Lee Krasner
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52. ND-Tabak-3.
53. ND-Tabak-1.
54. Hofmann moved the school to 52 West Ninth Street in 1936 and moved to 52 West Eighth Street in 1938.
55. Address documented by her NYPL card, LKP, AAA.
56. LKP, biographical file, NYPL card dated 1934 gives this address. The rooftop was so accessible that jewelry thieves had crossed it just months earlier in a robbery. See “Burgulars Use Housetops,” NYT, 1-30-1934, documenting a robbery at 209–11 West Fourteenth Street, for which the thieves crossed on rooftops from 221 West Fourteenth Street.
57. See Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: A Catalogue Raisonné (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995), entry for City Roofs on CD-Rom.
58. LKCR misdates the study as c. 1934–35, when the canvas that followed is signed and dated on the rear lower right canvas: “Lee Krasner 1934.”
59. ND-Tabak-3.
60. ND-Tabak-4.
61. 1980-Slodbodkina, vol. II.
62. 1976-Slodbodkina vol. I and online in part at http://www.slobodkina.com/about%20esphyr_autobiography.htm.
63. ND-Tabak-4.
64. 1965-Forge.
65. Kadish quoted in 1989-Kisseloff, 467.
66. See the ad in Art Front, no. 1, November 1934.
67. “History of the Artists Union,” Art Front, no. 1, November 1934.
68. 1972-Rose-1.
69. “29 Store Pickets Seized,” NYT, 12-18-1934, 18; “Girl Striker Heckels La Guardia,” NYT, 1-21-1935, 17.
70. Tom Vallance, “Obituary: Dane Clark,” The Independent, September 17, 1998.
71. 1972-Rose-1.
72. 1984-Jonas.
73. Gerald Monroe to Gail Levin, July 17, 2007.
74. 1985-Potter, 64.
75. 1985-Potter, 64.
76. 1985-Potter, 64.
77. 1984-Jonas.
78. 1984-Jonas.
79. His parents’ anti-Semitism has been confirmed to the author in interviews with Pantuhoff’s nieces, both of whom married Jewish men against their parents’ wishes.
80. Letter with drawing is in AAA, roll 3771. Igor’s two nieces married Jewish men. Their father, Igor’s brother, refused to attend the wedding of one of his own daughters, since it took place in a synagogue. Author’s interview with Igor’s niece, Leigh Olshan, August 26, 2007.
81. LKP, AAA, reel 3771, frame 27, contains her entire WPA record of employment.
82. 1972-Rose-1.
83. 1980-Slobodkina, vol. II, 363.
84. 1963-Spivak.
85. 1963-Spivak.
86. 1963-Spivak.
87. 1970-Spivak.
88. 1972-Rose-1.
89. May Tabak Rosenberg to William Shawn, letter of July 1978, Getty.
90. ND-Tabak-2, 12.
91. ND-Tabak-2, 17. 1970-Rosenberg concurs on this part of the story of how he got on the WPA.
92. Harold Rosenberg attended City College in 1923–24 and graduated with a law degree from St. Lawrence University in 1927. For context, see also Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 222.
93. 1979-Munro, 108.
94. 1979-Munro, 108.
95. This address and date are taken from Rosenberg’s letters to Poetry magazine, which document that he was on Fourteenth Street from July 9, 1936, to at least May 18, 1937. Early letters with other addresses confirm that this must be the period when Krasner and Pantuhoff shared an apartment with the Rosenbergs, not earlier, as both LKCR, and 1999-Hobbs state. I am grateful to Rosenberg biographer Debra Bricker Balken for confirming this time and place. 1970-Rosenberg states that after he married in 1932, they lived on Paradise Alley (East Eleventh Street off First Avenue) and then in 1933 on Houston Street, before moving in December to Christopher Street. In 1934 they lived in two places on West Eleventh Street, before decamping to Brooklyn on January 9, 1935. They returned to Manhattan in Janaury 1936, but to 259 West Twelfth Street, moving to 333 West Fourteenth Street by that July.
96. The telephone was recorded in the name “B. Dolen” from April 1936 through April 1937 in the Manhattan Address Telephone Directory at 333 West Fourteenth Street. Patia Rosenberg remembers from her childhood a friend of her parents named “Bobby Dolen,” who was a pharmacist.
97. ND-Tabak-1.
98. 1936-Cahill, 142 and fig. 51. Igor Pantuhoff’s work was number 100 in the catalogue.
99. LKCR no. 31, p. 35, imprecisely dates this work c. 1935–36, when it clearly was made in response to this show at the Museum of Modern Art, December 7, 1936–January 17, 1937.
