by Gail Levin
Krasner and I often talked about anti-Semitism, which both of us had experienced not only in our childhoods but also in the art world. We had both refused to sing the obligatory Christmas carols in school. I sought her counsel about how to cope with blatantly anti-Semitic comments made in my presence at work.
In mid-October 1979, I saw Krasner when I traveled to speak in a symposium called “Abstract Expressionism: Idea and Symbol,” at the University of Virginia. The event was organized by Elizabeth Langhorne, then an assistant professor of art history there, who had written a dissertation offering a Jungian reading of Pollock’s early imagery. Krasner attended this symposium, where Barbara Rose and Ellen Landau delivered papers about Krasner. At the request of Richard Pousette-Dart, another lesser-known artist (who had also been included in our abstract expressionism show), I gave a paper on his work entitled “Richard Pousette-Dart’s Painting and Sculpture: Form, Poetry, and Significance.”
During these years, Krasner wanted me to write about her. She decided that I should present a paper on her work in a symposium at New York University on December 5, 1981, coinciding with Barbara Rose’s show at the Grey Art Gallery called “Krasner/Pollock: A Working Relationship.” Lee supplied me with lots of documentation (photocopies of articles annotated in her handwriting), old photographs of her, and slides of her art. I agreed to speak, and she came to hear me.
Lee was quite enthusiastic and told a number of my colleagues that they should encourage me to publish my paper. Perhaps because I intuited that I should not interfere with Rose’s work (she eventually curated Krasner’s first American retrospective), I never published that paper.
I never forgot the impact Krasner had on my life. In 1989, five years after her death, I purchased a home in Springs, not far from Krasner and Pollock’s house, where I had had my most extensive visits with her. In fact, for me, she seemed to embody that distant part of Long Island.
Before I bought my house, I had collected many souvenirs during my travels to distant places, including a collection of exotic sea-shells. When I moved into my new home, I decided to use them decoratively, placing the shells on a shelf in the bedroom. It just seemed natural.
It wasn’t until I visited the newly opened Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in 1991 that I rediscovered that Lee had kept shells on shelves in her bedroom. On some subconscious level, these shells had come to define for me how a house in Springs ought to look. Knowing Krasner enriched my life. She had deeply affected me, and the shells were just one small clue to the many dimensions of her influence upon me.
As to the meaning of Krasner’s art, she insisted, “I think my painting is so autobiographical if anyone can take the trouble to read it.”17 She allowed this remark to survive in her careful edit of an interview for publication, so we can assume that she wanted us to believe what she said. A few years later, she said, “I suppose everything is autobiographical in that sense, all experience is, but that doesn’t mean it’s naturalistic reading necessarily. I am sure that all events affect one—at least that’s the way I feel about it—but I don’t think it means using a camera and snapping events.”18
The personal content of Krasner’s art becomes even more apparent in a comment she made to John Bernard Myers that her early self-portraits “make it clear that my ‘subject matter’ would be myself.”19 She went on to explain: “The ‘what’ would be truths contained in my own body, an organism as much a part of nature and reality as plants, animals, the sea, or the stones beneath us. The words ‘subject matter,’ let me quickly say, are a useful verbal ploy for discussion. There is no separation between style, or forms, and so-called ‘subject matter.’”20
When one interviewer mentioned Surrealism and “Jungian qualities” in art before pressing her about the psychological content in her work, Krasner snapped, “All work has psychological content.”21 However, to another interviewer, she did specify that “in terms of psychological content, my work…is riddled with it. The reading of it is another kind of thing.”22
Implicit in Krasner’s words is the suggestion that interpreting her work is difficult. Furthermore the context in which she made her art has been obscured up to the present by the huge gaps in knowledge about her life. Even the chronology in the catalogue raisonné of her work has serious errors and omissions.23 Problems in understanding Krasner and her art have been compounded too by distortions—some inadvertent but too many willful, motivated by contentious agendas and special interests. Krasner was also aware of the reevaluation of her place within abstract expressionism: “I think the process of re-interpretation will continue and that many things will now be re-evaluated. I’m sharply aware of my own re-evaluation.”24
While most of Krasner’s art is abstract and not easy to interpret, her early self-portraits, representational works, abstract pictures clearly titled by her, and later works with fragmented figurative imagery present less of a problem for interpretation. Even among her abstract pictures, entire series of paintings stand out for their distinctive palette, forms, or materials. Krasner’s habit of creating collages from her own earlier work or from scraps of Pollock’s discards also offers clues to the complex interaction of her life and work.
