Lee Krasner

by Gail Levin

  Then suddenly Lee’s older sister Rose died of appendicitis on July 9, 1928, leaving behind her husband, William Stein, and two small daughters, Muriel Pearl and Bernice.41 According to Old World Jewish tradition, the next in line—Lee—the eldest of the two remaining unmarried sisters, was supposed to marry her brother-in-law and raise the children. But Lee refused. Though she doted on her nieces, she believed she had another destiny and would not even consider such a marriage. The responsibility fell to Lee’s younger sister, Ruth, who, it seems, never forgave her sister.

  FOUR

  National Academy and First Love, 1928–32

  Igor Pantuhoff and his portrait of a nude model, c. 1930. At the National Academy, Igor, a tall, handsome, charming White Russian who boasted of an aristocratic lineage, was easy to notice. Younger than Krasner by three years, he often won prizes for his work.

  LATE IN THE SUMMER OF 1928, LEE STARTED AN AMBITIOUS SELF-PORTRAIT to qualify her for the life class at the National Academy of Design. She set herself up outdoors at her parents’ new home in Greenlawn (Huntington Township) on Long Island’s north shore. They had purchased a modest rural house with a separate garage (that might have been an old barn) in May 1926,1 when Joseph was fifty-five and Anna was nearly forty-six. (The 1930 census says that Lee’s parents still lived in the Brooklyn house they rented for $50 a month; Lee and Irving were also still living there.)2 After nearly two decades of physical drudgery and economic uncertainty as fishmongers, Joseph and Anna longed for a country life like the one they’d had in Shpikov. The house, next to a small lake, was simple with no indoor plumbing, but they could grow vegetables, raise chickens, and sell eggs. It was also just up the hill from Centreport Harbor, which offered swimming and fishing.3 They sold some of what they grew.

  Getting there was easy via the Long Island Railroad. Krasner had been painting from life even before she left Cooper Union. Now she was working with confidence, producing an oil painting that was thirty by twenty-five inches. “I nailed a mirror to a tree, and spent the summer painting myself with trees showing in the background,” she remembered. “It was difficult—the light in the mirror, the heat and the bugs.”4

  Krasner showed herself in a short-sleeved blue shirt and painter’s apron. Her hair is cut short; her rouged cheeks stand out; her eyes are just intense white dots that glint from beneath her trademark heavy eyebrows. One full arm extends across her body to the focal point where her hand grasps a paint-spattered rag and three brushes tinted with color, while the other arm just vanishes at the canvas. By depicting herself in the act of painting, she thus asserts her identity as a painter. Yet the picture contains a puzzle: why does it show her clutching her tools in her right hand while working on the canvas with her left? She was right-handed and painted with her right hand.5 Evidently her mind had not reckoned with the mirror’s reversing effect, exhibiting left-right confusion that today is often considered a symptom of dyslexia.6

  Though dyslexia is today known as a common disability caused by a defect in the brain’s ability to process graphic symbols, it was not understood during Krasner’s lifetime. Considered a learning disability, dyslexia does not reflect any lack of intelligence. Dyslexics might start math problems on the wrong side, or want to carry a number the wrong way. Similarly, Krasner habitually began her paintings from right to left, working in a manner that was atypical in a culture that reads from left to right. A dyslexic’s unique brain architecture and “unusual wiring” also make reading, writing, and spelling difficult. Many dyslexics, however, are gifted in areas that the brain’s right hemisphere is said to control, among them artistic skill, vivid imagination, intuition, creative thinking, and curiosity—characteristics that could be used to describe Krasner.

  Her lifelong propensity for asking people to read aloud to her as well as her frequent spelling errors and dislike of writing suggest that she suffered from a dyslexic’s confused sense of direction, which often impedes reading and writing. However, as was the case with Krasner, comprehension through listening usually exceeds reading.

