Lee Krasner

by Gail Levin

  The magazine did not mention Krasner’s painting in the show, but her friends from the Hofmann School took a close look at it, especially Perle Fine, who wrote to say how much she liked it: “It was so much more spatial and the color looked so much richer than anything I had seen of yours previously (and you know how much I liked your other work). It had some real competition, I think, but stood up, Maurice [her husband, the photographer Maurice Berezov] & I agreed, very admirably. We’re proud of you.”7

  Despite her excitement about Pollock, Krasner did not immediately cancel all of the connections that she had been building to focus on him alone. She was there when Mondrian’s first (and only during his lifetime) solo show opened that January at the Valentine Gallery (run by F. Valentine Dudensing) on Fifty-seventh Street; however, Mondrian stayed away because he had heard somewhere that artists do not attend the openings of their own shows.8 This disappointed some of his followers who had come to pay homage to him. Nonetheless, his work earned praise in the press.9

  “After the terrible experience Mondrian had in the London blitz he was quite sick,” John Little recalled. Only after Mondrian felt that he had recovered did the Valentine Dudensing Gallery give him his show in January 1942 and invite a few artists “to meet Mondrian and attend a lecture on his theories.”10 Mondrian’s lecture, which Little remembered as having been called “Toward the True Vision of Reality,” took place on Friday, January 23, 1942, and appeared in the newspaper as “The Liberation of Oppression in Plastic Art and Life.”11 Huge crowds, including Krasner, Little, and many of her other friends from the Hofmann School and the American Abstract Artists, jammed in to hear what Mondrian had to tell them.12

  This lecture was the second in a series of informal meetings sponsored by the American Abstract Artists.13 Actually it was a member of the group, Balcomb Greene, who read Mondrian’s contribution, in which he reflected on abstract art and how different the intuitive power of adults was from the instinctive capacities of primitives and children. He also explained his theories of composition and how he determined space in his pictures.14 Mondrian’s lecture was later published as an essay entitled “A New Realism” by the American Abstract Artists in their yearbook.15

  Mondrian’s art and theories had become known as “Neoplasticism” after he published a manifesto of that name in 1920. His work had been known as part of the Dutch De Stijl movement founded in 1917 by Theo van Doesburg. It stressed pure abstraction and universality, reducing subject matter to the essentials of form and primary colors—red, blue, and yellow—or the non-colors of black, gray, and white. Those in the movement favored asymmetry, while Mondrian liked to limit himself to vertical and horizontal lines. In Paris, Mondrian had joined a broader association of abstract artists (including Kandinsky, Jean Arp, and hundreds of others) founded in 1931 and called the Abstraction-Création movement.

  After the lecture, John Little and Krasner went to a party to welcome Mondrian to America at Café Society Uptown, which at that time “was the in place in New York and featured the latest music form, boogie-woogie, with Louis Armstrong at the piano and Hazel Scott, the exciting young singer [and pianist]. Mondrian was delighted, and we danced through the night.”16

  Café Society Uptown, the second branch of a successful downtown nightclub, was established in October 1940. The first Café Society, in downtown Manhattan, was written about in Time magazine as “a subterranean nightclub” that attracted connoisseurs of jazz. Its founder, Barney Josephson, was said to be “a mild-mannered shoe store owner” from Trenton, New Jersey. Josephson recalled that his aim was to create the “first truly integrated nightclub in this country.”17

  Krasner’s friend from the WPA Lou Bunce recalled, “Going and listening a lot…I had known some jazz people, particularly two-beat jazz in those years…. We went to the opening of Café Society. There was a friend of mine by the name of Anton Refregier, who did decorations, and…he managed to invite us there and it was our night out on the “town there…. It was kind of a neat place. It was beautiful. And I remember there was a jazz pianist by the name of Hazel Scott. And she was just absolutely great. That was the opening gun. It was quite an experience.”18

  Krasner’s admiration for Mondrian was such that she must have relished the opportunity to mingle with him once again. For her friend John Little, and for other Americans already influenced by Mondrian’s work, meeting him was sensational, an event they, like Krasner, recollected for the rest of their lives. Many of the Americans, including Krasner and Little, among many others, had experimented with the master’s Neoplasticism, trying out variations of his structure, forms, color, space, and content.19

