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1942. Midtown. Peggy Guggenheim arrives, opens a gallery and gives hungry artists hope.
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Pushkin. It's an early morning in May nineteen forty two. Lee Krasner is in her apartment on Ninth Street when she hears someone outside. Lee opens the door. It's someone she recognizes.
It was Pollack's brother, saying she had to come to the hospital because Pollack had been on a bender.
Lee doesn't know what to think. She asks where exactly Jackson is. Here's Mary Gabriel, who you heard from in our previous episodes.
He was in such a bad way that he ended up in Bellevue Hospital, New York's infamous hospital for Darryl lexim mentally infirm for years.
Jackson had tried to stop king, but nothing helped for long. At Bellevue, Lee could see that he was in bad shape.
The man she saw on the bed was not the man she'd come to know.
Lee is speechless for a second. She knew Jackson like to drink, but nothing like this.
She just said, pull yourself together.
Lee cleans Jackson up, gets him dressed, and holds him into a cab. Back at his flat. She feeds him milk and eggs.
That was the first of what would become a lifetime of such incidents with Lee. You know dragging Pollock back from the very edge, nursing him back to life, putting him on his feet, hoping to God that he continued in the direction he needed to go.
At this point, Lee is thirty three years old. She's shown her work in a big exhibition with important artists. She's also met someone who she feels is her artistic equal, someone whose work she really believes in. But now this His drinking is so bad he's ended up in a psychiatric hospital, and still they have no money. It's a lot to handle, and Lee's not sure she can. But then she hears a whisper on the grapevine that gives her hope. A whisper about a party girl airess who's just arrived in the city. She's come with a bunch of paintings, Margreet's Dullies and others that she smuggled out from under the nose of the Nazis. She's got cash to spend and a desire to buy new American art.
The most important thing about it was it gave these artists hope that there was passively an audience.
Her name was Peggy Guggenheim, and Lee thought she might just be the solution to all of their problems if only Lee can get her attention. I'm Katie Hessel and this is Death of an Artist Krasner and Pollock, Episode three, The Collector. I'm going to go back in time now to a few months before Jackson's drinking landed him at Bellevue, because those months leading up to that moment is actually when Lee and Jackson first start to get to know each other. In January nineteen forty two, Lee went to an exhibition organized by a friend. On the walls were paintings by her Idols, Matisse, Picasso, Brack, and one of her very own paintings, a still life that had morphed into colorful abstract shapes.
She was the tap of the art heap in Manhattan, center of the scene.
As author Mary Gabriel says, in the last few years, Lee had become one of the most watched artists in New York, but it was still a small, mostly unknown scene. People were struggling to get by and get noticed, and yet here she was, her work hanging up beside Picasso's. Lee was a big deal and everyone wanted to talk to her. But that night there was another reason people were staring. Lee had arrived with a new man on her own, Jackson Pollock.
This shy, good looking young man appeared at this art opening on the arm of a supernova.
Jackson had a painting on show too, called Birth. It was a vision of childbirth with fragmented limbs intersecting with Native American symbols painted in reds, blues, and whites.
Lee's was considered the stronger work. Pollack's was considered kind of timid.
That night, the only really interesting thing about Jackson was that he was with Lee.
Pollack was a complete unknown. Her friends didn't really know what to make of them. Some of them thought he wasn't worthy of Lee, that he didn't have the personality, that his art wasn't good enough.
But Lee didn't care much for gossip. She wanted to see more of Jackson the very moment she'd entered his flat. She was impressed by his work, and she wanted to see what else he had in him. Plus she thought he was kind of cute. Soon they started dating, but Lee wasn't interested in candle lit dinners and small talk.
Their courtship looked a little different.
I mean literally, the sparks that would have been flying as they visited each other's studio. When she walked into his and saw what he was doing, when he walked into hers and sow what she was doing.
