Lee Krasner (15 page)

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 dis
covery. “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 deal 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

Lee Krasner in her New York studio, photographed by Maurice Berezov, c. 1939. At this time, under the influence of Mondrian's work, Krasner was producing thickly painted canvases with an emphasis on primary colors and bold black lines (CR 130 on her easel, CR 127 on wall, and CR 129 on the floor).

P
OVERTY AND PROTEST CHARACTERIZED
K
RASNER'S EXPERIENCE
of the mid-1930s. Looking back, Krasner recounted how she was fired and rehired and jailed for illegal activities—meaning protests against the brutal “pink slips” of dismissal.
¹
She said that she was arrested many times and was in “some of the best jails in New York.”
²
“I was practically in every jail in New York City,” she boasted. “Each time we were fired, or threatened with being fired, we'd go out and picket. On many occasions, we'd
be taken off in a Black Maria and locked in a cell. Fortunately, we never had to spend the night.”
³

The Black Maria paddy wagons actually evoked a certain nostalgia. Krasner was probably one of the eighty-three WPA artists and art teachers who picketed before the College Art Association on August 15, 1935, protesting wage cuts and demanding better pay, improved working conditions, and shorter hours.
⁴

On December 1, 1936, Krasner was demonstrating in a sit-down strike with some four hundred artists and models against the impending dismissal of five hundred workers from the WPA. Organized by the Artists Union, their demonstration took place at 6 East Thirty-ninth Street, at the WPA Arts Projects Building. Paul Block, a sculptor and activist, urged the crowd to be nonviolent.
⁵
An eyewitness reported that Block was “slammed across the head with a club, dragged across the floor, stepped on, and thrown bleeding into the elevator.” Months later he joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and was killed in the Spanish Civil War.
⁶
The
New York Daily Mirror
reported that more than 50 people were injured and some 231 protesters were arrested in a clash with the police that lasted more than two hours. The paper claimed that two policemen were bitten to the bone by “hysterical women,” and that desks were smashed. Using a billy club, the police knocked unconscious the leader of the demonstration, a sixty-three-year-old mural painter and printmaker named Helen West Heller.
⁷

Years later Krasner recalled that “special squads dragged out artists roughly,” and she remembered “sedate elegant [Anne] Goldwaithe dragged on the floor while photographers coolly photographed the scene,” calling it the “shock of my life.” The police used clubs, she recalled, and the whole thing was “frightening.”
⁸

Another demonstrator, Serge Trubach, was a Ukrainian-born artist who studied at the National Academy and later worked with Krasner on the War Services project. Trubach recalled that when the artists refused to leave as the WPA offices were closing, “Mrs.
[Audrey] MacMahon called the police department and they came down to the entrance and the people wouldn't leave so they immediately called up ambulances and they beat the devil out of all the artists and some of them had to be taken to hospitals on stretchers.”
⁹
He added, “The women were hit with rubber [truncheons] in the midriff because they didn't want to show any bruises, so there wouldn't be any public sentiment that they were also beaten. So they were hit in the midriff of their body so it wouldn't show in public, you know, when they went out of the building.”

Trubach also recounted the protesters' harsh experiences in jail after the demonstration. “It turned out that all the artists arrested, all gave fictitious names and were sent up to night court.” Often the names were of dead famous artists. “Everybody from Cézanne to Michelangelo was arrested. Rubens was there, and Bruegel, and, oh, Ryder, and let me see, Turner, everybody, you name them and they had them. After everybody was registered and their names taken….

“They had two big pens. They put all the women in one pen and all the men in the other. And several women became hysterical. There was only a urinal on the floor where the men were…. Nobody had eaten any dinner. It was just before dinnertime when the arrests were made. So they kept a vigil until about ten o'clock at night and they put all the men in…jail…. I don't know what happened to the women. I didn't know where they went,” he explained, “but the men were all…. sleeping like sardines one over the other. And most of the artists just sat around and talked.”

Krasner booked herself into prison as the painter Mary Cassatt.
¹⁰
“I didn't have a big selection, you know, it was either Rosa Bonheur or Mary Cassatt…. But when it came to trial, the court clerk reading some of these names, my dear; you know, you'd hear Picasso and everybody's head would turn around and see who had said Picasso.”
¹¹
She chuckled that the clerks were clueless as to their ruse.

Vito Marcantonio handled the case. Marcantonio was a radical
politician and protégé of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, and he eventually got suspended sentences for all the artists arrested and convicted for “disorderly conduct” in exchange for not prosecuting the individual policemen that were brought up on charges of assault and brutality. Fifteen of the artists had needed emergency medical treatment.
¹²
Paul Block appeared in court as the main witness, Trubach recounted. “When he came to court he was bandaged from his shoulders up to his head. You could only see his eyes…it was obvious it was police brutality.”

It was while jailed after this same protest that Krasner first met Jeanne (Mercedes) Cordoba Carles, who also got arrested. The daughter of the modernist painter Arthur B. Carles, Mercedes was a great beauty who easily attracted men in the art world—from the outspoken Gorky, with whom she was then involved, to Hans Hofmann, the much beloved teacher. Both women worked on the WPA mural project under Diller, and they became close friends. Their friendship, forged in such drastic circumstances in such desperate times, would be marked by both poignancy and significance.

