Lee Krasner (6 page)

Krasner's work was among those chosen by a designer for the Famous Players–Lasky Corporation, who visited the costume class to select for an exhibition student work from a project that aimed “to change the styles for men,” replacing tweeds with “light comfortable garments.”
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Despite this success, Krasner was not like most of her class
mates, who thought about jobs in industry after studying at Cooper. She was planning to be a painter. No doubt that she was already beginning to learn about the existence of modern art. In Cooper's weekly student newspaper,
The Pioneer,
there were discussions of modern painters and reviews of their works when shown at New York galleries. On February 17, 1928, a show of Cézanne's work at the Wildenstein Gallery was praised for his “cosmic truths,” and his “warmth and sincerity.” The same writer remarked, “In Matisse, in Derain and in Segonzac, no one can readily see the reflection of Cézanne, but in Cézanne, one sees all and more.”
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Other shows reviewed in the Cooper newspaper that term included a show of Degas at Durand-Ruel, the Independent Artists held at the Waldorf Hotel, and the work of George Bellows, Ralph Blakelock, and Albert Ryder at the MacBeth Gallery. Even a Picasso still life in the latest “Surrealist” manner drew a student journalist's attention.
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Thus, by the time Krasner left Cooper to enroll at the National Academy, it is likely that she already had some sense that there was more going on aesthetically than her instructors at Cooper had been willing to admit.

In spring 1928, Krasner continued to study portrait painting, life drawing, and art history. She also added courses in perspective and anatomy. By then she was in the third alcove, studying “in cast” the full figure with the French-born Victor Semon Perard. She got along very well with Perard, her lecturer for anatomy, who appreciated her abilities enough to pay her the first compensation she ever received for making art. Known as an etcher and a lithographer, Perard employed Krasner to make illustrations for his book,
Anatomy and Drawing
(1928)—“a page or two for his book of hands and feet, blocked hands and feet from a cast.”
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She recounted that she told herself: “This is easy!” She imagined that she could earn a living from selling her artwork. Years later, when Krasner was shown a copy of Perard's book, long since out of print and which she had not seen in fifty years, she proudly turned to
her sketch, “Studies of Hands Method of Blocking.” The cubical forms, which do not resemble the book's other illustrations, perhaps hint at the modernist beginning to emerge.
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Perard's recognition was meaningful to Krasner. She did not, however, win any of the official prizes—110 in all—awarded that year to “Cooper Union girls.” For those in their second year, the awards were given for recognition in drawing and sketching in black and white, for watercolor, mural painting, and even for drawing in crayon.
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Even though she was encouraged by Perard's response to her work, Krasner left after the spring term of 1928. “I decided I ought to do something more serious than Cooper Union.”
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She had already begun to share a studio at 96 Fifth Avenue (at Fifteenth Street) with some friends. Their rented quarters were near the Cooper Union Studio Club west of Union Square, where student members could work outside of school hours. Girls were known to go to Washington Square Park to sketch alfresco.

Krasner supported her share of the rent by modeling in the nude for Moses Weiner Dykaar, whose studio was located in the same building. Years later her friend the sculptor Ibram Lassaw recalled that he first met Krasner when she was working as a model.
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Lassaw studied from 1931 to 1932 at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design in Midtown, which held life modeling and other courses, where Krasner might also have modeled.

Although Dykaar liked to sculpt figures as well, he was known for his portrait busts, and had modeled one of Calvin Coolidge and other notables for the Senate Gallery in the United States Capitol.
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Krasner might have been encouraged by Dykaar's success, since he had progressed from an impoverished young Jew in Vilnius (Lithuania, in the Russian empire) to studying art in Vilnius and in Paris at the Académie Julian. Nevertheless, she found him “bitter.”
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Dykaar encouraged Krasner to enroll at the Arts Students League on West Fifty-seventh Street, which he considered less
structured than Cooper Union and more serious. In July she began study with Canadian-born George Brant Bridgman for a life drawing course. She studied five days a week in the mornings. Bridgman, like Hinton at Cooper Union, had studied in Paris with Gérôme and Bouguereau. In his teaching, Bridgman promoted a system of “wedging” to convey the twisting and turning of the human figure. Known to be “prim and meticulous,” Bridgman was said to glower “at any student who wastes drawing paper or sits a few inches out of line from the other students. Occasionally he stops to drop a sardonic remark or to redraw, in heavy accurate lines, an improperly pitched shoulder or a badly proportioned leg.”
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Nor did he permit nude models in classes that mixed men and women. As might be expected, Krasner's determination to maintain her own emerging style conflicted with this French-Academic-trained teacher, as it had with Hinton, who was similarly trained. The Art Students League was not to Krasner's taste, and she decided to move on to the National Academy of Design.

