Lee Krasner (8 page)

When the stock market crashed in October 1929, the academy's
adventuresome students didn't even seem to notice. No records have survived of any reaction from the students. Indeed it was not until 1930 that the grip of long-term economic depression took hold. Furthermore, for many of the students, especially those from immigrant families like Krasner, there had always been a worry over money.
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Krasner's acquaintance and contemporary Lionel Abel, a playwright and critic, wrote that in November, “I did not even know that there had been a crash on Wall Street during the previous month. When I say I did not know about the crash, I do not mean that I had not read of it. I mean merely that it had no special significance to me.”
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At the same time that Krasner gained admission to the Life Class at the beginning of 1929, she also enrolled in Charles Courtney Curran's day class and the night class of Ivan Gregorewitch Olinsky, an affable Russian Jewish immigrant who was a highly successful portraitist who had work in major galleries. Olinsky was born in Elizabethgrad (Kirovohrad in the Ukraine) and emigrated with his family when he was twelve. Just after Alexander III ascended the throne, in April 1881, their town underwent two days of government-sanctioned pogroms. Many Jews were raped or murdered, and their property was destroyed. Olinsky and his family survived and managed to emigrate before an uprising in 1905 when many more Jews met their death. Given Olinsky's painful experience with anti-Semitism, it is not surprising that he often emphasized his Russian origins over his Jewish identity.
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Luckily for Olinsky, his family settled in New York, where he enrolled at the academy under the artists J. Alden Weir, George W. Maynard, and Robert Vonnoh. He also did a stint working for John La Farge, helping to make both murals and stained glass. Olinsky's portraits and figure paintings, while academic in style, do show the influence of impressionism. He was purportedly so successful as a portraitist that he sometimes had no work for sale in his studio. He was represented by major New York art dealers such as the Macbeth and Grand Central galleries.
Middle-aged, established, and set in his ways, Olinsky nonetheless provided Krasner with a link to her family's ethnicity. His “Russian” profile at the academy may have represented a new possibility of assimilation and social acceptance for Krasner, whose own family was much more identified with Jewish insularity and isolation. Still, Olinsky offered no new aesthetic direction she could call her own.

That autumn Krasner added a fourth class that would occasion a significant turn in her artistic development—Still Life, taught with criticisms on Wednesday afternoons by the septuagenarian William S. Robinson. Robinson had studied at the Académie Julian in Paris, and the “extra” class that he taught was open to students “sufficiently advanced, whenever they desire to paint from the still life model.” Attendance was required for three afternoons during the week.

Meanwhile Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Seurat were featured in the Museum of Modern Art's inaugural show on Friday, November 8, 1929. Throngs attended the opening, and the museum announced that it was open free to the public for the day.
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The show's ninety-eight pictures were revelatory to many, who had to seek them out in the museum's first quarters, a few rented rooms on the twelfth floor of the Heckscher Building at 730 Fifth Avenue. The museum's director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., told the press that “several art connoisseurs who had been known for their antipathy to modern painting were ‘converted' after seeing the exhibition.”
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Founded by three progressive and socially prominent women—Miss Lillie P. Bliss, Mrs. Cornelius J. (Mary Quinn) Sullivan, and Mrs. John D. (Abby Aldrich) Rockefeller, Jr.—the Modern challenged the conservative outlook of the National Academy. Curious and rebellious young artists like Krasner would naturally be attracted to the promise of a new aesthetic freedom.

