Things That Lee Krasner Never Did and Chelo Does

Things That Lee Krasner Never Did... and Chelo Does

Estrella de Diego

It’s not blood but ink stains that spread capriciously over the sheet of paper, sometimes with the air of an ironic copy of Pollock and his drip paintings. And yet these stains have a moderately harmonious quality, an odd flavour of the past—that of a children’s notebook of yesteryear, of nibs and inkwells, tricks played by our memory, seeming to be what they are not (which is something that Chelo Matesanz manages to master). Then, all of a sudden, the stains become microscopic visions, suggested interpretations at a psychological consultancy. Back to square one: there is never an answer that lasts forever, perhaps because, to quote Belgian poet Louis Scoutenaire, ‘Eternity is an impression.’

This isn’t blood or ink stains but sewn felt, even though it does look like blood bubbling out of a wound and spreading capriciously over the canvas. This is a canvas tensed over the wall that, devoid of a frame and of preambles, stretched like ravaged skin, even questioned as a regular canvas—it seems like fate erased by the needle and its oppressive discipline. Pollock, who bragged about chance and its coincidences, would never have done anything like that.

And yet when discipline becomes an exercise in subversion it ends up resembling a fertile ground for misunderstanding (as we often find in Chelo Matesanz’s proposals), where the coincidental is either feigned or subjected to order. Such is the case of El goloso (The Sweet-Toothed, 2000), chocolate stains on a tablecloth, as capricious as a feast day, delimited between the backstitches (a paradox in which the method replaces the fortuitous: it sustains and closes it).Sewing the whole world, at each step and in every corner, in every tear; backstitching the abysses and gaps: the backstitch as a prodigious suture that has been the strategy chosen by women over the centuries. We were invincible there. No matter that others felt it was very little, hardly anything. It looked like the territory that nobody dared take away from us, so we backstitched until we fell exhausted into a superb genealogy of tacking.

Yet, let nobody be misled: backstitching belongs to a privileged script, an extraordinary camouflage and, moreover, it forms a part of our own history, a shared history that Matesanz revives at each step in a sort of self-portrait, perhaps because, to a certain extent, to speak of the others, of those who went before, is to speak of oneself.

Autobiography and painstaking skill come together in sewn felt (that looks like blood) and in collage as a story of open borders, a tribute to Lee Krasner immersed in perplexity rather than in disapproval, that is convincingly settled in the radical work Lo que Lee Krasner podía haber hecho… pero no hizo (What Lee Krasner Could Have Done… But Didn’t, 2001). Unlike Krasner perhaps, Matesanz has stopped asking herself what would Pollock not have done. The foreign order appears in the perpetual tacking, and given that what comes from abroad inevitably brings questions and leaves the order in the house of the father upside down, the story of the world must be told again.

In my opinion, Lo que Lee Krasner podía haber hecho… pero no hizo is a key work in Matesanz’s production, for it draws on a theme that is often repeated in her proposals—the aforementioned feminine genealogies that are not only embodied in the use of the needle as a throwing weapon, as opposed to the discourse of power that lives attached to large-sized canvases and forceful brushstrokes (those that in Chelo’s oeuvre merely have the appearance of canvas and brushstroke, even though she prefers the size of the forceful, at least in certain works in the series). Pure craftiness.The canvas is cross-dressed, like her impressions of Picasso’s women, which, among the shapes that remind us of the painter Pollock always wanted to outdo (to do what Picasso had not done), draw once again on sewing as a guarantee of freedom. Thus, this Picasso as an ‘aesthetic category’ to which Matesanz alludes succumbs to the canvas and the stitch: we were warned that things are never as they appear. A collage of sensations, security against a discourse of ruptures; neither Picasso nor Pollock would have ever done that.

The fact is that to seek genealogies is to construct an alternative tale, or quite the opposite. This explains why Matesanz challenges Lee Krasner with regard to what she could have done and never did, as well as with regard to what she originated on the way. It is also a question of asking History for an explanation (and why not?), even though History with a capital aitch didn’t contemplate a space for industrious women who, like Krasner, ran to their studio in the hope of not doing the same, of not repeating mistakes.