Lee's studio was super tidy, neat stacks of canvasses, with all the different styles she'd been working on, the latest, usually standing on an easel. Jackson didn't even have his own studio. He lived in his brother's cramped flat and painted in the front room, surrounded by rubbish, old paint cans, and broken coffee cups. His latest work usually just taped to the wall. The early days of their relationship mostly took place in these two spaces.
The relationship was built around art, beyond merely romantic or sexual attraction. They had this intense artistic bond.
Lee was the educated one. She knew all the latest trends in European modern art, and she was well connected. Jackson was an outsider. He'd trained with a traditional mural painter known for his illustrative scenes of American life. But there was some shed ground his Lee. Our mutual interest in painting was the Parish school of painting. We'd either be talking about Casso or arguing about my teas. So always French painting. That was their date chat.
They regarded each other equally as artists. His respect for her work was great, her respect for his work was great. They became so comfortable with these jays work. Then they took liberties.
One night, Jackson was over at Least studio looking at one of her paintings. Now I don't know exactly which one it was, but at the time Lee was making colorful paintings with blocks of whites, pinks, and blues broken up with curvy, loose lines inspired by Matis. I really like these works. They're kind of jazzy and show the start of something. Anyway, Jackson was standing in front of one of these paintings giving his opinion. Lee looked at the painting more closely. Something wasn't quite right, she.
Thought, snap, my painting, and she realized that Powak had been there and it actually worked on it.
She shot Jackson a death ste Rule number one of dating an artist don't mess with their work.
An absolute violation of the highest degree for any artist that is just not done.
Lee yelled, that's not my painting and slashed the canvas. If it had been anyone else, that would have been the end for Lee. Relationship over, but a month or so later, Lee was back at Jackson's studio looking at one of his paintings.
She had a brush in her hand, a paint brush, and it had paint on it.
Again, we don't know the exact work Lee was in front of, but at that time Jackson was making heavily texted canvases depicting surreal part animal part human forms mixing sand and paint together.
And I don't know if she was paying him back for all the liberties had taken with her work, but she approached the painting closer and closer until she finally touched it and left a smear of paint on his work.
Check Mate.
He stormed out and said, you know you've finished the guard dayan painting.
They squabbled like kids or like temperamental artists, but all they wanted to do was hang out with each other. Lee started showing him the good life, having a coffee out together, taking him to cool parties, and soon they became a bit of an it couple, an item of gossip.
Another painter on the scene said she actually felt like Palack stole from Lee as his style developed, it as he became stronger, it was because of Lee's influence in what Lee was doing on canvas.
It's true that when Lee looked at Jackson's latest paintings, she could see her impact. She'd introduced him to one of her heroes, Matisse, who used color like bluebody else, and soon Jackson turned away from muddy brown's and reds and embraced vibrant blues pinks. He turned away from symbols and went in a more abstract direction.
After meeting Lee, Jackson began painting in a much freer style, not fully abstract. There were recognizable figures in them, women, animals, but they were done in such a fresh way, with such intense color, such passion, and the result was really magnificent.
And when Jackson was in a rut, he turned to Lee.
Lee spoke to him in a way that reassured him completely. She gave him the encouragement he needed at that very delicate moment to go beyond himself, to take the chances he needed to take.
Lee had always tried to avoid destructions from her own career. Determined and laser focused, she sought out the right schools, the right mentals, and the right shows. Being with Jackson shifted something for her. Here's what Lee said in an interview. I must admit I didn't resist very long. I was terribly drawn to Jackson, and I fell in love with him physically, mentally, in every sense of the word. I had a conviction when I met Jackson that he had something important to say, something important to say that the world needed to know, something no one apart from Lee was hearing or seeing. Yet, for the first time in her life, Lee started to wonder maybe her mission to make a new kind of art in America was not
just about her own work. Maybe it was also about Jackson's encouraging it, shaping it, and ultimately convincing the world how important it was. In that same interview, she said, my own work became irrelevant. He was the important thing. I couldn't do enough for him. I know this sounds like a bit of a one eighty from Lee. Certainly, it was surprising to me that, after everything she'd sacrificed for her own work, she'd begin to focus on someone else's.