Then suddenly Lee's older sister Rose died of appendicitis on July 9, 1928, leaving behind her husband, William Stein, and two small daughters, Muriel Pearl and Bernice.
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According to Old World Jewish tradition, the next in line—Lee—the eldest of the two remaining unmarried sisters, was supposed to marry her brother-in-law and raise the children. But Lee refused. Though she doted on her nieces, she believed she had another destiny and would not even consider such a marriage. The responsibility fell to Lee's younger sister, Ruth, who, it seems, never forgave her sister.

Igor Pantuhoff and his portrait of a nude model, c. 1930. At the National Academy, Igor, a tall, handsome, charming White Russian who boasted of an aristocratic lineage, was easy to notice. Younger than Krasner by three years, he often won prizes for his work.

L
ATE IN THE SUMMER OF
1928, L
EE STARTED AN AMBITIOUS SELF-PORTRAIT
to qualify her for the life class at the National Academy of Design. She set herself up outdoors at her parents' new home in Greenlawn (Huntington Township) on Long Island's north shore. They had purchased a modest rural house with a separate garage (that might have been an old barn) in May 1926,
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when Joseph was fifty-five and Anna was nearly forty-six. (The 1930 census says that Lee's parents still lived in the Brooklyn
house they rented for $50 a month; Lee and Irving were also still living there.)
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After nearly two decades of physical drudgery and economic uncertainty as fishmongers, Joseph and Anna longed for a country life like the one they'd had in Shpikov. The house, next to a small lake, was simple with no indoor plumbing, but they could grow vegetables, raise chickens, and sell eggs. It was also just up the hill from Centreport Harbor, which offered swimming and fishing.
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They sold some of what they grew.

Getting there was easy via the Long Island Railroad. Krasner had been painting from life even before she left Cooper Union. Now she was working with confidence, producing an oil painting that was thirty by twenty-five inches. “I nailed a mirror to a tree, and spent the summer painting myself with trees showing in the background,” she remembered. “It was difficult—the light in the mirror, the heat and the bugs.”
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Krasner showed herself in a short-sleeved blue shirt and painter's apron. Her hair is cut short; her rouged cheeks stand out; her eyes are just intense white dots that glint from beneath her trademark heavy eyebrows. One full arm extends across her body to the focal point where her hand grasps a paint-spattered rag and three brushes tinted with color, while the other arm just vanishes at the canvas. By depicting herself in the act of painting, she thus asserts her identity as a painter. Yet the picture contains a puzzle: why does it show her clutching her tools in her right hand while working on the canvas with her left? She was right-handed and painted with her right hand.
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Evidently her mind had not reckoned with the mirror's reversing effect, exhibiting left-right confusion that today is often considered a symptom of dyslexia.
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Though dyslexia is today known as a common disability caused by a defect in the brain's ability to process graphic symbols, it was not understood during Krasner's lifetime. Considered a learning disability, dyslexia does not reflect any lack of intelligence. Dyslexics might start math problems on the wrong side, or want to carry a number the wrong way. Similarly, Krasner habitually began her
paintings from right to left, working in a manner that was atypical in a culture that reads from left to right. A dyslexic's unique brain architecture and “unusual wiring” also make reading, writing, and spelling difficult. Many dyslexics, however, are gifted in areas that the brain's right hemisphere is said to control, among them artistic skill, vivid imagination, intuition, creative thinking, and curiosity—characteristics that could be used to describe Krasner.