100. 1936-Barr-1, figures 130 and 163.
101. See LKCR, 34, nos. 29r, 29v, 30.
102. 1936-Barr-2, 288, includes this film among those shown. Years later, when she included images of disembodied eyes in her pictures, critics wrongly attributed this motif to Pollock’s influence.
103. Krasner and Pollock came to possess a copy of the 1933 book The Art of Henri Matisse by Albert Barnes and Violet de Mazia, which he inscribed to Marcel Duchamp, now at PKHSC, but acquired at a much later date.
104. Henry McBride, Matisse (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930), plate 38. This work is variously called Interior, Nice; Still Life in the Studio; Nature morte dans l’atelier, Nice; and Interior with Phonograph.
105. See Greuze’s The Broken Eggs of 1756, in the Metropolitan Museum collection since 1920, which is itself inspired by a seventeenth-century Dutch painting by Frans van Mieris the Elder (State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg), which Greuze knew through an engraving. The broken eggs are said to symbolize the maiden’s loss of virginity.
106. 1967-Parsons.
107. B. H. Friedman, “Lee Krasner: An Intimate Introduction,” in 1999-Hobbs, 23. The link of this story to Bultman is in Friedman’s notes for the Whitechapel catalogue essay, LKP, AAA.
108. 1967-Parsons.
109. Stuart Davis, quoted in Garnett McCoy, “The Rise and Fall of the American Artists’ Congress,” Prospects, 13, 1988, 328.
110. 2004-Stevens, 113.
111. Arshile Gorky, in a lecture that he gave at the Art Students League in the early 1930s, is reported to have said: “Proletariat art is poor art for poor people.” See Jacob Kainen, “Memories of Arshile Gorky,” Arts Magazine, 50, no. 7, March 1976, 98; 1963-Spivak; Jody Patterson, “Flight from Reality? A Reconsideration of Gorky’s Politics and Approach to Public Murals in the 1930s,” in Michael Taylor, ed., Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 79.
112. 1966-Mooradian, 191. See also 202, where art historian Meyer Schapiro claimed that Gorky influenced Pollock despite Krasner’s insistance that they only met for the first time in 1943.
113. Milton Resnick to 1980-Mooradian, 193. Resnick’s wife, Patricia Passloff, conducted interviews for the 1956 show on “The Thirties, New York” at Poindexter Gallery, so this may have informed his opinion.
114. Stephen Polcari, “Orozco and Pollock: Epic Transformations,” American Art, vol. 6, no. 3 (summer 1992), 40.
115. Harold Lehman, “For an Artists Union Workshop,” Art Front, October 1937; quoted in Hurlburt, “Siqueiros Experimental Workshop,” 239.
116. Charmion von Wiegand, “David Alfaro Siqueiros,” New Masses, II, no. 5 (May 1, 1934), 16–21.
117. 1976-Hurlburt, 239.
118. “40,000 March Here in May Day Parade, Quietest in Years,” NYT, May 2, 1936, 1.
119. “40,000 March Here in May Day Parade, Quietest in Years,” NYT, May 2, 1936, 1.
120. 1976-Hurlburt, 238. Hurlburt based much of his research on his 1973 interview with Harold Lehman.
121. Some of the other workshop participants were Axel Horn (then spelled Horr), George Cox, Louis Ferstadt, Clara Mahl, Luis Arenal, Antonio Pujol, Conrado Vasquez, José Gutiérrez, and Roberto Berdecio.
122. 1967-Kadish.
123. 1967-Glaser.
124. 2008-Küster, 73, which incorrectly states in Lee Krasner’s
paragraph-long biography: “As a committed Communist, she moved to Long Island with Pollock in search of a ‘simple life,’ following their marriage in 1945.” In the author’s March 2007 interview with Ulf Küster, he admitted that he had no documentary source for this statement.
125. 1967-Parsons.
126. 1967-Glaser.
127. Gerald Monroe to the author, interview of July 17, 2007.
128. 1965-Friedman, 16, note 6.
129. 1970-Monroe.
130. 1970-Monroe.
131. 1970-Monroe.
132. Among the books in Krasner’s library in PKHSC in Springs are: Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1936) and Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1937). Inside the front cover, this volume is inscribed in pencil “Pantuhoff 38 E. 9th St.”
133. 1971-Monroe, 141–42.
134. Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? (1937), http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch07.htm#ch07-3.
135. Lee Krasner interview with Christopher Crosman (assisted by Nancy Miller), both then of the education department at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Tape available at this museum in Buffalo, New York, or at the PKHSC. Crosman to the author, 10-31-2010, notes that Krasner was “delightful” to interview.