But the more I listened to Lee's interviews, looked at her writings, I came to think of it this way. Lee's devotion to art was so total, so spiritual and uncompromising that it transcended the usual bounds of artistic ego, of success and fame. If Lee was going to achieve her aim through Jackson, maybe so be it. But then, just as Lee was starting to feel this way, she got that knock on the door I told you about.
Pallack's brother, saying she had to come to the hospital because Pollack had been on a bender.
He was in Bellevue Hospital, and Lee went to get him. Before that day, her relationship with Jackson had been about art. Now, as she was nursing him back to life, other concerns wandered into her mind.
You know, they had very little by way of money.
The government scheme that had been tiding Lee over for the past couple of years was finally drying up. Soon they wouldn't have enough money even for food, and now Jackson's drinking had landed him in hospital. No one in New York was buying the kind of art they were making. But Lee understood the reality that if either of them were going to sell anytime soon, it would probably be him, because he was a man. Being a woman artist at least one who actually made money was not a thing, and so Lee practical as ever realized something, she.
Would have to be the agent, the one who represented him, the one who kind of did aside her soul of making sure that the right people saw his work.
And just as Lee started scheming, she heard the news a wealthy heiress had just arrived in New York with a massive collection of European modern art, the very kind that had inspired Lee, and rumor had it, this woman was now interested in something else in New American art. Her name was Peggy Gubenheim. That's after the breakdown. In October Sober nineteen forty two, Peggy Guggenheim's gallery opened in New York. It was called Art of This Century and was just south of Central Park. This was no ordinary white walled gallery. It was a tube shaped room with curved walls and a turquoise floor. Sheaths of material that looked like sails hung from the ceiling and on them, with paintings facing all kinds of directions. Here's Jacqueline Bogar DWorld,
Peggy's biographer.
People were shocked. They didn't know what to make of it. Many critics didn't think it was art.
There were Picasso's stark cubist visions of an artist's studio or mirrors, disfigured creatures. Even for her, this felt totally knew, intimate, dreamlike, and definitely radical. In the middle of the sales and the most cutting edge art was the mysterious Peggy Guggenheim, surrounded by the who's who of the New York art scene.
She had this quality, this charisma, this ability to have all eyes on her in the room.
She had her hair dyed a bootblack.
She was very much a presence.
She worked the room.
She'd have one lighters like how many husbands have you had? And she'd say mine or other people.
Peggy spent most of her time at the opening talking to the well heeled crowd, business people, Some of them even seemed to be considering buying the art. The vibe felt different, new electric.
Peggy creates a world where there wasn't one before. She becomes a beacon, if you will, of the new art.
A rumor went around that for her next show, Peggy was considering actually buying work from some of the New York artists Lee's crowd.
When Peggy arrived in New York, there were only a handful of galleries showing American art, and none of them showing the new American art.
The idea of Peggy showing contemporary American art was a big deal because to everyone here Peggy Guggenheim eccentricities aside, was herself a very big deal. She would eventually become one of the most influential collectors and tastemakers of the twentieth century, someone who identified in art that very few even knew existed and made it popular.
I think I got in this, said Monath a minute I got into I learned it.
Peggy was born in eighteen ninety eight into one of the most prominent families in America, but when she was thirteen, her life was turned upside down her father died on the Titanic. Peggy was left with a massive inheritance over ten million dollars in today's cash, and unsure of her direction in life. So in nineteen twenty, when she was twenty two, she decided to leave home, leave America.
And she went to Paris, like many many people did in those days, because.
It was the place to be.
You sat in the cafes, you would absorb what was going on because people would talk and and somehow you know about what was happening. You would have met some of the players.
Ernest Hemingway and f Scott Fitzgerald were brooding over black coffee, trying to reinvent the novel. Coco Chanel was challenging women to ditch their corsets for a little black dress.
Eagle.
Stravinsky's avant garde symphonies were stunning audiences, and at night everyone headed to the bars. Peggy fit right in.