  On September 17, 1928, nineteen-year-old “Lenore Krasner” formally applied to the National Academy of Design, then located “in an old wooden barn of a building” in Manhattan at 109th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, not far from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.7 A little more than a week later, she gained admission, with free tuition for the seven-month term. There were about six hundred students there, and for the first time since elementary school, she was with females and males.8

  The academy’s creed seemed to mesh with Krasner’s ambition to become an artist: “Only students who intend to follow art as a profession will be admitted.”9 The academy advertised “a balanced system of art education, combining both practical study and theoretical knowledge.”10 Applicants had to practice drawing from casts of famous ancient sculptures until they could qualify for the life class by submitting an acceptable full-length figure or torso drawn from a cast.

  Despite her new self-portraits, Krasner had to begin again by drawing from the antique. Even worse, she again faced her old nemesis from Cooper Union, Charles Hinton, who taught the traditional introduction at the academy. Neither the teacher nor the rebellious student wanted to repeat their previous clash. Krasner remembered: “He looked at me and I looked at him, and this time there wasn’t anything he could do about getting rid of me [by sending me to the next level] as it took a full committee at the Academy to promote you.”11

  Her opinion of Hinton was shared by her classmate and friend Esphyr (Esther) Slobodkina, who referred to him, with irony, as “our pretty Mr. Hinton” and as a “genteel mummy of a teacher.” She complained that “if not for that dear, kindly Mr. [Arthur] Covey, our teacher in composition, and a few friends that I made, I surely would have gone out of my mind in that completely sterile atmosphere of permanently congealed mediocrity.”12

  Slobodkina was an immigrant on a student visa, so she had to sign in at the academy but was so disgusted with the school that she did little more than that. “When Mr. Hinton came to give me his ‘criticism,’” she recalled, “I patiently waited for him to slick up a few spots on my far-from-inspired work while mumbling something about light and shade, and flowing line. The poor, old, doddering cherub knew no more what the real art of drawing was about than the school janitor. Yet he was there for years and years, ruining countless young, fresh, promising talents.”13

  Slobodkina was from Siberia, where her father managed a Rothschild-owned oil enterprise. Before arriving at the academy, she had trained in art and become familiar with modernism in Russia. Though she later won an Honorable Mention for Composition in 1932, Slobodkina quickly became disillusioned with the school’s conservatism, as would some of the other more adventuresome students including Krasner, Herbert Ferber, Giorgio Cavallon, Byron Browne, and Ilya Bolotowsky—all destined to make names for themselves.

  When Krasner was finally able to present her self-portrait to the appointed committee, they judged it so fine that they didn’t believe it was done outdoors. “When you paint a picture inside, don’t pretend it’s done outside,” they admonished her.14 The committee chair, Raymond Perry Rodgers Neilson, a well-known portrait artist, then forty-two, scolded, “That’s a dirty trick you played.”15

  Nevertheless Krasner preferred him over Hinton. “It was no use my protesting, but he passed me anyway—on probation! At this time I had not seen any French painting; I had simply tried to paint what I saw. His reaction was very shocking to me. But now I suppose I must have seemed to him like some smart-aleck kid trying to imitate the French and show them all up. And I assume now they were all worried by the French.”16 In interviews years later, Krasner made much of being admitted on probation. But the catalogue stated: “All new students are admitted on probation” with advancement only by producing appropriate work.

  Academy records document that Krasner was promoted to “Life in Full” for a one-month “trial” as of January 26, 1929.17 “Life in Full” referred to leav
ing plaster casts behind to draw full-time from a live model. A related Self-Portrait survives in pencil and sepia watercolor on paper. To create the work, she glanced back over her shoulder into a mirror; her short haircut suggests that she created this work around the time of her outdoor oil self-portrait. Krasner explained that she had done a series of self-portraits, “not because I was fascinated with my image but because I was the one subject that would stand still at my convenience.”18 After her promotion, her record card for that first year reveals that someone drew a line through Hinton’s name, as she dropped out of his dreaded class. Instead the name “Neilson,” who taught the desired “Life Drawing and Painting” on Tuesday and Friday mornings, was written in.19

