Lee Krasner

by Gail Levin

  Monroe wrote that Krasner chaired many meetings and was “known to be very militant in union fights with government.” Monroe’s notes state that Krasner “headed committee to get fired (pink slip) artists back on WPA. By & large chairman ran an open meeting but when a crucial issue was on floor, discussion was controlled—through chairman (‘via me’) by selecting speakers from sea of hands on the floor. She was known not to be in party nor under strict control, never attended ‘inner inner sanctum.’”129

  Krasner recalled that after she had been relieved of her work with the WPA, she was on a committee of three or five people elected to meet with the WPA to get union members first priority in being rehired. When she found that her name had not made the list for reinstatement, she complained to an executive board member of the Artists Union that she was being overlooked. Her name was put on the list for reinstatement at the next meeting, where the director, Audrey McMahon, instructed her, “Miss Krasner this is something that you should discuss with your union, not me.”130 Then, weeks after being told that the union’s policy was that active members of the Artists Union, not Communist Party members, got preference, a board member told her, “[Communist] Party members are being reinstated first.” Just before a meeting of the union was to begin, she told the board member, “What a dirty little trick! I am going to get up on the platform and inform membership what you just told me.” He warned her not to do it, and she said, “Can’t stop me.” To which he replied, “OK you’ll be on the job next week.” He kept his word, and she was reinstated the following week.131 That was a turning point for Krasner, who became less active in the union.

  Years later, Krasner recalled a regular Wednesday-night meeting of the union in 1935 or 1936 when she questioned an issue on the floor only to hear several shouts of “Trotskyite.” She didn’t know much about politics, but the label so angered her that she actually began to read Trotsky. From the publication dates of books in her library—Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution (1936), and Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? (1937)—this angry encounter at the union meeting may have come in late 1935 or in 1936.132 The artist Bernarda Bryson recommended particular works of Trotsky to Krasner, who in turn urged them on Pantuhoff.133 Krasner also kept two books by Karl Marx: Class Struggle in France (which is inscribed “Igor Pantuhoff”) and The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Marxist Library v. 35), as well as Nikolai Bukharin’s Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology (New York, 1934) and Lincoln Steffens’s autobiography of 1931.

  From Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed, Krasner could understand his views on nationalism and culture:

  The official formula reads: Culture should be socialist in content, national in form. As to the content of a socialist culture, however, only certain more or less happy guesses are possible. Nobody can grow that culture upon an inadequate economic foundation. Art is far less capable than science of anticipating the future. In any case, such prescriptions as, “portray the construction of the future,” “indicate the road to socialism,” “make over mankind,” give little more to the creative imagination than does the price list of a hardware store, or a railroad timetable.134

  Krasner made clear her attitude toward Trotsky and Siqueiros in a 1975 videotaped interview with Christopher Crosman, then on the staff of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. He asked her directly about “unsubstantiated rumors floating around in Pollock’s name…. The Mexican muralist Siqueiros was being sought by the American authorities, the FBI, I suppose, with regards to an attempted assassination plot against Trotsky and that Pollock had hid him out for maybe a day or two in his apartment. Have you ever heard anything to that effect before?”

  “I have and it’s not true because I was already living with Pollock at that point,” she responded in good humor, but definitively.

  “I guess that pretty well nails that rumor down,” replied Crosman, as Krasner volunteered:

  “It’s a fact that Siqueiros was being sought and was accused directly of being tied into the assassination. He was not—He was not hidden out in Pollock’s studio.” She chuckled, adding, “I wouldn’t have allowed it if nothing else because I was a great admirer of Trotsky’s.” She closed her sentence with a smile, evidently not particularly annoyed by the question.135

  Unfortunately, Crosman missed the chance to point out to Krasner that in fact she was not yet living with Pollock when the unsuccessful attempt on Trotsky’s life was made on May 24, 1940, nor by August 20, the day of Trotsky’s assassination. Another curator says that Krasner “was particularly troubled that Pollock had admitted aiding Siqueiros during the time he was hiding from the police,” and that she “brought this fact up several times” during a visit in the summer of 1977. If so, then she reversed herself merely two years after denying this same story on camera.136

