Lee Krasner

by Gail Levin

  Lee Krasner’s sister Rose, six years her senior, shared a bed with Lee and their youngest sister, Ruth. American born, the two youngest sisters vied for attention from their parents and older siblings, all of whom were immigrants.

  Lena’s favorite teacher at P.S. 72 was male. She was probably about eleven or twelve when she had Mr. Philip L. Walrath as her teacher. She recounted that he was “eccentric enough” to believe that girls should be allowed to play baseball with the boys: “Togetherness like that was my kind of thing!”61 While it is not clear what art instruction this school offered, Krasner recalled the craft aspect of making a map of the United States: “Every time I see a Jasper Johns map, I remember how crazy I was for doing that thing. We had to figure out what each state was known for. I got tiny empty capsules and filled them with wheat or whatever and glued them onto a piece of beautiful blue paper. I had drawn the states in colored crayon. And I just loved that blue.”62

  Lena could never say why she chose art as a career. “I don’t know where the word A-R-T came from; but by the time I was thirteen, I knew I wanted to be a painter.”63 She once commented, “All I can remember is that on graduation from elementary school, you had to designate what you chose to do, in order to select the right high school. The only school that majored in art which is what I wrote was Washington Irving High School. On applying for entrance I was told that they were filled and as I lived in Brooklyn I couldn’t enter. It led to a good deal of complication as I had to go to a public high school.”64

  She had already envisioned a better life, a creative career outside of her home, and she also wanted to become economically self-sufficient. Dreams of a husband might have been part of the picture, but certainly not the responsibility and burden endured by the mother of a large family.

  TWO

  Breaking Away: Determined to Be an Artist, 1922–25

  Lee Krasner (far right) at the age of sixteen with her mother, Anna Weiss Krasner (far left), and her sister Rose Krasner Stein, with Rose’s two daughters, Muriel (held by Lee) and Bernice Stein, 1925.

  WHEN LENA GRADUATED FROM P.S. 72 IN 1922, SHE BEGAN to see herself as “an independent girl” and started calling herself “Lenore.”1 It is also possible that Krasner was trying to move away from the more ethnically marked name Lena, which had been popular in her parents’ Russia. “Lenore” was popular in America at the time, and Krasner later indicated that Edgar Allan Poe “had an enormous effect on me in my teens.”2 Since Poe used the name Lenore prominently in his poetry, his work may also have influenced her to adopt that name.

  Krasner had been fascinated by the supernatural since her early childhood fixation on the monster that jumped at her across a banister in her home when she was about five years old.3 Poe’s use of fear and his evocative and stylized language meshed strongly with Krasner’s lifelong preoccupation.4 Krasner was most likely drawn to Poe’s story “The Oval Portrait,” which tells of an artist “who took glory in his work, which went on from hour to hour, and from day to day. And he was a passionate, and wild, and moody man.” Poe also describes the artist’s wife as suffering “withered” health and spirits by the behavior of her oblivious self-involved husband. Poe wrote: “Yet she smiled on and still on, uncomplainingly, because she saw that the painter (who had high renown) took a fervid and burning pleasure in his task.”5

  While it would be absurd to suggest that Krasner’s future fate was determined by reading Poe as a teenager, this was the time in which she formed the values and fantasies that would help to shape her adult life. Such a romantic fantasy of a woman’s devoted role as an artist’s wife also echoed the kind of role that pious Jewish women assumed when they married men who devoted their lives to religious study, a common occupation among Jewish men in the Eastern Europe of Krasner’s parents’ generation. It is, after all, Krasner who, years later, volunteered that Poe resonated for her during these formative years. If she did not know then that she was destined not only to be an artist, but also to marry a self-destructive one, she certainly would make serious efforts to do both. Thus it is tempting to believe that she read and absorbed Poe’s account of a crazed painter with his wife as a model, whose “deep love for her whom he depicted so surpassingly well. But at length, as the labor drew nearer to its conclusion, there were admitted none into the turret; for the painter had grown wild with the ardor of his work, and turned his eyes from the canvas rarely, even to regard the countenance of his wife. And he would not see that the tints which he spread upon the canvas were drawn from the cheeks of her who sat beside him.” Poe told of a manic self-absorbed painter who after he cried out at last “with a loud voice ‘This is indeed Life itself!’ turned suddenly to regard his beloved:—She was dead.”6

  Lena might well have come across her new name while reading Poe’s Gothic fantasy poem “Lenore” (1831), which also focuses on a woman’s death:

  See! on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore!

  Come! let the burial rite be read—the funeral song be sung!—

  And, of course, the name also appears in Poe’s “The Raven” (1845):

  From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—

  For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—

  Nameless here for evermore.

  Maurice Maeterlinck, who wrote in French, but whom she and her brother Irving read in translation, also probably had an effect on Krasner’s other tastes in reading.7 His book On Emerson and Other Essays, published in 1912, incorporated essays by Emerson, Ruysbroeck, and Novalis, three men “to whom the external event was nought beside the inner life.”8 Krasner was so engaged by Emerson’s work that she later titled one of her major paintings after the first line in his essay “Circles.” But both her new name and her memories of writers show that her interest in the mystical or inner nature of man began at an early age.

