Lee Krasner

by Gail Levin

  Krasner knew well many of those involved in the Union, including Balcomb Greene and his wife, Gertrude “Peter” Glass Greene, Ibram Lassaw, Michael Loew, Robert Jonas, Willem de Kooning, and the muralist Max Spivak, whom Krasner was assigned to assist at the WPA in 1935. Krasner also recalled that the Russian-emigré painter Anton Refregier was very active at the Union.40 Having studied in Paris and then with Hofmann in Munich, Refregier was a friend of de Kooning’s in New York, though he was much more politically active than his pragmatic Dutch friend.

  De Kooning was four years older than Krasner, and they had first met at his loft on West Twenty-first Street in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood when he was living with the dancer Juliet Browner. Krasner described Browner as “an exceptionally beautiful young girl [who] played the viola beautifully…. Many years later I learned that Julie became the wife of Man Ray.”41

  Since de Kooning did not move from Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street to his Chelsea loft until late that year, Krasner probably met de Kooning in late 1934 or early 1935. Krasner described the encounter many years later, making only a vague reference to the man who had been her lover before Pollock: “I do remember it was someone called Igor Pantuhoff, who…took me up to Bill’s studio, a loft converted into a studio, on Twenty-second Street and introduced me to him. And it was quite a few years, maybe about three or four, before I met someone called Pollock.”42

  De Kooning, using income earned from working regularly as a commercial artist for A.S. Beck (a chain of shoe stores), had purchased a Capehart high-fidelity system with an automatic record changer.43 The Capehart was advertised as “the finest gift it is possible to provide for a home and its family and friends. For the Capehart virtually brings the operatic stage, the symphonic festival, the theatre, the ballroom, the whole world of recorded and radio diversions, right to your living room.”44 De Kooning, like Krasner, liked to listen to classical music and to modernists like Stravinsky, as well as jazz, yet she was in no condition to acquire the best and most expensive record player available.45

  Krasner recalled: “Bill had a beautiful recording machine and wonderful records, and he always encouraged the idea of people coming to his studio so that one rarely saw him alone, there would always be a kind of entourage, three or four people if one went there on a Sunday.”46 He also hosted informal loft parties, where artists brought their own liquor and danced.47

  EVEN WITH THE HELP OF THE PWAP, KRASNER AND PANTUHOFF REMAINED anxious about getting by and being able to feed themselves. Leon Kroll, their former teacher at the academy, who was now one of the confidential advisers at Yaddo, encouraged them to correspond with Elizabeth Ames at the artists colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. In a letter to Ames, Kroll recommended the couple as “desirable candidates for scholarships” and included “Igor Pantuckoff” on a list of the people he thought most important to go to Yaddo. Lee and Igor were invited to come between August and October 1934.48

  The colony offered room, board, and studio space for two-month periods to those artists “who have achieved some measure of professional accomplishment.”49 In his rankings, Kroll placed Igor third, after artists Maurice Becker and Alix Stavenitz. He described Igor as “a talented young painter and an agreeable person. His wife not as good as he is. Both in the middle twenties. Pantukoff had won the Pulitzer Prize at the National Academy two or three years ago. His wife was one of his fellow students. They both studied under me and I thought they were of my best as students.”50

  By then, Igor and Lee were living in the Village at 56 West Eighth Street, and they signed their application to Yaddo as “Mr. and Mrs. Igor Pantuckoff.” Even in their application letter, written in February, Igor referred to Lee as his wife. Both Kroll’s letter and Pantuhoff’s make clear that Lee and Igor pretended to be legally married. One note, saying that any time Yaddo accepts them would be “quite satisfactory,” is signed “Igor and Lenore Pantukoff.”51 There is, however, no evidence that they ever did marry or that they ever went to Yaddo. The reason must be that by the time they were scheduled to go, they feared losing their federal employment.