A purpose then of the present book is not only to tell Krasner’s story but also to rectify mistakes of fact, some of which I chronicle in A Note About Sources. I also hope that I have filled in gaps by means of more thorough research, and have moved away from distorting agendas and theoretical fantasies, the better to cast light on the remarkable evolution by which Lena Krassner,* a daughter of immigrants, became Lee Krasner, an artist of still growing international renown.
ONE
Beyond the Pale: A Brooklyn Childhood, 1908–21
Lena Krasner (right) and her younger sister, Ruth, posing for a snapshot on their front stoop when they were about seven and five, wearing identical coats and boots as well as short, cropped straight hair. Unlike their older siblings, they were so eager to be American that they hardly bothered to speak Yiddish or Russian.
LENA KRASNER WAS BORN ON OCTOBER 27, 1908—NINE months and two weeks after her mother, Chane (Anna) Weiss Krasner, had arrived in New York from Shpikov, a shtetl located in the southern part of the Russian region then known as Podolia, now in central Ukraine, about thirty-five miles south of the city of Vinnytsia. Shpikov was then part of the Pale of Settlement, the area where the Russian Imperial government restricted Jews.1 Anna had sailed on a Dutch liner, the Ryndam, out of Rotterdam and had arrived at Ellis Island on January 14, 1908, to join her husband, who had reached America in September 1905, traveling out of Liverpool, England.
In Shpikov, Jews were predominantly Hasidic, followers of a mystical revival movement that began in eighteenth-century Eastern Europe. Lena’s father had, along with Anna, worked for a rabbi, helping to manage ritual observances, including dietary laws, kosher slaughtering of animals, services on religious holidays and Sabbaths, weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, and circumcisions. Joseph Krasner had left behind his wife and four surviving children so he could earn money for their passage—a strategy that was painful, risky, and only too common among those who wanted to flee the Russian empire in the early years of the century.2 But Anna’s younger unmarried brother, William Weiss, had emigrated earlier, and his reports of life in America gave Joseph the confidence to sail. To the Jews oppressed by the tsar, America appeared to offer endless opportunity and the prospect of prosperity.
Before Joseph’s departure, the entire family posed for a photograph before a landscape backdrop. The staid adults and four solemn children look well dressed, even elegant—typical of what a couple would want to remember of each other while being forced apart by the ordeal of emigration. Anna is carefully coifed and dressed with a ruffled and belted blouse, the children neatly accoutered and groomed, their father dressed in a modern secular style, wearing a dapper bow tie and white collar, with no sign of Hasidic or Orthodox garb. In the photograph, the edge of the painted landscape is visible. This
imaginary background must be one of the first painted scenes that Lena ever saw.
The hints of prosperity visible in the photograph—and that it was commissioned—suggest that poverty was not the reason the Krasners left Russia. The motivations may have been more grave. There was a massive flight from Eastern Europe, and especially from Russia, around the turn of the century, when Jews suffered anti-Semitism, oppressive taxation, and enforced conscription of their sons.
