Lee Krasner (16 page)

Hofmann brought extensive experience with modernism to his teaching. Born in 1880 in Bavaria, he grew up in Munich, then studied for a decade in Paris, beginning in 1904, where he met Braque and Picasso. He became a friend of Robert Delaunay, who
prompted him to focus on color through his own colorful abstract cubist style. The outbreak of World War I caused Hofmann to stay in Munich, and during this time he got to know Gabriele Münter, the former companion of Wassily Kandinsky, and read Kandinsky's book
On the Spiritual in Art
. Münter even persuaded Hofmann to store some of the art abandoned by Kandinsky when he fled to Russia as war broke out. Despite the fighting, Hofmann opened his own art school in 1915, and over the coming years it began to attract American students.

Eventually Hofmann was invited to be a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley, where he taught during the summer of 1930. He returned the next year, when he had a show of his work at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. Not surprisingly, he closed his Munich school in 1932 and settled in the United States, and went on to run schools both winters in New York and summers in Provincetown.

“To avoid being academic” was Hofmann's byword. He said his philosophy was to be “a vital participant in contemporary aesthetics,” insisting that “teaching which represents the Renaissance tradition has deteriorated to a method of mere visual representation, where perspective, anatomy, dynamic symmetry and other scientific formulas have been placed as obstacles to the natural creative process of painting.”
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He argued that the American reaction against the academic had resulted in “an exclusive interest in subject matter and neglect of aesthetic considerations.”
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He rejected the focus on representation of an Edward Hopper or a Raphael Soyer. He also rejected Surrealism and would not have liked either Krasner's
Gansevoort I
or
Gansevoort II,
despite the latter's abstracted shapes.

At the same time, Hofmann emphasized that “a student's talent should be estimated by his instinctive faculty of plastic sensitivity: the power, when applied to the experience of nature, to penetrate the relationships of its colors, forms, weights, textures, etc.”
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He emphasized life drawing and still life in the winter
classes in New York and added landscape in his summers on Cape Cod, high above Provincetown overlooking the sea. He encouraged his students to work and rework their drawings before moving on to paintings. The student would then reduce what was observable to express only volumes that exist in nature through planes of abstract color.

Krasner began making charcoal drawings of still life setups. The students often worked on these in afternoon sessions: fruit, objects, textiles on a tabletop. Some of the objects were bottles, glasses, melons, or a bunch of grapes. From these, she quickly moved into colors, letting planes and spots of color dominate her composition. She didn't focus on edges but rather emphasized the contrasts of colored shapes as they vibrated (pushing and pulling) against one another in space. The hot colors like red seemed to jump out at the viewer, while the cooler blues and violets appeared to recede. Sometimes the objects almost seemed to dissolve into the surrounding space, creating an abstract composition.

The mornings at the school were reserved for sketching in charcoal from the human figure. Hofmann liked to set the model in a space defined by the light and surrounding objects. Students were to capture the push and pull, positive and negative space, which articulated the figure. Krasner sketched seated female models by employing bold lines and planes of paper left white for contrast. Before long, she opened up the figure and depicted a fragmented view, implying movement, as if exploring the dynamics of how the limbs functioned.

Krasner depicted the figure in a shallow space with a contrast of values that came out of cubism. Krasner acknowledged that she was familiar with Picasso's 1910 drawing
Standing Figure,
which the photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz gave to the Metropolitan Museum in 1949.
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Krasner would have seen this drawing in the Museum of Modern Art's 1936 show “Cubism and Abstract Art,” just in time to incorporate what she had observed in her own work at the Hofmann School.
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Some of the nude studies she
made in class repeat these axial lines of motion; they are a far cry from the figure drawing she had done at the National Academy or with Job Goodman, not even aiming at the subtle chiaroscuro of the old masters.

Her classmate Perle Fine recalled Krasner's distress when she arrived late one Monday morning after the class had been sketching from the same model for two or three weeks. Taking one look at her drawing, Krasner began to exclaim aloud, “It's all wrong. It's all wrong! It's all changed!”
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The other students looked to Krasner and her drawing. She explained, “She's cut her hair,” a deed that, while seemingly meaningless, changed the abstract planes Krasner was translating directly from what she observed.

Hofmann taught how colors interacted optically when juxtaposed. He had students try applying colored paper shapes to their drawings. Sometimes students felt that he went too far, especially when he seized a drawing and tore it in two pieces, hoping to show how to create vitality by shifting the paper to show a less rigid composition. His exuberant demonstrations might have unintentionally suggested the possibility of collage to Krasner. In connection with her Stable Gallery show of collages in 1955, Krasner reflected, “Back in the '30s, as a Hofmann student, I had cut and replaced portions of a painting.”
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“It was a result of the Hofmann classes that I painted my first abstract compositions. The physical break in my work occurred at the time I was attending Hofmann's class. I didn't go regularly, but I was there off and on for three years or so.”
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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”
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and taught that “Mondrian brought plastic art to ultimate purity.”
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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.”
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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.
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Olinsey recalled of Krasner: “She always made the fur fly.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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On balance, Krasner appreciated Hofmann. She told one interviewer that “Hofmann was the first person who said encouraging things to me about my work.”
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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.”
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At the time, Krasner suggested that Greenberg attend Hofmann's Friday lectures, which were open to all.
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Greenberg went and soon pronounced that no one in the United States understood cubism as well as Hofmann.
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Greenberg also signed up to take life drawing classes taught by Pantuhoff for the WPA.
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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,
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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A touch of sexism shows too in his view of her marriage to Pollock: “She gave in all the time. She was very feminine.”
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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,”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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