  Krasner’s outspokenness would keep getting her into trouble. A note on her record card states, “This student is always a bother—locker key paid—but no record of it on record—insists upon having own way despite School Rules.” Krasner was very much a product of her Jewish immigrant culture. Growing up in a large impoverished family and having to fend for herself had made her into a fierce defender of her rights—as she saw them. Furthermore, it had been necessary for her to look out for herself in the poverty-stricken immigrant communities in Brooklyn, where anti-Semitic gangs sometimes caused havoc—a precarious situation all too similar to the one her family had faced as Jews in Russia.

  Of the 580 students (238 women, 342 men) who attended the academy that year, only 479 survived the entire school year. Krasner made friends with both men and women, but later mentioned only the men that she’d made friends with, most of whom later won recognition as artists: Byron Browne, Ilya Bolotowsky, Giorgio Cavallon, Boris Gorelick, Igor Pantuhoff, and Pan Theodor.20 One classmate opined that two of the best-looking men were Browne, who was “tall, blond, strong and as radiantly handsome as a summer morning in a northern country,” and Igor Pantuhoff.21

  Although most students at the academy were Americans, there were also many international students, including some from Austria, China, France, Hungary, Canada, England, Italy, and Russia. Besides Esphyr Slobodkina, who was only there on a student visa because recently imposed quotas impeded her from immigrating legally, the “Russian” contingent included Eda Mirsky, her sister Kitty, Gorelick, Bolotowsky, and Pantuhoff.

  Krasner became especially close to the Mirskys, Eda and her older sister Kitty. The sisters worked in contrasting styles: Eda painted flowers and children in “lavish colors, sensuous shapes,” while Kitty preferred dark and brooding seascapes and kittens. Eda won the School Prizes of $15 for both the Still Life class and the Women’s Night Class—Figure in 1932.

  Their Russian-Jewish family had emigrated from Ukraine to England, where the girls were born, then to the United States, settling in the Bronx when the girls were still children. They eventually moved to Edgemere, Long Island. Their father, Samuel, was a self-taught portrait painter who earned a good living, working on commissions from his studio at Union Square. Kitty started studying at the academy two years before Krasner. By the time Krasner encountered the Mirskys, they were living in Manhattan.

  The Mirskys were conversant with their father’s work as an artist, and this gave them a sophistication about art that Krasner lacked because she had no such role model at home. Yet the Mirsky daughters also had to deal with their father’s judgment—both his criticism of their work and his high standards for what it took to be an artist. Nevertheless this did not deter them from pursuing art. Eda told her daughter, the author Erica Jong, that she “could have gone to college anywhere I chose—but since Kitty quit school and went to the National Academy of Design, and since she was always coming home with stories of how splendid it was, how many handsome boys there were, how much fun it was, I decided I wanted to leave school too…. Papa let me.”22

  Eda became a star at the academy, but with a bitter twist: “the teachers always twitted the boys: ‘Better watch out for that Mirsky girl—she’ll win the Prix de Rome,’ which was the big traveling scholarship. But they never gave it to girls and I knew that. In fact, when I won two bronze medals, I was furious because I knew they were just tokens—not real money prizes. And that was because I was a girl. Why did they say ‘Better watch out for that Mirsky girl!’ if not to torment me?”23 Eda was so frustrated by the sexism that years later she discouraged her daughter, Erica, from pursuing a career in the visual arts when Erica went to the High School of Music and Art and the Art Students League.24

  Eda’s granddaughter, the author Molly Jong-Fast, recalled her grandmother “screaming about socialism,” a concern that would have interested her friend Lenore.25 Lenore and Eda’s friendship was so close that Lenore agreed to pose for at least two portraits. They capture Lenore’s likeness and personality with extraordinary confidence. One shows her long, luxuriant hair, while in the later one, clad in a fashionable striped jacket, she sports the short haircut of a flapper. Lenore also gave Eda a self-portrait painted in the basement of her family’s house in Brooklyn.

