Lee Krasner (7 page)

The basement portrait, a moody, wide-eyed image, resembles the style of Krasner's future teacher Leon Kroll, who would have appreciated Lenore's decision to pose before a mirror in half-shadow with the sunlight pouring through the basement window behind her, illuminating a potted plant and one side of her face. The portrait already shows remarkable sophistication and skill. Krasner's ability was not lost on Eda, who treasured the gift and finally, in 1988, gave it, along with her own two portraits of Krasner, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Like Krasner, the Mirsky sisters studied with the despised Hinton and with Charles Courtney Curran. Curran, who was nearly seventy years old at the time, was equally old-fashioned in his style of teaching. Born in Kentucky, he had studied at the Académie Julian in Paris and exhibited at the Salon. Curran had won a number of prizes in the 1880s and 1890s in both Europe and the United States. At the time he taught Krasner he also held the prestigious position of the academy's corresponding secretary. His impressionistic style might have seemed like a breath of fresh air to Krasner had she not been attracted instead to the new Museum of Modern Art and its more radical program of showing Matisse, Picasso, and abstract art.

Krasner was attracted not only to modernism but also to a coterie of Russians who shared her enthusiasm. It was as if she felt at ease with people who shared the origin of her parents, older siblings, and mother's brother. On her registration card for the academy, the category “where born” correctly reads “New York City,” but to the right on the same line is typed “Russia.” The note reappears on cards for successive years, making it less likely that it's accidental. Some years, the word
Russia
follows the letters
M
and
F,
which seem to stand for the birthplace of “Mother” and “Father.” Krasner may have been born in America, but she still spent her time with the Russians, most of whom were Jewish. But one of them who caught Krasner's eye definitely was not.
²⁶

A tall, handsome, charming White Russian, Igor Pantuhoff
was easy to notice. He was younger than Krasner by three years but boasted of an aristocratic lineage. Gossip about his background circulated among his fellow students and later among his contemporaries. Joop Sanders, a younger Dutch painter who settled in New York, recalled meeting Pantuhoff in the late 1940s through their mutual friend, the artist Willem de Kooning, and said that “Igor was very elegant and good looking with a smooth European manner.”
²⁷
Robert Jonas, another artist who befriended both de Kooning and Pantuhoff, later recalled that Pantuhoff's father was “a captain of the guard of the Kremlin.”
²⁸

Oleg Ivanovich Pantuhoff was born in Kiev in 1882—the youngest son of a physician who had been a general in the Army Medical Corps—and had been an energetic young colonel, a commanding officer of the Russian Imperial Guard, and a staff member to Tsar Nicholas II. The tsar commissioned him to start a branch of the Boy Scouts in Russia (the National Organization of Russian Scouts, founded in St. Petersburg in 1909).
²⁹
Colonel Pantuhoff became the first Chief Scout and the tsar's son, Alexei, was the first Russian Scout, placing Pantuhoff quite close to the imperial family.

When Colonel Pantuhoff named his second son Igor, he was expressing his ardent Russian nationalism, because the name recalls a twelfth-century Russian prince whose exploits were immortalized in an anonymous epic,
Song of Igor's Campaign.
³⁰
At the time of Igor's birth, the Pantuhoffs employed a children's nurse, a maid, a cook, and an orderly. Igor's mother, Nina Michailovna Dobrovolskaya, was ill for nearly a year after the boy's birth. At her doctor's suggestion, she left her family and resided in Davos, Switzerland, and then in a spa near Salzburg. She continued to suffer from asthma and was frequently absent while she visited various clinics in search of a cure.

As small children, Igor and his older brother, Oleg, Jr., lived with their parents in Tsarskoe Selo, the town devoted to the Imperial Palace and also where the last tsar officially resided.
³¹
During
spring and winter seasons, however, the two boys went to live with their grandmother in St. Petersburg, just sixteen miles away. They also stayed with their grandmother when their father went off to war.

The Russian Civil War began in 1918. Colonel Pantuhoff served with the White armies against the Bolshevik Red Army and “took part in the last defense of the Kremlin against the Bolsheviks.”
³²
As the fighting escalated, the Pantuhoffs fled first to Moscow and then to the Crimea on the Black Sea. Food became scarce. In his memoirs, Colonel Pantuhoff described how his family suffered from malnutrition. Both Igor and his brother developed jaundice; Oleg, Jr., became so weak that he could not walk. Their mother was also quite ill and weak, suffering from bouts of pneumonia.

