by Gail Levin
With equal passion she learned to savor great art and to dance the latest steps. Unlike her older sisters, who married young, she needed no further coaxing to move beyond her family’s cramped life to one of individualism. Greenwich Village, with its lively bohemian scene, soon beckoned to her from Irving Place. It was the heyday of free love, the new woman, the Jazz Age, the fast-dancing flapper, and other thrilling new types.
While moralists attempted to prohibit “the shimmy” and other jazz dances during the early 1920s, a teenaged girl like Lenore was just getting her first taste of freedom. Drawn to the new and the chance to jettison her burdensome immigrant heritage, she was not encumbered by Victorian sexual mores. In her Jewish immigrant culture, sexuality in marriage, whether or not for procreation, was considered a positive value, not a necessary evil, as it was in Catholicism. As St. Augustine declared: “Intercourse even with one’s legitimate wife is unlawful and wicked where the conception of offspring is prevented.”35 Though premarital sex was not permitted in strict Jewish culture, the religion did not associate the human body with guilt. Judaism assumed that a woman’s sexual drive was at least equal to a man’s and sex within marriage was sanctified—for both pleasure and procreation. In fact, the choice of a celibate life over a married life was condemned.36
As she graduated from high school in 1925, Lenore faced a world of new freedoms and possibilities in an economy that was robust.
THREE
Art School: Cooper Union, 1926–28
Lenore and Ruth Krasner at the beach, c. 1927.
IN FEBRUARY 1926, THE SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD “LENA KRASNER” entered the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, a tuition-free college in Manhattan at the intersection of Fourth Avenue and East Eighth Street, known as Astor Place. Founded in 1859 by Peter Cooper, the school boasted that it had “a constant demand for the graduates in the commercial world.”1
The Woman’s Art School was meant to enable “young women, who expect to be dependent on their exertions for gaining a livelihood, to obtain, free of cost, a training that will fit them for useful activity in art work of one form or another.”2
The school’s supporters, visible on the long list that constituted its “Ladies’ Advisory Council,” included such prominent names as Miss Helen Frick (Henry Clay Frick’s daughter), Mrs. Frederick W. Vanderbilt, and Her Highness, The Princess Viggo of Denmark (née Eleanor Green). Mrs. J. P. Morgan had also figured on the council until her recent death. The school had the attention of high society matrons, who contributed scholarship funds, money for student prizes, and even a summer art course in Paris.
Applicants were admitted as space became available, “with some preference to such as submit work showing preparatory training or decided fitness for artistic pursuits.”3 Lenore Krasner began in midyear. That academic year the Woman’s Art School enrolled 293 girls for training in design and applied arts, including fashion, furniture, illustration, interior decoration, portrait and other painting, and the teaching of art. At the end of her life, Krasner reminisced: “I do recall Cooper Union having the most magnificent Cooper-Hewitt Museum available to us, just one flight below our classrooms—what an enormous treat.”4 The collection, now relocated, emphasized architecture and the decorative arts.
But another memory was less approbatory. “I also particularly remember the separation of the men and women, even with separate entrances. We never crossed paths!”5 The Union’s main men’s division was an engineering school, although art classes for men were given during the evenings. Krasner never approved of separation by gender, yet, at the time, she had no other options. Typically only about two dozen women graduated in a given year.6 The small number of graduates resulted from women dropping out because they could not produce acceptable work, as well as those who dropped out because they chose to get married, had to take a paying job, or wanted to pursue study at another school, as Krasner eventually did.
Cooper Union’s emphasis on businesslike careers in the arts for women initially made it a good fit for the ambitious Krasner. The school stressed learning the craft and techniques of art, and the women’s course of study was rather rigidly prescribed. Like her classmates, Krasner began studying elementary drawing, which involved drawing from simple forms and from casts of ornaments, torsos, feet, and hands. She was also enrolled in General Drawing, which was an afternoon class open to all, and portrait painting.