Her lifelong propensity for asking people to read aloud to her as well as her frequent spelling errors and dislike of writing suggest that she suffered from a dyslexic's confused sense of direction, which often impedes reading and writing. However, as was the case with Krasner, comprehension through listening usually exceeds reading.

On September 17, 1928, nineteen-year-old “Lenore Krasner” formally applied to the National Academy of Design, then located “in an old wooden barn of a building” in Manhattan at 109th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, not far from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
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A little more than a week later, she gained admission, with free tuition for the seven-month term. There were about six hundred students there, and for the first time since elementary school, she was with females and males.
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The academy's creed seemed to mesh with Krasner's ambition to become an artist: “Only students who intend to follow art as a profession will be admitted.”
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The academy advertised “a balanced system of art education, combining both practical study and theoretical knowledge.”
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Applicants had to practice drawing from casts of famous ancient sculptures until they could qualify for the life class by submitting an acceptable full-length figure or torso drawn from a cast.

Despite her new self-portraits, Krasner had to begin again by drawing from the antique. Even worse, she again faced her old nemesis from Cooper Union, Charles Hinton, who taught the traditional introduction at the academy. Neither the teacher nor the rebellious student wanted to repeat their previous clash. Kras
ner remembered: “He looked at me and I looked at him, and this time there wasn't anything he could do about getting rid of me [by sending me to the next level] as it took a full committee at the Academy to promote you.”
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Her opinion of Hinton was shared by her classmate and friend Esphyr (Esther) Slobodkina, who referred to him, with irony, as “our pretty Mr. Hinton” and as a “genteel mummy of a teacher.” She complained that “if not for that dear, kindly Mr. [Arthur] Covey, our teacher in composition, and a few friends that I made, I surely would have gone out of my mind in that completely sterile atmosphere of permanently congealed mediocrity.”
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Slobodkina was an immigrant on a student visa, so she had to sign in at the academy but was so disgusted with the school that she did little more than that. “When Mr. Hinton came to give me his ‘criticism,'” she recalled, “I patiently waited for him to slick up a few spots on my far-from-inspired work while mumbling something about light and shade, and flowing line. The poor, old, doddering cherub knew no more what the real art of drawing was about than the school janitor. Yet he was there for years and years, ruining countless young, fresh, promising talents.”
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Slobodkina was from Siberia, where her father managed a Rothschild-owned oil enterprise. Before arriving at the academy, she had trained in art and become familiar with modernism in Russia. Though she later won an Honorable Mention for Composition in 1932, Slobodkina quickly became disillusioned with the school's conservatism, as would some of the other more adventuresome students including Krasner, Herbert Ferber, Giorgio Cavallon, Byron Browne, and Ilya Bolotowsky—all destined to make names for themselves.

When Krasner was finally able to present her self-portrait to the appointed committee, they judged it so fine that they didn't believe it was done outdoors. “When you paint a picture inside, don't pretend it's done outside,” they admonished her.
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The committee chair, Raymond Perry Rodgers Neilson, a well-known
portrait artist, then forty-two, scolded, “That's a dirty trick you played.”
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Nevertheless Krasner preferred him over Hinton. “It was no use my protesting, but he passed me anyway—on probation! At this time I had not seen any French painting; I had simply tried to paint what I saw. His reaction was very shocking to me. But now I suppose I must have seemed to him like some smart-aleck kid trying to imitate the French and show them all up. And I assume now they were all worried by the French.”
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In interviews years later, Krasner made much of being admitted on probation. But the catalogue stated: “All new students are admitted on probation” with advancement only by producing appropriate work.

