To play out the other side of her relationship with Irving, the side of self-denial, subordination, and emulation, Lee turned to another of her instructors, Victor Semon Perard. A graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the author of numerous books on drawing and anatomy, Perard cared less about originality than about technique, especially his own technique. Lee proved an unusually adept, admiring student, and developed a drawing style so indistinguishable from her teacher’s that when Perard began work on an instruction manual, he hired Lee to provide some of the illustrations. Lee was elated. “Victor Perard was the first one who bought my art,” she says. “I got paid something like ten dollars for it and I thought, This is easy.” In the summer of 1928, she enrolled in George Bridgman’s drawing class at the Art Students League with expectations of a similar success but with very different results. Even after she adjusted her academic figural technique to please Bridgman’s more casual taste, he continued to be “disdainful of her work.” According to a friend, Lee was “infuriated” by Bridgman’s rejection but also, oddly, “drew strength” from it.
During the same summer, while sharing a studio with a group of friends on Fifth Avenue at Fifteenth Street, Lee modeled for Moses Wainer Dykaar, a well-known portrait sculptor who worked in the same building. It was Dykaar who suggested that Cooper Union “was no place for a young artist of real ambitions,” Lee recalls, and encouraged her to apply to the National Academy of Design, one of the most prestigious art schools in America at the time. Although her record was hardly exemplary, the academy accepted her, on the chilling condition that she start the whole arduous process over again back in the first alcove, drawing from casts.
Lee arrived at the National Academy of Design at 109th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in September 1928, the same year Jackson Pollock entered Manual Arts High School. At the first class, her high hopes, inflated by the elegant Victorian surroundings and the cosmopolitan student body, were abruptly dashed when the instructor walked in. It was Charles Hinton, her nemesis from Cooper Union. “We looked at each other and realized it was futile,” Lee recalled, “because at the Academy he couldn’t promote me. It took a full committee to do that. So we were stuck with each other again, and so it went.”
Once again, the rigid academic discipline proved too much like the repressive home life she was trying to escape. “At the Academy, I was very busy trying to do my best like everybody else,” she said later, “only I never could make it. For the life of me, it wouldn’t come through looking like Academy.” Just how long and hard she exerted herself is open to question. Only four months after arriving she was placed on probation. By the end of her first year, in a rigid, conservative school where even the most accommodating students “rarely got along with their teachers,” she had earned a reputation among students and faculty alike as “a nuisance,” “impossible,” “smart-alecky,” and “too sure of herself.” One teacher noted in her file, “This student is always a bother.”
The inevitable collision came in the fall of 1929. After a full year bottled up in Hinton’s cast drawing class, Lee was determined to break out. There was only one way: she would have to submit an oil painting that met the “approval” of a full committee of the faculty. In the summer after her first year, she set out to do just that, working at her parents’ new house in Huntington, Long Island, to escape the city heat.
Fittingly, it was a self-portrait. Her figure fills the largish canvas. She catches herself at her most important activity, painting. The corner of a canvas juts in from the right; she wears a painter’s smock over her light, short-sleeved blouse. One hand tightly clutches a quiver of brushes and a dirty rag, the other is hidden behind the canvas, laying on the very paint that depicts the act. Despite the studio accoutrements, she stands against an Impressionistic background of shaded tree trunks and sun-speckled underbrush. Warm sunlight strikes her back and bare neck. The face is skeptical, vulnerable, and defiant, all in one slight, sidelong glance. She hasn’t misrepresented the facial features, only softened them with shadows and a complexion like marble. This was the way Lee Krasner wanted to be seen—and judged.
Krasner’s plein air self-portrait, 1929, oil on linen, 30⅛” × 25 ⅛”
In the fall, she took the painting to the faculty review committee. Raymond P. R. Nielsen, a portrait painter and the jury chairman, looked at it once and waved it away. “That’s a dirty trick you played,” he said, wagging a finger at her. “Don’t ever pretend you painted outdoors when you painted indoors.” Lee explained how she had hung a mirror on a tree and suffered through heat and bugs and the mirror’s glare, but her words fell on deaf ears. Nielsen and the other judges refused to believe that a beginning student could produce even a modestly successful plein air portrait. Surprised and probably cowed by Lee’s uninhibited protests (“His reaction was very shocking to me,” she recalled), Nielsen passed her anyway—on probation.
