The school’s volunteer registrar, Lillian Olaney (later Mrs. Frederick Kiesler), was impressed by Lee’s “animal magnetism” and “voluptuousness.” She barely paused long enough to look at Lee’s portfolio of academy drawings before rushing downstairs to Hofmann’s tiny cubicle on the main floor to tell him that “a unique student, a girl by the name of Lee Krasner,” wanted to enroll. “You must give her a scholarship,” Olaney insisted. Hofmann agreed immediately and Olaney explained to Krasner what she would need: Strathmore paper, charcoal, a charcoal eraser, and a board. A few days later, Lee returned for her first class, ready to make a fresh start.
Before long, however, Jerome Street reasserted itself. “She really raised hell,” recalls John Little, another student. “She was very pushy in class, especially with the women. If a woman set up an easel between her and the model, she’d just push her way through.” A few of the female students, like Olaney and Ray “Buda” Kaiser (later Mrs. Charles Eames), did respond enthusiastically to Lee’s urbanity and style, but most shared the assessment of Maria Piacenza, Rita Benton’s niece who was also a Hofmann student at the time, that Lee was “mad at the world.” “She always acted as if life had been unfair to her,” Piacenza remembers. “She was a woman, and people didn’t take women seriously. She was an artist, and it wasn’t easy to make your way as an artist in the thirties. Then she was Jewish, which she didn’t seem to want to be … and she certainly didn’t like being ugly. She always acted as if she had these four big chips on her shoulder and she dared you to knock one of them off.”
To older-brother figures like John Little, George McNeil, and Fritz Bultman, however, Lee was the life of the party. In an era when “hanging around” was the primary activity and conversation was the dominant form of entertainment day and night, Lee Krasner was a dazzling talker. “She was very lively and forthright,” recalls George McNeil, “outspoken and gay. She would make known her opinions of people and things, very clearly.” “She was always vociferous and she always had a great liveliness about her,” Fritz Bultman remembers. Although by no means an intellectual—she resisted reading throughout her life—Lee had an acute sense of people, a quick caustic wit, and an extraordinary ear for words and phrases. When familiar words failed her, she invented her own (“this was a prestate to the state we’re talking about”). When they bored her, she left them out entirely (“And then the minister said, ‘Do you take this cloppety clop clop—I do”). John Little recalls walking down Madison Avenue with Lee when she spotted a late landscape by the French artist Maurice Vlaminck in a gallery window. “It looks like it was painted with cold cream,” Little remarked. “Too bad it wasn’t painted with vanishing cream,” Lee shot back.
In the Hofmann school, reactions to Lee’s painting were mixed. Some fellow students, like George McNeil, considered her “a painter’s painter, a professional artist.” “Lee was taken very seriously by the other students in the school,” says Lillian Olaney. Others, like Beatrice Ribak, thought “nobody took Lee Krasner seriously as an artist. She was no more a good artist than she was a good looker.” To Lee, however, the only approval that mattered was Hofmann’s, and from her first day, mustering all the emotional resources of her past, she set out to win it.
Hans Hofmann
Like John Graham, Hans Hofmann was among the small, adventurous band of European “missionaries” who, beginning in the 1920s, brought the new gospel of modernism to young American artists. In 1930, at the relatively late age of fifty, Hofmann had traveled to the University of California at Berkeley, then to the Chouinard Institute of Art in Los Angeles, and finally, in 1932, to New York. Unlike Graham, who acquired—or invented—his expertise after arriving in America, Hofmann brought with him an encyclopedic knowledge of European modernism and a genuine familiarity with the giants of the new movement. Drawn to Paris, the mecca of modern art, from his native Bavaria in 1904, he remained there for ten years, rubbing elbows with Picasso, Braque, Derain, and others during the very years when they were creating their revolutions of Cubism and Fauvism. Hofmann also brought with him a rigorous pedagogical training—something almost unheard of in an artistic movement that was still in the process of discovering and defining itself. As a student alongside Matisse at the Grande Chaumière, an atelier in Paris, he had acquired both a passion for teaching and an admiration for Matisse’s work that suffused his pedagogical theories. When war broke out in 1914, he returned to Munich and established his own school modeled on one Matisse had opened in Paris.