Despite his family's suffering, Colonel Pantuhoff continued to work with the Boy Scouts, many of whom he later described as “sons or grandsons of men wounded or killed in the world war or the civil war…. Their recent experiences so confirmed them in loyalty to their country and to their church that, even after the Bolsheviks had outlawed scout activity, some persisted secretly in scout work.”
³³
He also wrote about “a large Jewish Boy Scout group in Sevastopol known as the Maccabees. Their leaders were good men and their boys looked very smart. On one occasion they invited me and other scoutmasters to inspect their unit and then asked to become part of the Russian Boy Scout organization.” After conferring with his colleagues, Pantuhoff “decided that since they were not of our religion and carried a flag with the Star of David, our bylaws precluded their joining us.”
³⁴
Pantuhoff would later try to impose this same kind of exclusionary thinking on his sons in America.

During the height of the war, the brothers suffered from either changing schools or having no school at all. Colonel Pantuhoff wrote that Igor, who studied less well than Oleg, “lagged sadly behind in reading” but developed “unquestioned talents in drawing”
and “definite talent as an actor.”
³⁵
Igor's parents did what they could with homeschooling. After the Red Army recaptured Kiev on December 17, 1919, the major fighting ended, and the defeated Cossacks fled back toward the Black Sea. Colonel Pantuhoff finally decided to put his safety and that of his family first and joined more than a million Russian refugees from the Bolsheviks. The Pantuhoffs now had to cope with sudden poverty.

They sailed on a freighter from Sevastopol and landed on March 5, 1920, in Constantinople (now Istanbul), which was still under Allied control after World War I.
³⁶
The boys were placed in two different boarding schools: Igor's, Yeni Kioi, had an English headmaster.

The Bolsheviks soon banned the scouts and, beginning in 1922, purged the scout leaders, who either perished or had already gone into exile along with other White Russians. Igor became a Cub Scout in Constantinople until early September of that year, when the Pantuhoffs sailed for the United States, arriving on the tenth of October.

Having moved about during most of Igor's childhood, the family finally settled down at 385 Central Park West—far in both distance and culture from the Brooklyn immigrant neighborhood of the Krasners. The Pantuhoffs' lifestyle, however, was not elegant. Like many other immigrants, the family could afford their apartment only by taking in four boarders.
³⁷
Igor's brother modeled his life on their father's military career, joining the U.S. Army and distinguishing himself as a translator. Igor's mother had studied art in St. Petersburg at the art school of Ian F. Tzionglinsky, an ardent follower of Impressionism, and at the school of Technical Design of Baron Aleksander Stiglitze. Igor's father also enjoyed painting, so Igor took after both parents.
³⁸

Pantuhoff had already spent a full year at the academy when Krasner arrived there. In October 1928, Pantuhoff won an honorable mention in the required submission category, “A Corner of New York: Noon Hour,” a theme that all competing had to
produce. The next spring, Krasner's second term, he won multiple prizes in the categories of painting from the nude, figure, still life, and composition.
³⁹
Since he registered his name as “Igor Pantuckoff,” it appears that he had not yet decided on how to anglicize it. Evidently names shifted among the emigrés; Ilya Bolotowsky was also “Elias” and Giorgio Cavallon also “George.”
⁴⁰
It would take still more time for “Lenore Krassner” to become Lee Krasner.

The new student at the academy caught the attention of the rising star. Just twenty-one, Krasner was outgoing and slender with a model's figure. She delighted in her first experience in a coed institution since elementary school. She was ambitious and determined to be an artist. To her, Pantuhoff embodied the sophistication of European culture. He exuded style, which was completely missing in her background.

The two soon became a couple. He began to style and present her to the world like a Pygmalion. She enjoyed the glamorous clothing and exotic jewelry he picked for her to purchase, even if her modest budget suffered. Whatever qualms Krasner might have had about Pantuhoff's attempts to transform her appearance faded in the context of Jazz Age New York, when the image of the flapper redefined modern womanhood. Rigid Victorian customs gave way, leaving young women to cope with sexual liberation. They now had new opportunities to dress in more revealing clothes and to wear makeup, once associated with prostitutes, but now fashionable in the Roaring Twenties.