But Lee refused to heed the warnings. In December, she was caught trying to paint a fish still life that had been set up for another class in the basement, an area that was off-limits to women. The penalty was a brief suspension for “painting figures without permission.”
Later that winter, on a Saturday after class, Lee and a group of fellow students took a subway from the academy to 730 Fifth Avenue to see “Painting in Paris from American Collections,” a show of modern French painting including works by Picasso, Matisse, and Braque at the newly opened Museum of Modern Art in the Heckscher Building. For Lee, the exhibition “really hit like an explosion.” On the following Monday, the same group reassembled at the academy and staged a minor coup. In the studio before class, they pulled down the heavy red velvet drape against which the models posed—its Victorian solemnity was suddenly a symbol of everything repressive about academy tradition—and kicked the model’s stand away from the wall into the middle of the room. When the model, a black man, appeared, and began taking off his “brightly-checkered lumberjacket,” Lee recalled, the group shouted, “No! Keep your jacket on!” Just then the instructor walked in and saw the anarchy to which his class had been reduced. “I can’t do anything with anybody!” he cried and stalked out of the room.
One of Lee’s co-conspirators that day was a tall, dark, extravagantly handsome man with whom she had fallen madly in love.
Igor Pantuhoff had what Irving Krassner had: an aura. In 1928, the year of Lee’s arrival, he won four of the academy’s principal prizes for artistic excellence and was unanimously acclaimed the school’s most promising student. Two years later, he won a traveling scholarship stipend, the equivalent of the prestigious Prix de Rome. Even in hard-luck, Depression-era New York, Igor appeared to lead a charmed life. So charmed that when he told stories about his childhood ordeal of escaping Russia, he found more puzzlement than sympathy among the women who inevitably flocked to him at parties. To them the stories seemed somehow unreal—like the romantic inventions of a Hollywood screenwriter.
In fact, Igor’s entire life was suffused with the gauzy, glamorous unreality of a thirties movie. At six feet two, he was a striking presence in any crowd, moving with a lithe theatricality, embellishing his comings and goings with flamboyant gestures. When he spoke, his deep, golden baritone, with a hint of an accent, carried over the babble of ordinary conversation. With his high forehead, dark eyes, and exquisitely dimpled chin, he was as handsome as any of the era’s leading men: Ronald Colman, Robert Taylor, William Powell. “That’s the first thing anyone would remark about him,” recalls Ronald Stein, a friend for thirty years. “How handsome he was. He looked like Errol Flynn.” Thus it seemed only fitting that at a gala charity auction some years later, Igor made the winning bid for the evening’s choicest lot: a dance with the actress Veronica Lake. When the couple took the floor—he in elegant black tie, she in a shimmering gown—they seemed the perfect pair. It was also typical of Igor that he made the winning bid “without a cent in his pocket.”
The next day, their picture appeared in the New York papers and ev
eryone wondered who that other movie star was swirling across the dance floor with Veronica Lake.
It’s not entirely clear who he was. Like many fugitives from the 1918 Revolution, he claimed to be a White Russian of noble blood—a cousin to the czar. He was only seven years old when the revolution forced his family to flee, first to Turkey, then briefly to Paris where he later studied painting in an academic atelier, then finally to America where he joined his aunt Olga, a devotee of religious cults and vegetarian regimes, who had married a wealthy Florida businessman. If eccentricity and flamboyance ran in the Pantuhoff family, they ran through Olga’s line. “She was a worldly, charming, sophisticated woman,” recalls Muriel Francis, a longtime friend of Igor’s, “but a little bit of a crackpot. She would pin her dress up around her waist and get down and scrub the floors with her hat on.”