In New York, Hofmann taught briefly at the Art Students League but found the atmosphere—permeated by traditional thinking and Benton’s rhetoric—inhospitable. In 1933, he left the League and established the first of his “schools.” Students were drawn not only by his European experience but also by his charismatic personal style. Unlike Benton, who took little pleasure in teaching, Hofmann flourished in the collegial environment of the atelier and in his role as its “cher Maître.” He was an imposing man—“as strong as a mountain;” according to one student, “and as big”—with a “good German ego” to match. Suave and detached one minute, buoyant and enthusiastic the next, his classroom presence was catalytic, combining equal parts of temperamental artist, supportive teacher, and irrepressible showman. It was a combination that, in the quarter century between 1933 and 1958, left a permanent mark on an entire generation of American artists. “He brought Paris to New York,” says one former student. “We were all ignorant. He really brought the word.”
“The word” was that traditional art wasn’t really art at all, just reproduction—a clever but wrongheaded effort to imitate nature. Unlike the traditional painter who “pretended,” by the use of tricks like perspective drawing, that the image was three-dimensional, the modern artist recognized and embraced the limitations of his medium: in particular, the flatness of the canvas and the inertness of the colored pigment.
Hofmann’s critique of traditional art was nothing new. Even his sermon on the flatness of the canvas, although seldom heard before in American classrooms, had been preached by Maurice Denis as early as 1890 in Europe. His analogy of color to music had been made by Gauguin at least as early as 1888. What was new, and truly inspirational to struggling young painters like Lee Krasner, was the way he applied these grand abstractions to the artist’s core dilemma: what to do with a blank canvas.
European modernism may have liberated painting from “the tyranny of reality,” but in the process it created a whole new set of problems. If the common goal was no longer to reproduce reality in some compelling way, by what rules did an artist apply paint? What connection was there between one brush stroke and the next? How could an artist judge whether the last stroke, or the next, was right or wrong? When was a painting “completed”? And when it was completed, how could an artist—or a critic—make judgments about it, or compare it to other paintings? By what articulable standards was a painting by Matisse “great,” or one Matisse painting “better” than another, or Matisse a better artist than Dufy? These were the pressing questions to which Hofmann offered answers.
In any painting, he argued, various tensions are created from the moment the first dab of paint is applied: tension between the dab and the empty canvas, between the color of the dab and the color of the canvas, between the space covered by the dab and the space outside it. A second dab affects all those tensions and creates new ones. If the next dab is a different color, a whole new set of tensions is created—between warm color and cool color, between receding color and advancing color, between luminous color and tonal color. Add a line and the complications multiply geometrically—tensions between inside and outside, solid and void, direction and stability. And so on, dab by dab, color by color, line by line. (“Put a spot on the surface and let the surface answer back!” he would say.) Hofmann described each tension as a “push-pull” of competing forces or elements and urged his students to “activate the surface” with the energy of these tensions. The ultimate goal, of course, was to contro
l the tensions so they achieved the state that Hofmann considered the goal of all great art: “equilibrium.” A painting that sustained an equilibrium between push and pull, between force and counterforce, created an alternate reality, one far more profound than any mere academic depiction of the natural world.
Hofmann’s version of the artistic process may have been abstruse but at least it was a version that could be debated, practiced, replicated, and, not least important, taught. During his twice-weekly rounds of student work, he hammered at the same themes, exhorting students to “keep the picture plane flat,” “make the colors sing,” and “give the most with the least.” He frequently commented that a student drawing “lacked sufficient push and pull,” or “had a hole in it”—that is, the equilibrium was disrupted. Sometimes, a bad painting would spark a long exegesis on “how to handle color” or “why colors worked or didn’t work with each other.” At other times, the comments were arrogantly terse: “this is wrong, and that’s wrong, and the color is tonal, and you’re losing the picture plane.” He often referred to “the mythical perfect picture [that was] just waiting to be painted.” More than anything, Hofmann provided a common language for talking about modern painting and thinking about quality, a language that avoided simpleminded verisimilitude without slipping into the deep ooze of subjectivity.