Krasner went to the newly opened museum that Saturday with a group of classmates. “We disbanded after leaving the show, and
there was no time to compare notes. But on Monday morning we met again at the academy. Nothing was said, but the after-affects were automatic. We ripped down the red and green velvet curtains—they were always behind everything from the wall into the middle of the room. The model came in, he was a Negro, and wearing a brightly checked lumberjacket. He started to take it off, but we all shouted ‘No! Keep your jacket on!'”
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She often spoke of how encountering “live Matisses and Picassos” had an immediate effect on her and had inspired the students, who “decided to do what we saw in front of us.”
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She delighted in telling how, when their portrait instructor, Sydney Edward Dickinson, showed up to give the next criticism, “he was so irritated with what he saw that…he picked up somebody's brushes and hurled them across the room, saying, ‘I can't teach you people anything' and left.”
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Dickinson's angry response to the students' visual provocation was particularly startling. Krasner had described him as “a very charming, delightful man, who practically never raised his voice. He was extremely patient.”
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Having studied portrait and still life painting with the conservative William Merritt Chase and figure drawing with the traditionalist George Bridgman, Dickinson was a successful painter of society portraits, but he could not accept modernism.
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Krasner's work in her still life class suggests that she treasured MoMA's catalogue long after the show came down. She painted floral and fruit subjects including
Still Life with Apples
and
Easter Lillies,
both using a darker palette, though in the latter she daubed orange on the green cloth beneath the vase. However, both Krasner's modeling of her
Apples
and her decision to tilt the tabletop toward the picture plane suggest that she had been looking with care at both Cézanne and Gauguin. Krasner signed
Easter Lillies
as “L. Krassner” boldly on the bottom right.

At the Modern's inaugural show, Krasner would have seen at least six still life images of Cézanne's apples. Two of them probably had an impact on her. In Krasner's
Apples
still life, she depicts
apples piled on a plate seen from above. Her decision to place a single apple to the left, apart from the others on a cloth that does not lie flat, appears to echo a Cézanne then owned by Joseph Winterbotham and on loan for the show. Another Cézanne, from the Étienne Bignou Collection, has a similar arrangement of apples piled on a plate also repeating the visual emphasis on the table's back edge across the canvas. Krasner's decision to tip both the table and the plate forward, however, is actually closer to Gauguin's still life in his
Portrait of Meyer de Haan,
which was both in the show and reproduced in the catalogue.

“It was an upheaval for me,” Krasner exclaimed, speaking of modern painting, “something like reading Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. A freeing…an opening of a door. I can't say what it was, exactly, that I recognized, any more than some years earlier I could have said why it was I wanted to have anything to do with art. But one thing, beyond the aesthetic impact: seeing those French paintings stirred my anger against any form of provincialism. When I hailed those masters I didn't care if they were French or what they were.”
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Krasner also had problems with the academy beyond aesthetic differences. Even the rules that governed painting in still life made her angry. For example, she learned that anyone wanting to paint still life with fish had to do it in the basement, where it was cooler and the fish were slower to rot. The problem was that no women were allowed downstairs. “That was the first time I had experienced real separation as an artist, and it infuriated me. You're not being allowed to paint a…fish because you're a woman. It reminded me of being in the synagogue and being told to go up not downstairs. That kind of thing still riles me, and it still comes up.”
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In protest, Krasner, the fishmonger's daughter, made the forbidden foray into the basement to paint fish with her pal Eda Mirsky, a star student. The faculty was so offended by the girls' rebellious gesture that it suspended them on December 7, 1929,
for “painting figures without permission.” It took the signature of “CCC”—their teacher Charles Courtney Curran—to restore their student status after the suspension. In an interview with Eda Mirsky when she was ninety-nine years old, the artist beamed at the thought of her youthful act of defiance with Krasner. She insisted that it was the only time she got in trouble.
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Surprisingly, Krasner later interpreted the experience differently, saying, “I had absolutely no consciousness of being discriminated against until abstract expressionism came into blossom.”
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This was one of her rare inconsistent moments, which may have sprung from her thinking in a different context.

If Krasner's rebellious attitude kept her from winning any prizes at the academy, it did not prevent Eda Mirsky's recognition there—at least the small prizes that they allowed for women. As for Krasner, by her second term in 1929, she was made a “monitor,” which helped to pay for her materials and other expenses. According to Slobodkina, monitors were usually chosen by the students in a class.
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But a teacher, if displeased, could surely replace the monitor.

