Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner in Their Bathing Suits in the Hamptons
Almost 70 years ago, newlyweds Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock moved into a greying, shingled house from 1879 in Springs, a little-known fishing town six miles northeast of Grey Gardens in East Hampton. They got the house with $5,000 of borrowed Guggenheim cash, and there was a barn that fishermen had used. Pollock moved it to open up a view of the small creek the property abuts and put his studio in it, then famously painted on the floor.
Because they had to do everything differently, they moved to the Hamptons in the fall, right as things were getting cold. “And once we moved to Springs,” the East Hampton hamlet they called home, “which was in 1945,” Lee Krasner remembered decades later, “we didn’t see very much of the New York art world.”
“We’d come in,” Krasner says of their trips to the art world and the city, “and there was some contact but, by and large, most of the time …” They went to the beach. Lee’s family visited. There was a dog. Clement Greenberg and Helen Frankenthaler came by to chill.
In the spirit of Memorial Day and the start of summer, SEEN has a few personal moments for you from this legendary art couple — all taken from Artists Unframed, a collection of similarly legendary artists being perfectly ordinary.
Jackson Pollock cutting the hair of his father, LeRoy Pollock, 1927.
Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner with Krasner’s family, 1946.
Front row: Lee’s niece, Muriel Stein, with Pollock and Krasner’s dog, Gyp, and nephew, R...
Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner with Krasner’s family, 1946.
Front row: Lee’s niece, Muriel Stein, with Pollock and Krasner’s dog, Gyp, and nephew, Ronald Stein. Back row: Pollock, Krasner, Krasner’s mother, Anna Krasner; sister, Ruth Stein, and her husband, William Stein.
Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, 1946. Photograph by Ronald Stein.
Jackson Pollock on the beach with a dog, 1945.
Lee Krasner in the kitchen, Springs, New York, 1948.
Jackson Pollock, Clement Greenberg, Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, and an unidentified child at the beach in East Hampton, New York, July 1952.
Jackson Pollock posing with animal bones in Springs, New York, 1950.
Jackson Pollock outside his studio with his painting Number 9, 1952: Black, White, Tan, 1952.
Jackson Pollock in his studio, 1955.
Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner at the beach in East Hampton, New York, 1955.
Jackson Pollock in the studio with his dogs, Ahab and Gyp, 1955.
Lee Krasner, Stella Pollock, and Jackson Pollock carving a turkey, 1950.