  When it came time for high school, Lenore’s first choice was Washington Irving High School in Manhattan: unique in the history of women’s education in New York City, it described itself as “the only school in greater New York offering an industrial art course for girls.”9 But Washington Irving rejected Krasner’s first application. Her disappointment was all the more intense because she had seen high school as an opportunity to pursue a different kind of life from that of her parents and her elder sisters. As long as Krasner made no demands on her parents, they left her alone and did not try to dissuade her from her educational goals.10 “I think my parents had their hands full acclimatizing themselves and putting their children through school. They didn’t encourage me, but as long as I didn’t present them with any particular problems, neither did they interfere. If I wanted to study art, it was all right with them.”11

  Anna’s and Joseph’s gradual openness resembled that of many Eastern European Jews who were now in America. The strain in Judaism that discouraged girls from obtaining all but the most basic literacy had been affected by the Jewish intellectual and literary movement known as Haskalah (or secular enlightenment), which had advanced the idea that Jewish emancipation and equality would come from the reconciliation of Judaism with modern Western ideas and customs. Already by 1844 a Haskalah writer broached the idea of a segregated education system for Jewish women, advocating “the establishment in various cities of special institutes of study, with a six-year program, for girls who are to obtain a strict moral education in these schools. The teachers and educators ought to be females only. In the entire course of the years of study and education, the girls must be strictly forbidden to see men and, especially, to speak with them.”12

  After Lenore was rejected by Washington Irving, she fell back on Brooklyn’s Girls’ High in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Established in 1886 as a free public high school for girls, the school was housed in a notable building designed in Victorian Gothic and French Second Empire styles. A descendant of the Central Grammar School, it was the first free secondary school in the city.13

  Girls’ High worked well for some of
its students; among the successful graduates who preceded Lenore were the screenwriter Helen Deutsch and the artist Gwendolyn Bennett, whose poster design won the school’s art contest in 1921, and whose art and writing appeared in journals during the Harlem Renaissance.14 But the experience at Girls’ High was not what Lenore had in mind. She commented later: “Even at school as a kid, I knew I was an artist.”15 The school did not offer art as a major field of study, and she chose to study law.

  Even Krasner’s second choice of study, the law, attested to her desire to forge a new life, independent of that traditional model of her parents and older sisters. She never envisioned herself as a housewife. The message of suffrage and equal opportunity for women had somehow seized her imagination. She was determined to struggle for those rights.

  It was also a time of rebellion. In class she refused to sing Christmas carols. “Much to my own astonishment, I got up in the classroom and said, ‘I refuse to say “Jesus Christ is my Lord.” He is not my Lord.’ Now you can imagine this caused quite a commotion.”16 She had probably heard the legendary tale from 1913 when six boys from her own elementary school had protested the singing of Christian hymns. The boys had proclaimed themselves atheists and gone on a “silence strike,” even getting attention in the local newspaper. The reporter noted that the six had “been reading up on science and evolution.”17 One teacher characterized the students as “free thinkers,” commenting: “We have given up the practice of singing the hymns and are confining ourselves to Bible reading. The district seems to be a hot-bed of Socialism.”

  The teacher lamented that some of the school’s girls had joined in the silence strike, forcing the end of the hymns. The next day Thomas D. Murphy, the school’s principal, announced to the press that after consulting with the district superintendent, he had removed the objectionable hymns from the singing books and that only Bible readings would be required as “the religious part of the assembly exercises.”18

  With Irving’s help, Lenore was also reading the German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, which influenced her to turn away from Jewish tradition and belief. Both Nietzsche’s dictum that “God is dead” and his insistence that humanity “take responsibility for setting its own moral standards” strongly affected her. Schopenhauer too influenced Lenore to leave behind religion: “The power of religious dogma, when inculcated early, is such as to stifle conscience, compassion, and finally every feeling of humanity.”19

  Lenore was miffed by Orthodox Judaism’s inequitable beliefs about men and women, especially with regards to how women were excluded from significant religious involvement. “The beginnings were there in the synagogue, and I am told to go upstairs, I have never swallowed it to date,” she insisted late in life. She was not alone in her disapproval. Rebekah Kohut, a Hungarian immigrant of Lenore’s father’s generation, married a rabbi and then became an activist, campaigning for Jewish women’s right to fully participate in their religion. Kohut argued that “the denial of woman’s ability to serve the synagogue in every part of its work is cruel and dangerous.”20 Though Kohut was in many ways successful in advancing Jewish women’s rights in the synagogue, these successes came too late to prevent Lenore from becoming estranged from Jewish religious practice.

  Krasner recalled arriving home one Shabbat (Sabbath) while her parents calmly entertained a friend over a cup of tea; she described herself as a young teenager coming in “like a charging banshee” and announcing that she was done with religion.21 And that was that. She remained identified as Jewish but rejected all organized religion to lead a secular life, though gradually she would replace religious worship with devotion to art.