136. 1999-Hobbs, 194, n. 42. The author was also in attendance that weekend and does not recall Krasner ever bringing up this topic while she was present.
137. Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? (1937), http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch07.htm;nsch07-3
138. 1984-Abel, 55.
139. See Tim Wohlforth, “Trotskyism,” in Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas, Encyclopedia of the American Left (Chicago: St. James Press, 1990), 782–83.
140. Reuben Kadish quoted in 1989-Kisseloff, 471.
141. Willem de Kooning interviewed by Anne Bowen Parsons, AAA.
142. Max Margolies to 1980-Mooradian, 165.
143. 1972-Rose-1.
144. See Sam Sills, “Abraham Lincoln Brigade,” in Buhle, et al., Encyclopedia of the American Left, 2–3. Called the Debs Column by the socialists, their open recruitment caused government suppression.
145. Picasso quoted in “Artists Congress Denounces Japan,” NYT, December 18, 1937, 22.
146. The art education of Lincoln Brigade member Irving Norman (1906–1998) followed his participation in the Spanish Civil War.
147. 1965-Vogel.
148. 1983-Rose, 37.
149. 1967-Greene.
150. 1967-Greene.
151. 1964-Gorelick.
152. 2002-Hemingway, 39.
153. Joe Solman, “Chirico—Father of Surrealism,” Art Front, January 1936, 6.
154. Harold Rosenberg, “The Wit of William Gropper,” Art Front, March 1936, 7–8. 1970-Spivak.
155. “National Organization,” Art Front, March 1936, 2.
156. “National Organization,” Art Front, March 1936, 2.
157. Meyer Schapiro, “Race, Nationality, and Art,” Art Front, 2, March 1936, 10.
158. LK to Dore Ashton, undated quote cited in 1972-Ashton, 31.
159. See John O’Brian, Ruthless Hedonism: The American Reception of Matisse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 47.
160. LK to the author recorded by 1977-Rose, 1977.
161. 1966-Rose.
162. 1977-Bourdon, 57.
163. 1966-Mooradian, 189.
164. Edward Alden Jewell, “Quickenings,” NYT, May 27, 1934, X7.
165. A venerable institution, the Jumble Shop was once located in what had been the MacDougal Alley studio of James Earle Fraser, who produced the bison on the “Buffalo nickel.” See Henry Wysham Lanier, Greenwich Village Today & Yesterday (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949), 150.
166. See Matthew Spender, From a High Place: A Life of Arshile Gorky (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 206.
167. Edward Alden Jewell, “Art in Review,” May 2, 1932, 15, and Edward Alden Jewell, “Youthful Explorers in Form and Color Present Deep Problems for Lay Spectators,” May 7, 1932, 21.
168. 1972-Holmes. This is contrary to LKCR, which ignores Krasner’s interest in Pereira’s work.
169. Among them Yvonne Pène du Bois, Felicia Meyer [Marsh], Lena Glackens, Minna Citron, Mary Hutchinson, Beata Beach, Eloisa Schwab, and Janet Scudder, for example.
170. 1984-Abel, 35.
171. 1970-Rosenberg.
Chapter 6: From Politics to Modernism, 1936–39 (pp. 117–142)
1. 1979-Munro, 108.
2. 1979-Novak.
3. 1977-Bourdon, 57.
4. “Artists Increase Their Understanding of Public Buildings,” Art Front, November, 1935, 3.
5. 1994-Carroll, 81.
6. 1984-Carroll, 81.
7. 2007-Landau, 9. See also these articles from December 2, 1936: “WPA Artists Fight Police; 219 Ejected, Many Clubbed; Crowd Protesting Dismissals Forms ‘Human Chain,’ Refuses to Leave Office–Scores Arrested, Dozen Treated by Doctors,” NYT, 1; “231 Arrested in WPA Riot,” Daily Mirror, 2; “250 Artists Arrested in Relief Battle,” New York American, 1.
8. 1970-Monroe.
9. 1964-Trubach and the following quotations from this source.
10. 1979-Munro, 108.
11. 1979-Novak.
12. 1994-Carroll, 81. See also Mercedes Matter in “Remembering Pollock,” symposium at MoMA, 11-17-98, tape 98, 164, no. 5.
13. “Pink Slips and the WPA,” NYT, July 25, 1937, 137.
14. Still Life was no. 28 in the catalogue of the exhibition, but she later forgot which work she exhibited. Catalogue in Lee Krasner papers at AAA.
15. LKCR 33.
16. Ford Madox Ford, Foreword, Pink Slips over Culture. Ford’s grandfather was Ford Madox Brown, an English Pre-Raphaelite painter.
