by Gail Levin
Spivak fondly recounted attending meetings, protests, picketing, and marching across Forty-fourth Street. “We used to have meetings. The meetings served as our social place.” He described how painters of different styles began to talk about their common problems, “the trade union problems, what’s doing on the project and who’s the enemy.”86 Spivak, however, found himself labeled a “Trotskyite” because of infractions of party discipline. Disillusioned when told that artists had to give up everything to be revolutionary, he walked out of a meeting and quit the Communist Party.87
Though Spivak regarded Krasner as his “research girl,” he did recognize (but did not acknowledge) her obvious intellectual abilities. This was probably why she didn’t have to wash the paint-brushes. Spivak’s art interests may have had a larger impact on Krasner than his politics. By the time she painted Gansevoort II in 1935, she seems to have responded to Spivak’s style. She also seems to have discovered the work of the Italian modernist painter Giorgio de Chirico. “Some of the paintings had a slight touch of Surrealism,” she admitted. “I saw paintings in reproduction and talked to fellow artists.”88
Spivak recalled that, although Rosenberg was a writer, he had gotten into the artists’ project by using someone else’s painting. Even May Tabak admitted, “Harold and I never intended for him to get a regular job. He went on the art project because his friends went and no one really believed it would materialize.”89 Tabak recalled that some friends woke them up by knocking loudly on the door of their cold-water flat, exclaiming, “Harold, come on. Come on, come on. They’re hiring artists.” Telling him that it had to be done today, they implored him to “grab some paintings…. Grab anything you’ve got framed and come along.”90 This conflicted with Rosenberg’s story of being picked out for the WPA at Greenwich House.
Tabak claimed that only a cursory glance was given to Rosenberg’s sample works during his WPA interview. The applicants could choose between teaching or being on the easel or mural projects. When Harold choose murals, they asked him, “Have you painted any murals?” to which he replied: “Nonsense. No one in this country has painted a mural yet.”91 Thus Rosenberg got himself into the WPA with almost no training as an artist, though he had amused himself in law school by sketching professors and students.92
Though layoffs were constant, Krasner saw one positive element. “There was no discrimination against women that I was aware of in the WPA. There were a lot of us working then—Alice Trumbull Mason, Suzy Frelinghuysen, Gertrude Greene and others. The head of the New York project was a woman, Audrey McMahon.”93 Another plus for Krasner was “the camaraderie, instead of isolation…. But basically, it was a living for us all.”94
Krasner received a pay adjustment on March 12, 1936, and her monthly salary was lowered to $95.44.
Since insecurity remained high and money was still in short supply, Krasner and Pantuhoff arranged to rent space for twenty-three dollars a month in an eight-room cold-water flat at 333 West Fourteenth Street.95 “When I met them about the time the Art Project began, they were living together,” Tabak recalled. “After a while they, we, and a bachelor friend [named Bobby Dolan]96 rented an eight-room top-floor apartment on Fourteenth Street, opposite a church. We divided the space so that we would not need to intrude on each other. We also shared the bathroom and the telephone.
“We had each kept a simple record of each telephone call we made, for example, and not once had the total varied by as much as one nickel,” recalled Tabak. “It was possible for us to entertain without needing to invite the others; they did likewise. Sometimes we’d be joint hosts. When it proved impossible to find another shareable apartment, we moved into smaller quarters but continued our close friendship.”97
Meanwhile, with the assistance of Krasner and Rosenberg, Spivak was working on a series of murals on the theme of puppets for the downstairs playroom of the Astoria Branch of the public library in Long Island City. There were nine panels in all that took up 260 square feet. He made studies on paper and completed a model of the interior showing the murals in place. He exhibited these with one completed panel, in oil on canvas, in “New Horizons in American Art” in 1936, which opened on September 16, 1936, at the Museum of Modern Art after being shown at the Phillips Collection in Washington.98
In this same show, Pantuhoff exhibited Ventilator # 2 of 1936, one of his canvases influenced by Surrealism during the mid-1930s—a time when he briefly shared Krasner’s interest in the avant-garde. Ventilator # 2 includes a Picassoesque head in profile, floating in space in the upper left of the composition. The central image, a metal construction mounted on a brick tower, distantly echoes both the Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico and Russian constructivism, including, strangely enough, Vladimir Tatlin’s concept for the gigantic Monument to the Third International of 1920, designed at the time when Pantuhoff’s family had been forced to flee Russia. Because Tatlin’s Monument was re-created for the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, where it was awarded a gold medal, it certainly would have been known to Pantuhoff. Despite his recent study with Hans Hofmann, Pantuhoff lacked commitment to be avant-garde. Instead, encouraged by his parents, he seems to have wanted to break into the conservative establishment that he had known briefly as a prizewinner at the academy and to exploit his considerable skills as a portrait painter.