Academy records document that Krasner was promoted to “Life in Full” for a one-month “trial” as of January 26, 1929.
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“Life in Full” referred to leaving plaster casts behind to draw full-time from a live model. A related
Self-Portrait
survives in pencil and sepia watercolor on paper. To create the work, she glanced back over her shoulder into a mirror; her short haircut suggests that she created this work around the time of her outdoor oil self-portrait. Krasner explained that she had done a series of self-portraits, “not because I was fascinated with my image but because I was the one subject that would stand still at my convenience.”
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After her promotion, her record card for that first year reveals that someone drew a line through Hinton's name, as she dropped out of his dreaded class. Instead the name “Neilson,” who taught the desired “Life Drawing and Painting” on Tuesday and Friday mornings, was written in.
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Krasner's outspokenness would keep getting her into trouble. A note on her record card states, “This student is always a bother—locker key paid—but no record of it on record—insists upon having own way despite School Rules.” Krasner was very much a product of her Jewish immigrant culture. Growing up in a large impoverished family and having to fend for herself had made her into a fierce defender of her rights—as she saw them.
Furthermore, it had been necessary for her to look out for herself in the poverty-stricken immigrant communities in Brooklyn, where anti-Semitic gangs sometimes caused havoc—a precarious situation all too similar to the one her family had faced as Jews in Russia.

Of the 580 students (238 women, 342 men) who attended the academy that year, only 479 survived the entire school year. Krasner made friends with both men and women, but later mentioned only the men that she'd made friends with, most of whom later won recognition as artists: Byron Browne, Ilya Bolotowsky, Giorgio Cavallon, Boris Gorelick, Igor Pantuhoff, and Pan Theodor.
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One classmate opined that two of the best-looking men were Browne, who was “tall, blond, strong and as radiantly handsome as a summer morning in a northern country,” and Igor Pantuhoff.
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Although most students at the academy were Americans, there were also many international students, including some from Austria, China, France, Hungary, Canada, England, Italy, and Russia. Besides Esphyr Slobodkina, who was only there on a student visa because recently imposed quotas impeded her from immigrating legally, the “Russian” contingent included Eda Mirsky, her sister Kitty, Gorelick, Bolotowsky, and Pantuhoff.

Krasner became especially close to the Mirskys, Eda and her older sister Kitty. The sisters worked in contrasting styles: Eda painted flowers and children in “lavish colors, sensuous shapes,” while Kitty preferred dark and brooding seascapes and kittens. Eda won the School Prizes of $15 for both the Still Life class and the Women's Night Class—Figure in 1932.

Their Russian-Jewish family had emigrated from Ukraine to England, where the girls were born, then to the United States, settling in the Bronx when the girls were still children. They eventually moved to Edgemere, Long Island. Their father, Samuel, was a self-taught portrait painter who earned a good living, working on commissions from his studio at Union Square. Kitty started study
ing at the academy two years before Krasner. By the time Krasner encountered the Mirskys, they were living in Manhattan.

The Mirskys were conversant with their father's work as an artist, and this gave them a sophistication about art that Krasner lacked because she had no such role model at home. Yet the Mirsky daughters also had to deal with their father's judgment—both his criticism of their work and his high standards for what it took to be an artist. Nevertheless this did not deter them from pursuing art. Eda told her daughter, the author Erica Jong, that she “could have gone to college anywhere I chose—but since Kitty quit school and went to the National Academy of Design, and since she was always coming home with stories of how splendid it was, how many handsome boys there were, how much fun it was, I decided I wanted to leave school too…. Papa let me.”
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Eda became a star at the academy, but with a bitter twist: “the teachers always twitted the boys: ‘Better watch out for that Mirsky girl—she'll win the Prix de Rome,' which was the big traveling scholarship. But they never gave it to girls and I knew that. In fact, when I won two bronze medals, I was furious because I knew they were just tokens—not real money prizes. And that was because I was a girl. Why did they say ‘Better watch out for that Mirsky girl!' if not to torment me?”
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Eda was so frustrated by the sexism that years later she discouraged her daughter, Erica, from pursuing a career in the visual arts when Erica went to the High School of Music and Art and the Art Students League.
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Eda's granddaughter, the author Molly Jong-Fast, recalled her grandmother “screaming about socialism,” a concern that would have interested her friend Lenore.
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Lenore and Eda's friendship was so close that Lenore agreed to pose for at least two portraits. They capture Lenore's likeness and personality with extraordinary confidence. One shows her long, luxuriant hair, while in the later one, clad in a fashionable striped jacket, she sports the short haircut of a flapper. Lenore also gave Eda a self-portrait painted in the basement of her family's house in Brooklyn.