  KRASNER AND PANTUHOFF GREW TO ENJOY THE COMPANY OF HAROLD Rosenberg, whom she first met while waitressing at Sam Johnson’s, and Rosenberg’s wife, the writer May Natalie Tabak. Both couples were fascinated with politics and joined others in various causes, occasionally attending political rallies together. They also talked about French poetry, Russian novels, Marxist literature, and “the eternal verities.”52 Tabak remembered, “Igor began to attend the newly opened Hans Hofmann art school. Other artists we all knew had gone to Europe to study with Hofmann; and, although familiar with much of his vocabulary (like ‘push and pull,’ which was interpreted by every artist in a personal way), the school in New York was an exciting curiosity. We were all fascinated by Igor’s reports of what went on there.”53 Hofmann, a German modernist painter who had studied in Paris, opened his first school in America at 444 Madison Avenue in 1933.54 Krasner too was curious about Pantuhoff’s new venture.

  The couple then moved to 213 West Fourteenth Street, just west of Seventh Avenue.55 Their apartment building offered access to the roof, from which Krasner painted a typical city scene called Fourteenth Street.56 Although the catalogue raisonné identifies this canvas as “one of Krasner’s few attempts to paint in the Social Realist vein,” it is not overtly political and is, in fact, much closer to the realist subject matter and the emphasis on painting light and shadow of an artist like Edward Hopper, who a few years earlier painted City Roofs (1932), a similar view from his own roof.57 Hopper delivered City Roofs to the Rehn Gallery in New York in October 1932, so it’s possible Krasner saw it there. Though Rehn is not a gallery she recalled frequenting, the entire art scene was then quite small, and eager artists looked everywhere for potential places to show their own work.

  For another 1934 canvas, Gansevoort I, Krasner walked along the West Side of Manhattan, where she observed ships tied up at the docks. Gansevoort Street extends through its gritty riverfront neighborhood east to the point where both it and West Fourth end at West Thirteenth, a block south of West Fourteenth. The barren roughness of this meatpacking district, with its old cobblestone street and austere brick warehouses, seemed to have attracted her.

  In her pencil sketch Study for Gansevoort I, Krasner included on the sidewalk’s right side a pair of figures sitting and reclining. Given the context of the Depression, the men are probably homeless.58 The drawing also includes trash cans and assorted debris that she eliminated in her final painted composition; and she moved the fire hydrant from the street’s left to its right side. Reducing the details, she sought to achieve an urban modernity worthy of the French painter Fernand Léger, who first visited New York in 1931. She nonetheless captured the neighborhood’s exoticism, which long attracted artists to its cheap loft spaces located above ground-floor warehouses. Two years later, the prolific Berenice Abbott would photograph the same area that attracted Krasner.

  Krasner and Pantuhoff enhanced their urban life by continuing to go to the beach on Long Island and to her parents’ house. May Tabak recounted how, while Igor was driving Harold Rosenberg out to Jones Beach, a policeman stopped them for speeding.

  “‘Where’s the fire?,’ he asked irritably.

  “Igor, blond, young, startlingly handsome, with a heavy Russian accent, drew himself up with White-Russian-tsarist-officer disdain and snorted, ‘I am Igor Pantuhoff, Great Artist!’ ‘Oh!’ said the startled cop. ‘OK, then,’ said Igor and, shifting gears, drove off.”59 Igor’s father had seen his promise as an actor.

  At the beach Harold and Igor “had played handball, gone into the surf, played darts, gone swimming again. In and out, over and over again, hither and yon, from one sport to another. Finally, when they had just about seated themselves once more, Igor suggested they do something else. ‘Sit still for a while and meditate,’ Harold told him; ‘Try it,’ he told him. ‘I’ve tried it,’ said Igor. ‘It’s no good. As soon as I get set to medita
te, I get a hard-on.’”60

  Krasner seemed to have retained no inhibitions from the modesty of her observant Jewish home. She was so relaxed about her body that she posed for nude photos with Pantuhoff on the beach. In fact, the sexual electricity in their relationship caught the attention of their close circle. An estimate of their sexuality may be encoded in a brightly colored crayon drawing of 1934 by Esphyr Slobodkina entitled Lee Krasner Astride a Fighting Cock. It shows three female figures, repeated as if in a cubist painting or film, mounted on a rooster’s back. The faces on the three heads evoke Krasner, as do the three energetic bodies. The figure has hinged limbs, like those of paper dolls that Slobodkina remembered making as a child.61 While a female doll astride a cock is an obvious sexual metaphor, whether Slobodkina meant to express envy or complaint is unclear.