  But they were also impressed with Mondrian’s engaging personality. His enjoyment of boogie-woogie music and dancing also added to the fun. Krasner recalled that they “liked to listen to jazz, and we used to go to a Café Uptown or Café Downtown…and dance.”20 She considered Mondrian one of her most outstanding partners for dancing. “I was a fairly good dancer, that is to say I can follow easily, but the complexity of Mondrian’s rhythm was not simple in any sense.”21 “I nearly went mad trying to follow this man’s rhythm.”22

  Krasner remembered a particular evening with Mondrian at the Café Uptown or Café Downtown. “First, he waited through several numbers for a particular piece that he wanted to dance to,” she recalled. “Then he said, ‘Now!’ and we went around in what I would describe as one of the strangest rhythms I’ve ever had to deal with. In other words, I had to do major concentration to follow this man…. I noticed lots of heads looking at us and I thought, ‘Of course, they’re looking at us, because I’m dancing with Mondrian.’ Then we swung around a corner and I could see the couple behind us, and it was some movie actor and a divine-looking woman, and that’s who were being watched!”23

  American Abstract Artists member Charmion von Wiegand described Mondrian as “a perfect dancer [who] danced in a way so perfect that it was almost too perfect…it was alive.” Another recalled that Mondrian “danced stiffly, with his head thrown back.”24 Mondrian apparently liked women and once gave this explanation for why he never married: “I have not come so far. I have been too occupied with my work.”25 Though he had purportedly been in love several times, it was rumored that he had not married because he lacked adequate money and security to support both his work and a wife. Described by some as a “passionate, virile man,” Mondrian, according to von Wiegand, liked to dance to the accompaniment of boogie-woogie, not the melody.26

  Harriet Janis (Sidney’s wife) recalled that Mondrian’s favorite haunt was “Café Society, Downtown, where he went especially to hear Albert Ammons, Mead Lux Lewis, and Pete Johnson, the Negro boogie-woogie pianists.”27 Boogie-woogie was considered the least melodic form of jazz and the most technical, and for Mondrian, it related to music in the same way that abstract art related to traditional representational art: “Boogie-Woogie was to jazz what Neoplasticism was to Cubism,”28 he said. He loved the rhythm.

  According to Little, Mondrian’s patron (probably Holtzman) invited them for breakfast at Child’s restaurant, not far from Mondrian’s Fifty-sixth Street studio. From there Krasner and Little headed back to the Village, tired but invigorated by the memorable night out.

  Inspired, Mondrian would go on to begin work that summer on his famous canvas Broadway Boogie-Woogie (1942–43), which the Museum of Modern Art rushed to acquire in May 1943 and exhibit the following summer. “I especially like the metropolitan life of New York,” exclaimed Mondrian. “Very noisy, but that doesn’t hinder me. I think that in America there is much more general appreciation for the new things than in France and in London. I don’t know the reason but it may be that Americans see freer—a very good quality.”29 For the unfinished Victory Boogie-Woogie of 1943–44, where he added some secondary colors, Mondrian relied on both bits of colored paper and small bits of Dennison adhesive tape, which were then produced in primary colors.30

  For one of Krasner’s works called Mosaic Collage (
estimated in the catalogue raisonné to have been produced sometime in 1939–40), she appears to have seized on a jazz rhythm like Mondrian’s. She too experimented with mostly primary colors and small bits of colored paper to achieve an optical effect that also vibrates. Though Mondrian rejected curves in his classic abstractions, Krasner employed curves and circles both here and in her other Mondrian-inspired works while emphasizing primary colors, such as in her Red, Yellow, Blue of 1939–40.31 Her single collage of this period is a unique work in her oeuvre and seems unlikely to be related to anything but Mondrian’s work.

  Mondrian’s place in Krasner’s thinking is even more evident in Mercer’s reply to a letter she sent him in February 1942. “You are right,” he wrote to her about Mondrian. “Piet is wrong. He’s cloistered. ‘Good’ and ‘Bad,’ pure and impure are equally valid. But then, if we will be ourselves, what can Piet do? His purity makes for impure in painting—or doesn’t it? (One can still like him).”32

  From Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where Mercer was running a camouflage school, he confided his anxiety that America might not win the impending war. Krasner’s friendship with Mercer resulted in her close exposure to a reluctant and frustrated soldier’s view of the war. Not long after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, he reflected his frustration that the United States had allowed Japan to open hostilities and complained that we had been “so blind to the moral condition of Germany.”33

  Mercer also inquired about Krasner: “What about you? And your co-exhibitor friend that you think you like? Write and let me know.”34 Their friendship was such that she had confided in Mercer, indeed shared, the excitement she felt upon meeting Pollock.

