When Times Were Tough For Women Artists

'Alice Neel; The Art of Not Sitting Pretty' by Phoebe Hoban. St. Martin's Press. 2010 500pp.
 'Lee Krasner : A Biography by Gail Levin. 2011 Harper Collins. 564pp.


    "It's a complex fate to be an American," the U.S. novelist Henry james once said. But to be an American female artist wasn't  sometimes  living a complex fate, whatever that was. At times it was living a life of sheer hell.
    Take the lives of Alice Neel and Lee Krasner. Their lives sometimes overlapped though their art differed. Neel was born into small town Pennsylvania in 1900. "Although Alice suffered enormously," writes her biographer Phoebe Hoben, "she never was a victim." A victim maybe she wasn't, but people tried to victimize her.
   Neel married a man, a rich famous Cuban artist named Carlos Enriquez. He took their daughter back to Cuba and Neel only saw her twice again. Neel also lost another daughter to diptheria.
     Neel lived through the Great Depression in New York City when poverty engulfed millions of Americans. For years Neel painted portraits of her friends and acquaintencies. But her earnings were tiny. She survived like thousands of other artists, by working for the Works Progress Administration projects, set up by U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. The WPA hired easel painters, muralists and others to create works of art. Without the WPA Neel would have starved.
    Then there were Neel's men. Sam Brady whom she lived with for a long time, was an abusive child beater.He often beat up Richard, one of Neel's two sons. Nor were most of Neel's other lovers much better than Brady. "I had to reach my sexual aim," Neel explained to one of her friends about her private life.
      Neel ran up against not only poverty and abusive mates, but also pure sexism. Until the 1970's, much of her art was considered by male critics as just inferior women's art. Also her edgy portraits clashed with the tastes of the 1940's and 1950's, when abstract expressionism ruled the roost.
    Only in the 1970's when a new feminist movement emerged, did Neel get her due at last. Her life has now been finely told in this book 'Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty' by Phoebe Hoban.
      The same sort of journey was followed by Lee Krasner as Gail Levin tells us in her book on Krasner called 'Lee Krasner; A Biography'. Born into a Jewish family near New York City in 1908, Krasner early on wanted to be an artist.
      She travelled in artist's circles in New York City in the 1920's and after. She too was nearly stranded by the Great Depression and like Neel was rescued from starvation by Roosevelt's WPA.
     Alice Neel joined the American Communist Party which Krasner stayed away from. But like Neel, Krasner was outraged by the pain and suffering of 1930's America."The times are permanently bad," Krasner wrote to a friend in the 1940's as the Second World war started up. Kranser found Igor Pantuhoff, a portrait painter born in Russia. They fell in love. But then he left her.
     Soon afterwards she met Jackson Pollock and as they say, "The rest is history." But for Krasner this love affair and then marriage to Pollock nearly overwhelmed her.
      Pollock was a disturbed alcolholic who went on massive drinking binges. He was also a prime time abuser. But he did start the abstract expressionist movement in the 1940's. His reputation soon outranked the reputations of all other artists. Kransner had been painting abstract modern works long before Pollock came along. But soon she was only referred to As 'Jackson Pollock's wife'.
      Pollock died in a car accident in 1956 and two other women were with him. One of them also died but the other woman survived. The accident devastated Krasner who was in Paris at the time. Still, she pulled herself together and survived. She managed Pollock's art legacy shrewdly and soon was livng on the proceeds of his works that she could sell. Finally, she was recognized as an accomplished artist too. But that didn't happen until near the end of her life.
      Like Alice Neel, she ran into horrible sexism but also anti-semitism since she was Jewish. Finally, like Neel, the feminists of the 1970's discovered Krasner and rescued her from obscurity where male critics and historians had placed her. "Women's liberation helped me enormously," Krasner said in 1980. "Thank you women's lib," she said in 1973. "In that sense, life now is better than forty plus."
     Also like Neel, Krasner was showered with honours and awards in the last 15 years of her life. Gail Levin, a veteran writer and critic, has written a long and excellent book on this fine American abstract painter.
      Henry James had it easy compared to these two women. He may have endured what he called ' a complex fate'. These women endured far far worse. They suffered but in the end the triumphed and their lives are well worth reading about.