Lee Krasner (11 page)

One issue raised at the Artists Union was that “easel” artists
were lending to shows that attracted crowds to be exploited by businesses. The union contended that these artists should receive direct payment for participation, as would commercial artists or mural painters for their work. Instead, as Max Spivak pointed out in an article he wrote for the union's journal,
Art Front,
sponsors like Wanamaker's Department Store or Rockefeller Center might support an art show at which “the easel painter is promised ‘pie in the sky'” but instead receives nothing for taking part in “promotional schemes” of “big business.”
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Meanwhile, a combination of forces from the art world and society persuaded the federal government to fund patronage programs for artists as part of the New Deal recovery effort. Established in late 1933 as part of the New Deal, the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) would employ more than 3,700 artists to decorate federal and other public buildings, including post offices “now under construction throughout the country.” “Artists to Adorn Nation's Buildings” read the headline in the
New York Times
for December 12, 1933. The article reported a meeting at the home of the painter Edward Bruce, “attended by Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, leaders of American Art, and government officials.”
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Eleanor Roosevelt told the press, “I think this plan has tremendous possibilities for awakening the interest of the people as a whole in art and for developing artistic qualities which have not come to light in the past and for recognizing artists who already have made their names among their fellow-artists, but who have had little recognition from the public at large.”
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Eventually, under various programs administered by the Treasury Department, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and the Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration), more than 10,000 artists and support staff received commissions or salary jobs that rescued many of them from intense poverty. The WPA's Federal Art Project reflected President Roosevelt's belief that in order to retain human dignity, people needed jobs rather than direct relief. He later expressed
this in a radio address from the White House. “The Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration is a practical relief project which also emphasizes the best tradition of the democratic spirit. The WPA artist, in rendering his own impression of things, speaks also for the spirit of his fellow countrymen everywhere. I think the WPA artist exemplifies with great force the essential place which the arts have in a democratic society such as ours.”
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“Once the WPA jobs were opened to the unemployed,” Lionel Abel recalled, “real change came over the city. The breadlines disappeared, and that was very important because of the psychological effect the lines had had…. The artists were helping the government by their work, saying, there can't possibly be a sea of blood here, for look, here are works of art!”
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Yet all of the WPA artists, Krasner included, lived with the insecurity of not knowing when a government project would end.

Krasner recalled how she was chosen for her initial job doing illustrations for the Public Works of Art Project. While she was studying with Job Goodman a government official visited the class and announced that there were jobs for indigent artists. She immediately raised her hand and was told to report for an examination. Given her education, skills, and proven financial need, she was able to meet the criteria for acceptance.
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Rosenberg described a similar experience at Greenwich House: “So I was there drawing one afternoon and a guy came rushing in like a messenger in an old-fashioned play, who announced that they were hiring artists up at the College Art Association…the agency appointed…to run the project in New York.”
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In January 1934, Krasner attained a paid position at the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP). She worked through March, assisting a geology professor doing a book on rocks.
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She was “drawing fossils,” she recalled, “so that I was working [on] very detailed drawing. I don't remember how long it lasted as it was an extensive project with a loft full of artists working on these things.”
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The assignment brought back girlhood memories of
working from nature at Washington Irving High School. “There I was with a hard pencil, and what came to me was the memory of all those butterflies and beetles, only now in more abstract form. I was happy as a lark doing that stuff!”
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She earned $23.65 per week, which was enough to survive, even thrive, compared to the dire straits of life without the Project.

Under the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA), which took over from the PWAP in April, Krasner began as a teacher, but was soon reassigned as an artist. Her salary was a weekly wage of $24.00 for “thirty to thirty-nine hours' work, that is, about $4.80 per day.” The Artists Union raised the issue that only pressure from a strong union would give artists a chance to retain the union wage scale. An article in
Art Front
illustrated the meager artist's wage when compared to those of other skilled workers. “Union plumbers, for instance, receive $12.00 per day, house painters receive $11.20, plasterers, $12.00, stone carvers, $14.00. The Artists Union, after careful consideration of comparative wages, has determined on $2.00 per hour as a fair wage for artists, for a maximum 30-hour, and a minimum 12-hour week. Artists who now receive $24.00 for a 30-hour week will, under the new rate, receive the same sum for 12 hours of work.”
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Krasner knew well many of those involved in the Union, including Balcomb Greene and his wife, Gertrude “Peter” Glass Greene, Ibram Lassaw, Michael Loew, Robert Jonas, Willem de Kooning, and the muralist Max Spivak, whom Krasner was assigned to assist at the WPA in 1935. Krasner also recalled that the Russian-emigré painter Anton Refregier was very active at the Union.
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Having studied in Paris and then with Hofmann in Munich, Refregier was a friend of de Kooning's in New York, though he was much more politically active than his pragmatic Dutch friend.