To seek alternatives: paintbrushes like needles. And yet, why should our alternatives always be small, minute and discrete as opposed to male alternatives, entire walls covered in brushstrokes that are never blood? Why not cover the whole wall with the canvas, camouflaging the tears and backstitches, the parodies and subversion in this large-scale work by Matesanz in which the stains that are red felt and radical tacking enable the artist to ask herself the same question that usually challenges the tale before the arrival of the foreigner? No matter that no answer lasts forever. What could Lee Krasner have done but didn’t?

The gaze hastens after the photos of Springs, Long Island, in the garden of the legendary house. Krasner and Pollock are standing side by side, outside the studio, in the place where the also legendary photographs of the ‘genius’ at work were taken and which shaped the last notion of the artist as a ‘shaman’ exploited by the most widespread tale. The two are standing very close to one another; in some pictures the house is in the background, the house near where the shaman will lose his life for a trifle, in that very spot, very close by, almost there, on a clear summer night in 1956. They take care of the garden, pick flowers, look at one another, take a walk, sometimes against the background scene of a house and a wheelbarrow wheel: a perfect American home, that of indulgent publicity.

How different are these images from the legendary snapshots that capture Pollock at work. How different are these images of the Pollocks (Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner) taken by Wilfrid Zogbaum in 1950 that show the painter relaxed, in his everyday surroundings, accompanied by his wife who, as in other descriptions, seems to adapt to the role of solicitous spouse required in that day and age and demanded by the ‘genius.’

This is the same role described in the feature by his neighbour, journalist Berton Roueché, in his article on Pollock published in The New Yorker around the same time, where they are distinctly portrayed as befits the stereotypes that are essential for the narrative to coincide, with no fissures. We see him smoking at breakfast, unwelcoming, unable to remember even the title of his works, and her, ‘the former Lee Krasner, a slim… young woman who is also an artist,’1 (writes Roueché), smiling, making raspberry marmalade, jotting down the details of her husband’s pictures that the great American painter, lost in thought, is incapable of remembering.

‘Is this a painting? Should I cut it here?,’ Pollock seems to have asked this question quite often of his wife, ‘previously known as Lee Krasner,’ a female artist who, after marrying Pollock in the mid-forties, was apparently only that—smiling Mrs Pollock, the conscientious memory that fuelled her husband’s creativity. The two artists shaped the narrative legend required at that moment in time in the United States, each playing the part they had been assigned for the tale to be perfect (narrative tacking and sutures), a world of tales and of comics that Matesanz brazenly challenged at the start of her career, suggesting a different ending for the story.

‘Is this a painting?,’ Pollock asked the woman sitting on a high stool watching him work, as if she had all the time in the world and yet no project of her own (this is how they were portrayed by Namuth).2 The woman listens to him and comforts him; the story repeats itself. She is practical and he trusts her. She has all that women need. Mrs Pollock, Lee Krasner, looks at her husband’s paintings, makes suggestions. Then she goes to her studio and perhaps takes her husband’s paintings as a starting point. She tries to apply what she has seen to her own production. There, in her studio, she knows what she must do, of course. Or rather, she knows what she mustn’t do. ‘Is this a painting?,’ she asks herself; who knows, in her case nobody answers. Is anyone anywhere qualified to answer that question, if she decided to formulate it out loud?

Despite all, things were different before meeting Pollock, when she was Hoffman’s most brilliant student; before her whole life, even after Pollock’s death (especially then) evolved around the legend. ‘Unfortunately, it was most fortunate to know Jackson Pollock,’3 Lee Krasner declared in an interview with Louise Elliott Rago in the early sixties.