  If Trotsky’s ideas did not prompt her to reject nationalism in art along with socialist realism, they must at least have reinforced her convictions. Krasner did not value the accessible in art and instead favored the artist’s personal expression. According to Trotsky, “The national form of an art is identical with its universal accessibility.” He denies the ideological decree that what the public wants must be the inspiration for significant art, which is what the Soviet propaganda paper, Pravda, dictated to artists.137

  Trotskyism in America dates back to October 27, 1928, when the party expelled three leaders who had criticized the leadership of Joseph Stalin and sought to return to Lenin’s original ideas. By 1933, the Trotskyists began to influence American workers with their well-orchestrated campaign against the rise of fascism in Germany. Intellectuals, such as those involved in the journal Partisan Review, joined the Trotskyists, whose influence grew.

  Krasner’s acquaintance Lionel Abel recounted that “in the spiritual life of the city during the thirties, the most important question discussed was whether to defend the Stalin government against those who criticized it, or to join the critics of that government’s policies, the most important of whom was Leon Trotsky. So the Trotsky-Stalin controversy became the most bitterly discussed and violently argued issue where ever radical politics were discussed, and they were discussed in the city streets and cafeterias, in the unions and at universities.”138 The Trotskyists had their largest impact in America between 1937 and 1940, before Trotsky was assassinated on August 20, 1940, in Mexico by a Comintern agent.139

  “Artists and writers were very radical in that particular period,” recalled Reuben Kadish. “I, for instance, was doing things for the Communist Party even though I wasn’t a member. I wasn’t alone. The party at that particular time was very forceful in bringing together the efforts of union people and artists. If you went through those areas that suffered fantastically and saw the bread lines and saw the things that nobody else was doing anything about, you might have been sympathetic to the party, too.”140

  Willem de Kooning recalled, “I was no Communist, no Stalinist. I was not so opposed to Russian art in principle, but all those other guys had made me a modern…. There were the ardent people like [William] Gropper, and they were so rigid, so doctrinaire. I remember their jeering at Gorky on the night when he stood up to speak at a union meeting.”141 Nonetheless, another friend recalled that Gorky was actively interested in the Spanish Civil War and took part in demonstrations.142

  The Spanish Civil War (1936–39) motivated 2,800 Americans to voluntarily join the fight to defend the Spanish Republic against a military rebellion led by Francisco Franco, who was being assisted by the fascists Hitler and Mussolini. “In the Artists Union days, Spain was an issue,” Krasner recalled. “Fellow artists went to Spain. You put things on the line.”143 Trotskyists in the Socialist Party quickly rallied to the Spanish workers’ revolution and funded a military unit to join the battle in Spain.144

  Joris Ivens’s film Spanish Earth, which was shown in 1937, further raised awareness in America. On December 19, 1937, Picasso’s statement about the Span
ish Republican Government’s struggle was read to the American Artists Congress in New York. As director of Madrid’s Prado Museum, Picasso assured the artists that “the democratic government of the Spanish Republic has taken all the necessary measures to protect the artistic treasures of Spain during the cruel and unjust war. While rebel planes have dropped incendiary bombs on our museums, the people and the military at the risk of their lives, have rescued the works of art and placed them in security.”

  Picasso addressed artists directly when he said “artists who live and work with spiritual values cannot and should not remain indifferent to a conflict in which the highest values of humanity and civilization are at stake.”145 Of the 2,800 Americans who went to Spain, many joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (Battalion), which fought from 1937 through 1938 against the rebel Nationalists. Others volunteered as doctors, nurses, medical technicians, and ambulance drivers.