  Slobodkina and another friend from the academy, Ilya Bolotowsky, decided to marry in 1933; but lacking a sexual charge like Igor and Lee’s, they were divorced by 1936, though they remained close friends for some time after. Esphyr later wrote that during “the Great Depression at its worst, every right-thinking artist’s idea was to marry a good-looking, capable, young woman—preferably a teacher—thus acquiring in one fell swoop a model for his work and an economic anchor in what was usually a miserable bohemian existence.”62

  Krasner started working for the WPA at its inception in August 1935. Her experience was so satisfying that she rejected a career teaching. May Tabak recalled that Krasner and Pantuhoff “both got jobs on the WPA. For a while Igor continued to paint lovely landscapes and even lovelier portraits. On the Project he had immediately been assigned to the easel project, a ‘sinecure’ greatly coveted by the painters; for one thing, it meant working at home.”63 Being on the easel project also meant that Pantuhoff had more independence to work within his own aesthetic, while those on the mural project had to work on what the recipients wanted.

  In contrast Krasner, who had not won acclaim at the academy, held firmly to her modernist vision. When a critic asked her years later whether her involvement with the WPA affected her aesthetic in any way, she responded, “To a degree it did, as the work that was called for didn’t quite line up with what I was interested in. On the WPA an order for work—murals, easel paintings—was to be placed in public buildings. Someone from the public buildings had to designate what kind of art they wanted. Needless to say it moved a little away from my own interests in art. Nevertheless, its validity I would never deny. It kept a group of painters alive through a very difficult period.”64

  Because the WPA was necessary for the survival of many artists, there was always the worry that the WPA would end. According to Harry Gottlieb, another artist on the Project in New York, “There were always problems…. Whenever they tried to get rid of the WPA we had picket lines set up.”65 On October 27, 1934, an artists’ demonstration had marched on City Hall to protest the lack of jobs for artists and to demand “immediate relief for all artists.”66 The Artists Union insisted “only the artist can define the artist’s needs and the conditions necessary for his maintenance as an artist.”67

  When asked if she was only concerned with art issues, Krasner answered: “Primarily, we were protecting our rights. However we did join some marches on social protest issues. For example, we marched [with] the workers picketing Ohrbach’s. We carried signs with our names like ‘I am Stuart Davis and I protest the firing of…’ My sign said ‘I am Lee Krasner and I protest the firing of…’”68

  The picket line she recalled at Orhbach’s department store on East Fourteenth Street formed in December 1934 when the workers demanded union recognition, a forty-hour week, and a ten-cent wage increase. The New York Times reported that the police broke up a line of 125 “snake dancing pickets in front of Orhbach’s” and charged them with “disorderly conduct.”69 Those arrested were held until they paid $5 each in bail. The hearings took place the next day.

  On the picket line, Krasner joined not just the store’s workers, but also Office Workers Union members and others sympathetic to the cause—visual artists like herself, but also people such as the actor Dane Clark, who made his Broadway debut in Friedrich Woolf’s Sailors of Catarro. Though the protest was not advertised as Communist, the party probably organized it. And yet, even despite the arrests, the actors were somehow bailed out in time for the evening performance.70

  Addressing the issue of women on the WPA, Krasner later reflected, “Of course there were many more men than women, but there were women. There was no pointed discrimination, but at that point there weren’t many professional women artists. In the WPA you worked in your own studio and the timekeeper came to check you once a week to see that you were working. Once a week you reported to a meeting of all the mural artists. So you were necessarily with your fellow artists quite a bit. That meant you didn’t feel totally isolated.”71

  Krasner and Pantuhoff were anything but lonely. During 1935 they moved yet again to share a railroad apartment in the East Village with artists Bob Jonas and Michael Loew. A close friend of Willem de Kooning, Jonas had studied commercial art in his native Newark, New Jersey. Jonas’s father abandoned his family, and he worked to support his mother and siblings. He was feeling desperate. He had just left his family’s home for the first time and later claimed: “I was into very advanced thinking. It used to frighten Lee Krasner.”72