Despite Krasner's problems with the academy, her fellow students seem to have recognized in Krasner the qualities of common sense, leadership, and a practical nature, since they made her secretary of the Students' Association even before she got into trouble. Careful minutes for November 11, 1929, remain on file: $327 profit, school dance; $227 taken out for “student's show,” as well as $120, loaned to the students' supply store, leaving an active balance of $20.

Krasner continued to study during both day and night classes with Olinsky. As the academy required, he conducted separate life classes for men and women. Krasner's classmate Ilya Bolotowsky also liked Olinsky. He remarked years later that he thought that the National Academy: “was a very bad school…. The teachers were extremely academic, although Olinsky was not; he was sort of a modernist. I was considered a rebel and a bad example
because I was experimenting in color, rather modest experiments but for the Academy it was wild. We were warned not to follow people like Picasso, Cézanne…because Picasso never learned how to draw and Cézanne never learned how to paint, and other advice of this nature.”
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The faculty that Bolotowsky described is also the one that continued to esteem Igor Pantuhoff, who also studied with both Neilson and Olinsky. They awarded him the Mooney Traveling Scholarship in spring 1930, enabling him to travel to study the old masters in Europe. The award meant a temporary separation for Pantuhoff and Krasner, who were already viewed as a couple according to May Tabak Rosenberg.
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With Pantuhoff gone, Krasner could focus on advancing her own career, which he encouraged.
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According to the 1930 federal census, even though Krasner was registered as “Lenore” at the academy, she gave her name to the census taker as “Lee,” having already adopted this nickname permanently during Cooper Union days; on April 11, she gave her age as twenty-one, which was correct, because she would not have her birthday until October. She had not yet begun her habit of lying about her age. She continued to include a second
s
in Krassner.

Though Krasner continued to serve as the monitor of the night class, she was not among the winners of bronze medals or honorable mentions that went to four of the female students in “Drawing from Life—Figure.” In November 1930, Krasner was again taking Life in Full, continuing under Curran by day and Olinsky by night. Her work as the monitor for the night class suggests that she got along well with Olinsky. That year Krasner also attended lectures in art history, and lithography and took Chemistry of Color. In the spring of 1931, she attended lectures on the history of architecture, stained glass, and mosaics; the latter would prove particularly useful.

With Krasner in Curran's class in 1930 and 1931 was Joseph Vogel, a Polish-born Jewish immigrant, who lived with his fam
ily in the Bronx. Vogel's family was also poor and struggling to make ends meet. By January 1931, the Depression hit hard, and his registration card noted: “Given time to pay; Entire family out of work.” Vogel and Krasner took a class in the fall of 1931 with a new instructor named Leon Kroll.

Kroll had just arrived at the academy and was teaching Life in Full. He was gregarious, short, Jewish, and he painted portraits, figures, and landscapes. But most important, he was sophisticated enough to admire and talk about Cézanne, which caused the students to view him positively as a more progressive teacher. They did not know that Kroll's background included painting with the realist Edward Hopper in Gloucester in 1912, and, just before World War I, befriending the modernist artists Sonia and Robert Delaunay in Paris, who were already painting adventurous, colorful cubist-inspired abstractions. Vogel remembered Kroll as the “Bolshevik of the Academy,” which, considering Vogel's politics, was a compliment.
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Krasner recalled that “when it was announced that Leon Kroll was coming to the National Academy, it was as if Picasso was coming.” But she soon found him to be “very academic and hostile.”
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Kroll, once ensconced at the academy, seemed to have forgotten the modernist colors of the Delaunays. Krasner recalled that “one day this model came in and she was wild, her face was white, her hair was orange, she had purple eyelids and black round the eyes. I was the class monitor, and booked her right away, even though she wasn't exactly academy stock. Kroll came in and took one look at the model, and demanded loudly which one of us was the monitor. He came over, took one look at my painting and screamed, ‘Young lady! Go home and take a mental bath.'”
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