by Gail Levin
Krasner was not as fragile as the young women who pursued Bodenheim. She always maintained that her parents were indifferent to her career choice as long as she made no demands upon them. Hence she was less vulnerable to judgments from powerful or established men in the art world. She had a healthy sense of her own ability and her work’s value, even if others initially failed to agree. She repeatedly brushed off her teachers’ negative criticisms and pushed ahead. Self-confidence and firm resolve were, in the end, more valuable than talent alone. Sometimes, when asked how she dealt with such issues, she would respond, “I guess that I’m just a tough cookie.”98
FIVE
Enduring the Great Depression, 1932–36
Lee Krasner with her nieces Muriel Stein and Bernice Stein and her nephew (their half brother), Ronald Stein, in her parents’ garden in Huntington, Long Island, c. 1934–36.
KRASNER “MOVED IN TOGETHER” WITH PANTUHOFF ON HIS RETURN from Europe, where he went in the spring of 1930 on the traveling scholarship that the academy had awarded him.1 Their relationship would prove momentous and lasting. Years later she described the relationship as “a togetherness.”2 And many, including Krasner’s parents, saw this togetherness as marriage. At times even Krasner called herself “Mrs. Igor Pantuhoff,” making it easy for acquaintances to assume something that wasn’t true. In the late 1940s, Pantuhoff would be introduced to Joop Sanders as “the former husband of Lee Krasner” by either Willem de Kooning or Aristodimos Kaldis.3
Companionship without the legal ties of marriage was trendy at this time. New ideas about the relations of the sexes both within and outside of marriage generated a lot of discussion and controversy. In 1927 The Companionate Marriage, a book written by Ben Lindsey and Wainwright Evans, urged legal marriage, birth control, counseling, and divorce if all else failed, but it admitted alternatives to the Victorian model, which served to protect child-bearing and child rearing.4 Krasner, having watched her mother struggle to support and care for a large family and having to cope with the Depression’s economic hardships herself, did not appear to obsess over dreams of motherhood. She seemed suited to her relationship with Pantuhoff.
Krasner did take an active part in raising the Stein children—her nieces Muriel and Bernice and nephew Ronnie. Muriel recalls that her Aunt Lee sometimes brought Igor along to the family Passover seders. Muriel adored both her aunt and Igor, whom she described as “such a character, charming, so charming.”5 She remembers when her aunt took her to the Paramount Theatre at Times Square to see Ella Fitzgerald and Chick Webb, the orchestra leader who became Fitzgerald’s mentor.6 Muriel’s father and her stepmother, Ruth, wondered about Lee: “Where did she come from?” They observed that Lee “dressed magnificently,” wearing makeup and high heels. It was a flare for style that none in her family could match, but which owed much to her collaboration with Igor.7
Without their own children, there was nothing to tie Lee and Igor together. According to contemporary theorists, the woman had to keep “the flame of romance alive.” A woman’s “status must be won and rewon by personality and attractiveness if she is to get and keep a husband under the dissolving bans of modern marriage,” wrote sociologist Robert S. Lynd, an observer of American customs during the 1920s.8 To meet this challenge, Krasner brought an outgoing personality, keen intelligence, and a dry wit. Though not blessed with a conventionally beautiful face or classic “Anglo-Saxon” features, she had a stunning slim figure. Her hair was auburn and luxuriant. Many friends remarked on her “animal energy,” “voluptuousness,” and “sex appeal,” which is evident in some early photographs.9
Judging simply from a gouache sketch Igor did of her posing in a sultry profile, he felt the same way. In Krasner he must have also found the kind of physical abandon that satisfied his own often-expressed sexuality. “With Igor, Lee had a sparkle and gaiety,” said Fritz Bultman, although he claimed to have heard Igor remark in her presence: “I like being with an ugly woman because it makes me feel more handsome.”10 It’s hard to fathom why Pantuhoff felt so insecure as to make a comment like this—he was tall, slender, and some even said he was as handsome as a movie star. Pantuhoff clearly found in Krasner’s self-assurance a quality he needed. He was invested in the relationship and made sure that Krasner exuded style. He helped her apply elaborate makeup and picked out her clothes, including colorful stockings to show off her legs.
But despite their relationship’s sexual sparkle, it suffered from the economic challenges of the Depression. Things were already so bleak for artists in 1932 that a committee formed to raise money to see that artists and writers, “who were quite literally starving,” could have “one square meal a day,” recalled Krasner’s academy classmate Balcomb Greene, the son of a Methodist minister, who became her colleague in several artists’ groups. Eating in McFadden’s restaurant, which had “an idea about the nutritional value of wheat germ,” recalled the artist Bob Jonas, who met Krasner during the 1930s, meant “asking for hot water in a bowl,” to which they would add “ketchup, salt, pepper, anything that was around.”11 “It was a period of great privation, hunger stalked the country, and that’s not putting it dramatically, but that’s a fact,” said Boris Gorelick, who had been with Krasner at the academy. “Millions of people were involved in very desperate circumstances, and the professions were down the drain because they were at the bottom of the economic ladder, especially the art profession.”12
“After the ’29 crash, there was a tremendous amount of unemployment in New York. There were a lot of people who were willing to do anything for a quarter. There were the usual apple sellers, and there were guys shoveling snow for the twenty-five cents or whatever it was they could get as a handout. There were people working in restaurants for just the room and board,” recalled the artist Reuben Kadish.13 At the time, he was close to the Dutch immigrant Willem de Kooning and to Jackson Pollock.