Despite Krasner’s previous training, her teacher for elementary drawing, sculptor and mural painter Charles Louis Hinton, still judged her work as “messy.” Hinton had been a pupil of Will Hicok Low at the National Academy of Design in New York; he had also studied in Paris with Gérôme and Bouguereau, who were famous academicians in the 1890s. Hinton’s course emphasized “drawing from simple forms and casts of ornaments, blocked hands, feet, etc. Also special elementary preparation for Decorative Design and Interior Decoration for students intending to study those branches.”7 Krasner, however, aimed to become a “fine artist,” not a “decorative artist,” and resisted this practical curriculum.
A muralist and an illustrator for children’s books, Hinton was trying to maintain old-fashioned academic taste at a time when modern art was beginning to make its way into public consciousness.8 He could not tolerate Krasner’s independent spirit and casual attitudes. And for her part, this resistance came at significant risk. Students were subject to close supervision, and anyone not making fair progress was subject to dismissal. In order to advance from elementary drawing, the lowest class, a student had to advance—and that was subject to the teacher’s judgment.9
Krasner later recounted how Hinton’s course was divided into alcoves: “The first alcove, you did hands and feet of casts, the second the torso, and third, the full figure, and then you were promoted to life. Well I got stuck in the middle alcove somewhere in the torso and Mr. Hinton at one point, in utter despair and desperation, said more or less what the high school teacher had said, ‘I’m going to promote you to life, not because you deserve it, but because I can’t do anything with you.’ And so I got into life.”10
In May Cooper Union awarded Krasner a certificate stating that she “has successfully completed the work prescribed for the class in Elementary Drawing.” She had registered as “Lena Krasner” but managed to have them put on her certificate “Lenore,” the first name that she had chosen for herself.11
Free from Hinton’s strictures, Krasner began the fall term as one of 312 woman students.12 Since almost all of the teachers at Cooper were men, role models for women were very scarce. Ethel Traphagen, who taught courses in fashion design, was a notable exception.13 She had made an impact in the world of fashion and is said to have brought attention to the United States as a fashion center. She worked then on the staff of the Ladies’ Home Journal and Dress Magazine. She also resurrected and depicted “costumes of Indian maidens” and collected nineteenth-century garments. Traphagen had started out at Cooper but eventually graduated from the National Academy of Design and also studied at the Art Students League and the Chase School. In 1923, she founded the Traphagen School of Design with her husband, William R. Leigh, a painter who fiercely opposed modernism.14
Traphagen’s Costume Design and Illustration was a “two years course, designed to develop the taste of its students and to fit them for immediate practical work.” The first year’s focus was on “drawing and sketching the human figure in action, proportion and details; also from garments and drapery. Historic costume; color theory; dressmaker’s sketches.” By the second year, the focus was on “drawing for publication in pencil, pen-and-ink, wash, color, etc. Composition and grouping of figures. General preparation for practical work.”15 Students also began to sketch garments and drapery as well as historic costume. They studied color theory and made dressmaker’s sketches. Krasner, who had enjoyed drawing fashions as a girl, came out of the course with a respect for clothing design and designers.
Krasner was interested in clothes and style. However, her
own look must have appeared very relaxed to her classmates. In the February 4, 1927, issue of The Pioneer, the student newspaper, the female columnist asked: Would the world come to an end if “Kitty Scholz quit believing she was the ‘Princess’? Mickey Beyers favored long skirts? Betty Augonoa and Sadie Mulholland ‘grew up’? Lee Krasner at last put her hair up?”16
This is also the first documented use of Krasner’s nickname, “Lee,” rather than Lena or Lenore. In a gossip column about women students, the school paper again identified her as “Lee Krasner” when it commented positively on her eyelashes.17 Of Cooper Union, Krasner later said, “I’m surrounded by the women that are going to be artists so there’s nothing unusual about women artists, it’s a natural environment for me.”18 Changing names was commonplace among Krasner’s immigrant siblings. Her name appears as “Lee” on the U.S. Federal Census for 1930, so she had definitely made the switch from Lenore by that time.19 Though some have alleged that Krasner later took the androgynous name Lee so that it would seem that her art was made by a man, her earlier use of the name in her single-sex school casts doubt on that theory.20
At this time, Krasner was five feet five, with blue eyes, and she had developed a model’s slender figure. Her hair was auburn and usually worn in a pageboy cut, just above the shoulders. Her smile was warm, though her facial features were far from classical. Greenwich Village was becoming home to women said to be sexually uninhibited, glamorous, and free. The feminists who fought for suffrage had been eclipsed by the flapper. The struggle of revolutionary women such as Emma Goldman and Crystal Eastman seemed over. With the economy booming and garrets in dilapidated buildings available at cheap rents, a bohemian existence at society’s fringes became a viable option for many. Couples living freely together made traditional marriage and families look less like an inevitable destiny than a limiting choice.
