The other side of the room has eight of Krasner’s collage paintings, all produced in a sprint in 1955. Each is almost seven by five feet, and most establish a broad field of color—blue, crimson, orange—across which migrate sharp and irregular shapes, some like long teeth or spears, others like shards of obsidian. Together, they amount to a daring raid on the standard-bearers of Abstract Expressionism. By the late forties, many of the Ab Ex artists had regulated the expressive element of their style into signature trademarks—think of Rothko’s soft bars of color, Robert Motherwell’s enlarged ink stains, Adolph Gottlieb’s celestial orbs, Clyfford Still’s crags. In a savvy deflationary move, Krasner sliced and diced the machismo of Ab Ex into her own configurations. The vertical stripes in her paintings recall Barnett Newman’s “zips,” the black occupying shapes have a touch of Motherwell, and some edges are jagged enough to be by Still. The most provocative move is in “Bald Eagle” (1955), with fragments cut right out of a Pollock drip painting and packed into a mosaic—Krasner reclaiming her husband’s free-form mark with a blade. The critic Arthur Danto once wrote that, in Krasner’s work, “there are only shadows of other selves, the echo of other voices,” implying that she was doomed to be derivative. That not only ignores the cross-pollinating exchange with Pollock but also fails to see how her absorption of other modes, and her studied replication of expressive signatures, anticipates what was shortly to be celebrated as “postmodern” in the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.
Even as fame and alcoholism sunk Pollock in the fifties—his production tapered, and his affairs all but destroyed the marriage—he and Krasner started painting more like each other, not less. Compare Krasner’s “Untitled” (1951) to Pollock’s “Easter and the Totem” (1953), in which Krasner’s distinctive palette of Pepto-Bismol pink, pale orange, chalk white, and black gets reprised by Pollock, who also borrows some of his partner’s curvy Matisse-like forms. After Pollock spent years trying to keep the figure out of his pieces, recognizable lumps and body parts reëmerged, such as the whirlpool of drowning eyes in “Ocean Greyness” (1953), and the same ocular shapes rolled into Krasner’s work a few years later, in “Embrace” (1956). They both had a symbolic fetish for eyeballs, and it’s hard to tell if it was pantheistic or paranoid—every particle of nature seeing itself or watching them.
Greenberg said Pollock began to wobble at the end, and you can see why. There’s a tackiness to some of his final gestures, like “The Deep” (1953) and “Portrait and a Dream” (1953). “The Deep” I instinctively like: it has an almost baptismal quality, as though you’re lifting your head out of a bath of milk to see the night sky. But there’s also a melodrama to the way Pollock uses white paint to surround a black chasm that runs through the picture’s center, as if it were a wound or an existential abyss. Three years after making it, while driving drunk in East Hampton, Pollock crashed his car, killing himself and one of the passengers, Edith Metzger. (The other, Ruth Kligman, with whom he was having an affair, survived.) Krasner was in Paris, and Greenberg called her to deliver the news.