  Volunteers came from all walks of life and included visual artists such as Joseph Vogel from the National Academy and Emanuel Hochberg.146 Krasner surely recalled that she and Vogel had both studied with Leon Kroll. Vogel recalled, “Out of a sense of sheer belief in social justice…. I found there were others with me and some of them lost their lives. Paul Block lost his life. A few other artists lost their lives there…. There were two others, a man by the name of Taylor…. There were others who never came back.”147

  The artists who responded to the Spanish Civil War and those who left for the front made a lasting impression on Krasner. The American Friends of Spanish Democracy, whose supporters included the influential critics Waldo Frank and Lewis Mumford and the philosopher John Dewey, donated an art award in 1937 to help focus public attention on the events in Spain. This was the same year that Joan Miró produced The Reaper, his famous mural for the Spanish Republican pavilion at the Paris International Exposition. He then produced a related poster of a raised clenched fist with the words “Aidez Espagne [Help Spain].” The image was also published by the journal Cahiers d’Art.

  In the same pavilion Picasso showed his monumental black and white painting Guernica (1937), which depicts the Nazi bombing on market day in April 1937 of this Basque town. The Nazis bombed the town, which was not a military objective, in order to spread terror.

  Though Krasner was politically active, her painting was not explicitly political. “There was the Spanish Civil War, the clash of fascism and communism. In theory, we were sympathetic to the Russian Revolution—the socialist idea as against the fascist idea, naturally,” she remarked. “Then came complications like Stalinism being the betrayal of the revolution. I, for one, didn’t feel my art had to reflect my political point of view. I didn’t feel like I was purifying the world at all. No, I was just going about my business and my business seemed to be in the direction of abstraction.”148

  Krasner’s friend Balcomb Greene recalled, “We spent long evenings in arguing and discussing painting. A great many were opposed to social realism. I remember Gorky, in particular, was strongly of this opinion.” Greene had written for Art Front, the union’s magazine, and served as the union president for a year.149 “Meetings grew very excited with discussions on art and politics,” he reflected. “There was considerable difficulty in combating attempts of the Communist members to take over the union. It was hard to know exactly who they were at times, some but not all were openly Communists. You had to judge by a man’s actions in the long run. It was this political rough stuff that put the artists off the Communist Party.”150

  Art Front magazine, the union’s official publication, “was a broad cultural publication for which many very prominent people, international names from Man Ray to Léger, would write.”151 The journal did not promote art as propaganda but instead suggested that modernist forms themselves could be progressive, or even revolutionary.152 Spivak recalled how the artist Hugo Gellert tried to make Art Front a completely proletarian magazine and that it was sold at the union parade on May Day. Circulation reached about three thousand.

  The Art Front cover for March 1936 featured Igor Pantuhoff’s painting Ventilator No. 1, which, according to the caption, he painted for the Federal Art Project. Pantuhoff’s composition and subject matter, depicting the rooftop of an urban building with water towers and chimneys, were quite close to Krasner’s painting Fourteenth Street, of 1934. Both Krasner and Pantuhoff exploit a worm’s eye perspective, looking up at the water towers from the rooftop below. Although it is not known when Pantuhoff actually painted the work, his composition with repeated arches and brick walls visible through them suggests that he had just seen the show featuring twenty-six of Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York, which was reviewed in Art Front for January 1936 by the artist Joe Solman. Solman had praised both de Chirico’s “use of perspective” and his “fertile imagination.”153

  By January 1936, Harold Rosenberg had become a member of the Art Front editorial board alongside Solman, Joseph Gower, Murray Hantman, Jacob Kainen, Balcomb Greene, J. Yeargens, and Clarence Weinstock. Rosenberg had been added to the board by Spivak, who then resigned in February. Rosenberg became a regular contributor and wrote an essay, “The Wit of William Gropper,” for the March issue with Pantuhoff’s cover.154

  In that same March issue, Art Front reported that on the WPA project in New York City, artists “are being paid $103.40 a month, supervisors of murals, $115.00, for a 24-hour week.” The Artists Union was then pressing hard “for a $2.00 hour-rate, 15-hour minimum week.”155 Because private patronage had all but dried up, government patronage was the artists’ only plausible salvation. Thus the union proposed that its funds be spent for “the benefit of the public, in the form of mural painting; decoration and sculpture in public buildings; the teaching of arts and crafts for children and adults; traveling exhibitions of paintings, drawings, small sculpture.”156

