by Gail Levin
Krasner also became interested in Piet Mondrian’s work. Though Hofmann had not shown any of his students his own paintings, Krasner was influenced by one of Hofmann’s classroom sessions on how Mondrian used space to compress nature into a few, stark horizontal and vertical lines and rectangles. Hofmann praised Mondrian as “the architect of modern painting”36 and taught that “Mondrian brought plastic art to ultimate purity.”37
Krasner sometimes worked in a palette limited to the primary colors—red, yellow, and blue—plus black and white, like Mondrian’s geometric De Stijl abstractions: “I might do a vertical or horizontal measurement of space; something when Mondrian was up front for me so it looked like a Mondrian but he [Hofmann] would want the negative elements to conform to what was absolutely in front of me; no leeway whatsoever. After a while this came to disturb me on quite a lot of levels.”38
Eventually she turned out a painting that went beyond Mondrian, embodying the spatial concepts that Hofmann taught and creating planes that appeared to move in space. With this work, she anticipated Hofmann’s own painting by about two decades—all without knowledge of how her teacher painted.39 Olinsey recalled of Krasner: “She always made the fur fly.”40
Later, when asked if she had liked Hofmann as a teacher, Krasner reflected, “I did at first, and then I really got very irritated with him at several levels. One was his rigidity of working within the given sphere; he didn’t care how abstract you went—that is, there were many times when I reduced the model in front of me. You had to work rigidly from what was in front of you—still life or model. He insisted on it.”41 She complained that “he would come up to your drawing; pick up your charcoal and start working on top of the thing to make his corrections.”42
Krasner was irritated with how Hofmann demonstrated what students should be doing by drawing on their sketches. Hofmann roamed through the classroom on the lookout for a work he considered unsuccessful. He was known to erase entire sections of a student’s work or to add his own corrections, hoping to show how to activate space and his system of “push and pull.”43
On balance, Krasner appreciated Hofmann. She told one interviewer that “Hofmann was the first person who said encouraging things to me about my work.”44 She liked the fact that he was teaching cubism. Reflecting, she concluded that it was analytical, not synthetic cubism, meaning that she viewed him as teaching how Picasso and Braque first analyzed and reduced observed forms into geometric shapes on a two-dimensional picture surface rather than how they and others later (after 1912) constructed compositions and collages out of shapes often achieving more decorative effects.
Others seemed to be taking her seriously as well. Harold Rosenberg showed his respect when he introduced her to the art critic Clement Greenberg at a party, taking her aside and saying, “That guy wants to know about painting, talk to him about painting.” Greenberg later admitted that he was in awe of Krasner’s strength of character: “Just her presence. With this pure un-accented English. I learned a lot from that too. Her strict eye. And she was good [at] looking at art.”45 At the time, Krasner suggested that Greenberg attend Hofmann’s Friday lectures, which were open to all.46 Greenberg went and soon pronounced that no one in the United States understood cubism as well as Hofmann.47
Greenberg also signed up to take life drawing classes taught by Pantuhoff for the WPA.48 Pantuhoff himself had already studied with Hofmann and moved on. He was not that open to Hofmann’s engagement with abstraction and still held on to realistic representation. Painting portraits gave the opportunity to make good money, while there was no market yet for abstract art. Pantuhoff became particularly adept as a society portraitist, since his upper-class manners and good looks won him favor.