The Jewish population of Russian Podolia began to emigrate in the aftermath of the March 1881 assassination of Tsar Alexander II, which was blamed on Jews, causing anti-Jewish riots or pogroms. Pressure to emigrate grew more urgent after the Krasners heard the ominous news of a pogrom at Kishinev, a town in southern Russia. In the spring of 1903, anti-Semitic propaganda from reactionary local journalists led to bands of rioters staging an organized attack on Jews, looting and destroying their shops and homes while police and soldiers stationed on the streets stood by without interfering. The next day, the looting turned to savage violence—the police and soldiers raped women, destroyed the local synagogue, and tortured and killed forty-nine people. Nearly six hundred others were injured.3
“There was a well laid-out plan for the general massacre of Jews on the day following the Orthodox Easter,” the New York Times wrote. “The mob was led by priests, and the general cry, ‘Kill the Jews,’ was taken up all over the city. The Jews were taken wholly unaware and were slaughtered like sheep. The dead number 120 and the injured about 500. The scenes of horror attending this massacre are beyond description. Babes were literally torn to pieces by the frenzied and bloodthirsty mob. The local police made no attempt to check the reign of terror. At sunset the streets were piled with corpses and wounded. Those who could make their escape fled in terror, and the city is now practically deserted of Jews.”4
The Krasners did not need much more to imagine that this could happen elsewhere, including Shpikov. Just after Joseph left for America, a new wave of anti-Jewish pogroms swept the Pale of Settlement. In response to the pogroms, Tsar Nicholas II issued the October Manifesto in 1905, which granted fundamental civil rights and political liberties to Jews, which in turn sparked ethnic and political tensions and hostilities that exacerbated popular unrest. Pogroms were directed not only at Jews but also at students, intellectuals, and other minorities. In Odessa alone, at least 400 Jews and 100 non-Jews were killed and approximately 300 people, mostly Jews, were injured. Many Jewish homes and stores also suffered damage. Anna, alone with the children and eager to join Joseph, must have anxiously waited for him to send her enough money to escape. When Joseph arrived in America, he was among the thousands of Jews (77,544 in 1904 alone, almost double the number that fled in 1902)5 who left Russia at this time for the New World, many in response to the Kishinev pogrom. The impetus for Jews to flee the Russian empire had only intensified by the time Anna and the children were able to join Joseph.
The desire for freedom had already inspired some Jews to promote socialist revolution. Jewish socialists stressed that social justice had a tradition in their religion: the moral commandments of the Torah (the five books of Moses read each year from start to finish) and the Talmud (authoritative body of law and commentary), and the customs of tsedaka or righteousness and justice toward others, community responsibility, and mutual aid. The radicals, who joined an underground labor movement that organized massive strikes, also took the innovative step of praising women as comrades and intellectual equals. These actions were in sharp contrast to traditional Jewish men, who reinforced ancient customs that seemed misogynistic to many women.
As conditions deteriorated in Russia, some Jews became fixed on the idea of finding a Jewish homeland, but many like the Krasners turned to America, though even there asylum was far from settled. Prejudice toward the new Jewish immigrants meant that a family like the Krasners had to struggle to earn a living, educate their children, and obtain an improved standard of living.
