by Gail Levin
The Russian Civil War began in 1918. Colonel Pantuhoff served with the White armies against the Bolshevik Red Army and “took part in the last defense of the Kremlin against the Bolsheviks.”32 As the fighting escalated, the Pantuhoffs fled first to Moscow and then to the Crimea on the Black Sea. Food became scarce. In his memoirs, Colonel Pantuhoff described how his family suffered from malnutrition. Both Igor and his brother developed jaundice; Oleg, Jr., became so weak that he could not walk. Their mother was also quite ill and weak, suffering from bouts of pneumonia.
Despite his family’s suffering, Colonel Pantuhoff continued to work with the Boy Scouts, many of whom he later described as “sons or grandsons of men wounded or killed in the world war or the civil war…. Their recent experiences so confirmed them in loyalty to their country and to their church that, even after the Bolsheviks had outlawed scout activity, some persisted secretly in scout work.”33 He also wrote about “a large Jewish Boy Scout group in Sevastopol known as the Maccabees. Their leaders were good men and their boys looked very smart. On one occasion they invited me and other scoutmasters to inspect their unit and then asked to become part of the Russian Boy Scout organization.” After conferring with his colleagues, Pantuhoff “decided that since they were not of our religion and carried a flag with the Star of David, our bylaws precluded their joining us.”34 Pantuhoff would later try to impose this same kind of exclusionary thinking on his sons in America.
During the height of the war, the brothers suffered from either changing schools or having no school at all. Colonel Pantuhoff wrote that Igor, who studied less well than Oleg, “lagged sadly behind in reading” but developed “unquestioned talents in drawing” and “definite talent as an actor.”35 Igor’s parents did what they could with homeschooling. After the Red Army recaptured Kiev on December 17, 1919, the major fighting ended, and the defeated Cossacks fled back toward the Black Sea. Colonel Pantuhoff finally decided to put his safety and that of his family first and joined more than a million Russian refugees from the Bolsheviks. The Pantuhoffs now had to cope with sudden poverty.
They sailed on a freighter from Sevastopol and landed on March 5, 1920, in Constantinople (now Istanbul), which was still under Allied control after World War I.36 The boys were placed in two different boarding schools: Igor’s, Yeni Kioi, had an English headmaster.
The Bolsheviks soon banned the scouts and, beginning in 1922, purged the scout leaders, who either perished or had already gone into exile along with other White Russians. Igor became a Cub Scout in Constantinople until early September of that year, when the Pantuhoffs sailed for the United States, arriving on the tenth of October.
Having moved about during most of Igor’s childhood, the family finally settled down at 385 Central Park West—far in both distance and culture from the Brooklyn immigrant neighborhood of the Krasners. The Pantuhoffs’ lifestyle, however, was not elegant. Like many other immigrants, the family could afford their apartment only by taking in four boarders.37 Igor’s brother modeled his life on their father’s military career, joining the U.S. Army and distinguishing himself as a translator. Igor’s mother had studied art in St. Petersburg at the art school of Ian F. Tzionglinsky, an ardent follower of Impressionism, and at the school of Technical Design of Baron Aleksander Stiglitze. Igor’s father also enjoyed painting, so Igor took after both parents.38
Pantuhoff had already spent a full year at the academy when Krasner arrived there. In October 1928, Pantuhoff won an honorable mention in the required submission category, “A Corner of New York: Noon Hour,” a theme that all competing had to produce. The next spring, Krasner’s second term, he won multiple prizes in the categories of painting from the nude, figure, still life, and composition.39 Since he registered his name as “Igor Pantuckoff,” it appears that he had not yet decided on how to anglicize it. Evidently names shifted among the emigrés; Ilya Bolotowsky was also “Elias” and Giorgio Cavallon also “George.”40 It would take still more time for “Lenore Krassner” to become Lee Krasner.
The new student at the academy caught the attention of the rising star. Just twenty-one, Krasner was outgoing and slender with a model’s figure. She delighted in her first experience in a coed institution since elementary school. She was ambitious and determined to be an artist. To her, Pantuhoff embodied the sophistication of European culture. He exuded style, which was completely missing in her background.