Studies of the “New Woman” blossomed in the popular press. Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, wrote that having gained the vote, “woman is now learning how to use it intelligently so as to realize the ultimate aim of the movement—absolute equality between men and women.”21 Meanwhile reformers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman discussed “companionate marriage” publicly, condemning it as “merely legal indulgence” of those “who deliberately prefer not to have children to interfere with their pleasures.”22 She excoriated those “who seek sex indulgence without marriage, and whose activities have long been recognized as so deleterious as to be called ‘social evil,’” blaming much such behavior on “that new contingent who are infected by Freudian and sub-Freudian theories.”23
Meanwhile the Reverend Henry Sloane Coffin, president of the Union Theological Seminary, exhorted married couples to hold “to marital vows and the keeping up of appearances even though the illusions and ideals of marriage have vanished.” Coffin evoked a case in which “the wife realizes that she has married a mediocrity, or a weakling, or a scamp; the husband finds himself tied to a scold, or a bore, or a heartless worldling.”24 Such public discourse did little to make young women like Krasner long for matrimony just when they were beginning to test freedoms newly found.
Krasner’s eventual decision to avoid motherhood should be viewed in the context of those who were then insisting that “the greatest social problem of the day” was excess population. Many in this camp, such as Harry Emerson Fosdick of the Park Avenue Baptist Church, argued publicly for “the general practice of scientific birth control.”25 This issue was closely related to the anti-immigration legislation that had passed in the early 1920s, which encouraged those who openly called for the use of eugenics to shape the population. Indeed, Fosdick described himself as “restrictionist in immigration.”26
Krasner’s own outlook was strongly cosmopolitan, having grown up in a neighborhood populated by a mix of old Dutch farmers and recent immigrants: Russian-Jewish, French, Irish, and German, and mixed-race.27 Years later she spoke of despising nationalistic attitudes and resented being narrowly categorized as an “American” artist—a point of view that must come from her early experiences with various cultures and her awareness of bias against minorities.
At Cooper Union, Krasner kept her eye on her professional goal. Soon after her introductory courses, she advanced to Drawing from the Antique and Fashion Design. Drawing from the Antique entailed working with plaster casts of Greek and Roman works. The students focused on drawing the human head and figure, and in the afternoons they drew in color. Lectures were required on anatomy, perspective, and the history of art.
The first term had been an awkward time for Lee, but then her prowess started being recorded not only on her transcript but also in the school paper, which listed some two dozen women who had their drawings “hung at the monthly exhibition,” Krasner’s among them.28
Given the school’s vocational agenda, it is hardly surprising that Krasner quickly made a name for herself as a fine artist. By December she obtained admission to the life drawing class, for which one had to earn admission by submitting satisfactory drawings, usually in the third year. She was only in the second term of her first year. In the mornings the students drew from life, and in the afternoons they painted from life in oil. The course stressed posing, arrangement, and lighting. That December too the newspaper’s women’s column reported Krasner as one of the “girls who have had work on exhibition for December.”29 She also took Oil Painting—Portrait and art history, which was a required lecture course.