  The basement portrait, a moody, wide-eyed image, resembles the style of Krasner’s future teacher Leon Kroll, who would have appreciated Lenore’s decision to pose before a mirror in half-shadow with the sunlight pouring through the basement window behind her, illuminating a potted plant and one side of her face. The portrait already shows remarkable sophistication and skill. Krasner’s ability was not lost on Eda, who treasured the gift and finally, in 1988, gave it, along with her own two portraits of Krasner, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  Like Krasner, the Mirsky sisters studied with the despised Hinton and with Charles Courtney Curran. Curran, who was nearly seventy years old at the time, was equally old-fashioned in his style of teaching. Born in Kentucky, he had studied at the Académie Julian in Paris and exhibited at the Salon. Curran had won a number of prizes in the 1880s and 1890s in both Europe and the United States. At the time he taught Krasner he also held the prestigious position of the academy’s corresponding secretary. His impressionistic style might have seemed like a breath of fresh air to Krasner had she not been attracted instead to the new Museum of Modern Art and its more radical program of showing Matisse, Picasso, and abstract art.

  Krasner was attracted not only to modernism but also to a coterie of Russians who shared her enthusiasm. It was as if she felt at ease with people who shared the origin of her parents, older siblings, and mother’s brother. On her registration card for the academy, the category “where born” correctly reads “New York City,” but to the right on the same line is typed “Russia.” The note reappears on cards for successive years, making it less likely that it’s accidental. Some years, the word Russia follows the letters M and F, which seem to stand for the birthplace of “Mother” and “Father.” Krasner may have been born in America, but she still spent her time with the Russians, most of whom were Jewish. But one of them who caught Krasner’s eye definitely was not.26

  A tall, handsome, charming White Russian, Igor Pantuhoff was easy to notice. He was younger than Krasner by three years but boasted of an aristocratic lineage. Gossip about his background circulated among his fellow students and later among his contemporaries. Joop Sanders, a younger Dutch painter who settled in New York, recalled meeting Pantuhoff in the late 1940s through their mutual friend, the artist Willem de Kooning, and said that “Igor was very elegant and good looking with a smooth European manner.”27 Robert Jonas, another artist who befriended both de Kooning and Pantuhoff, later recalled that Pantuhoff’s father was “a captain of the guard of the Kremlin.”28

  Oleg Ivanovich Pantuhoff was born in Kiev in 1882—the youngest son of a physician who had been a general in the Army Medical Corps—and had been an energetic young colonel, a commanding officer of the Russian Imperial Guard, and a staff member to Tsar Nicholas II. The tsar commissioned him to start a branch of the Boy Scouts in Russia (the National Organization of Russian Scouts, founded in St. Petersburg in 1909).29 Colonel Pantuhoff became the first Chief Scout and the tsar’s son, Alexei, was the first Russian Scout, placi
ng Pantuhoff quite close to the imperial family.

  When Colonel Pantuhoff named his second son Igor, he was expressing his ardent Russian nationalism, because the name recalls a twelfth-century Russian prince whose exploits were immortalized in an anonymous epic, Song of Igor’s Campaign.30 At the time of Igor’s birth, the Pantuhoffs employed a children’s nurse, a maid, a cook, and an orderly. Igor’s mother, Nina Michailovna Dobrovolskaya, was ill for nearly a year after the boy’s birth. At her doctor’s suggestion, she left her family and resided in Davos, Switzerland, and then in a spa near Salzburg. She continued to suffer from asthma and was frequently absent while she visited various clinics in search of a cure.

  As small children, Igor and his older brother, Oleg, Jr., lived with their parents in Tsarskoe Selo, the town devoted to the Imperial Palace and also where the last tsar officially resided.31 During spring and winter seasons, however, the two boys went to live with their grandmother in St. Petersburg, just sixteen miles away. They also stayed with their grandmother when their father went off to war.