  She recalled her changes of direction as abrupt: “I decided to be a lawyer and entered a high school in Brooklyn called Girls’ High, I believe it was, flunked everything in the first six months I was there, and reapplied once more to Washington Irving. This time I was admitted and so I started my art career.”22 Either they kept Krasner on a waiting list or had some students drop out, making room for her even though she lived in Brooklyn.

  Washington Irving High School was just where Lenore wanted to be. Even its seven-story building on Irving Place suggested its special purpose. Completed in 1913, it was designed by C. B. J. Snyder in brick, limestone, and terra-cotta with an imposing arched entrance and paired round-arched Florentine Renaissance windows on the top. A deep cornice and a tiled hip roof completed the artful ensemble, echoed inside by elaborate interior mural decorations.23 The school originated in 1902 as a branch of Wadleigh High School (at the time, the only girls’ high school in Manhattan) called Girls’ Technical High School. It was the concept of the progressive educator William McAndrew who sought to mingle girls training for vocational or technical trades with those pursuing an academic curriculum, figuring that they would learn from one another.

  Washington Irving advertised a wide curriculum for women: drawing, illustrating, embroidery, picture hanging, printing, photography, costume designing, plain sewing, garment making, dancing, gardening, cooking, entertaining, sanitation, housekeeping, nursing, marketing, infant care, laundering, telephoning, typewriting, bookkeeping, stenography, salesmanship, office management, bookbinding, cataloguing, commercial filing, and newspaper writing, besides the usual high school subjects. Rather than promoting art for art’s sake, the curriculum aimed at enabling its graduates to find work, including jobs in the thriving garment industry. For Lenore, determined to become an artist, the menu offered at least some of what she sought.

  The all-female student body at Washington Irving was quite comfortable for Lenore. In 1921, the New York Times described the school as having “6000 pupils, almost wholly Jewish.”24 The school’s industrial art department had been the project of the progressive Dr. James Parton Haney, secretary of the National Association for the Promotion of Industrial Education and the first art director of New York City’s high schools. Haney’s singular achievement was praised in his obituary in March 1923.25 The popular school was so overcrowded that in 1921 there were two sessions for academic classes and another two for students who elected commercial or industrial subjects.26

  As a student Lenore certainly worked hard. Even years later, she was proud to state: “I earned my own car fare…. I had all kinds of jobs. I painted lamp shades. I put vertical stripes on felt hats.”27 These types of artistic odd jobs served as practice drills that prepared Lenore for technical labor later on, such as her work on the WPA during the 1930s. Many such tedious jobs depended on the labor of poorly paid young women. An immigrant she met a few years later described such subsistence-level factory jobs then available in New York, this one on the sixth floor of a large loft building just east of Washington Square. She was told to “fill in the ‘modernistic’ raised design on one of the parchment shades…they paid four cents a piece.”28

  Lenore preferred illustrating over needlework or other crafts identified with women’s work and the Old World. Her early love of nature came in handy at Washington Irving. “We drew big charts of beetles, flies, butterflies, moths, insects, fish and so on. We would get models of a fly or butterflies in boxes with glass tops. Then it would be up to us to pick the size of sheet or composition board and the range of hard pencils and to decide how many to put on the page. And we would get anatomical assists from books. I loved doing those!”29

  She recalled, however, that she did well in all her subjects, except art. “By the time one gets to the graduation class you’re majoring in art a great deal, you’re drawing from a live model and so forth,” Krasner later recalled. She remembered taking “more and more periods of art.”30 Her determination and sense of purpose were not, however, enough to win her art teacher’s praises. Her originality was still too roughly formed. She possessed neither the charm nor the beauty of some of the school’s earlier success stories. The French immigrant and future actor Claudette Colbert, for example, preceded her by only five years, moving on first to study fashion design at the Art Students L
eague.31 When Lenore decided in her senior year to go to a woman’s art school, Cooper Union, she recalled that her high school art teacher “called me over and said very quietly and very definitely, ‘The only reason I am passing you in art [sixty-five was the passing mark at that time] is because you’ve done so excellently in all your other subjects, I don’t want to hold you back and so I am giving you a sixty-five and allowing you to graduate.’ In other words, I didn’t make the grade in art at all.”32

  Undaunted even by harsh criticism and confident in her own abilities, Lenore remained resolute. “You had to apply with work, so I picked the best, or what I thought was the best I’d done in Washington Irving and used that to get entrance into Cooper Union. I was admitted.”33 Her unflappable resolve and persistence would prove invaluable. She probably knew well the lesson of Rabbi Hillel, who was renowned for his concern for humanity. One of his most famous sayings, recorded in Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers, a tractate of the Mishnah), is: “If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?”34

  To study art, Lenore had to travel each day for about an hour each way to and from East New York. Manhattan must have seemed worlds apart from the provincial life she knew in Brooklyn. This was her first taste of real freedom—with galleries and museums to explore, including the Metropolitan Museum. There she saw the old masters and developed tastes that would last a lifetime, even after she rejected traditional art for modernism. She became particularly interested in paintings of the Italian renaissance, the Spanish masters, including Goya, and French painters such as Ingres.