The two soon became a couple. He began to style and present her to the world like a Pygmalion. She enjoyed the glamorous clothing and exotic jewelry he picked for her to purchase, even if her modest budget suffered. Whatever qualms Krasner might have had about Pantuhoff’s attempts to transform her appearance faded in the context of Jazz Age New York, when the image of the flapper redefined modern womanhood. Rigid Victorian customs gave way, leaving young women to cope with sexual liberation. They now had new opportunities to dress in more revealing clothes and to wear makeup, once associated with prostitutes, but now fashionable in the Roaring Twenties.
Pantuhoff’s attention to Krasner earned her some envy. Slobodkina grumbled, “Half the girls in school, including Kitty and Eda Mirsky, hung around him. His particular lady of the time was the extremely ugly, elegantly stylized Lee Krasner. She had a huge nose, pendulous lips, bleached hair in a long, slick bob, and a dazzlingly beautiful, luminously white body.”41 Slobodkina seems to have gotten a surprise from Igor when she first began to attend the academy morning sessions. She wrote in her memoir: “A dashing young man, the darling of the female student body, by the name of Igor Pentukhov [sic] heard of the arrival of a new student, a young lady not so bad to look at and a Russian at that. One late morning he rushed to our all female class, and finding me busily bent over the eternal drawing from the cast of Venus de Milo, unhesitatingly planted a gentle kiss in the temptingly low-cut décolleté of my back.”42 Slobodkina turned around and slapped his face. He protested that he just wanted to meet her and speak a little Russian. She snapped back that she was there to speak English and to learn to paint. “I must say he was not heartbroken.”
Krasner was apparently less rejecting of Pantuhoff’s flirtatious nature. Slobodkina’s memoir documents that it was not unusual among the academy’s students for them to form live-in relationships before marriage. In one case, however, Slobodkina commented that their classmate Gertrude “Peter” Greene was “indefatigable in her search for new partners. I suspect that she had a touch of nymphomania in her” but she and others viewed Krasner as loving and faithful to Pantuhoff.43 In fact many of their teachers and friends eventually believed the two were married.
In contrast with nineteenth-century precepts of womanly virtue, this era began to view sexual activity before marriage as no longer a grave moral breach. It was even commended by some books of advice. “The girl who makes use of the new opportunities for sex freedom is likely to find her experiences have been wholesome…she may be better prepared for marriage by her playful activities than if she had clung to a passive role of waiting for marriage before giving any expression to her sex impulses.”44
Enchanted by Igor, Lee was relieved when her younger sister, Ruth, then only eighteen, stepped up to meet the family’s responsibility of providing a wife for their sister’s widower by marrying him on February 5, 1929. Ruth’s new husband, Willie Stein, operated the projector at the Pearl Movie House in Brooklyn, then owned by his father, Morris Stein.45 Ruth accepted the burden (or the opportunity) of raising Stein’s two small daughters as her own. According to the 1930 federal census, Krasner apparently still lived at home at 594 Jerome Street with her parents, along with her brother Irving.46 Her sister Ruth and her husband, William Stein, along with Muriel and Bernice, his two daughters, also lived at the same address. Lee occupied the basement room and shared the kitchen and bathroom upstairs.
Pantuhoff often visited Krasner at her home. One of her nieces, Muriel, treasured her times with the couple. “I used to sit on [Igor’s] lap and he would tell me stories and give me sips of wine.�
�47 Muriel remembers that Pantuhoff always had a glass of wine and that he smoked a lot. She also described her Aunt Lee as a frequent and beloved babysitter, who was much needed after Ruth’s only child, Ronald Jay (Ronnie) Stein, was born in September 1930. For Muriel, Lee was “like a second mother”—very kind, helping her with her clothes, taking her out to eat, and teaching her “what the world was like.”48 Lee sometimes took Igor to visit her parents in Greenlawn, especially during the summers, where he would paint Muriel’s portrait and landscapes. Krasner often took Muriel and Bernice to the circus and to shop for clothes, and “other such treats.”49 The sisters found Aunt Lee to be much warmer than their stepmother, Ruth. Aunt Lee often accompanied the girls to the movies at the Pearl, where their father worked until 1929. The theater, which was just north of East New York, had inspired Muriel’s middle name.
