Ellen G. Landau, Art Historian

1991 Literature

Ellen Landau's engaging and informative book, Jackson Pollock, was warmly praised for both its impeccable scholarship and its lively insights into the work of one of the 20th century's seminal painters. Published jointly by Harry N. Abrams, New York, and Thames & Hudson, London (1989), the book also confirmed Landau's stature as one of the world's foremost authorities on the work of Pollock (1912–1956), the leader of the Abstract Expressionist movement and arguably the most original painter to emerge in America. She is also an authority on the work of Lee Krasner (1908–1984), Pollock's wife, who was one of the few female painters in the aggressively male circle of the New York school of Abstract Expressionism.

In fact, it was in the course of writing her doctoral dissertation about Krasner at the University of Delaware (Ph.D., 1981) that Landau became interested in Pollock, the deeply troubled man and brilliant painter with whom Krasner lived for 14 years. Landau's contributions to our understanding of the work of Pollock and Krasner have been recognized with numerous scholarship-in-residence appointments at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, a project of the Stony Brook Foundation, in East Hampton, New York, where her appreciation for the unique visions and abiding legacy of this extraordinary couple continued to deepen and expand.

A series of articles written for prestigious American and European art journals such as Les cahiers du musée nationale d'art moderne, which published Landau’s "Jackson Pollock—L'equipée sauvage" in the spring of 1988, won her growing respect among contemporary art historians. And in 1989 she was invited to co-curate the Krasner/Pollock exhibition at the Kunstmuseum in Bern, Switzerland, the first show featuring the pair's work to be mounted in Europe.

Since winning the Cleveland Arts Prize in 1991, Landau has continued to make important contributions to Pollock and Krasner scholarship. In 1993 Landau wrote the catalogue text for an exhibition of Pollock's work at the ACA Galleries in Munich, Germany, and in 1995 she published an essay reconsidering the influence of Mexican art on Pollock for a joint exhibition of the work of Pollock and Mexican painter and political activist David Siqueiros organized at the Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf. The same year saw the publication of Lee Krasner: A Catalogue Raisonné (Harry N. Abrams), written with the assistance of Jeffrey D. Grove under the auspices of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the Robert Miller Gallery in New York, which examined the steadily growing reputation of Pollock's widow as an artist in her own right.

In 1998 Landau was appointed to chair the joint program in art history and museum studies sponsored by the Cleveland Museum of Art and Case Western Reserve University, where she has been a member of the faculty since 1982 and holds the distinguished title of University Professor. Her special area of concentration is 20th-century American and European art and theory, particularly Abstract Expressionism.

In 2001 Landau was invited to the World Congress of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem to present a paper on the painter Philip Guston, which is part of a book in progress
on abstract expressionism and Mexican art. Her anthology and methodological
study of abstract expressionism will be published by Yale University Press in 2003.

— Dennis Dooley
1986 Winner of the Cleveland Arts Prize for Literature