Ruth Kligman (1930-2010)

Ruth Kligman, the abstract artist known as the lone survivor of the car crash that killed Jackson Pollock more than 50 years ago, died last week in New York. The longtime Manhattanite was a celebrity of the art world for decades and portrayed by Jennifer Connelly in the 2000 Academy Award-nominated film Pollock. But Kligman’s notoriety mainly came from her role as the mistress-turned-muse for Pollock and Willem de Koonig. Her effect on the leading postwar American artists is impressive—Irving Penn and Robert Mapplethorpe also created portraits of Kligman, Andy Warhol wrote of her in his diaries, she proposed to friend Jasper Johns, and she lived and worked in Franz Kline’s studio nearly her entire life. “‘Art is my life,’ is my motto,” Ms. Kligman wrote in her book Love Affair: A Memoir of Jackson Pollock. “They think it’s easy. They don’t know it’s like jumping off a 12-story building every day.”