“None of us were established in any way,” Kadish remembered. “De Kooning was a house painter, and Jackson was doing odd jobs and getting by…. There was a lot of bartering going on. People bartered with doctors and dentists, but not Jackson. Jack had such a highly developed sense of professionalism that even then there wasn’t any question of him going to Washington Square and hanging a painting over the railing. He’d never go to the market with a painting and trade it for a bowl of soup. Others would.”14
Artists were frequently evicted from their simple quarters. Some began to help others by returning their furniture, which had been placed out on the streets. With all the economic tension, art was the last thing that most people thought about. Artists needed work. In his acceptance speech before the Democratic National Convention on July 2, 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised to help, announcing “I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people…. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.”15
As president he would eventually include visual artists among the recipients of federal help.
During this time, Krasner was still at City College with the ultimate goal of working toward her teaching certificate. She was waitressing, but she was also taking life classes with the painter Job Goodman, a Russian-born Jew who had emigrated in 1905 at the age of eight. He had studied at the Art Students League and later taught there.16 After returning from a Guggenheim grant to the Netherlands and Belgium, he became the director of art instruction at Greenwich House, which had been founded by social reformers in 1902, to improve living conditions among the immigrants who then populated Greenwich Village. From the start, Greenwich House held a strong commitment to the arts “as a dynamic stimulus for cultural enrichment and individual growth.”17
Goodman stressed the “hollow and bump” method he had learned from the American artist Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League. It was a method adapted by Benton from the abstract painters known as Synchromists (whose name for themselves meant “with color,” as symphony means “with sound”) with whom he exhib
ited in New York during the 1910s.18 The Synchromists Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright had painted abstractions based on figures by Michelangelo, whose work they studied attentively. Benton adapted their practice and later stressed Michelangelo’s forms with his own students at the Art Students League, among whom in 1932 were Axel Horn and Pollock. In one exercise, Horn, recalled analyzing famous works of art, “stressing the interplay in the various forms by simplifying and accentuating changes in plane.” Michelangelo was one of the “popular subjects.”19 Benton wrote of his “continued study of Michelangelo’s sculptural structures, which soon was expanded to his paintings.”20
In Goodman’s class, Krasner produced a copy of one of Michelangelo’s ignudi flanking the creation of Eve on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. While study of Michelangelo’s forms was a standard assignment for a Benton disciple like Goodman, he might have noted the irony of Krasner’s choice of subject and of the assignment itself. At the time, there was a slight controversy surrounding a number of rotogravure reproductions of Michelangelo’s ceiling that had been held up by United States Customs, which charged that the nudes were “obscene.” What really mattered, according to a New York Times article covering the controversy, was that the art importer was “dumping” reproductions of a foreigner’s art “on this country at a time when thousands of American artists are without a market for their work. We have talent enough in this country to produce a fair substitute for the Sistine paintings.”21
Goodman’s drawing classes also attracted Harold Rosenberg (whom Krasner had met at Sam Johnson’s) to Greenwich House. “There was a fellow teaching there and they had a live model, so we’d go there in the afternoon and draw a bit, you know,” Rosenberg later said. “I think it was just a matter of liking to do it, no particular aim in mind. I liked to draw. They had the model; all you had to do is register.”22
Apart from Michelangelo, Krasner focused on drawing from life, working mainly in Conté crayon. She drew the male and female nude life models with candor and ease. Although Goodman taught courses also in murals and painting in oil and tempera, buying paint was also too costly at this time. Krasner’s family was in no position to help her, so she depended on her own labors and wit, and was not able to hire her own model. When she later quipped about those customers at Sam Johnson’s who were lousy tippers, she was talking about the difference between being able to pay for paint herself or having to borrow from her friends who had very little to lend.
Krasner gravitated toward others suffering poverty, and eventually they organized to address their plight. In 1932, the Society of Independent Artists made front-page news by deciding to barter work in exchange for some necessities of life. “Artists are always on the bread line, but this year they are in even worse straits than usual and we hope to make sales a special feature of the show. Dental services will be one of the most welcome media of exchange for works of art. Medical care and clothing will also be acceptable. Best of all, however, will be the offer of rent for six months or a year,” declared a spokesperson.23
In the summer of 1933 the John Reed Club, which had been founded in 1929 as a Communist organization of artists and writers and was named for the American journalist, poet, and Communist activist, whose firsthand account of the Bolshevik revolution is called Ten Days That Shook the World, gave birth to the Unemployed Artists Group. Creation of the group was perhaps prompted by the Cultural Committee of the Communist Party, to act as the “Emergency Work Bureau Artists Group, the bargaining unit for artists on government projects.”24 After holding meetings in various halls for a few months, it changed its name to the Artists Union in February 1934, when it rented a loft in Chelsea.25 The founders argued “that in presenting resolutions to the State, numbers and organized strength counted.”26
Boris Gorelick, who served as its president for three years, said that “it started in New York with possibly twenty-five or thirty people, but it quickly grew into an organization of about fifteen hundred to two thousand people with auxiliary groups which included women as separate sympathetic groups, students, young students in the art field who also became members of auxiliary groups.”27 Krasner favored the Artists Union because it looked out for artists’ rights.