Krasner, however, kept her focus on the avant-garde. Surrealism affected her more profoundly than she later recalled, although her interest in the movement was fleeting. Her Untitled (Surrealist Composition) (1936–37) depicts a classical female figure floating in space, which indicates her continuing interest in de Chirico—she must have just seen the exhibition “Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism,” which Alfred H. Barr, Jr., opened to great fanfare for the Museum of Modern Art on December 7, 1936.99 De Chirico’s painting provided inspiration for her composition, which features two eyes floating in and above a landscape. For the motif of the eyes, she turned not to a Surrealist image, however, but to earlier fantastic art. For instance, she draws from two nineteenth-century French graphics: J. J. Grandville’s First dream—crime and expiation and Odilon Redon’s The eye like a strange balloon mounts toward infinity, both of which are reproduced in the show’s catalogue.100 In both artists’ works, she found a similar horizon line defining a rather empty landscape. Krasner not only seized on these images of disembodied eyes, using the single round eyeball of Redon, but took a cue to multiply it from Grandville, as well as adopting the cross that he places in the landscape. She made pencil sketches on pages of notebook-size paper on which she began working out her own images.101
Surrealist films were also shown at the museum in conjunction with this show, and she certainly may have been affected by these films. Krasner’s focusing again on eyes may reflect the notorious scene of a razor slicing a young woman’s eye in Luis Buñuel’s 1929 film, Un Chien Andalou, the script of which he wrote jointly with Salvador Dalí.102
Since discovering Matisse at the Modern, Krasner’s passion for his work was also intensifying.103 Her Untitled (Still Life) of 1935 closely resembles Matisse’s Gourds of 1916, which the Museum of Modern Art acquired the same year she painted her homage. Her flat ground as well as the placement and shapes of the separate objects tilted toward the picture plane evoke this Matisse.
In Bathroom Door, painted in 1935, Krasner adapted Matisse’s strategy of painting a still life in the foreground with a view into another space visible in the distance. In Krasner’s case, this is through the bathroom door to an image of a female nude in the tub. Her composition brings to mind Matisse’s 1924 canvas of an interior in Nice, which appears in Henry McBride’s 1930 monograph on Matisse and presents a similar spatial arrangement.104 Krasner’s figure in the tub, with her raised arm bent at the elbow, repeats the form of Matisse’s sculpture of a reclining nude or of his painting Blue Nude of 1907. Krasner’s nude seems like a self-portrait, and her treatment is intentionally erotic, signaled by the Cézannes
que still life—the two ripe oranges in the foreground evoke the nude’s round breasts. Were this a painting of the eighteenth century, one would interpret the broken pottery like the broken eggs in Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s still life—as referring to the woman’s lost virginity.105 Krasner’s subtle, yet teasing expression of sexuality suggests that she might have been momentarily interested in the erotic humor of Marcel Duchamp or the Surrealists, whose work she later discounted.
As Pantuhoff strayed, Krasner surely began to look around. In an unusually candid interview with Anne Bowen Parsons in 1967 or 1968, she acknowledged that she first met Jackson Pollock when he cut in on her dancing at an Artists Union party in December 1936. Parsons asked Krasner, “Did you feel that contacts initiated through working together on the project carried over into increased interaction, dialogue, ferment? Did you feel there was a lasting effect?”