Igor Pantuhoff
Igor represented everything that had been missing from Lee’s life, everything she had left home, family, religion, and Brooklyn to find. Where the Krassners were poor and working class, Igor was rich and aristocratic—or at least appeared to be, in his impeccably tailored suits and his twelve-cylinder, yellow-and-chrome Lincoln convertible. Where Joseph and Irving were remote and laconic, Igor was garrulous, extroverted, and thrillingly attentive. Where Lee was a drab child of East New York, Igor was the darling of Paris. Where Lee was a Jew, Igor was a White Russian—as far from a Jew as one could get at the time. (According to May Rosenberg, “The only thing his family knew about Jews back in Russia was how to kill them.”) Where Lee was short and zaftig, Igor was tall and sleek and strikingly handsome. Where Lee was struggling to become an artist, Igor seemed born to it.
Igor’s attraction to Lee is harder to fathom. Most of his friends dismissed it as just another of Igor’s eccentricities—of which there turned out to be an alarming number. “There was something off about Igor,” recalls Muriel Francis, “something that wasn’t quite straight. He was always charming, but you could see there was a darker side.”
The darker side was alcoholism. Igor was “a notorious drinker,” according to Ronald Stein, Lee’s nephew. “I’ve never seen anybody drink so much and live.” Lee may not have known about his drinking when they met in 1929, but she no doubt sensed the needfulness and vulnerability that underlay it. When she did discover it, sometime during the thirties, “she only loved him more,” recalls May Rosenberg. “[She] said only a man desperately in need of something he can’t get turns to alcohol.”
With her usual abandon, Lee threw herself into the relationship. In 1932, when Igor returned from his fellowship year in Rome, they moved into an apartment together.
Soon afterward, Lee quit her career as an artist. After years of struggle and confrontation, almost at the moment of her most exciting artistic discoveries, she decided to “withdraw from the field.” In fact, it was more like a rout than a withdrawal. She not only left art, she retreated all the way back to the most traditional and secure aspiration a young Jewish woman could have: teaching. She enrolled in a teacher training program at City College of New York.
Lee later tried to explain the sudden reversal as a financial necessity. It was the depths of the Depression, after all, and somebody had to make a living. But no excuse could conceal the truth. Even Lee must have realized that at a critical moment in her career, her will had failed; that for all her style and rhetoric, her fire didn’t burn hot enough. There were too many others, like Jackson Pollock, who survived the worst of the Depression without surrendering their ambitions; who built fires out of floorboards in abandoned buildings and stole food so they could buy canvas.
Abandoning her Bohemian independence, she accompanied Igor to society parties, nightclubs, dance halls, and fashionable uptown cafés, riding proudly next to him in the yellow Lincoln. She danced the steps he taught her. She wore the clothes he chose: a severe black outfit for casual wear; brightly colored stockings to show off her legs; an exotic evening dress he assembled from bits and pieces; a nun’s habit to a costume party. “Part of the understanding between them was that [Igor] would choose all of her clothing,” recalls May Rosenberg, “even though Lee continued to pay for it. After that, she was always magnificently dressed.” Igor also designed her makeup, sometimes using several shades of mascara or painting wide circles around her eyes, then adding a final touch of a few vividly colored feathers in her hair or, occasionally, a bright red wig.
Lee fell willingly into the hands of her Pygmalion. Within a few years, the homely and rebellious little Jewish girl from Jerome Street, Brooklyn, was transformed into a chic, smart, acerbic young woman. Fritz Bultman remembers her “sparkle and gaiety.” “[She had] a kind of arrogance that blinds people and makes waves happen,” recalls Lillian Olaney, who met Lee soon after her transformation. “She had the kind of animal energy and voluptuousness we later came to call sex appeal.”
To support their gay life-style, Igor forsook modernism and took up portraiture. Even in the Depression, a portrait artist could earn a decent living if he was facile and discreet. “He did mostly pretty women and their children,” recalls Muriel Francis, “or just pretty women, and all with beautiful swan-like necks.” Always intending to return to modernism when he could afford to, Igor religiously attended gallery openings and museum exhibitions with Lee in tow, sharing his sharp aesthetic judgments and educating her eye to the new art. “He came in with books on Picasso and copies of the Cahiers d’art long before anybody else did,” Fritz Bultman remembers. He introduced her to his friends Gorky and de Kooning, and when the modernist teacher Hans Hofmann opened a school in New York, he was among the first to sign up. But the money and glamour of society work proved more addictive than the aesthetic adrenaline of modernism. According to a friend, “Igor sort of struggled between wanting to be a serious painter and wanting to live in the world of the beautiful people.”