“The big meetings at the Artists Union…were held in a place called Germania Hall, on Third Avenue,” recalled an artist named Irving Block. “That’s an old parlor and beer hall, and they had a big meeting hall in the back, and they would have these meetings and they would go on interminably. They would begin by talking about the needs of the art project, about the artist role in society, and then they would just end up by general argument that the brushes were no damned good and the paints were no good.”28
One issue raised at the Artists Union was that “easel” artists were lending to shows that attracted crowds to be exploited by businesses. The union contended that these artists should receive direct payment for participation, as would commercial artists or mural painters for their work. Instead, as Max Spivak pointed out in an article he wrote for the union’s journal, Art Front, sponsors like Wanamaker’s Department Store or Rockefeller Center might support an art show at which “the easel painter is promised ‘pie in the sky’” but instead receives nothing for taking part in “promotional schemes” of “big business.”29
Meanwhile, a combination of forces from the art world and society persuaded the federal government to fund patronage programs for artists as part of the New Deal recovery effort. Established in late 1933 as part of the New Deal, the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) would employ more than 3,700 artists to decorate federal and other public buildings, including post offices “now under construction throughout the country.” “Artists to Adorn Nation’s Buildings” read the headline in the New York Times for December 12, 1933. The article reported a meeting at the home of the painter Edward Bruce, “attended by Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, leaders of American Art, and government officials.”30 Eleanor Roosevelt told the press, “I think this plan has tremendous possibilities for awakening the interest of the people as a whole in art and for developing artistic qualities which have not come to light in the past and for recognizing artists who already have made their names among their fellow-artists, but who have had little recognition from the public at large.”31
Eventually, under various programs administered by the Treasury Department, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and the Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration), more than 10,000 artists and support staff received commissions or salary jobs that rescued many of them from intense poverty. The WPA’s Federal Art Project reflected President Roosevelt’s belief that in order to retain human dignity, people needed jobs rather than direct relief. He later expressed this in a radio address from the White House. “The Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration is a practical relief project which also emphasizes the best tradition of the democratic spirit. The WPA artist, in rendering his own impression of things, speaks also for the spirit of his fellow countrymen everywhere. I think the WPA artist exemplifies with great force the essential place which the arts have in a democratic society such as ours.”32
“Once the WPA jobs were opened to the unemployed,” Lionel Abel recalled, “real change came over the city. The breadlines disappeared, and that was very important because of the psychological effect the lines had had…. The artists were helping the government by their work, saying, there can’t possibly be a sea of blood here, for look, here are works of art!”33 Yet all of the WPA artists, Krasner included, lived with the insecurity of not knowing when a government project would end.
Krasner recalled how she was chosen for her initial job doing illustrations for the Public Works of Art Project. While she was studying with Job Goodman a government official visited the class and announced that there were jobs for indigent artists. She immediately raised her hand and was told to report for an examination. Given her education, skills, and proven financial need, she was able to meet the criteria fo
r acceptance.34 Rosenberg described a similar experience at Greenwich House: “So I was there drawing one afternoon and a guy came rushing in like a messenger in an old-fashioned play, who announced that they were hiring artists up at the College Art Association…the agency appointed…to run the project in New York.”35
In January 1934, Krasner attained a paid position at the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP). She worked through March, assisting a geology professor doing a book on rocks.36 She was “drawing fossils,” she recalled, “so that I was working [on] very detailed drawing. I don’t remember how long it lasted as it was an extensive project with a loft full of artists working on these things.”37 The assignment brought back girlhood memories of working from nature at Washington Irving High School. “There I was with a hard pencil, and what came to me was the memory of all those butterflies and beetles, only now in more abstract form. I was happy as a lark doing that stuff!”38 She earned $23.65 per week, which was enough to survive, even thrive, compared to the dire straits of life without the Project.
Under the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA), which took over from the PWAP in April, Krasner began as a teacher, but was soon reassigned as an artist. Her salary was a weekly wage of $24.00 for “thirty to thirty-nine hours’ work, that is, about $4.80 per day.” The Artists Union raised the issue that only pressure from a strong union would give artists a chance to retain the union wage scale. An article in Art Front illustrated the meager artist’s wage when compared to those of other skilled workers. “Union plumbers, for instance, receive $12.00 per day, house painters receive $11.20, plasterers, $12.00, stone carvers, $14.00. The Artists Union, after careful consideration of comparative wages, has determined on $2.00 per hour as a fair wage for artists, for a maximum 30-hour, and a minimum 12-hour week. Artists who now receive $24.00 for a 30-hour week will, under the new rate, receive the same sum for 12 hours of work.”39