Speaker: Helen A. Harrison 

In November 1945, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, newly married, left their apartment at 46 East Eighth Street in Greenwich Village and moved to a homestead in The Springs, a rural hamlet in the Town of East Hampton on eastern Long Island. After absorbing myriad influences during their formative years, both artists had gained a measure of recognition as aspiring modernists who had not yet gone beyond those precedents. The radical decision to leave the center of the art world and live full time a hundred miles away in a rural backwater was to some extent an effort to get away from the pressure to innovate. By releasing that pressure, they were able to move in new and productive directions. Writing to friends in the city, Pollock declared, “The country is wonderful." 

Biography:

Helen A. Harrison, the Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton, NY, is a former New York Times art critic and NPR arts commentator. She has been a curator at Guild Hall Museum and the Parrish Art Museum, has taught at the School of Visual Arts, and currently holds an adjunct faculty position in Stony Brook University’s Department of Art. Her articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous scholarly and popular publications, and she’s the author of several books, including three mystery novels set in the New York art world.