Art professor makes the Dutch connection

Gail Levin, 20th century American art professor at Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center, is taking full advantage of her Fulbright Grant by studying the Dutch influence on the work of abstract expressionist painter Lee Krasner.

Levin, who was recently lauded by The Wall Street Journal for her biography of Edward Hopper, hopes to replicate that success in her new biography of Lee Krasner.

She is the current Fullbright-Dow distinguished chair at the Roosevelt Study Center in Middleburg, Netherlands.

For decades, painter Lee Krasner had been relegated to the less renowned branch of abstract expressionism; she was typically overshadowed by the fame of her husband, the rugged expressionist Jackson Pollock.

You may ask what is the Dutch connection? Levin lists the Dutch expatriates Willem de Kooning and Piet Mondrian as significant influences on Krasner. "She met de Kooning in the early 1930s, long before she met Jackson Pollock, the man she would marry."

Her introduction to the neoplasticist Mondrian, however, was to be more sociable than ideological. Krasner and Mondrian both enjoyed jazz and boogie woogie music. It was perhaps this energy that translated to her work.

Mondrian later commended Krasner for preserving the distinctive rhythm in her work. Their shared amusements would also influence Mondrian, allowing him to create later in life a work of palpable energy, "Broadway Boogie Woogie." This influence would release his canvas of its characteristic immobility.

Levin is enjoying her time in the Netherlands. She describes the town she lives in as "stepping out of a Vermeer painting." All she mentions seems to illustrate the quaintness one would associate with the height of Dutch culture.

"My office is in a former abbey from the 13th century," she says ecstatically. "Now [it is] updated with good internet connections!"

The mix of history and technology is sure to instill productivity in this much-acclaimed instructor and biographer.

The small-town life is a perfect opportunity for her to focus on writing Krasner's biography. "I am to give only five guest lectures [in Zeeland, Netherlands] and to focus on the remaining research and writing of my book."

Therefore, Levin is excited about the wealth of information available to her at The Roosevelt Study Center.

Among the trove of information accessible in the archives of the institution, are documents related to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's promotion of public arts through his Works Progress Administration initiative. Among the benefactors of this New Deal program was Lee Krasner, who for a time oversaw a group of artists in the Murals Division, some of which included her husband Pollock.

"We try to travel some of the weekends and see lots of Holland and Belgium. We have made some wonderful Dutch friends, some of whom are artists," Levins explains.

It is not difficult to sense the excitement she feels by fully immersing herself in the general culture of the Netherlands. "We learned a lot about how the Dutch respect the environment and have much lesswaste of energy and other resources than in the U.S."

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