Greenberg saw a lot of Krasner, Pantuhoff, and other Hofmann students. Arshire Greenberg also recalled that Krasner and Pantuhoff introduced him to Gorky somewhere on Eighth Street around 1937 or 1938,49 and that Krasner first introduced him to Willem de Kooning. As for her relationship with Pantuhoff, Greenberg thought that Krasner had a “sick soul” and that she always chose weak men such as Pantuhoff, whom he called “a White Russian scamp.” He remembered that she was with Pantuhoff when he first met her and that he had painted portraits. Greenberg liked Krasner’s friend George Mercer even less, going so far as to question his masculinity.50 Even though Greenberg said that he viewed Krasner as “powerful,” he blamed her attraction to such men on her having had a remote father, claiming that this was “the same story I’ve heard from other girls.”51
Hofmann wielded an immense influence over Greenberg, Krasner, and many of his students. She viewed him as “swinging between Picasso and Matisse in terms of what he was saying. Because I’m aware of Picasso, I’m aware of Matisse, by the time I’m working with Hofmann.”52 Through Krasner, and by extension, through Hofmann, these artists became important for Greenberg too. On balance, Krasner credited Hofmann for her development as an artist. “His serious commitment to art supported my own.”53
He in turn remembered her as “one of the best students I ever had,” although he once encouraged her by remarking, “This is so good you would not know it was by a woman.”54 A touch of sexism shows too in his view of her marriage to Pollock: “She gave in all the time. She was very feminine.”55
At Hofmann’s school, Krasner made many of her lifelong friends, such as George McNeil, George Mercer, Perle Fine, Fritz Bultman, Mercedes Carles [Matter], Lillian Olinsey [Kiesler], Ray “Buddha” Kaiser [Eames], and John Little. Just one year older than Lee, Little had come from the tiny town of Sanford, Alabama, near the Florida panhandle. “Often, Lee and I were assigned our working positions on the same side of the studio, and we were free to work on a drawing from the model for a week if need be,”56 Little said later. His continuing respect for her devotion to art buttressed their close friendship. “At once I was attracted by Lee,” Little recalled, “not only by her personality and natural beauty but by a real dedication to her work, by a quiet, smoldering inner rage that seemed to come through in her drawing, and by beautiful bright green stockings—all of which gave her a marked distinction and set her apart from the student body. Yes, she had style.”57
As for McNeil, he had also worked on the Mural Project of the WPA and was active in the Artists Union. He and Krasner both had the abstract painter Burgoyne Diller as their supervisor. Both Krasner and Diller were influenced by Mondrian. Diller was a sympathetic person in a powerful position. Krasner felt a large debt to Diller, whom she praised years later for his “enormous sensitivity to the needs of the painters…. I think he made it possible for more than one artist to continue painting…. He was in some supervisory capacity which made it possible for him to—he was fully aware of the needs of the artist and painting and dealing with something called high administrative jobs.”58 To other women on the project, Diller was known as “Killer-Diller” because, according to one woman, he was “extremely good-looking” and had “at least half of the project ladies running after him.”59
Both Krasner and McNeil agreed that the shows at the Museum of Modern Art in the 1930s were very important, though he claimed Hofmann was his “most important influence.”60 Around this time McNeil shared a loft with Pantuhoff and Krasner at 38 East Ninth Street. By 1936, one of Krasner’s assignments was to finish an abstract mural that Willem de Kooning had started for the WPA. Since she could not afford a space of her own, she was using part of the studio Pantuhoff and McNeil shared to work on de Kooning’s design. “He had to leave [the employ of the WPA] because he was not a United States citizen,” she recalled. “His sketch was about four by six feet. They took it and turned it over to me to blow it up…. I was already working abstractly and Diller would have known that.”61 Krasner probably viewed Diller’s assignment to complete de Kooning’s abstract mural as a more pleasant assignment than working on finishing other artists’ representational schemes. De Kooning, she explained, would “come unofficially to my studio and see what I was doing. It was hard-edged for de
Kooning and very abstract.”62
At least at that time they spoke the same basic aesthetic language.
While attending the Hofmann classes, Krasner remained active in the Artists Union, which she saw as “organized to protect the rights of the artists on the WPA Art Project.”63 Although she worked abstractly, Krasner emphasized, “I as an abstract artist was active politically. And I know many others that were.”64
Krasner’s vivid memories of a meeting of artists in the late 1930s that took place in de Kooning’s studio, a loft on Twenty-second Street, once again demonstrate that she was present during the formative experiences of the abstract expressionists, although most accounts of the movement usually exclude any mention of her or indeed of any other women. Though she was probably present accompanied by Pantuhoff, only she remained an abstract painter, while he became a portraitist.
