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1968

INTERVIEW WITH LEE KRASNER POLLOCK
January 9, 1968, Emily Wasserman, interviewer

Subjects covered: the Hans Hofmann school; Krasner's artistic relationship to Pollock; the influence of Matisse and French painting, current work and development.

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EW: The first thing I wanted to ask you was, when you met Pollock, what was his attitude towards European painting--what was he thinking and talking about with you?

LK: When I first met him?--We didn't discuss painting!

EW: You didn't at all?

LK: No, no, that's a little unfair, and not quite so ... When I first met him, I was so taken with his work, you know, that there was no European painting--it was his work, and my response to it. Now then, I'm trying to think what could've been the first discussion of European painting and I can't pinpoint it. I can only answer that in a general sense--'cause it wasn't like we met and started to talk about art. Which meant my fantastic response to his work, and about a week later, he came to my studio and looked at my work. And we didn't discuss art in a general sense--you know, it was specific about what we were looking at. Now, European painting--?

EW: Well, in what I listened to last night (Tape made with Barbara Rose in July 1966) on the subject of the late '30's and '40's, you stressed over and over again how French painting was important to all of the young painters--I wondered what his attitude was about this?

LK: Right...now, I'm speaking about myself here, you know, this is what we were looking for, waiting for the next show to come over. Either Matisse, or Picasso, or Miro, or whatever it was. Certainly it was all coming from across the Atlantic, there were no two ways about it. Jackson, who happened to have an acute awareness of painting, was certainly well aware of this...So what threw me off with your question "When I first met Pollock,"---this starts to take place as we know each other. And his response to my knowledge--I think he makes a comment on it someplace himself--the only two painters who interest him have never been to this country. I believe it's Miro and Picasso, I think he says this. And I remember him having the last publication of the then Picasso (whether it was the Cahiers d'Art, or what, I don't know), thumbing through it, and going into a total rage about it, and saying, "That bastard, he misses nothing!", which meant, like, he was with it, in that sense...so that his eye was very much directed towards what was happening in the so-called Paris School of painting at that time.

EW: What was his reaction to your work when he first saw it?

LK: Very sympathetic.

EW: Did he in any way criticize what you were doing, or give you suggestions?

LK: No, he did not criticize. He simply did this, and I'll relate one episode here... and that is, he took a canvas--this is while I'm in my ninth street studio, and we meet, and he's on eighth street, and I'm on ninth street, and he comes to see me a good deal. And I was out one afternoon, and I come in, and I found that the painting I had on the easel, that I was working, you know, and I said, "That's not my painting," and then the second reaction was, he had worked on it. And in a total rage, I slashed the canvas...I wished to hell I had never done it, but...and I guess I didn't speak to him for some two months, and then we got through that.