Hofmann had his detractors. Some students found him “pompous, blustering, [and] egocentric,” and dismissed his favorite aphorisms—“Do not make it flat! But it must stay flat!”—as more gibberish than genius. But most, like Lee Krasner, hung on his every word. “It was just wonderful,” recalls George Mercer. “We’d come out of class gasping, all refocused in new possible directions.” Even when he got carried away with his own ideas, and his fractured English dissolved into German, they would sit reverentially to the end. According to Larry Rivers, who attended the school years later, Hofmann “beefed up the timid hearts” and “puffed up” the delusions of grandeur “until you saw clearly your name in the long line from Michelangelo to Matisse … to Hofmann himself.”
Hans Hofmann proved the perfect object for Lee Krasner’s ambivalent affections. With a telling mix of fondness and resentment, she later recalled how Hofmann “would come up to me, look at my work, and do a critique half in English and half in German, but certainly nothing I could understand.” When he left the room, she would ask a fellow student, “What did this man say to me?” With her instinct for antagonism, Lee quickly detected Hofmann’s chauvinism. (“Hans thought women were better artists than men until they fell in love,” says May Rosenberg. “After that the man gets stronger and the woman gets weaker.”) One time he commented on a drawing of Lee’s, “This is so good that you wouldn’t know it was done by a woman.”
To Lee, they were fighting words. Soon, a guerrilla war developed between the autocratic teacher and his most assertive female student. “A number of times,” she recalls bitterly, “he would walk up to me and take the charcoal out of my hand and start working on my drawing.” In class one day for a biweekly critique, he stopped in front of a drawing that Lee considered particularly good. (It had attracted several compliments from other students.) After looking at it only briefly, Hofmann untacked it from the easel and ripped it into four pieces. He rearranged the pieces on the easel and announced, “This is tension,” then walked away.
Like a chastened child, Lee said nothing at the time, but later complained furiously to friends. “I had a total fit,” she recalls. Nevertheless, she went on to become Hofmann’s most ardent admirer and imitator at the school, mouthing his clichés—“This has got a hole in it,” and “Keep the picture plane flat”—and, according to fellow students, trying desperately to make the “perfect picture” Hofmann always talked about. “She wasn’t a great mind,” says May Rosenberg, “but she was an acute mind, and she could pick things up with great ease when she wanted to.”
Lee undoubtedly would have picked up Hofmann’s painting style as well as his vocabulary if it hadn’t been for the master’s legendary reticence. Although sometimes arrogant, Hofmann harbored grave doubts about his ability as an artist, and literally hid his paintings from all but his closest friends. He even barred students from his studio, offering the excuse that “he did not want them copying him.” Unable to imitate the work of the artist she worshiped, Lee turned to the work of the artist that Hofmann worshiped: Matisse. She had used Matisse as a model before arriving at the school, but in the effort to please Hofmann, she resorted to outright imitation, borrowing, in some of her paintings, the pointillistic “broken touch” of such early Matisse paintings as Study for Joy of Life (which was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936); in others, Matisse’s color, his mature painterly technique, even his subject matter.
But Hofmann was also “one of the leading exponents” of Cubism in America and, along with John Graham, an ardent admirer of Picasso. Lee remembered how, in class, her teacher’s favor seemed to “swing like a pendulum” between the two giants of modernism. Inevitably, Lee swung along with it, executing reams of charcoal drawings based on Picasso’s Cubist sketches, and paintings, like Abstract Human Figure, based on Picasso’s cloisonnist works. In 1939, she saw Guernica and, for a while at least, stopped swinging. “It knocked me right out of the room,” she said. She meant it literally. At her first sight of the painting, she left the gallery and circled the block “four or five times” before returning for a second look. For a while, all of her paintings paid homage to Picasso’s flat areas of color and thick black outlining.