Portrait of Krasner by Pantuhoff, early 1930s, pastel and watercolor on paper, 22” × 25”
It wasn’t just a matter of money, however. When John Little asked Pantuhoff how much he was paid for a portrait of a society lady, he replied: “How much you get paid depends on how well you sleep with her.” Igor often boasted of his amorous adventures with sitters and, in the tiny art community, gossip inevitably reached Lee. “Friends tried to tell her,” says Little, “but she refused to listen.” When other artists complained about his snobbery, his facile painting style, his drunken insults, or his moral lassitude, Lee either closed her eyes or made excuses. If he spent his talent on society portraits, it was because he wanted to be generous with his friends, she would say. If he cursed sweet-tempered James Brooks in a drunken frenzy, it was because Brooks taunted him. “If Igor left to go get drunk, and there was a catastrophe,” recalls May Rosenberg, “Lee would hold everyone to blame except him.”
Even when Igor turned his abuse on her, in public, Lee never protested. “She was so madly in love with him that she forgave him anything,” according to Little. When Igor said to a friend in her presence, “I like being with an ugly woman because it makes me feel more handsome,” she didn’t wince. “He tormented her,” says Fritz Bultman, “but she never complained. The masochistic part of Lee loved every minute of it.”
In fact, despite the rising chorus of complaints, Lee clearly was determined to live the rest of her life with Igor. In the mid-thirties, they moved into a large apartment among the dilapidated warehouses on the lower West Side, sharing the cavernous space with May and Harold Rosenberg and another tenant. Lee took Igor to visit her parents in Greenlawn, Long Island, where Joseph and Anna Krassner had bought a small farm, and to Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn, where her sister Ruth had settled with her husband, William Stein. The sight of Igor’s sleek yellow convertible brought the entire neighborhood to their windows, “with their mouths hanging open,” Ruth remembers. “[Igor] was so stunning coming out of that car.” Afterward, he would take Lee and Ruth to dinner at an expensive restaurant. “When the waiter brought the check, Igor would whip out a hund
red dollar bill, and nobody could break it,” Ruth Stein recalls. ”‘In those days, a hundred dollars was a great deal of money. So he would sign for it. Of course he never paid a penny. He probably did all of New York on that hundred dollar bill.”
If the Krassner family treated Igor like an in-law, it was because they thought he was one. Throughout the thirties, Lee led her parents and sisters to believe that she and Igor were married. “They never volunteered any information,” says Ruth, “but one time he said, ‘Don’t you ever wonder about our relationship?’ And I said, ‘Well, you’re married, aren’t you?’ He didn’t deny it.”
The problems began in 1934 when Lee, after two years of studying at City College and working as a waitress in Greenwich Village, decided she wanted “no part of teaching” and began to paint again. When PWAP, the government’s first assistance program, opened its doors in early December, Lee was at the front of the line waiting to sign up.
The renewed sense of competition went almost unnoticed at first. Although both still harbored modernist dreams, they were working in different worlds: Igor in the recherché world of society portraits, Lee in the workmanlike world of the early projects. But a collision was inevitable.
One night, Igor came home and regaled Lee and the Rosenbergs with stories about the exciting new ideas being explored at the school. That same night, Lee decided that she would go there, too.
Hofmann’s “school” occupied a single large room, designed by the European architect Frederick Kiesler, in a building at 38 West Ninth Street. When Lee walked in, wearing her most Continental outfit—a tight skirt and black blouse, net stockings, and high heels—she saw a familiar tableau: about twenty students working intently at their easels. But this clearly wasn’t the National Academy of Design. On a table facing the easels someone had carefully placed a red ball, a length of brightly colored cloth, a playing card, and a piece of broken pottery with a Kleenex tissue draped over its edge. Behind this assemblage hung a crumpled sheet of cellophane. A lamp had been placed so that its light raked the cellophane into fragments of light and shadow.
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