Peggy was one of the group. She was a rebellious type of person. She liked that idea of shocking and being outre and being different that was in her soul, shall we say and mean as early as when she was a schoolgirl. She shaved off her eyebrows, which was then in vogue, but it shocked everybody.
Peggy spent most of her nights at clubs in Montparnasse, probably wearing a peacock headdress and dancing the foxtrot with women dressed in monocles and tales. Other nights she might have ended up at Cole Porter's house, listening to him plays scandalous jazz while she chatted up the men.
Well, she went to bed with every man she ever met. If she didn't it wasn't from want of trying.
But the people who really caught Peggy's attention were the artists. She hung out in cafes with Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalis, and Marcel Duchamp. They spent all their time feverishly talking about new kinds of art, images they said came straight out of their dreams or that broke the rules of representation.
And Peggy started to think about something she could do with all of her money. What if she spent it on this new, mysterious, beautiful art art no one else was paying much attention to.
She begins then to buy a picture from every show she wanted to show the kind of art that was not traditional. It wasn't by any means a given that this was an accepted art, or that people thought of it even out art.
Peggy didn't care, though. She opened a small gallery and was even planning to start a museum. Then something happened that brought the party to a stop. Before Hitler declared actual war, he declared war on art in the nineteen thirties. The Nazis had seized more than fifteen thousand works and staged degenerate art exhibitions in Munich, labeled degenerate for not conforming to Hitler's ideology. They featured many of the artists Peggy collected or wanted to, Paul Clay, Picasso, Mondrian Dinski.
In nineteen thirty nine, Hitler announced that all modern art was degenerate and should be destroyed. This flipped a switch in Peggy. Her passion for collecting turned into a rescue mission to save modern art from the Nazis.
So she went about collecting a picture a day.
Peggy went to see every artist she knew, cash in hand.
Since it was the war coming down the pipe, the artists were only too happy to sell the.
Art to her.
Well, almost everyone.
Where she went to visit Pablo Picasso, he said, well, lady, le laingerie is on the third floor. He resented that she was buying pictures like she would be buying, you know, underwear.
But Peggy just kept on buying.
She visited them all, and she bought pictures for very little money.
By around nineteen forty she had a mass the greatest collection of modern art in the world. Today it is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Peggy's main concern then was how to preserve her by now extensive collection.
She asked the biggest museum in Paris, the Louver, to store it.
The louverra wouldn't save it. They consider it none art to a large.
Degree, so Peggy decided to take matters into her own hands. In nineteen forty she left Paris and secretly stashed her art in a warehouse in the south of France, and she laid low. Nine months later, she put her precious collection on board a ship bound for America. She labeled it hold goods and prayed no one would take a closer look. On the twelfth of June nineteen forty one, a few days before the Germans marched into Paris, Peggy fled the country. By July she was safely back in Manhattan, and a year later, here she was at her own gallery, ruling the roost the bell of the ball. In the spring of nineteen forty three, Peggy opened a show all of the New York artists had been waiting for. Because
this show was about them.
You can imagine that just a few months earlier, these artists only dreamed of being and the walls in her gallery, and now she was offering them the opportunity for them to show as well.
On opening night, everyone was.
There, collectors, other gallery honors, museum officials, art critics, everyone who was anyone in the art world.
Lee pushed through the throngs, trying to draw people towards one painting in particular, a mix of distorted human figures and animal body parts over painted with scratchy lines. This one was by Jackson, and Lee wanted everyone to pay attention.
She essentially worked at his promoter. She would bring art critics in art dealers in to look at his work.
But it had meant putting her own painting on the back burner for now.
Lee chose not to submit any works because she would never, throughout her career compete directly with Jackson in any way.
The supernova of the New York art scene might have had none of her own paintings in the show, but she was on a mission. She needed Jackson's paintings to get noticed. Because this group show was just stage one.
Peggy started expressing an interest in showing individual artists from this exhibition that she would start representing some of these artists in her gallery.