  Krasner had worked with Loew on a WPA mural for the Straubenmuller Textile High School (now Charles Evans Hughes High School) on West Eighteenth Street. In addition to murals, Loew also worked on stained glass windows, but politics were his passion. He had come to the Artists Union from the John Reed Club and was very active.73 In Loew’s view, “Lee was an intense, serious person who didn’t go for small talk or nonsense. Her work was semi-Surrealist, and she was seeking the most advanced ideas in art. Mature and strong, but by no means affectionate, she had warmth about art and she could be a good friend if you went along with her ideas.”74 On the other hand, Loew saw Pantuhoff as “a caricature of the White Russian, charming and suave—who used to do portraits on ocean liners.”75 Loew also recalled Pantuhoff as “a real man of the world but wild, running around with women. I could hear them scrapping a lot.”76

  “They were all brilliant, talented,” Jonas recalled of this group of friends. “Lee was better than Jackson Pollock in talent. Everything Mike Loew touched was beautiful. Igor was brilliant. He could draw like a wizard…. He had it in his hands, muscular, dashing, not sensitive. Lee was a Marxist of the Trotsky variety.”77

  Jonas also recounted that Pantuhoff “would say [to Krasner] as a put-down, ‘you’re common, like the rest of them.’”78 Others directly cited Pantuhoff for anti-Semitism, which characterized his family’s culture.79 Igor’s parents declined to meet Lee because she was Jewish, and this may have caused her to refuse to marry him. But he clearly embraced her family, who thought the two were married. In 1934, Igor had painted an affectionate portrait of Lee’s father, showing him holding one of his Yiddish texts. Igor took the trouble to carefully reproduce the Hebrew letters. Krasner owned and treasured the painting, later giving it to her nephew Ronald Stein.

  Some years later, Igor sent Lee a drawing of a figure in a landscape (with the setting sun and his name inscribed on a rock). The drawing was at the bottom of a note that he headed with the words, “But love…Igor.” Above the drawing, he also inscribed: “Wonderful day…Full of Trust and confidance [sic]. Will be Sleeping Thursday with a friend there in Hospital…Hell with Christianity.” The last three words survive to document the conflict that he felt about the prejudice his Russian (Orthodox) Christian family had against Jews.80

  Pantuhoff and Krasner both worked on the WPA. She was working at the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration until admitted to work on the Mural Division of the Fine Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration, where she was assigned to assist Max Spivak on August 1, 1935. While working with Spivak, her pay was raised to $103.40 per month.81 “To get on the WPA,” she recalled
, “you had to qualify for relief first. You had to prove you had no visible means of support. Then your work was looked at, and if you were accepted you were put on either the mural or easel painting projects. I was part of the mural painting project, even though I had never worked on a mural.”82

  According to Krasner’s old friend Esphyr Slobodkina, to meet the criteria to get on the federal payroll, it was necessary to endure “the bitter indignity of the Home Relief investigating, the demeaning visits to the local food distribution centers where they would supply you with a bag of half-rotten potatoes.”83

  Spivak, a Polish-born Jewish immigrant who was just two years older than Krasner, remembered that he had five assistants. “There was Lee Krasner who married Jackson Pollock. She was my research girl. Harold Rosenberg, who was my reader, a very good reader. And then we had a guy to wash the brushes and so forth. Another one did odd jobs.”84 Spivak preferred to have his assistants run errands for him, and he liked to engage them in discussions of Trotskyist politics.

  Though Spivak was in charge, he did not have better training than Krasner. He had spent six months studying at Cooper Union, before studying for a year at the Grand Central Art School and two years at the Art Students League. He then spent three years in Europe, including some work at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. A lot of his European training consisted of copying old masters in museums. Slobodkina recalled that Spivak stuttered.

  And though Krasner was better spoken, Spivak was better connected politically. He had been a member of the John Reed Club, the Communist Party, and the four-man executive board that formed the Artists Union. “The WPA and Depression climate gave artists a sense of unity…,” he later reflected, “and the fact that they all shared the same experience of starvation, they weren’t alone…. For the first time they were participating not as individuals but as a group.”85