Four artists, who advanced the abstract expressionism movement that put New York on the international art map in the early 20th Century, came together in that special period as friends, lovers, promoters, competitors – and captives of alcohol.

By J. Roger Guilfoyle

The Museum of Modern Art in New York is exhibiting a lifetime of work by the Dutch born, American artist/sculptor Willem de Kooning. This show, in nine galleries, with almost 200 pieces, affirms de Kooning’s position as a titan of modern art, easily the equal of Picasso and Matisse as well as of American contemporaries such as Jackson Pollock.

Drawn from public and private collections, the show concludes with the spare, elegant works that were created in the 1980’s while de Kooning was suffering from the onset of Alzheimer’s and the effects of his alcoholism.

de Kooning was also included in “Abstract Expressionism,” the 2010-2011 monumental MoMA show that occupied the entire fourth floor of the museum and spilled onto the third and second floors. That show, drawn entirely from the museum’s collection, is the genesis of this article.

In the 1960s my office was around the corner from the Museum of Modern Art. Armed with MoMA press passes, my fellow editors and I used the museum’s cafeteria as an extension of our office. Abstract Expression-ism and MoMA were entwined at this time. de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and their contemporaries became our familiars.

Life in a shadow
Leaving the “Abstract Expressionism” exhibit last spring, I was stopped by “Gaea” (1966), a painting done by Lee Krasner, Pollock’s wife and a respected painter in her own right. It is Krasner’s fate that, then, and even now, when her name is mentioned it is bracketed with “Mrs. Jackson Pollock.” I realized that I had only the sketchiest idea of Krasner and her life. I guess to me, as to almost everyone, she was Mrs. Jackson Pollock. It was not a designation she desired. However, without her, and the home life and companionship she provided, Pollock’s alcoholism would have raged out of control. He would unlikely have produced the work on which his reputation rests. So it is a designation she earned and deserves.

Gail Levin’s Lee Krasner: A Biography was published almost simultaneously with the closing of the “Abstract Expression” show in spring 2011. I began reading it, and it inspired me to look more deeply into the lives of these great artists.

Messy lives
The creative process, according to Freud, is an alternative to neurosis. Artists have the ability to turn their fanta-sies into art instead of into symptoms, thereby engaging and entertaining society. By doing so, artists’ lives, like their art, fall into the public domain. And, being human, those lives are frequently messy, leaving the impression that to be an artist is to be compulsive/obsessive, manic/depressive, or addict/alcoholic, among other diagnoses. Many artists lead successful, normal lives. However, the public remembers Toulouse-Lautrec’s affinity for absinthe, and Amy Winehouse’s and Keith Ledger’s addictions.

Lee Krasner met Jackson Pollock in 1938, the same year de Kooning met artist Elaine Fried whom he later married. Pollock had already been treated in a psychiatric hospital for depression and alcoholism at the behest of his brothers, Charles and Sande. As part of this treatment, Pollock saw two Jungian analysts through the late 1930s and early 1940s. While his mental problems were far from resolved, he was sober for two years. This led to a very fertile period of creativity. It also became a sometime pattern in Pollock’s alcoholism — first some sort of treatment, sobriety, then relapse. In 1942, de Kooning, Krasner and Pollock would all come together again when they were asked to contribute work to fill out a show of Picasso, Matisse, Braque and other well-known European artists, curated by John D. Graham at the McMillan Gallery in New York.

Stability for Pollock
Krasner and Pollock married in 1945 and shortly after moved to Springs, on the outskirts of East Hampton, Long Island. They bought a house with a down payment from Peggy Guggenheim, who was a patron of Pol-lock’s. In 1948, Pollock began seeing Dr. Edwin Heller, a family practitioner, and stopped drinking. Krasner said that Dr. Heller was “sympathetic.” Jeffrey Potter, a friend of Krasner, “remembered that they (Pollock and Heller) just talked.” This suggests elements of AA, although there is no evidence of a connection.

Suffolk County did have an AA presence. The Huntington Group was founded in 1947, but, Huntington, LI, is a considerable distance west of East Hampton. Heller and, unquestionably, Krasner gave Pollock stability. Heller through his empathetic treatment and Krasner by being wife, mother, manager, and kindred art spirit, roles she assumed early in her relationship with Pollock. She and Heller formed a de facto recovery support system: Heller through his therapeutic approach, Krasner through watchfulness and love. So Pollack became very productive again as he had been in the late 1930s. In this period in the late 1940s, he created some of his most famous canvases. In 2006, media mogul David Geffen sold Pollock’s No 5 (1948) for a record $140 million. In her Krasner biography, Levin quotes Helen Phillips, a friend in East Hampton, who says, “I don’t think we would have much production out of Jack, if it hadn’t been for Lee, or even survival.”

Heller was killed in an automobile accident in March 1950. After Heller’s death, Pollock remained sober until November when, at the completion of Hans Namuth’s filming him from below painting on glass outside his barn/studio in Springs for that now famous documentary film, Pollock began drinking and, after arguing with Namuth, in an outburst of violence, overturned the dining table. This scene was vividly re-enacted by the actor Ed Harris in the film, “Pollock,” in 2000. Marcia Gay Harden won an Oscar for her portrayal of Krasner in that film.

Violence flares
Violence had always been a part of Pollock’s behavior. Freud’s thesis about creativity speaks about artists being capable of transposing fantasies into art rather than indulging in neurotic symptoms.