Actually giving someone a solo show. This could be a game changer if you had a solo show, you might actually have a chance of selling, a chance of earning some money, and Lee wanted this to go to Jackson because at this stage they were desperate, so Lee was all the more determined to get Peggy's attention. But she knew that coosing up to Peggy at an event like this was going to get her nowhere. She needed to set up a proper professional meeting a few weeks after that group show. On an early June morning in nine, eighteen forty three, Lee was in Jackson's flat hanging up her favorite of his works on the walls. She tilted one a little to straighten it. Everything had to be perfect because that day they were going to receive a
visit from the most important person in the art world, Peggy Guggenheim herself, and Lee knew that this visit could change everything.
The first time she ever saw his work, the earth moved for her in a way that it did when she saw Picasso or Matisse, and Lee wanted Peggy to have that feeling.
If Peggy liked Jackson's paintings, it would be the best chance they'd had yet to get a solo show, make a few sales, and actually pay some bills. Lee took a final look around the room. Everything was all set. She put a couple of her own paintings up too, for good measure, and after one last tidy, she left to join Jackson at a wedding. He was on best man duties. It was a lunchtime thing, and he'd assured her it wouldn't take long. A few hours later, at five minutes to four, Lee was dragging a steaming Jackson out of the wedding, pouring black coffee down his throat, trying to sober him up.
You know, drooling, spitting drunk polock to a cafeteria to try to sober him up so he'd be presentable when he met Peggy.
He still looked terrible, but he could walk, sort of.
She got him to the stage where he could get as far as their home.
But as Lee dragged Jackson along their street, her heart sank. She could see Peggy Guggenheim walking out their door.
She and her assistant had climbed the five flights up to Jackson and Lee's studio, waited very impatiently for Powerck and Lee to arrive home, and when they didn't, after fifteen minutes to Peggy's mind that was the end of her relationship with Pallock. She stormed down the steps.
Peggy looked like she was fuming.
That was going to be the end of Peggy's support for Pollack.
Lee sprinted across the road and went into full groveling mode.
So Lee and Peggy's assistant spent fifteen minutes trying to convince Peggy that it would be worth her while to mount those steps again in the heat of the early summer in New York to look at Jackson's work. Surprisingly, she agreed.
Lee marshaled Peggy back up towards the flat. She opened the door for Peggy, who still seemed furious.
The first paintings she encountered were Lee's. Lee signed her paintings el K and as a slight. When Peggy walked in the door, she said, who is el K? I didn't climb these steps to look at el Ka's painting.
Lee bit her tongue today was about Jackson. She ushered Peggy in front of the painting she'd carefully picked out with ill shapes and also the bright blues and reds she'd introduced him to, full of free brushstrokes painted with an energy no one else had. Lee saw Peggy lean in for a closer look.
Peggy wasn't effusive.
That wasn't necessarily ann.
She looked at the work without declaring whether or now she would represent Jackson.
Lee held her breath. Their livelihoods hung in the balance. Peggy had the power to change everything for them, but only if Lee could convince her that Jackson, the man and the artist was worth it. Coming up, Lee moves Jackson out to the countryside to give him the space to create.
For those of us who lived here, was you know, you're getting all these Jackson poll Up paintings. What are you going to deal with the paper you're living room? There simply was no understanding of what he was trying to say.
With paint That's next time on Death of an Artist. Death of an Artist Krasner and Pollock is produced by Pushkin Industries and samasdat Audio. Clem Hitchcock is our producer. Story editing by Dasherlitz at Sina, Sophie Crane and Karen Schakerji from Pushkin. The executive producer is Jacob Smith from samasdaut Audio. The executive producers are Dasherlitz at Sena and Joe Sykes, sound design by Peregrin Andrews. Original scoring and our theme were composed by Martin Ustwick. Fact checking by Arthur Gompertz. Special thanks to Jacob Weisberg. Many thanks to Jacqueline Bogard World for her audio interviews of Peggy Guggenheim, which formed the basis of her book, Peggy the Wayward Guggenheim.
Do check it out.
I'm Katie Hassel.