The theater opened in 1914 and could draw about five hundred spectators for its second-and third-run films. Muriel recalls how thrilled she was to see Greta Garbo and Clark Gable and be with her Aunt Lee.50 Muriel and her sister viewed their aunt as “a second mother,” who was “kind and generous; she really wanted children and never had them.” Conversely, Lee probably viewed her nieces as if they were her children—at least children whose lives she could enrich without taking primary responsibility for them. Later she would famously dote on their half brother, Ronnie Stein.
When the stock market crashed in October 1929, the academy’s adventuresome students didn’t even seem to notice. No records have survived of any reaction from the students. Indeed it was not until 1930 that the grip of long-term economic depression took hold. Furthermore, for many of the students, especially those from immigrant families like Krasner, there had always been a worry over money.51 Krasner’s acquaintance and contemporary Lionel Abel, a playwright and critic, wrote that in November, “I did not even know that there had been a crash on Wall Street during the previous month. When I say I did not know about the crash, I do not mean that I had not read of it. I mean merely that it had no special significance to me.”52
At the same time that Krasner gained admission to the Life Class at the beginning of 1929, she also enrolled in Charles Courtney Curran’s day class and the night class of Ivan Gregorewitch Olinsky, an affable Russian Jewish immigrant who was a highly successful portraitist who had work in major galleries. Olinsky was born in Elizabethgrad (Kirovohrad in the Ukraine) and emigrated with his family when he was twelve. Just after Alexander III ascended the throne, in April 1881, their town underwent two days of government-sanctioned pogroms. Many Jews were raped or murdered, and their property was destroyed. Olinsky and his family survived and managed to emigrate before an uprising in 1905 when many more Jews met their death. Given Olinsky’s painful experience with anti-Semitism, it is not surprising that he often emphasized his Russian origins over his Jewish identity.53
Luckily for Olinsky, his family settled in New York, where he enrolled at the academy under the artists J. Alden Weir, George W. Maynard, and Robert Vonnoh. He also did a stint working for John La Farge, helping to make both murals and stained glass. Olinsky’s portraits and figure paintings, while academic in style, do show the influence of impressionism. He was purportedly so successful as a portraitist that he sometimes had no work for sale in his studio. He was represented by major New York art dealers such as the Macbeth and Grand Central galleries. Middle-aged, established, and set in his ways, Olinsky nonetheless provided Krasner with a link to her family’s ethnicity. His “Russian” profile at the academy may have represented a new possibility of assimilation and social acceptance for Krasner, whose own family was much more identified with Jewish insularity and isolation. Still, Olinsky offered no new aesthetic direction she could call her own.
That autumn Krasner added a fourth class that would occasion a significant turn in her artistic development—Still Life, taught with criticisms on Wednesday afternoons by the septuagenarian William S. Robinson. Robinson had studied at the Académie Julian in Paris, and the “extra” class that he taught was open to students “sufficiently advanced, whenever they desire to paint from the still life model.” Attendance was required for three afternoons during the week.
Meanwhile Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Seurat were featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s inaugural show on Friday, November 8, 1929. Throngs attended the opening, and the museum announced that it was open free to the public for the day.54 The show’s ninety-eight pictures were revelatory to many, who had to seek them out in the museum’s first quarters, a few rented rooms on the twelfth floor of the Heckscher Building at 730 Fifth Avenue. The museum’s director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., told the press that “several art connoisseurs who had been known for their antipathy to modern painting were ‘converted’ after seeing the exhibition.”55
Founded by three progressive and socially prominent women—Miss Lillie P. Bliss, Mrs. Cornelius J. (Mary Quinn) Sullivan, and Mrs. John D. (Abby Aldrich) Rockefeller, Jr.—the Modern challenged the conservative outlook of the National Academy. Curious and rebellious young artists like Krasner would naturally be attracted to the promise of a new aesthetic freedom.
