Lee Krasner (17 page)

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 galleries. 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.

At the end of July 1939, friends of Krasner and Pantuhoff still considered them to be an item. While vacationing in Provincetown, George Mercer even sent them a postcard that read “Dear Lee Gor: How are you kids?” He encouraged them to join him and some of their friends attending the Hofmann summer school, including Bultman, Mercedes Carles, and Wilfrid Zogbaum. He included a hint of their aesthetic interests of the moment. “How is
‘Can-Can' Kandinsky & Mother Miró?”
⁸⁴
Mercer had managed to buy a Kandinsky, perhaps even from Hofmann.

Krasner had been attracted both to modernism and to Pantuhoff's keen interest in the avant-garde just after his return from his European tour in 1930. But as Igor's interest in modernism waned, her commitment strengthened, causing a growing tension in their relationship. Other troubling issues that divided them, as observed by friends like Michael Loew and Robert Jonas, were Pantuhoff's womanizing and the fact that his family refused to meet Krasner because she was Jewish.

Regardless, Igor gave Lee the book
Paintings and Drawings of Matisse
by Jean Cassou, which he inscribed: “To Lee with admiration from Igor, 1939, New York.”
⁸⁵
Beyond recognizing her passion for Matisse with this gift, Igor eventually gave or left other books to Krasner, including
Picasso
by Henri Mahaut, published in 1930 and inscribed “Igor Pantuhoff 1932,” and
Raoul Dufy
by Jean René, published in Paris in 1931 and inscribed “Igor Pantuhoff 1931.”
⁸⁶

Krasner ended her job on the WPA once again on August 31, 1939, under a ruling that discharged all who had been employed for more than eighteen months. She did not get rehired until November 29. The three months of virtual destitution further stressed her relationship with Pantuhoff, who friends recalled always lived beyond his means.
⁸⁷

Money was so scarce for them that she looked around to see what she could sell to raise some funds. On September 10, she ran an ad in the
New York Times
offering to sell a “Copehard Radio-Phonograph” with an automatic record changer for $100. The ad noted “Call between 5–7 o'clock. Lenore Krasner, 44 East 9th Street.”
⁸⁸
This ad obviously misspelled the “Capehart Radio-Phonograph,” purchased by the often extravagant Pantuhoff, either in advance or in imitation of de Kooning's similar acquisition. Now with both of them broke, it had to be sacrificed to pay for basic living expenses.

Evidently Krasner informed Mercer that Igor was thinking of going to Florida. Mercer wrote her on September 18, 1939: “Glad to hear Ig'r still with…. Ask Ig'r who is going to Florida and g've the big br'ser a k'ck in the a's for me.”
⁸⁹
Perhaps pressured by his inability to support himself, Igor departed suddenly, leaving a note that said, “Dear Lee I'm going to Florida this morning. Will you take care of yourself. I will right [
sic
] as soon as I get there. Igor. My Florida adress [
sic
] is 811 Hunter St. W. Palm Beach Fla.” On October 19, 1939, he sent a postcard from the Philco Race Track in Baltimore: “On the way Down South the Old bum. P.S. Say goodby to the gang.”
⁹⁰

Desperate, discouraged, and hoping for better fortune, Pantuhoff had gone to see his parents in Florida, from which he sent Krasner a letter on his second day. He illustrated his note with an elaborate sketch of himself reclining under the skimpy shade of a palm tree that he represented as an erect phallus with four fronds attached. He added a caption beneath the tree: “The large plant that you have does not lick [
sic
for
like
] sun. It must have shade to exist.” He was clearly hard up for cash because he implored Krasner to “try to sell Jules portrait for anything you can get? My parents turned out to be much poorer than I expected.” He reassured her, “I will give you 50% of the sum—I go to bed 8 p.m.” He also wrote: “It seems to me that sun is shining especially for me,” adding, “(The day before I araved [
sic
] hear [
sic
] three baby skunks came to my father's estate and nobody has a nurve [
sic
] to talk to them. Father promises 50 cents for me for each skunk I will persuade to go away.) P.S. But I am wise I will not talk to them.”
⁹¹