“Of course,” she responded, “in my own case, I met my husband as a result of the Project, and as a result of my involvement in the Artists Union, which was a related organization. There’s no question that we continued to meet, to concern ourselves with one another and one another’s work after the project was terminated.”106
Krasner met Pollock at an Artists Union dance in 1936. Already suffering from alcoholism, Pollock was drunk when he approached Krasner. Nothing came of it, but she later repeated a version of the story in which she did not remember meeting Pollock in 1936 and did not get his name at that first meeting. Yet, in what she told Parsons, she seems to have known more about Pollock in 1936 than she later let on. In fact, B. H. Friedman recorded in his journal how Krasner asked him to suppress the story of that first encounter (which he had heard about from their mutual friend, the painter Fritz Bultman), in which Pollock’s only words to her were “Do you like to fuck?”107
Krasner also told Parsons about Pollock’s work on a float for the May Day parade: “He worked with [David Alfaro] Siqueiros in his studio. At any rate, we felt a sense of community, of course for the rights of all artists. Stuart Davis was very active, for one.”108
Davis, who first marched in the 1935 May Day parade, remarked that it was “a necessity to be involved in what was going on, and since it had a specific artist section connected with it…the artists felt themselves part of everything else, general depression, the needs of money and food and everything else.”109
At one May Day parade organized by the Artists Union, de Kooning helped the abstract expressionist painter Arshile Gorky build a float. “It was Gorky’s idea,” said Robert Jonas. The float took the form of an abstract tower, produced in painted cardboard.110 Its immense size required six people to carry it. Gorky had emigrated from Armenia, where he was born Vosdanik Adoian in the village of Khorkom.
In fleeing the Turkish invasion, Gorky arrived in the United States in 1920 and shortly after changed his name to Arshile Gorky. From 1926 to 1931, he was a member of the faculty at the Grand Central School of Art in New York. Gorky was known to study the work of other modern artists intensely, especially Cézanne and Picasso. He became close friends with Stuart Davis, John Graham, and de Kooning. From 1935 to 1937 he worked on murals for Newark Airport under the Federal Art Program, although he painted in an abstract style. In a lecture at the Art Students League, rejecting Soviet orthodoxy, he disparaged the vogue of overtly political, proletarian art when he declared it “poor art for poor people.”111
While Gorky, just four years older than Krasner, was already very prominent among their contemporaries, Pollock was virtually unknown during the 1930s. Artists close to Gorky, from Stephen Greene to Willem de Kooning, later recalled that Pollock did not get along with Gorky, whom, according to Krasner, he did not actually meet until 1943.112 The painter Milton Resnick allowed that Gorky “influenced Lee Krasner, who in turn influenced Pollock.”113
Likewise, though Jackson Pollock worked with the activist David Alfaro Siqueiros, his politics have been described as “of the parlor and not of the activist variety. He was ultimately more interested in the revolution that would come from within, not one prescribed by sociopolitical agendas.”114 According to Harold Lehman in Art Front, the float Pollock worked on with the Siqueiros Experimental Workshop “crystallized practically all the outstanding ideas about which the shop had been organized. It was in the first place Art for the People, executed collaboratively; and into it went the dynamic idea, new painting media, mechanical construction and mechanical movement, polychrome structure, and the use of new tools. Certainly a message in such striking form had never been brought forward in a May Day parade before.”115
Siqueiros began his Experimental Workshop on Fourteenth Street just after arriving back in New York in February 1936 as one of the official delegates from Mexico to the American Artists Congress. In 1932, he had been deported from New York for political reasons. His March 1934 show at Alma Reed’s Delphic Studios in New York was reviewed for the New Masses that May by Charmion von Wiegand, who would become a disciple of the Dutch modernist painter Piet Mondrian. Von Wiegand stressed Siqueiros’s commitment to revolution and viewed his art as “one form of revolutionary agitation.”116
Siqueiros described the float as “an essay of polychromed monumental sculpture in motion,” but he appears to have adapted the image from a poster for the Farmer-Labor Party, which was another one of his causes. His aim was to demonize Wall Street and convey its fascistlike control of U.S. mainstream politics and encourage a backlash from the people. In order to do this, the workshop produced a huge figure with a swastika on its head and outstretched hands holding the symbols of the Democratic and Republican parties. At the same time, the float displayed a ticker tape machine from Wall Street being smashed by a gigantic hammer emblazoned with the hammer and sickle of the Communists, who were also supposed to represent united American resistance, shown triumphant as ticker tape spewed like blood over the figure of the capitalist.117
The 1936 May Day parade was said to have brought “the Communists and Left-wing Socialists together in a united demonstration for the first time in many years.” News reports estimated that from 45,000 to 60,000 people paraded and attended rallies in Union Square and on the Polo Grounds.118 The WPA’s Dance Unit demonstrated with its slogan “Build Your Bodies But Not for War” and staged impromptu dances.119 Krasner might well have participated in the parade and seen the float Pollock had worked on.