Pantuhoff's attention to Krasner earned her some envy. Slobodkina grumbled, “Half the girls in school, including Kitty and Eda Mirsky, hung around him. His particular lady of the time was the extremely ugly, elegantly stylized Lee Krasner. She had a huge nose, pendulous lips, bleached hair in a long, slick bob, and a dazzlingly beautiful, luminously white body.”
⁴¹
Slobodkina seems to have gotten a surprise from Igor when she first began to attend the academy morning sessions. She wrote in her memoir: “A dashing young man, the darling of the female student body, by the
name of Igor Pentukhov [
sic
] heard of the arrival of a new student, a young lady not so bad to look at and a Russian at that. One late morning he rushed to our all female class, and finding me busily bent over the eternal drawing from the cast of Venus de Milo, unhesitatingly planted a gentle kiss in the temptingly low-cut décolleté of my back.”
⁴²
Slobodkina turned around and slapped his face. He protested that he just wanted to meet her and speak a little Russian. She snapped back that she was there to speak English and to learn to paint. “I must say he was not heartbroken.”

Krasner was apparently less rejecting of Pantuhoff's flirtatious nature. Slobodkina's memoir documents that it was not unusual among the academy's students for them to form live-in relationships before marriage. In one case, however, Slobodkina commented that their classmate Gertrude “Peter” Greene was “indefatigable in her search for new partners. I suspect that she had a touch of nymphomania in her” but she and others viewed Krasner as loving and faithful to Pantuhoff.
⁴³
In fact many of their teachers and friends eventually believed the two were married.

In contrast with nineteenth-century precepts of womanly virtue, this era began to view sexual activity before marriage as no longer a grave moral breach. It was even commended by some books of advice. “The girl who makes use of the new opportunities for sex freedom is likely to find her experiences have been wholesome…she may be better prepared for marriage by her playful activities than if she had clung to a passive role of waiting for marriage before giving any expression to her sex impulses.”
⁴⁴

Enchanted by Igor, Lee was relieved when her younger sister, Ruth, then only eighteen, stepped up to meet the family's responsibility of providing a wife for their sister's widower by marrying him on February 5, 1929. Ruth's new husband, Willie Stein, operated the projector at the Pearl Movie House in Brooklyn, then owned by his father, Morris Stein.
⁴⁵
Ruth accepted the burden (or the opportunity) of raising Stein's two small daughters as her own. According to the 1930 federal census, Krasner apparently still
lived at home at 594 Jerome Street with her parents, along with her brother Irving.
⁴⁶
Her sister Ruth and her husband, William Stein, along with Muriel and Bernice, his two daughters, also lived at the same address. Lee occupied the basement room and shared the kitchen and bathroom upstairs.

Pantuhoff often visited Krasner at her home. One of her nieces, Muriel, treasured her times with the couple. “I used to sit on [Igor's] lap and he would tell me stories and give me sips of wine.”
⁴⁷
Muriel remembers that Pantuhoff always had a glass of wine and that he smoked a lot. She also described her Aunt Lee as a frequent and beloved babysitter, who was much needed after Ruth's only child, Ronald Jay (Ronnie) Stein, was born in September 1930. For Muriel, Lee was “like a second mother”—very kind, helping her with her clothes, taking her out to eat, and teaching her “what the world was like.”
⁴⁸
Lee sometimes took Igor to visit her parents in Greenlawn, especially during the summers, where he would paint Muriel's portrait and landscapes. Krasner often took Muriel and Bernice to the circus and to shop for clothes, and “other such treats.”
⁴⁹
The sisters found Aunt Lee to be much warmer than their stepmother, Ruth. Aunt Lee often accompanied the girls to the movies at the Pearl, where their father worked until 1929. The theater, which was just north of East New York, had inspired Muriel's middle name.

The theater opened in 1914 and could draw about five hundred spectators for its second-and third-run films. Muriel recalls how thrilled she was to see Greta Garbo and Clark Gable and be with her Aunt Lee.
⁵⁰
Muriel and her sister viewed their aunt as “a second mother,” who was “kind and generous; she really wanted children and never had them.” Conversely, Lee probably viewed her nieces as if they were her children—at least children whose lives she could enrich without taking primary responsibility for them. Later she would famously dote on their half brother, Ronnie Stein.