De Kooning was four years older than Krasner, and they had first met at his loft on West Twenty-first Street in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood when he was living with the dancer Juliet
Browner. Krasner described Browner as “an exceptionally beautiful young girl [who] played the viola beautifully…. Many years later I learned that Julie became the wife of Man Ray.”
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Since de Kooning did not move from Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street to his Chelsea loft until late that year, Krasner probably met de Kooning in late 1934 or early 1935. Krasner described the encounter many years later, making only a vague reference to the man who had been her lover before Pollock: “I do remember it was someone called Igor Pantuhoff, who…took me up to Bill's studio, a loft converted into a studio, on Twenty-second Street and introduced me to him. And it was quite a few years, maybe about three or four, before I met someone called Pollock.”
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De Kooning, using income earned from working regularly as a commercial artist for A.S. Beck (a chain of shoe stores), had purchased a Capehart high-fidelity system with an automatic record changer.
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The Capehart was advertised as “the finest gift it is possible to provide for a home and its family and friends. For the Capehart virtually brings the operatic stage, the symphonic festival, the theatre, the ballroom, the whole world of recorded and radio diversions, right to your living room.”
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De Kooning, like Krasner, liked to listen to classical music and to modernists like Stravinsky, as well as jazz, yet she was in no condition to acquire the best and most expensive record player available.
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Krasner recalled: “Bill had a beautiful recording machine and wonderful records, and he always encouraged the idea of people coming to his studio so that one rarely saw him alone, there would always be a kind of entourage, three or four people if one went there on a Sunday.”
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He also hosted informal loft parties, where artists brought their own liquor and danced.
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E
VEN WITH THE HELP OF THE
PWAP, K
RASNER AND
P
ANTUHOFF REMAINED
anxious about getting by and being able to feed themselves. Leon Kroll, their former teacher at the academy, who was
now one of the confidential advisers at Yaddo, encouraged them to correspond with Elizabeth Ames at the artists colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. In a letter to Ames, Kroll recommended the couple as “desirable candidates for scholarships” and included “Igor Pantuckoff” on a list of the people he thought most important to go to Yaddo. Lee and Igor were invited to come between August and October 1934.
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The colony offered room, board, and studio space for two-month periods to those artists “who have achieved some measure of professional accomplishment.”
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In his rankings, Kroll placed Igor third, after artists Maurice Becker and Alix Stavenitz. He described Igor as “a talented young painter and an agreeable person. His wife not as good as he is. Both in the middle twenties. Pantukoff had won the Pulitzer Prize at the National Academy two or three years ago. His wife was one of his fellow students. They both studied under me and I thought they were of my best as students.”
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By then, Igor and Lee were living in the Village at 56 West Eighth Street, and they signed their application to Yaddo as “Mr. and Mrs. Igor Pantuckoff.” Even in their application letter, written in February, Igor referred to Lee as his wife. Both Kroll's letter and Pantuhoff's make clear that Lee and Igor pretended to be legally married. One note, saying that any time Yaddo accepts them would be “quite satisfactory,” is signed “Igor and Lenore Pantukoff.”
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There is, however, no evidence that they ever did marry or that they ever went to Yaddo. The reason must be that by the time they were scheduled to go, they feared losing their federal employment.

 

K
RASNER AND
P
ANTUHOFF GREW TO ENJOY THE COMPANY OF
H
AROLD
Rosenberg, whom she first met while waitressing at Sam Johnson's, and Rosenberg's wife, the writer May Natalie Tabak. Both couples were fascinated with politics and joined others in various
causes, occasionally attending political rallies together. They also talked about French poetry, Russian novels, Marxist literature, and “the eternal verities.”
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Tabak remembered, “Igor began to attend the newly opened Hans Hofmann art school. Other artists we all knew had gone to Europe to study with Hofmann; and, although familiar with much of his vocabulary (like ‘push and pull,' which was interpreted by every artist in a personal way), the school in New York was an exciting curiosity. We were all fascinated by Igor's reports of what went on there.”
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Hofmann, a German modernist painter who had studied in Paris, opened his first school in America at 444 Madison Avenue in 1933.
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Krasner too was curious about Pantuhoff's new venture.

The couple then moved to 213 West Fourteenth Street, just west of Seventh Avenue.
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Their apartment building offered access to the roof, from which Krasner painted a typical city scene called
Fourteenth Street
.
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Although the catalogue raisonné identifies this canvas as “one of Krasner's few attempts to paint in the Social Realist vein,” it is not overtly political and is, in fact, much closer to the realist subject matter and the emphasis on painting light and shadow of an artist like Edward Hopper, who a few years earlier painted
City Roofs
(1932), a similar view from his own roof.
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Hopper delivered
City Roofs
to the Rehn Gallery in New York in October 1932, so it's possible Krasner saw it there. Though Rehn is not a gallery she recalled frequenting, the entire art scene was then quite small, and eager artists looked everywhere for potential places to show their own work.

For another 1934 canvas,
Gansevoort I,
Krasner walked along the West Side of Manhattan, where she observed ships tied up at the docks. Gansevoort Street extends through its gritty riverfront neighborhood east to the point where both it and West Fourth end at West Thirteenth, a block south of West Fourteenth. The barren roughness of this meatpacking district, with its old cobblestone street and austere brick warehouses, seemed to have attracted her.

In her pencil sketch
Study for Gansevoort I,
Krasner included
on the sidewalk's right side a pair of figures sitting and reclining. Given the context of the Depression, the men are probably homeless.
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The drawing also includes trash cans and assorted debris that she eliminated in her final painted composition; and she moved the fire hydrant from the street's left to its right side. Reducing the details, she sought to achieve an urban modernity worthy of the French painter Fernand Léger, who first visited New York in 1931. She nonetheless captured the neighborhood's exoticism, which long attracted artists to its cheap loft spaces located above ground-floor warehouses. Two years later, the prolific Berenice Abbott would photograph the same area that attracted Krasner.

Krasner and Pantuhoff enhanced their urban life by continuing to go to the beach on Long Island and to her parents' house. May Tabak recounted how, while Igor was driving Harold Rosenberg out to Jones Beach, a policeman stopped them for speeding.

“‘Where's the fire?,' he asked irritably.

“Igor, blond, young, startlingly handsome, with a heavy Russian accent, drew himself up with White-Russian-tsarist-officer disdain and snorted, ‘I am Igor Pantuhoff, Great Artist!' ‘Oh!' said the startled cop. ‘OK, then,' said Igor and, shifting gears, drove off.”
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Igor's father had seen his promise as an actor.