Krasner went to the newly opened museum that Saturday with a group of classmates. “We disbanded after leaving the show, and there was no time to compare notes. But on Monday morning we met again at the academy. Nothing was said, but the after-affects were automatic. We ripped down the red and green velvet curtains—they were always behind everything from the wall into the middle of the room. The model came in, he was a Negro, and wearing a brightly checked lumberjacket. He started to take it off, but we all shouted ‘No! Keep your jacket on!’”56 She often spoke of how encountering “live Matisses and Picassos” had an immediate effect on her and had inspired the students, who “decided to do what we saw in front of us.”57
She delighted in telling how, when their portrait instructor, Sydney Edward Dickinson, showed up to give the next criticism, “he was so irritated with what he saw that…he picked up somebody’s brushes and hurled them across the room, saying, ‘I can’t teach you people anything’ and left.”58 Dickinson’s angry response to the students’ visual provocation was particularly startling. Krasner had described him as “a very charming, delightful man, who practically never raised his voice. He was extremely patient.”59
Having studied portrait and still life painting with the conservative William Merritt Chase and figure drawing with the traditionalist George Bridgman, Dickinson was a successful painter of society portraits, but he could not accept modernism.60
Krasner’s work in her still life class suggests that she treasured MoMA’s catalogue long after the show came down. She painted floral and fruit subjects including Still Life with Apples and Easter Lillies, both using a darker palette, though in the latter she daubed orange on the green cloth beneath the vase. However, both Krasner’s modeling of her Apples and her decision to tilt the tabletop toward the picture plane suggest that she had been looking with care at both Cézanne and Gauguin. Krasner signed Easter Lillies as “L. Krassner” boldly on the bottom right.
At the Modern’s inaugural show, Krasner would have seen at least six still life images of Cézanne’s apples. Two of them probably had an impact on her. In Krasner’s Apples still life, she depicts apples piled on a plate seen from above. Her decision to place a single apple to the left, apart from the others on a cloth that does not lie flat, appears to echo a Cézanne then owned by Joseph Winterbotham and on loan for the show. Another Cézanne, from the Étienne Bignou Collection, has a similar arrangement of apples piled on a plate also repeating the visual emphasis on the table’s back edge across the canvas. Krasner’s decision to tip both the table and the plate forward, however, is actually closer to Gauguin’s still life in his Portrait of Meyer de Haan, which was both in the show and reproduced in the catalogue.
“It was an upheaval for me,” Krasner exclaimed, speaking of modern painting, “something like reading Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. A freeing…an opening of a door.
I can’t say what it was, exactly, that I recognized, any more than some years earlier I could have said why it was I wanted to have anything to do with art. But one thing, beyond the aesthetic impact: seeing those French paintings stirred my anger against any form of provincialism. When I hailed those masters I didn’t care if they were French or what they were.”61
Krasner also had problems with the academy beyond aesthetic differences. Even the rules that governed painting in still life made her angry. For example, she learned that anyone wanting to paint still life with fish had to do it in the basement, where it was cooler and the fish were slower to rot. The problem was that no women were allowed downstairs. “That was the first time I had experienced real separation as an artist, and it infuriated me. You’re not being allowed to paint a…fish because you’re a woman. It reminded me of being in the synagogue and being told to go up not downstairs. That kind of thing still riles me, and it still comes up.”62
In protest, Krasner, the fishmonger’s daughter, made the forbidden foray into the basement to paint fish with her pal Eda Mirsky, a star student. The faculty was so offended by the girls’ rebellious gesture that it suspended them on December 7, 1929, for “painting figures without permission.” It took the signature of “CCC”—their teacher Charles Courtney Curran—to restore their student status after the suspension. In an interview with Eda Mirsky when she was ninety-nine years old, the artist beamed at the thought of her youthful act of defiance with Krasner. She insisted that it was the only time she got in trouble.63 Surprisingly, Krasner later interpreted the experience differently, saying, “I had absolutely no consciousness of being discriminated against until abstract expressionism came into blossom.”64 This was one of her rare inconsistent moments, which may have sprung from her thinking in a different context.
If Krasner’s rebellious attitude kept her from winning any prizes at the academy, it did not prevent Eda Mirsky’s recognition there—at least the small prizes that they allowed for women. As for Krasner, by her second term in 1929, she was made a “monitor,” which helped to pay for her materials and other expenses. According to Slobodkina, monitors were usually chosen by the students in a class.65 But a teacher, if displeased, could surely replace the monitor.