However, it is Pollock’s tragedy that, while the symptoms were recognized, no one was treating his dual diagnosis. There is even speculation that Pollock may have been bipolar. Heller and Krasner, despite their best intentions and the temporary efficacy of their efforts, were ill-equipped to be an effective support system for someone as ill as Pollock. Further, his relationship with Krasner was becoming strained. In 1951, in an attempt to deal with his alcoholism, Pollock went on a “Protein” diet of soymilk, vegetables, nuts and fruit.

In the last year and half of his life as his illness progressed, Pollock no longer painted. He was being treated by a Sullivanian therapist. Unlike the analysts whose Jungian ideas inspired Pollock artistically in the late 1930’s, the controversial Sullivanian approach encouraged experimenting with drugs and alcohol, sleeping with anyone, and cutting family ties. In 2003, Amy Siskind, who was raised in the Sullivan community, turned her doctoral dissertation into a book, Madness and Evil — A Review of the Sullivanian Institute/Fourth Wall Community.

The tragic end
As Levin says, “Though these [Sullivanian] practitioners aimed to heal patients, sometimes, instead of cures for conditions like alcohol, which they did not understand, they offered misguided therapy, coercive advice that ended up doing harm. It was Klein [Pollock’s therapist], after all, who postponed trying to stop Pollock from drinking and encouraged his relationship with [Ruth] Kligman.” Krasner was in Paris, separated for the first time from Pollock in East Hampton, when Pollock killed himself and Edith Metzger and injured Ruth Kligman in a drunk driving accident when his convertible flipped over on Springs Fireplace Road in East Hampton in August 1956. He was 44 years old.

If Heller had not died, if Krasner had not gone to Paris, perhaps that accident might not have happened. This is conjecture. Pollock’s psychological make-up had led him in the 1950’s to embrace fad diets and Sullivanian therapy. At the time of his death, although still together, he and Krasner were estranged. Alcoholics and addicts, as their disease progresses, often turn against those who have provided for physical and emotional support.

Today, AA has a strong presence on the East End of Long Island. Psychiatrists and social workers are more skilled in treating addiction. There is even help on line, soberartists.com.

Competing with Pollock
In the 1950s, de Kooning began going out to East Hampton. After Pollock’s death, he took up with Ruth Kligman. Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan say in their book, de Kooning: An American Master (2004), that de Kooning took up with Ruth Kligman because “he was still competing with Pollock, even after Jackson’s death.” Kligman was a very beautiful woman, with movie star looks and an affinity for artists. de Kooning named his painting, “Ruth’s Zowie,” for her. An abstract artist herself, she wrote Love Affair — A Memoir of Jackson Pol-lock (1974). Her work can be seen on ruthkligman.com. She died in March 2010. She was 80.

de Kooning moved permanently to East Hampton in the early 1960’s. At the time, he was estranged from Elaine and was abstaining from alcohol. After Pollock’s death, Krasner continued to paint and nurture Pollock’s artistic legacy, as she controlled his paintings. This control, Levin observes, meant that Krasner “would never be financially needy again.” While Pollock was alive, money was always tight. They had moved to Springs because it was cheap and there was space for Pollock to paint. Their life choices, including whether to have a child, were determined by “the pecuniary and painting.”

Although in her later work the influence of Pollock can be seen, some of that influence derives from their mutual, yet separate, earlier interest in the surrealist, whose psychic automatism is cited by H.H. Arnason in his History of Modern Art as inspiring Abstract Expressionism. As H.W. Janson says about Krasner in his History of Art, after Pollock’s death, “she succeeded, in her painting, ‘Celebration’

(1959-1960), in doing what he had been attempting to do in the last three years of his life: to reintroduce the figure into Abstract Expressionism while retaining its automatic handwriting.” Krasner died in June 1984, at the age of 76.

Ravaged by alcoholism
By 1975, de Kooning was ravaged by his alcoholism. Elaine returned to Springs and took charge of his diet and living conditions. Their marriage had been marked by promiscuity and their alcoholism, but Elaine had stopped drinking. Her return made it possible for him to continue painting until 1990 as he slipped into Alzheimer’s. These last paintings, spare and elegant, presciently anticipate the direction of recent contemporary art and are the coda for the current show of MoMA.

Elaine, as Krasner had been with Pollock, was instrumental in promoting de Kooning. Beautiful, sexy and vivacious, she was not only an artist but also a writer. In this role, she did much to articulate Abstract Expressionism. Elaine died of lung cancer in February 1989. She was 70. de Kooning was not told of her death. He died in 1997 at the age of 93.

Many of Pollock’s greatest works were made while he was sober in the late 1940s, early 1950s. Towards the end of his life while, under the spell of the Sullivanians, he hardly painted. After Elaine’s return, she organized de Kooning’s life and saw to his diet. Those last years, in which she provided stability, de Kooning embarked on those remarkable paintings that close the MoMA show.

J. Roger Guilfoyle is Adjunct Professor in the Graduate Communications Design Department at Pratt Institute in New York. Prior to this, he taught in the Art History Department at Pratt for over 25 years. He began in his professional career in design magazines, and from the late 1960s until the mid 70s he was editor in chief of “Industrial Design” Magazine. In the late 70s, he worked at WNET Channel 13 exploring ways to create architecture and design programming for public television. Between 1977 and 1985, he wrote four books of “The Best in Packaging” series, three singly and one with his wife, Barbara Allen Guilfoyle. His articles on architecture, furniture, product design, art and graphics have appeared in design and consumer publications, including “Print,” “Interiors,” “Graphic Science,” and “USAirways Magazine.”