At the time, controversy about the massive numbers of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and about the issue of race itself pervaded American society. President Theodore Roosevelt had even been criticized for asking the African American educator and author Booker T. Washington to the White House for lunch. The problem of what it meant to be Jewish in America and in the world at that time concerned United States Senator Simon Guggenheim of Colorado (the son of a Swiss-Jewish immigrant peddler). He asked that “the Immigration Commission cease to classify the Jews as a race,” opposing W. W. Husband, secretary of the Immigration Commission, who wanted census enumerators to classify Jews as a race. “The Jew is a native of the country in which he is born, and a citizen of the country to which he swears allegiance,” argued Rabbi T. Schanferber. “We are only differentiated from others as respects religious beliefs.”6 “It is a great question as to whether there is such a thing as a Jewish people,” the noted rabbi Dr. Emil G. Hirsch agreed, saying. “Our blood is mixed with that of almost every other nationality.”7
Others such as Rabbi Leon Harrisson of St. Louis, who had a specific problem with intermarriage, took issue with this point of view. In a 1909 speech in New York, he said, “History and experience have shown us that unless we keep our race separate from others our religion also will soon cease to be…diluted to extinction.”8
At the same time, popular accounts of work by a Harvard professor, William Z. Ripley, warned in “Future Americans Will Be Swarthy” that “racial heterogeneity, due to the direct influx of foreigners in large numbers, is aggravated by their relatively high rate of reproduction after arrival, and, in many instances, by their surprisingly sustained tenacity of life, greatly exceeding that of the native-born American.”9
Surrounded by these conflicts over the meanings of race and religion, a highly vocal and visible fraction of Jewish immigrants put forward their belief in social justice and political reform. They found in America such harsh working conditions that they felt compelled to continue the struggles begun in Europe, often becoming strike leaders and union organizers. This kind of Jewish militancy no doubt reflected disillusion with the stories of a better life in America. At the time of Krasner’s birth, United Hebrew Charities, led by Jacob H. Schiff, tried to raise funds to support the Jewish poor, especially some of the more than 170,000 immigrants who had arrived in two fiscal years. He spoke of “a condition of unparalleled distress” during a year of “financial and industrial depression” and declared that “the Jewish community was not doing its duty.”10
Impoverished and often radicalized Jewish immigrants thronged the Krasners’ Brownsville neighborhood in Brooklyn. Lena’s birth just over nine months after her mother’s landing provided the reunited family with a child who was by law immediately a citizen of their adopted country. Her father was thirty-seven and her mother was twenty-eight.11
At the time of their arrival in America, Krasner’s four siblings included three sisters—Ides (also known as Ida, later changed to Edith) aged fourteen, Esther (Ester, later changed to Estelle) aged nine, and Rose (also known as Rosie) aged six—as well as one older brother, Isak (also know as Isadore or Izzy, later changed to Irving), who was then eleven.12 A fourth sister, Riva, had died in Shpikov when she was just three or four years old.13 Isak’s situation had been especially precarious in the Old World because he was nearly the age when military conscription took Jewish sons away from their parents, often for periods of up to twenty-five years. Many times the children were as young as twelve. The outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 had put Isak at greater risk.
Though Joseph was an Orthodox Jew, he had not followed the Hasidism of many of his neighbors in Shpikov. Instead of their search for spirituality and joy through Jewish mysticism, he favored the disciplined study of religious texts. Among the Orthodox, the most prestigious life for any man was to be a religious scholar. Women were excluded from such scholarly circles and expected to serve their families as both homemakers and breadwinners, enabling their husbands to devote themselves to study
. New World realities tempered that tradition in many immigrant households, including the Krasners’, although Joseph was said to be sensitive and introspective.14
Their father was greatly loved by his children, and Lena adored him, even though, according to her, “he was very remote.”15 She loved to hear him tell stories to her and her siblings: “Marvelous tales! About forests. Beautiful, beautiful stories, always like Grimm. Scary things. The sleighs in winter going out with the dogs, and there would always be someone standing in the road to stop them. The forest, and always the snow, and sleighs. A foreign world to me.”16 These stories of romance and of life in the Russian empire entered into the children’s collective memory. Lena liked to snuggle up close to her father and listen. She felt afraid of the dark and remained so all her life.
Her father’s stories fueled her imagination. He spoke of his mother Pesa’s magic. Just before Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), the shtetl neighbors visited the old woman and asked her to perform the folk ritual known as shlogn kapores, which involved her waving a chicken over the head of someone who wanted this act to transfer their sins to the fowl—three waves of a hen for women and one wave of a rooster for men. Afterward the applicant, now sin-free, hoped to be inscribed in the metaphorical “Book of Life” for the coming year.17 Shlogn kapores, opposed by various rabbinical authorities since the Middle Ages, continues to exist among some Orthodox Jews as a folk practice.