Then, in 1940, at an exhibition that included three of her Picassoid abstractions, she met Piet Mondrian, the Dutch master of the de Stijl movement who had recently arrived in New York. In his late sixties, Mondrian was an imposing, charismatic man: ascetically lean, elegant, and quintessentially European. Lee was overwhelmed. By the time Mondrian got around to looking at her paintings, she was “queasy” with anticipation. “Very strong inner rhythm,” he commented gently. “Stay with it.”
Lee in Hans Hofmann’s studio, early 1940s
Hardly resounding praise, but Lee treasured it anyway. “Oh, it was beautiful, just beautiful,” she said. “I have remembered that for a long time, for a long, long time, and still remember it.” She had experimented with Mondrian’s spare style before, but the encounter transformed her overnight into a passionate devotee. Together with Perle Fine, a fellow student at the Hofmann school, she began turning out paintings of black grids inlaid with red, yellow, and blue rectangles that were virtually indistinguishable from Mondrian’s own. For a while, “nothing existed except Mondrian,” she later admitted. “Mondrian at that point took over my life.”
Even as Lee’s career coalesced, her personal life disintegrated. After several years on West Fourteenth Street where May Rosenberg “never heard voices raised,” Lee and Igor moved to a new apartment on East Ninth Street. Their new roommate, Michael Loew, saw a very different couple. Instead of the gay, glib sophisticate she had been, Lee was now “an intense, serious person who didn’t go for small talk or nonsense,” according to Loew. Igor’s fecklessness and infidelity were now out in the open—“He was a real man of the world but wild, running around with women”—and after years of tranquillity with the Rosenbergs, Lee’s antagonism had found a voice. “I could hear them scrapping a lot,” Loew recalled. Other friends remember how Lee began to bridle under Igor’s abuse. He would say, “I’m not anti-Semitic, I’m anti-Jewish,” and she would lash back, “You son of a bitch,” and the fights would last for days. (Igor’s family’s refusal to even meet his Jewish girlfriend was a continuing source of friction between them and may have been behind Lee’s apparent resistance to real marriage.) When Igor pressed her to begin a family, even without a marriage, she refused. “She told him she wouldn’t think of spoiling her figure,” recalls Lee’s sister Ruth. Among Lee’s friends, a rumor circulated that she had aborted Igor’s child. It was sometime during this period of growing friction that Lee stepped onto the dance floor at an Artists Un
ion party with a big, clumsy drunk from “someplace out west” named Jackson Pollock and, according to some accounts, tried her own hand at infidelity.
By 1937, the years of sparkle and gaiety were over, although it was another two years before the relationship ended. Lee, who had begun as Igor’s eager work of art, was intently pursuing her own art at the Hofmann school. At the end, “she hardly had time for Igor,” says Fritz Bultman. “She was much too busy developing her own career.” In the meantime, Igor, who had begun the decade amid such acclaim, slid even deeper into frivolousness, dissolution, and drunkenness, reduced to peddling his portraits among the first-class passengers on ocean cruises. The two fates seemed strangely connected: the higher Lee rose, the lower Igor fell. “The problem,” says May Rosenberg, who knew them best, “was that Lee was getting more and more attention.” To most of Lee’s modernist friends, it was an act of charity to overlook Igor altogether. On a visit to Lee and Igor’s apartment, Harold Rosenberg complimented her paintings but not his. “That kind of thing was happening more and more,” May recalls. “People began to forget to ask about Igor’s work.” According to Lillian Olaney, “No one considered him even so much as a threat to Lee’s professionalism as an artist. He wasn’t to be taken seriously.” Not even by Lee. At first warily, then more and more stridently, she began to chastise him for his frivolous ways. “She felt defrauded,” May Rosenberg recalled, “seeing that this drudge was not the man who had presented himself to her as a romantic genius who had won prizes, scholarships, and great expectations.”
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