Gorky called the meeting, and he got up and said, “We have to admit we are bankrupt.”65 Krasner explained, “Gorky felt that perhaps we could as a group do a painting, ‘a composite.’ And when we asked what he meant, he said, ‘Well now, here we are about six or seven of us and there’s one person who can draw better than the others, there’s one who has better ideas than the others, there’s one who is better at color than the others. Now what we have to do is sit and talk this over and come up with a thought and then we all go home and do our separate things and bring them back and then we’ll decide who should draw it, who should paint it, who should color it.’…Well, we never got too far…I don’t think there was a second meeting; or if there was, there was never a third meeting. The canvas never came about.”66
Whether or not Krasner knew it, Gorky had been at the early meetings of the American Abstract Artists (AAA) in 1936, years before she joined. He tried to dominate the meetings, proposing similar “assignments” for the artists, but then not doing them himself. Already an art instructor, Gorky seemed bent on manipulating his colleagues, often through his theatrics and charisma. This time, as Ilya Bolotowsky reported, Gorky’s act backfired. “Gorky used to talk a lot. Gorky told us that the whole idea [of AAA artists exhibiting together] was silly because in art progress is always achieved by the great personalities, and all the rest serve as a kind of floorboard or floor mat for the great men, and our purpose should be to uphold and support and push one worthwhile personality who would survive in history, not waste ourselves on promoting useless careers like our own.”67
It is worth noting that Gorky spoke only about “the great men,” leaving no possibility for Krasner. When Gorky threatened to leave the meeting if the others did not follow his wish not to exhibit as a group, the painter Werner Drewes goaded him to make good on his threat, and he responded by walking out. His loyal friend, de Kooning, withdrew from the AAA in support of Gorky.68 As for Krasner, she was apparently not offended either by Gorky’s sexism or his need to be center stage; she later acknowledged that Gorky and his work “interested me enormously.”69 To the extent that she believed in Gorky’s theory of “the great men,” she might have concluded that if she could not be one, she could marry one.
Gorky, Krasner, Byron Browne, and the painter Mercedes Carles, whom Krasner knew well from the Artists Union activities, sometimes went together to Greek places. “The sailors used to come, and it was colorful and cheap,” recalled Aristodimos Kaldis, a Greek artist and lecturer.70 He remembered Gorky singing old Armenian songs, but he forgot about Pantuhoff, who surely went along.
Due to cutbacks in funding, Krasner received one of the infamous “pink slips” and was terminated by the WPA on July 16, 1937. No other jobs were readily available, so she was relieved to be rehired on August 19, 1937, at the same salary. On September 6, 1938, however, the government slapped on a “pay adjustment,” cutting her wages to $91.10 per month.
After being rehired, Krasner was put on an assignment for a mural in “some high school in Brooklyn.” The theme was history of ships. “It had been conceived and planned by another artist. He left in the middle for some reason. I supervised its completion.” They received preliminary approval for this project on May 9, 1939.