  Also featured in this March issue was Meyer Schapiro’s article “Race, Nationality, and Art,” in which he rejected nationalism. Schapiro condemned both the racialist theories of fascism that “call constantly on the traditions of art” and American critics who restricted what was “American” to those of “Anglo-Saxon blood.” He warned against the perils of racial antagonism, used as a means to weaken the masses and leave “untouched the original relations of rich and poor.”157

  Schapiro’s argument resonated with Krasner, who recalled these years not just as a time of austerity but also as a time of discovery. “At that point, the center of art for Gorky, de Kooning, and myself was the School of Paris. We used to go to shows at the Matisse and Valentine Dudensing galleries all the time.”158

  Dudensing, which became known as the Valentine Gallery around the time it showed Guernica, had presented exhibitions of Matisse in 1927 and 1928 and also hired Pierre Matisse, the artist’s son, then only in his twenties, to organize shows of contemporary French painting during the late 1920s. Then Pierre Matisse opened his own gallery in October 1931.159

  While living with Pantuhoff, Krasner hung out with fellow vanguard artists such as Gorky and de Kooning at the Jumble Shop, the venerable Village eatery then at 28 West Eighth Street. Krasner once quipped, “You didn’t get a seat at the table unless you thought Picasso was a god.”160 Of the 1930s, she recalled: “I knew de Kooning and I went to his studio so I knew about de Kooning’s work. But only a little handful knew about it, you know. Maybe there were ten people who knew about it. That’s a lot. There wasn’t a movement. And Gorky one knew about and one went to his studio or sat and drank beer with him at the Jumble Shop and enthused about Picasso and the latest painting of Picasso’s or Giotto, if that came up, or Ingres.”161

  Krasner does not say so, but she probably frequented the Jumble Shop with Pantuhoff: “We used to go there in the evening, settle down around the table, drink our beer, and have our big number on, say, Picasso. If Gorky was there, he dominated the conversation. And with Gorky, it was always Picasso.”162

  Another time, Krasner said of Gorky, “I had a great de
al of fights with Arshile. Oh yes, it wasn’t a relationship which always flowed in glowing terms. These arguments might, at some point, involve philosophies of art. At that point, the image of Picasso was dominating the art world very strongly and one might feel, well maybe Matisse is really a better painter.”163

  The Jumble Shop was a longtime bohemian resort with an old-fashioned bar and flowery tablecloths. A small private dining room featured fanciful murals of nightlife, painted in 1934 by Guy Pène du Bois.164 The shop was known for its “art-while-you-eat policy.”165 Other habitués ranged from the modernist Burgoyne Diller to the traditionalist Henry Varnum Poor.166 Group shows of contemporary American artists were regularly held (and noted in the weekly art columns). One could nurse a cup of coffee over a long conversation. The artists on view were not avant-garde or abstractionists, and the shows repeatedly featured the same circle, usually chosen by the troika, Guy Pène du Bois, H. E. Schnakenberg, and Reginald Marsh, who were representational artists that showed at the conservative Whitney Museum of American Art just down the street.

  An exception to usual representational fare happened only occasionally when, for example, the abstract painter I. Rice Pereira exhibited at a Jumble show. A Jewish woman who was just six years older than Krasner, Pereira used the initial I instead of Irene to avoid gender discrimination.167 Krasner was aware of Pereira’s work.168 Jumble shows frequently included women, perhaps because both the stakes and the prices were low.169

  The critic Lionel Abel also recalled the Jumble Shop in the 1930s, but the conversations focused on names like the socialist Morris Hillquit, the Communist Earl Browder, and Karl Marx, whom they dubbed “Charlie.”170 The more conservative, representational painters must have clustered at still another table. As the shop’s name might seem to imply, its customers were politically and aesthetically diverse. Harold Rosenberg described it as “for a more respectable element who had enough dough to buy a beer or something, you know. Most of us didn’t have very much money to spend, so we weren’t likely to go to a place that had middle-class tastes…. But Stuart Davis used to hang around in the Jumble Shop, and a few other guys, you know, the older guys who already had some cash.”171