9th Street the following week. The following week, when Pollock arrived at her as promised, he found that Lee's apartment was cramped, not much bigger than the kitchen or bathroom. Before he could sit down, Lee asked Pollock if he wanted some coffee, and Pollock nodded yes. So Lee stood up and put on his coat, "Let's go," she said, "but you haven't given me coffee yet!" Pollock protested in confusion.
Although Lee had a stove in her house, she had never used it and didn't even know if it would still work. Every time she treats a friend for coffee, it means, "Let's go downstairs to the drink shop down the street." ”
They went to coffee together, once, twice, a dozen times, and they found that they were both attracted to each other, and each seemed to have found an interest in being a new person. "When I told him I wanted to die, I never saw anyone as shocked as he was," Lee later recalled. Pollock told her that he was undergoing psychiatric treatment, and Lee happened to be reading a book on the subject, and the two talked very speculatively. Of course, they also talk about art. Pollock was a Presbyterian and Lee was a Jewish, but they believed in the same God – Picasso.
Lee told Pollock how she was "shaken" and left the studio when she first saw Guernica. Before seeing Guernica again, she had to wander the streets five times to calm her mood. They talk about art constantly, but never ask questions like "What does your work mean?" or "Why do you paint?". Perhaps they think it's as ridiculous to ask these kinds of questions as asking "why were you born?" They were both born painters, so they accepted each other's fates and just talked about art in a "jargon" way, as Lee said. Lee asked Pollock if he knew about the other Americans in the exhibition, if he knew about de Kooning, and she told him about de Kooning, and promised to take him to see de Kooning. She wanted to take him to every artist she knew.
The two complement each other not only in life and personality, but also in their artistic creation. Lee herself admits that she was a person with too much formal training, and by the time she met Pollock, she was a first-rate abstract painter. She mastered Cubism and tried to forget about it, and is now aspiring to find a genuine, dynamic source of art and a mode of art that expresses emotions directly. Pollock, on the other hand, had no formal training, he was independent and original. As can be seen from his early art, his art is felt rather than learned, which is not the case with Lee. Lee realizes his genius and discovers that he has fallen in love with Pollock, who is 4 years younger than himself.
Painter Wang Yancheng shares with you the beauty of modern art......