Krasner’s work was among those chosen by a designer for the Famous Players–Lasky Corporation, who visited the costume class to select for an exhibition student work from a project that aimed “to change the styles for men,” replacing tweeds with “light comfortable garments.”30
Despite this success, Krasner was not like most of her classmates, who thought about jobs in industry after studying at Cooper. She was planning to be a painter. No doubt that she was already beginning to learn about the existence of modern art. In Cooper’s weekly student newspaper, The Pioneer, there were discussions of modern painters and reviews of their works when shown at New York galleries. On February 17, 1928, a show of Cézanne’s work at the Wildenstein Gallery was praised for his “cosmic truths,” and his “warmth and sincerity.” The same writer remarked, “In Matisse, in Derain and in Segonzac, no one can readily see the reflection of Cézanne, but in Cézanne, one sees all and more.”31
Other shows reviewed in the Cooper newspaper that term included a show of Degas at Durand-Ruel, the Independent Artists held at the Waldorf Hotel, and the work of George Bellows, Ralph Blakelock, and Albert Ryder at the MacBeth Gallery. Even a Picasso still life in the latest “Surrealist” manner drew a student journalist’s attention.32 Thus, by the time Krasner left Cooper to enroll at the National Academy, it is likely that she already had some sense that there was more going on aesthetically than her instructors at Cooper had been willing to admit.
In spring 1928, Krasner continued to study portrait painting, life drawing, and art history. She also added courses in perspective and anatomy. By then she was in the third alcove, studying “in cast” the full figure with the French-born Victor Semon Perard. She got along very well with Perard, her lecturer for anatomy, who appreciated her abilities enough to pay her the first compensation she ever received for making art. Known as an etcher and a lithographer, Perard employed Krasner to make illustrations for his book, Anatomy and Drawing (1928)—“a page or two for his book of hands and feet, blocked hands and feet from a cast.”33 She recounted that she told herself: “This is easy!” She imagined that she could earn a living from selling her artwork. Years later, when Krasner was shown a copy of Perard’s book, long since out of print and which she had not seen in fifty years, she proudly turned to her sketch, “Studies of Hands Method of Blocking.” The cubical forms, which do not resemble the book’s other illustrations, perhaps hint at the modernist beginning to emerge.34
Perard’s recognition was meaningful to Krasner. S
he did not, however, win any of the official prizes—110 in all—awarded that year to “Cooper Union girls.” For those in their second year, the awards were given for recognition in drawing and sketching in black and white, for watercolor, mural painting, and even for drawing in crayon.35
Even though she was encouraged by Perard’s response to her work, Krasner left after the spring term of 1928. “I decided I ought to do something more serious than Cooper Union.”36 She had already begun to share a studio at 96 Fifth Avenue (at Fifteenth Street) with some friends. Their rented quarters were near the Cooper Union Studio Club west of Union Square, where student members could work outside of school hours. Girls were known to go to Washington Square Park to sketch alfresco.
Krasner supported her share of the rent by modeling in the nude for Moses Weiner Dykaar, whose studio was located in the same building. Years later her friend the sculptor Ibram Lassaw recalled that he first met Krasner when she was working as a model.37 Lassaw studied from 1931 to 1932 at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design in Midtown, which held life modeling and other courses, where Krasner might also have modeled.
Although Dykaar liked to sculpt figures as well, he was known for his portrait busts, and had modeled one of Calvin Coolidge and other notables for the Senate Gallery in the United States Capitol.38 Krasner might have been encouraged by Dykaar’s success, since he had progressed from an impoverished young Jew in Vilnius (Lithuania, in the Russian empire) to studying art in Vilnius and in Paris at the Académie Julian. Nevertheless, she found him “bitter.”39
Dykaar encouraged Krasner to enroll at the Arts Students League on West Fifty-seventh Street, which he considered less structured than Cooper Union and more serious. In July she began study with Canadian-born George Brant Bridgman for a life drawing course. She studied five days a week in the mornings. Bridgman, like Hinton at Cooper Union, had studied in Paris with Gérôme and Bouguereau. In his teaching, Bridgman promoted a system of “wedging” to convey the twisting and turning of the human figure. Known to be “prim and meticulous,” Bridgman was said to glower “at any student who wastes drawing paper or sits a few inches out of line from the other students. Occasionally he stops to drop a sardonic remark or to redraw, in heavy accurate lines, an improperly pitched shoulder or a badly proportioned leg.” 40 Nor did he permit nude models in classes that mixed men and women. As might be expected, Krasner’s determination to maintain her own emerging style conflicted with this French-Academic-trained teacher, as it had with Hinton, who was similarly trained. The Art Students League was not to Krasner’s taste, and she decided to move on to the National Academy of Design.