For Siqueiros’s workshop, the artist Harold Lehman, who knew Pollock from Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, had already worked with Siqueiros in Los Angeles. He recruited some of the Americans, including Pollock and his brother, Sande McCoy, while Siqueiros brought in artists from Mexico and South America. The stated aim of the workshop, held at 5 West Fourteenth Street, was “to raise the standard of a true revolutionary art program,” and as such, it served as “a Laboratory of Modern Techniques in Art.”120 The workshop intended to explore making large-scale political art using modern technology (such as painting with spray guns) and new, inexpensive materials. Instead of oil paint or canvas, industrial paints such as automotive enamels and lacquers on wood panels were materials of choice at the Siqueiros workshop. The artistic technique of dripping industrial paint here preceded Pollock’s later use of that technique.121
Given that in the late 1940s Krasner also dripped paint on horizontally placed canvases for her Little Image series, she too may have taken a cue either from Siqueiros or indirectly by way of Pollock. But it seems that her initial attention to Siqueiros in the 1930s was both for his artistry and for his leftist politics. Given her social networks at the time, she had obviously noticed his participation in the first American Artists Congress. The theme of the gathering was the struggle against war and fascism.
Though Krasner and the Communists shared a common interest in workers’ rights, Krasner rejected the representational work of artists on the left, including social realism and such names as Raphael Soyer, William Gropper, or Philip Evergood. As Reuben Kadish once put it, “The social realists…produced art fo
r the moment only. Think of the difference between Gropper and Daumier or Goya.”122 Krasner told an interviewer that the prominent leftist movements of the late 1930s “made me move as far away as possible, as they were emphasizing the most banal, provincial art…. French painting was the important thing at that point. Not the social realism that was going on here under our nose. Pictures of the Depression. Painting is not illustration.”123
Krasner eventually served on the Artists Union’s executive board, but even so, she and Jackson “never joined the party, proper,” for the Communists were the party. Though a recent book-length exhibition catalogue in Switzerland calls Krasner “a committed Communist” (without citing any evidence),124 this was not true. “We weren’t organizational types, but we felt at that time that they fought for our interests. I feel that the degree of an artist’s involvement can’t possibly be measured by a literal representation of problem areas in his art. That is a naive position.”125
Another time she spoke of “a big power move” at the union: “The Communist Party had moved into the Artists Union and started to shove around very heavily and I said, bye, bye. I am about other things. Other things interest me. And I would like to restate that I felt the full validity of the WPA around which the so-called Artists Union had organized. They did not meet to discuss any problems in painting…. Their full emphasis was a political move, a power move.”126
Though Krasner never joined the Communists, Gerald Monroe, who interviewed her around 1970 about her participation in the Artists Union, still recognized that Krasner was “sympathetic.” Monroe reported that she was occasionally invited to “the fraction meeting,” which was the executive committee subject to party discipline. It was composed of those members of the union who were in the party or close to it, and they met secretly to get guidance from the party and work out the strategy for the meetings.127 Krasner’s friend B. H. Friedman wrote, “It would seem in retrospect that Lee on the Communist-dominated executive committee was a ‘patsy’ or dupe; although she was liberal in politics and committed to the rights of the artist, she was never a Communist.”128