In another protest against the WPA's periodic firings and rehirings, Krasner joined some seventy-eight artists in the group show
Pink Slips over Culture,
which was held at A.C.A. Gallery on Eighth Street from July 19 to 31, 1937, and organized by the Citizens Committee for Support of the WPA and the Artists Union, which by then was billing itself as a CIO affiliate. The Citizens Committee included writers Edna St. Vincent Millay, Lewis Mumford, Upton Sinclair, Van Wyck Brooks, John Dewey, Lillian Hellman, and Dr. Stephen S. Wise, along with artists Rockwell Kent, Edward Steichen, William Zorach, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and the set designer Robert Edmund Jones.
¹³

Most of the artists contributed work of their own, but it was announced that some of the exhibited works were ironically produced for and loaned by the Federal Art Project. The show's jury included artists Stuart Davis, Harry Gottlieb, Jacob
Kainen, Elizabeth Olds, and Nahum Tschacbasov. Some of the contributors—including Krasner, Joseph Stella, and Isaac Soyer—had already stood out among their contemporaries. Krasner's work joined sixty-eight paintings and ten sculptures.
¹⁴
The work Krasner submitted was ambiguously titled
Still Life
. This painting was possibly her still life on canvas from 1935, where flattened forms, in heavy black outlines against a solid ground of gray and blue, echo Matisse's influence.
¹⁵

The show's catalogue reprinted a statement that the novelist Ford Madox Ford had delivered over WABC Radio: “In arranging this exhibition by artists dismissed from the FAP, the Artists Union feels that it is placing the very real question of the future of American art before the public. The public is to decide, in the long run, whether or not these artists and many others are to bring art to institutions and people hitherto unaware of the meaning of plastic beauty.”
¹⁶
Ford also mentioned economic need, “with all its harrowing consequences for the artists and their families.”
¹⁷

The catalogue also included Lewis Mumford's open letter to President Roosevelt, which had originally appeared in the
New Republic.
Mumford urged the president to stop cutting off public support for the arts. “I wish to persuade you that indifference to the arts projects of the WPA would not merely be unjust to the artists themselves who have worked with a zeal and devotion of which we must all be proud, but it would be an outright betrayal of a unique opportunity…. It is time that art be taken for what it is, a realm like education which requires active and constant public support.”
¹⁸

Besides her work at the WPA and the political activism it triggered, Krasner continued to develop her artwork by enrolling in classes at the Hans Hofmann School of Art at 52 West Ninth Street:
¹⁹
“I joined the class because I wanted to work with a model again. This was close by to where I lived, it was available, and I was interested in what was happening there,” she explained.
²⁰
She had also heard a lot about Hofmann from Pantuhoff. Hofmann
considered that he taught “progressive art students” about “pictorial space.”
²¹

Krasner's arrival at the Hofmann School made a lasting impression on Lillian Olinsey (later Lillian Kiesler, married to the artist Frederick Kiesler), a student who volunteered as the school's registrar. Seeking to be admitted, Lee breezed into the school carrying a portfolio with her black-and-white figure drawings, which Olinsey judged “unusually dynamic.” “Here was a very original talent,” she recalled, “I was thoroughly convinced about Lee…this quality of energy, her power of articulation…so vital. She was just unique.”
²²
Also impressed by Krasner's appearance, Olinsey described her on that first encounter as dressed in a black blouse, a black tight skirt with black net stockings and high-heeled shoes. “She had an animal magnetism, an energy, a kind of arrogance that commands…an energy that makes the waves happen.”

Olinsey rushed downstairs to see Hofmann in his small office, telling him about the new student, whom she considered “unique”: “You must give her a scholarship.” She had judged Krasner's work as superior to that of the other students. Hofmann took the advice of his trusted volunteer, and Krasner entered the school on a scholarship. All she had to do was buy the required Strathmore paper, charcoal, an eraser, and a board on which to work.

Despite Olinsey's enthusiastic initial evaluation, Hofmann felt that he had something to teach Krasner. Olinsey recalled that it was at Krasner's first Friday-morning “crit,” after a life class, that Hofmann took Krasner's drawing and tore the lower part of it into pieces, reassembling them on the left to demonstrate how to achieve greater dynamism and “a distinct movement” in relationship to the picture plane. Olinsey too was stunned and spoke about this incident to Hofmann, who later explained that he was demonstrating what he saw as Krasner's need for the theories of modern art, that one could not just work from the center, but should consider all four sides of the composition. Krasner,
who had grown accustomed to receiving harsh criticism from her teachers, weathered the shock of having Hofmann rip up her drawing before her classmates.

Much later she would complain that she had a hard time understanding Hofmann's English at first. She recalled that he “would come in twice a week and move from student to student.
²³
For the first six months I was there I couldn't understand a word the man was saying because he had such a heavy German accent. So I'd wait until he got through with the critique and there would be like thirty students—then when he left the room, I'd call George McNeil [the class monitor] over…and say ‘What did he say to me?' so I really got George's version of what he thought Hofmann had said to me.” Yet, given how many students were in the class, Krasner doubted that the monitor had really absorbed the master's words about her work. But “after a while,” she added, “I could understand him directly.”
²⁴

She remembered that Hofmann taught “the two-dimensional surface to be punctured and bring it back to the two-dimensional again; in effect he was teaching the principles of cubism.”
²⁵

Though cubism suggests showing multiple viewpoints simultaneously, this was her attempt at describing Hofmann's famous “push and pull” theory. He taught that the illusion of space, depth, and movement could be achieved on a flat canvas even in abstract art by using color principles and abstract shapes. At another time she described Hofmann as “one of the leading exponents in terms of explaining it [cubism] in this country…. I really didn't get…the full impact of [cubism] until I worked with Hofmann.”
²⁶
She concluded, however, “The most valid thing that came to me from Hofmann was his enthusiasm for painting and his seriousness and commitment to it.”
²⁷