  On March 16, 1942, Mercer wrote to Krasner, asking about the AAA show.35 He referred to the Sixth Annual Exhibition of the American Abstract Artists held at the Fine Arts Galleries, 215 West Fifty-seventh Street, and described by Art News as “the best show of abstract painting seen in some time.”36 Among the artists were both Krasner and her hero, Mondrian. Unlike Harry Holtzman, she was not, thankfully, singled out in the press for “slavishly” imitating the Dutch master. Though there were no published comments about Krasner’s heavily impastoed work, the New York Times critic Edward Alden Jewell did list “Leonore [sic] Krasner” as one of the forty-six participants.37

  Some, however, received more prominent notice. The reviewer for Art Digest singled out Bolotowsky, Slobodkina, Glarner, Holty, Xceron, and, of course, Mondrian and Léger—not so much for their aesthetics, but rather for their foreign birth, viewing these artists as Russian, Swiss, German, Greek, Dutch, and French.38 Krasner, of course, was American.

  By April 1942, Mercer reported that he had been chosen for officers school. “How is Monsieur Pollack [sic]? You like him, yes,” he wrote to her, then: “Krasner, I have spring fever. Tonight I wish we were walking together down along the docks, walking and talking until dawn broke, physically exhausted. How does that old song go…You are my favorite star.”39 A month later, he asked again, “What about Mr. Pollack [sic]?”

  Mercer rattled on: “I met Fritz [Bultman]’s sister [Muriel Francis]. She is a MONSTER. Krasner, you have the life—giving touch. You are WONDERBAR as the Germans say—only they don’t say it that way. (By the way, I should like to see you.)”40 After dismissing Miss Bultman, then active as an art collector, Mercer tells Krasner that he “was interviewed last night and asked a lot of interesting and peculiar questions. I was asked to tell just where I had been in Europe, especially Germany, Austria, Italy, and France. When they saw from my classification card that I was a painter—landscape & still life variety, they wanted to know if I could paint and draw coastlines! Good bye, honey. I’m off for a commando outfit or something like that. Jesus how I wish I could get into something terribly exciting, thrilling and dangerous. Only to kill this christ-awful dragging on and on.”41

  After the end of officers’ training and his promotion to lieutenant, Mercer reflected, “I can almost see now why I liked painting. Every now and then I find some phenomenon I would like to paint or draw but the chance and the will are fading. I know that painting is impossible. Even this writing demonstrates that I give it some thought but for now it is on the wane. I guess the death, for a time?, of the painter was a beautifully painful experience. And I can even summon that feeling again, as I have said. I am hardly mad about it any more.”42 When Barbara Rose asked her years later, “Were people affected by the war?” Krasner answered: “People were very affected by the war. But it didn’t mean you stopped painting unless you were called into the army; then you just couldn’t paint. But otherwise one continued.”43

  Ever more mindful that most of the eligible men had been drafted by the armed forces, Krasner had set her eye on Pollock, conveniently classified 4-F or unfit for military service because of his psychological problems, but still ambitious enough to paint. “We had a helluva lot in common—our interests, our goal. Art was the thing, for both of us. We focused on it, zeroed in on it, because our backgrounds, though different, were not so different as all that. Cody…Brooklyn. Not so different.”44 Indeed, compared to Pantuhoff, Krasner and Pollock were not from such dissimilar social classes.