Krasner explained, “The procedure was that an artist got a mural and then he would have anywhere from two to ten assistants, depending on the size of the mural and how many assistants he needed, or she needed. As the project lasted for a long time some of the artists whose sketchbooks had been approved, but the murals hadn’t been executed, and for some reason or another they left the Project, the research had been done, every thing had been done but the mural, the final execution of it.”71
According to Krasner, there were five different mural projects hanging side by side in a shed above a pier, and all the artists worked alongside one another.72 Municipal records document that she and Leonard Seweryn Jenkins worked on two large walls, each six by fifty feet. These were mural-sized oil paintings on canvas, which Krasner recalled as “108 feet long.” They were destined not for a high school, but for a children’s branch of the Brooklyn Public Library in Brownsville.73
“That mural seemed to be two or three miles wide. I worked from the original small sketch and blew it up. I had assistants and we worked on a pier over the river. Eleanor Roosevelt came to see us working there,” she said years later, adding, “that whole experience introduced me to scale—none of the nonsense they call scale today…. Long before I met Pollock too, I had been working that large.”74
Krasner recollected that she “got several of these dirty jobs to do—on the condition that they would give me an abstract mural of my own. To which they consented though there was very little request for abstract murals. You know there were mainly one or two places where they could be placed. This was some radio station I believe…. Unfortunately the public taste did not request abstract murals.”75 Krasner said she’d told Diller she would do the Brooklyn Public Library job “only if you give me a little mural of my own—something abstract—a small abstract panel. Well, he kept his word and gave me a small abstract panel, and I did the sketches and preliminary work, when wham the WPA was ended.”76
Krasner and Pantuhoff continued to visit her parents’ home in Huntington.77 Her niece Rusty Kanokogi remembered seeing her Aunt Lee there with Igor when she was still a small child. She adored him, since he was handsome and charming and paid attention to her aunt. She recalls the unpleasant surprise of seeing her aunt arrive several years later with another guy, who, unlike Igor, was neither handsome nor outgoing.78
During the summer of 1938, Krasner and Pantuhoff, together with a group of friends, spent their vacation on Cape Cod, renting two rooms in Provincetown for $7 a week. Their group that summer included the artists Rosalind Bengelsdorf and Byron Browne, Arshile Gorky, and David Margolis. Bengelsdorf recalled how they played in the dunes, swam in the chilly waters, then sunbathed nude, trying to warm up. She recalled that Gorky picked up “a little girl” who did not take off her clothes, but instead “took photographs of all of us,” which she never printed. Rosalind also remembered how Gorky directed all of this activity, but that “there was no eroticism, nobody touched anybody else. Everyone was with their own.”79 Gorky, she also recalled, made humorous remarks about everybody else’s anatomy.
Krasner appears in a group photograph of Hofmann’s class in Provincetown, which she apparently visited while on vacation. Though the published date is “c. 1939,” it should be 1938, because Krasner did not travel to the Cape during 1939.80 Among the others identified in this photograph, only Hofmann and Fritz Bultman are people who remained important for Krasner. Hofmann wrote that summer to his student Lillian Olinsey telling her of the escapades of Krasner and Pantuhoff in his flashy red convertible.
The escape to the relaxed environment of Provincetown helped to temper the frustrations of New York, which, as Krasner later noted, had “no atmosphere then, no ambiance. There was little support and few rewards. As an artist I felt like I was climbing a mountain made of porcelain. Paris was the center. We looked at Verve, Cahiers d’Art. None of us had gal
leries. We saw European art—Miró, Matisse, Giacometti, Picasso—on Fifty-seventh Street. For instance, I saw the Guernica at the Valentine [Dudensing] Gallery.”81
Picasso’s mural Guernica showed there for three weeks in May 1939, when it went on view together with drawings and related studies at the Valentine Gallery under the auspices of the American Artists Congress as a benefit for the Spanish Refugee Relief Fund. The chairman of the exhibition committee was the New York businessman, author, art collector, and future gallerist Sidney Janis. Guernica inspired lively critical debate. “I’m afraid it knocked a lot of people flat,” Krasner said of the painting. “I can only give you my response in that sense. It knocked me right out of the room, I circled the block four or five times, and then went back and took another look at it. I’m sure I was not alone in that kind of reaction.” She explained that “the presence of a great work of art…does many things to you in one second. It wasn’t that you consciously said, ‘I want to do that.’ You’re overwhelmed in many directions when you’re congenially confronted with, let’s say, a painting like the Guernica for the first time. It disturbs so many elements in one given second you can’t say ‘I want to paint like that.’ It isn’t that simple.”82 To see it again she traveled up to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.83 Then, in November 1939, Guernica went on view once again in New York in the Picasso retrospective exhibition organized by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., for the Museum of Modern Art. At the time, many artists responded to how monumental and moving the painting was.