Yes, Lee Krasner had had a life of her own before becoming the inevitable alter ego of the great painter, at least in the most common version of the story. ‘Is this a painting?’ And Krasner, fed up with having to look before answering the question, in her own studio knows what she mustn’t do. She devises small formats, small pictures (Little Images, she calls them); visual texts that could perhaps have been inspired by Pollock’s sources, yet only to move away from them and challenge spontaneity with control, endless order, trying to avoid making ‘masculine’ painting, trying to avoid ‘painting like men’—in short, trying to counter the subjectivity exploited by the New York School with a subjectivity of lacquered surfaces, rigour and seams, in which the subject has slightly disappeared or else is barely perceptible, a vague, camouflaged, ambiguous presence sought in the mirror. This explains why her pictures were never ‘dripped’ but ‘thrown’ on the wall: felt stains. Paintings, therefore, to be contemplated face to face; paintings in which to contemplate oneself: a mirror with a touch of a self-portrait. The thing is to enter the studio and do exactly what is expected, without asking oneself ‘Is this a painting?’ Chelo Matesanz makes ‘pictures’ on serviettes with cigarette burns. This is another astonishing game of chance and order, tablecloths precisely scorched—fissures and wounds. Indeed, a certain pyromaniac precision that hopes to hear the rustle of fire ignites the tradition of the house of the father and transforms it into a sort of new transparent collage. The question formulated in Krasner’s studio, that recognises the ultimate need for the work to cease to be a painting (at last) or to unexpectedly become a painting, is thus taken one step further.

These are the unmasking processes that emerge from the work of Matesanz, who, paradoxically, hides behind the immediate icons that are applied in each case to double meanings, like the stains made of felt, backstitches and blood.

Matesanz is aware of her origins: a genealogy that disrupts the world before mending it again; a genealogy that has to be repaired in each clay plasticine portrait that, like the rest of her oeuvre, is recreated into a sort of endless collage in which every single element is arranged in an infinite order. Her genealogies, some of which are of an abrupt roughness that transforms their humour into a terrible omen (like the lame little girl, the backstitched drawings or the tricked advertisements, where the idea is to ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ and where naïve characters are sexualised), ironically confront reality. In this world of disrupted genealogies, Chelo takes the lesson of those who preceded her—the women of the seventies who sought in needles a formula of freedom, the freedom that Krasner glimpsed but didn’t take to its last consequences in her revision of each half-truth—one step further.

In essence, as Gilmore asks, what can we call ‘truth’ if universal ‘truths’ are ‘particularized by a specific culture’s notion of what truth is, who may tell it, and who is authorized to judge it’? ‘What we have come to call truth or what a culture determines to be truth in autobiography, among other discourses,’ Gilmore proceeds, ‘is largely the effect of a long and complex process of authorization. Thus the canonizing question “What is truth?” cannot be separated from the process of verifying that truth. (…) Some are positioned in closer proximity to “truth” depending on their relation to other terms of value: gender, class, race, and sexuality, among others.’4

So what does it mean to be a first-hand witness of an event, as was Krasner of Pollock’s painting sessions? What does it mean to be a witness, and how can this question open debates on the problem of autobiographical fact, a key part of Matesanz’s oeuvre, as to speak of others is to speak of oneself?

The question brazenly torments us: can we keep out of events or do we form a part of scenes merely by ‘looking’, which is in fact the role played by witnesses? Don’t these events form a part of our lives merely because ‘we are looking’?

So perhaps what Lee Krasner didn’t do and could have done was get up out of that tall chair and stop watching Pollock at work, run over to her studio and put greater order in her canvases. Although those were other times and putting in order was perhaps a means of paving the way for the other female artists, for all those who, like Matesanz, decided not to be witnesses, albeit this were the most difficult path for, as an insolent Chelo reflects, ‘If I had been a quick painting artist, I could have retired to Miami.’

This is what Krasner didn’t do and what Matesanz pursues: to ignite the questions formulated from imposed narratives, to invent new questions that require different formulations; to divide herself up into a surprising self-portrait that ends up as the personification of the subject as multiplicity; no, as a multiplication. This too forms a part of the genealogies of women: to delve into the icons imposed and turn them inside out, by layers, in an ironic order.

Berton Roueché, ‘Unframed Space,’ The New Yorker, vol. 26, No. 24, August 1950, p. 16.

Hans Namuth (Essen, Germany, 1931 – Long Island, United States, 1990), a photographer famous for having portrayed Jackson Pollock, among other artists, in his studio at Long Island in 1950. Later on he would shoot two documentary films on the abstract expressionist and his work process.

Louise Elliott Rago, ‘We Interview Lee Krasner,’ School Arts, No. 60, September 1960, p. 32.

Leigh Gilmore, Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation, Cornell University Press, Ithaca (New York), 1994, p. 107.