17. Ford, Foreword, Pink Slips over Culture.
18. Lewis Mumford, Pink Slips over Culture.
19. For the night classes, see 1972-Rose; Pamela Adler in 1973-Tucker, 37, and the Web site www.HansHofmann.org/chronology lists the school as moving from this location to 52 West Eighth Street only in 1938, after Krasner was already enrolled. Rose-1.
20. 1979-Novak.
21. Hans Hofmann quoted by Lillian Olinsey Kiesler, oral history interview, Archives of American Art, 1990. Lillian Olinsey Kiesler to Deborah Solomon.
22. Lillian Olinsey Kiesler, oral history interview, Archives of American Art, 1990. The following recollections are also from this source.
23. 1972-Rose-1.
24. LK to the author; also almost verbatim in 1977-Diamonstein, and 1979-Novak.
25. 1966-Rose.
26. 1964-Seckler.
27. 1966-Rose.
28. The Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts, brochure of 1937–38 in Lillian Olinsey Kiesler papers, AAA.
29. The Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts, brochure of 1937–38 in Lillian Olinsey Kiesler papers, AAA.
30. The Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts, brochure of 1937–38 in Lillian Olinsey Kiesler papers, AAA.
31. 1983-Rose, 20.
32. “Cubism and Abstract Art,” March 2–April 19, 1936, 1936-Barr-1, no. 213, pp. 42, 43 (ill. fig. 27), 220. She might also have seen this work in “Beginnings and Landmarks, ‘291,’ 1905–1917,” Stieglitz’s gallery, An American Place, New York, October 27–December 27, 1937, exh. cat. no. 38.
33. Perle Fine recalling LK quoted 2005-Housley, 36–37.
34. 1980-Braff.
35. 1972-Rose-1.
36. Hofmann left an undated essay, “Toward the True Vision of Reality,” Hans Hofmann papers, AAA, box 7, roll 5808.
37. Ben Wolf, “The Digest Interviews Hans Hofmann,” Art Digest, April 1, 1945, 52.
38. 1979-Novak.
39. See Hofmann’s Cathedral of 1959 with its floating rectangles compared to LKCR 100.
40. Lil
lian Olinsey Kiesler, oral history interview, Archives of American Art, 1990.
41. 1979-Novak.
42. 1979-Novak.
43. See Cynthia Goodman, Hans Hofmann as Teacher: Drawings by Hofmann and His Students (New York: American Federation of Arts, 1982).
44. 1973-Freed.
45. Greenberg to Rubenfeld, unedited transcript of interview, 2/16/1990, CG Papers, Getty; see also 1997-Rubenfeld.
46. 1979-Novak.
47. 1965-Friedman, 7, claims incorrectly that LK first met Greenberg at Hofmann’s lectures.
48. 1997-Rubenfeld, 50. According to Rubenfeld, who interviewed Greenberg at length, he attended three of the six public lectures by Hofmann during the 1938–39 school year.
49. 1966-Greenberg at EDACA.
50. Clement Greenberg to Florence Rubenfeld, unedited transcript of interview, 2/16/1990, CG Papers, Getty; see also 1997-Rubenfeld.
51. Greenberg to Rubenfeld, unedited transcript of interview, 2/16/1990, CG Papers, Getty; see also 1997-Rubenfeld.
52. 1979-Novak.
53. 1972-Rose-1.
54. Lee Krasner to the author, August 1977 and other times.
55. Hofmann quoted in “Mrs. Jackson Pollock,” Time, March 17, 1958, 64.
56. 1984-Little, II-1. Little dated their meeting to the fall of 1936.
57. 1984-Little, II-1. Little was at the Hofmann school in New York and Provincetown from 1937 to 1942. He had previously studied at the Buffalo, New York, Fine Arts Academy and at the Art Students League under George Grosz. See “John Little, Painter,” his obituary in the East Hampton Star, August 2, 1984, 2.
58. 1964-Seckler.
59. 1976-Slobodkina, vol. II, 380.
60. 1967-McNeil.
61. Lee Krasner to the author, recorded by 1977-Rose.
62. 1979-Munro, 108. See A Note About Sources for the story of how Irving Sandler misunderstood why de Kooning’s study was in the studio Pantuhoff and McNeil shared and how he omitted Krasner from the story, which has been repeated in biographies of both Pollock and de Kooning.
63. 1966-Rose.
64. 1966-Rose.
65. 1968-Wasserman, recounts this meeting, this time recalling about “eight or ten artists.”
66. 1966-Rose.
67. 1982-Bolotowsky, 22.
68. Susan Carol Larsen, The American Abstract Artists Group: A History and Evaluation of Its Impact upon American Art (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1975), 226–28.