  She and Pollock shared a “mutual interest in painting which was the Paris School of Painting…. We’d either be talking about Picasso, or arguing about Matisse but…it was always French painting. I knew of his early interest in Orozco and Siqueiros, but we were past that stage.”45 Krasner recalled that Pollock had “the last publication of the then Picasso (whether it was Cahiers d’Art or what, I don’t know), thumbing through it, and going into a total rage about it, and saying, ‘That bastard, he misses nothing!,’ which meant, like, he was with it, in that sense…so that his eye was very much directed towards what was happening in the so-called Paris School of painting.”46

  Pollock was close to John Graham, whose ideas and art also informed Krasner’s work in 1942. She seriously considered Graham’s emphasis on an artist’s need to unite thought, feeling, and a record of physical gesture, which he called automatic writing, or “écriture.”47 He meant a combination of training and “improvisation.” Krasner took a close look at Graham’s own drawing and experimented with some pen-and-ink sketches in which she played around with line and rhythm, searching perhaps for what Graham termed a child’s “direct response to space.”48 In this sense, she could depart from Hofmann’s attachment to nature and allow line to have a life of its own.

  Graham also respected Mondrian’s “Neoplasticism,” and wrote that “Mondrian had the vision and heart to start anew. Maybe he did not go far enough, but he had the courage at least to say a new ‘a.’”49

  Graham began inviting Krasner and Pollock to elaborate Russian-style teas at his place, and soon enough, the three of them were spending a lot of time together. Krasner recalled: “He had already written his book which I had read prior to having met him…the book affected us and…he had these fabulous oceanic and African pieces.”50 Pollock was closer to Graham than Krasner because he had participated in a drawing group Graham held in his Greenwich Street studio.

  Pollock had taken what was for him a rare initiative in order to meet Graham, writing to him after being impressed by Graham’s article on Picasso and the unconscious.51 The abstract painter Carl Holty recalled getting to know “Pollock slightly” at Graham’s studio. “We used to draw down there at night, he had models and we have this a good deal today in New York. You know, you get a model and a group of fellows will practice drawing.”52

  One wintry night in early 1942, Krasner and Pollock were walking Graham back to his studio, when they ran into “a little man with a long overcoat,” whom Graham introduced: Frederick Kiesler, the architect and designer. Graham presented Pollock as “the greatest painter in America,” to which Kiesler, with his elegant European manners, bowed deeply and asked, “North or South America?”53

  Krasner was also busy visiting the downtown location of the Café Society.54 Among her acquaintances, Reuben Kadish
later recalled going to “Cafe Society Downtown on Sheridan Square. I saw the Mills Brothers there, Billie Holiday, and Lena Horne. It was worth dropping five dollars or so to see them.”55 Many of the patrons and even those who worked there had no idea that the Café Society was originally founded to raise funds for the American Communist Party and to guard against the spread of fascist ideas in the United States.56 Indeed, the radical periodical New Masses had been involved with the café’s foundation.

  Café Society also served as the locale for benefits for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.57 It attracted radicals and intellectuals critical of American society. Even the name of the club was an attempt to put down the wealthy Upper East Side café society.58 The decor, produced by leftist artists such as William Gropper or Anton Refregier, reflected the same ideology, sending up the lifestyle of the rich. Café Society advertised that it was “the wrong place for the Right people” and appropriate for “Celebs, Debs, and Plebs.”59

  The appearance there of boogie-woogie pianists Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson, and Meade Lux Lewis helped to create the craze for this music.60 Having enjoyed “dives” in Harlem, Krasner loved to go to Café Society, where those reported to have taken part in the racially mixed audience include Paul Robeson, Nelson Rockefeller, Charlie Chaplin, Lillian Hellman, and Eleanor Roosevelt.61 In his letter to Krasner of December 12, 1940, Mercer had jokingly referred to “Eleanor R.” in the same sentence as Piet Mondrian, suggesting that Krasner had either encountered Roosevelt at Café Society or at least had heard that she had once been seen there.

  In between her Café Society visits, Krasner and Pollock began seeing each other more frequently, during which time, she insisted, “we didn’t do art talk!”62 Most of her own engagements in the art world did not involve Pollock. Nevertheless, Krasner began to share with Pollock her enthusiasm for European modernism. Soon she was making efforts to have him go with her to look at work by modern masters. She later recalled that “while Pollock had Miró as a god, I favored Mondrian and Matisse.”63 Pollock also favored Picasso, but they both liked “early Kandinsky, the ones in the [collection of Solomon] Guggenheim…the 1913, ’14, magnificent, beautiful, beautiful things. Those we saw I think at the Plaza hotel, which is where the Guggenheim, the Baronness Rebay prior to her opening, that’s where the collection was.”64 She recalled seeing the Kandinsky paintings in what was then called the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, before it became the Guggenheim Museum.