Red, Black and Silver

My involvement in Kligman’s life and the tangled, troubled afterlife of Untitled (Red, Black and Silver)—an effort to authenticate the painting definitively, though Kligman would not be alive to see it finally come to pass—wasn’t something I had sought or expected. I was trained as an art historian. I work as an independent curator and publisher, focusing on living artists and works they are making right now, not provenance questions surrounding works by dead artists. But my career has also long been preoccupied with justice, equity and the work of female artists. My first master’s thesis focused on legal rights for artists and my second concentrated on female artists of the late 1990s who layered male-associated constructs of minimalism with significant new meaning through their use of culturally laden material. Over more than two decades of work, I’d also formed friendships and professional ties with a number of important women in the art world who were intrigued to see the painting—among them Julie Mehretu, Sarah Sze, Cecily Brown, Annalyn Swann and Lisa Phillips—as well as, coincidentally, with scholars and friends of Kligman’s, such as Johns, Dore Ashton, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and Karin Greenfield-Sanders, who worked as Kligman’s lawyer for a time. When I was approached by Kligman’s estate for help in examining the documentary and scientific evidence around the painting and trying to build consensus that it was indeed a Pollock work, I felt not only well positioned to do so but also a strong fascination with the issues of power and gender woven inextricably through the story.

The most concise version of the story, as Kligman told it, was this: Shortly before Pollock’s death, Kligman, twenty-six years old at the time and having an open affair with him, was living at his home in the Springs, on Long Island. (His wife Lee Krasner, from whom he was estranged, had left for Europe, enraged by the relationship.) Pollock, in the depths of alcoholism and depression, had not painted in more than two years. On the lawn, Kligman gave Pollock a canvas board upon which she had painted a half-finished still life of a vase and flowers, and Pollock took paints and the sticks he used in lieu of brushes and used the canvas to make an impromptu painting for her as a gift. Two weeks later, on August 11, 1956, he drove his Oldsmobile convertible off the road at high speed, flipping the car and killing himself and a friend of Kligman’s, Edith Metzger. Kligman, riding in the passenger seat, was thrown free of the car and badly injured.

Kligman first brought the painting forward to the Pollock-Krasner Authentication Board in the late 1980s in the hopes of getting it authenticated so she could sell it to support her career and herself; she was living on little more than social security checks at the time. While authentication is always a fraught business (many boards engaged in the effort, such as the Pollock-Krasner and the Warhol board, ultimately disbanded because of the constant threat of lawsuits), Kligman made a convincing scholarly and scientific case for the veracity and provenance of the painting, including letters of support from powerful figures like Ashton and Leo Castelli, who said the painting convinced him as being “a small, powerful Pollock.”

But in early 1995, the board ruled that it would go no further than offering to include the painting in a supplement to the Pollock catalogue raisonné under the category of “problems for study,” along with the caveat that it had found “no compelling independent evidence to corroborate the owner’s otherwise plausible account of its creation.” Kligman indignantly declined the offer. She continued to compile evidence in support of the painting and resubmitted an even more compelling application in 1996, but it was too late: the board had dissolved and there was no longer any official mechanism for adjudicating such questions. 

At Kligman’s death, the painting remained in critical and commercial limbo; it eventually passed into the hands of her executors, two close friends, Jonathan Cramer and Davey Frankel.

The work I did for the estate over more than a year was like having a front-row seat to observe the ways in which authority, money and power can operate in the art world. Over time, I developed a profoundly personal reaction to the Pollock, distinct from the historical, cultural and scientific lens that would shape my understanding of it. A sense of connection to Kligman as an artist and a woman—a woman whose voice was not being respected or heard—also deepened, and I began to feel a personal stake in wanting, for her sake, to see the painting freed from its storage locker and accepted by the public.

Sifting through the evidence amid the art world’s continued denial of it felt at times like an Alice-Through-the-Looking-Glass experience. Forensic reports commissioned by the estate discovered substances that had found their way into its surface, trapped within the layers, convincingly situating the work at Pollock’s home—grass seed pods, human hair and a polar bear hair that matched hair from a rug in the house. Johns went so far as to send me an email in his friend’s defense, stating: “I never understood why Ruth’s account of how it had been made met with such skepticism.” And yet it was and continues to be, long after her death—in a sense, both Kligman’s character and her own life as an artist still languishing in the shadow of her reputation as essentially a paramour and catalyst for other artists, most of them men.

As I worked to help build the painting’s case, I was also overseeing projects for the New Museum with artists Kerstin Bratsch, Liz Glynn, Matthew Monahan and Martin Puryear—all four complex feats of production and fabrication that challenged me in different ways and that ended up being strangely fueled by the rich and imaginative conversations I was having around the Pollock. As I learned more about Kligman, who was so fiercely dedicated to her painting despite a lack of commercial success, I considered the ways in which my work with art and artists has saved me over and over in my life. Her life had been filled with tremendous opportunity, excitement and achievement, but it had also been marked by trauma and hardship.

At some point in the midst of the authentication work, I got a membership at the McBurney YMCA on 14th Street, just down the street from Kligman’s studio, and I swam every morning, thinking about her, the painting, the state of the art world and a woman’s place in it. I thought about male energy, that of Pollock and of my beloved father, who was also killed in a single-car accident. I had brought myself to the painting as a respected art- world professional, a woman and a single mother, and the process had helped open my eyes to some things: the persistence of ingrained sexism in the world; my own accomplishments and potential in the face of chauvinism and narrow-mindedness; the art world’s reflexive fear and deference to conformity, tamping down genuine feeling and self-expression, minimizing the importance of individuality.

While I was never able to help the estate achieve full acceptance for the painting, I always hoped that somehow, in sharing its story, I was able to sway opinion about it. For myself, the experience fundamentally altered my way of thinking about art, reinvigorating a soft and expansive part of me, making me more radically open-minded, reminding me always to bring my heart and feelings to my engagement with art. It reinforced for me the importance of separating an artwork’s existence as an object in a commercial world from one’s direct experience of it, as well as the importance of generosity toward creators and acts of creation. The painting, and Kligman’s mission to make it whole for herself and history, created an opening for me, a space that helped me define myself and my own work, as I began to think anew about what art could mean.

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Lisa Ivorian-Jones is an independent art producer and curator based in New York. In addition to her work with institutions on special artist projects and commissions, Ivorian-Jones works with private clients on the acquisition of contemporary art. Her recent projects include a limited edition sculpture series by artist Sarah Sze for her long-term client, the New Museum of Contemporary Art.