Next month, hundreds of people will descend on East Hampton, Long Island, to celebrate the opening of a most unusual museum. An art museum it certainly isn’t, since it doesn’t have any art to speak of. Nor does it have stately quarters, occupying as it does an ordinary farmhouse with weathered brown shingles and a sagging front porch. What sets the house apart from the others lining Fireplace Road is an accident of history: Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner once lived here. The Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center—the first home of twentieth-century artists to be granted landmark status—offers us the chance to wander around their place and see how they lived.
Whose idea was this? Partly Lee Krasner’s. When she died in 1984, she stipulated in her will that her home in the Hamptons be turned into a museum and study center—and she offered to donate it to any nonprofit group interested in taking it over. But she didn’t leave a single cent of her twenty-million-dollar fortune to help the project along. This struck many people as puzzling. Why would a woman known for her business savvy specifically designate her house a museum yet withhold the funds necessary to guarantee its survival over time?
A couple of theories have been proposed. It was said that Krasner was testing the loyalty of the residents of East Hampton: she felt they’d been slow to appreciate her achievements during her lifetime, but hoped they’d step forward after her death to
