The slasher with the knife

A stiff, invigorating breeze of revisionism is blowing through stuffy art history. Is it really true that all the valuable traffic was on a mainline between Paris and New York, with modest sidings in London, Barcelona and Zurich? Was the adventure of modern art an exclusively masculine journey across the North Atlantic?

Suddenly, it has been discovered that there were modernists at work in Latin America and Africa too. An exhibition of Carmen Herrera, a Cuban abstractionist, in New York’s Whitney Museum two years ago was a sensation. The more so, of course, because Herrera (now 103) is a woman. The Tate has recently shown that Dorothea Tanning was at least as interesting as her better-known husband, Max Ernst. Hilma af Klimt at the Guggenheim has astonished New York.

In this way we approach the dismal swamps of ‘feminist art history’. Casual, or possibly even formal, misogyny is a recurrent theme in this properly sourced and densely footnoted new biography of the Widow Pollock. Is it true that Lee Krasner sacrificed her own career, one based on an impressive art education, for the benefit of her drunk and depressive husband, Jack the Dripper? Many people then and now thought her the better painter.

Krasner, who died aged 75 in 1984, came from a generation not empowered by the women’s movement. Although she did participate in a 1972 New York demonstration complaining that of 1,000 or so one-man shows staged by the Museum of Modern Art in 40 years, only five had been one-woman shows. Was this blind prejudice by MoMA?  Might there have been other reasons? Gail Levin does not quite say.

An element of grievance is indelible in this book because Krasner, whose family emigrated from the Pale of Settlement was, besides being hobbled by gender, Jewish too.