by Gail Levin
SIX
From Politics to Modernism, 1936–39
Lee Krasner in her New York studio, photographed by Maurice Berezov, c. 1939. At this time, under the influence of Mondrian’s work, Krasner was producing thickly painted canvases with an emphasis on primary colors and bold black lines (CR 130 on her easel, CR 127 on wall, and CR 129 on the floor).
POVERTY AND PROTEST CHARACTERIZED KRASNER’S EXPERIENCE of the mid-1930s. Looking back, Krasner recounted how she was fired and rehired and jailed for illegal activities—meaning protests against the brutal “pink slips” of dismissal.1 She said that she was arrested many times and was in “some of the best jails in New York.”2 “I was practically in every jail in New York City,” she boasted. “Each time we were fired, or threatened with being fired, we’d go out and picket. On many occasions, we’d be taken off in a Black Maria and locked in a cell. Fortunately, we never had to spend the night.”3
The Black Maria paddy wagons actually evoked a certain nostalgia. Krasner was probably one of the eighty-three WPA artists and art teachers who picketed before the College Art Association on August 15, 1935, protesting wage cuts and demanding better pay, improved working conditions, and shorter hours.4
On December 1, 1936, Krasner was demonstrating in a sit-down strike with some four hundred artists and models against the impending dismissal of five hundred workers from the WPA. Organized by the Artists Union, their demonstration took place at 6 East Thirty-ninth Street, at the WPA Arts Projects Building. Paul Block, a sculptor and activist, urged the crowd to be nonviolent.5 An eyewitness reported that Block was “slammed across the head with a club, dragged across the floor, stepped on, and thrown bleeding into the elevator.” Months later he joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and was killed in the Spanish Civil War.6 The New York Daily Mirror reported that more than 50 people were injured and some 231 protesters were arrested in a clash with the police that lasted more than two hours. The paper claimed that two policemen were bitten to the bone by “hysterical women,” and that desks were smashed. Using a billy club, the police knocked unconscious the leader of the demonstration, a sixty-three-year-old mural painter and printmaker named Helen West Heller.7
Years later Krasner recalled that “special squads dragged out artists roughly,” and she remembered “sedate elegant [Anne] Goldwaithe dragged on the floor while photographers coolly photographed the scene,” calling it the “shock of my life.” The police used clubs, she recalled, and the whole thing was “frightening.”8
Another demonstrator, Serge Trubach, was a Ukrainian-born artist who studied at the National Academy and later worked with Krasner on the War Services project. Trubach recalled that when the artists refused to leave as the WPA offices were closing, “Mrs. [Audrey] MacMahon called the police department and they came down to the entrance and the people wouldn’t leave so they immediately called up ambulances and they beat the devil out of all the artists and some of them had to be taken to hospitals on stretchers.”9 He added, “The women were hit with rubber [truncheons] in the midriff because they didn’t want to show any bruises, so there wouldn’t be any public sentiment that they were also beaten. So they were hit in the midriff of their body so it wouldn’t show in public, you know, when they went out of the building.”
Trubach also recounted the protesters’ harsh experiences in jail after the demonstration. “It turned out that all the artists arrested, all gave fictitious names and were sent up to night court.” Often the names were of dead famous artists. “Everybody from Cézanne to Michelangelo was arrested. Rubens was there, and Bruegel, and, oh, Ryder, and let me see, Turner, everybody, you name them and they had them. After everybody was registered and their names taken….
“They had two big pens. They put all the women in one pen and all the men in the other. And several women became hysterical. There was only a urinal on the floor where the men were…. Nobody had eaten any dinner. It was just before dinnertime when the arrests were made. So they kept a vigil until about ten o’clock at night and they put all the men in…jail…. I don’t know what happened to the women. I didn’t know where they went,” he explained, “but the men were all…. sleeping like sardines one over the other. And most of the artists just sat around and talked.”
Krasner booked herself into prison as the painter Mary Cassatt.10 “I didn’t have a big selection, you know, it was either Rosa Bonheur or Mary Cassatt…. But when it came to trial, the court clerk reading some of these names, my dear; you know, you’d hear Picasso and everybody’s head would turn around and see who had said Picasso.”11 She chuckled that the clerks were clueless as to their ruse.
Vito Marcantonio handled the case. Marcantonio was a radical politician and protégé of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, and he eventually got suspended sentences for all the artists arrested and convicted for “disorderly conduct” in exchange for not prosecuting the individual policemen that were brought up on charges of assault and brutality. Fifteen of the artists had needed emergency medical treatment.12 Paul Block appeared in court as the main witness, Trubach recounted. “When he came to court he was bandaged from his shoulders up to his head. You could only see his eyes…it was obvious it was police brutality.”
It was while jailed after this same protest that Krasner first met Jeanne (Mercedes) Cordoba Carles, who also got arrested. The daughter of the modernist painter Arthur B. Carles, Mercedes was a great beauty who easily attracted men in the art world—from the outspoken Gorky, with whom she was then involved, to Hans Hofmann, the much beloved teacher. Both women worked on the WPA mural project under Diller, and they became close friends. Their friendship, forged in such drastic circumstances in such desperate times, would be marked by both poignancy and significance.
In another protest against the WPA’s periodic firings and rehirings, Krasner joined some seventy-eight artists in the group show Pink Slips over Culture, which was held at A.C.A. Gallery on Eighth Street from July 19 to 31, 1937, and organized by the Citizens Committee for Support of the WPA and the Artists Union, which by then was billing itself as a CIO affiliate. The Citizens Committee included writers Edna St. Vincent Millay, Lewis Mumford, Upton Sinclair, Van Wyck Brooks, John Dewey, Lillian Hellman, and Dr. Stephen S. Wise, along with artists Rockwell Kent, Edward Steichen, William Zorach, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and the set designer Robert Edmund Jones.13
Most of the artists contributed work of their own, but it was announced that some of the exhibited works were ironically produced for and loaned by the Federal Art Project. The show’s jury included artists Stuart Davis, Harry Gottlieb, Jacob Kainen, Elizabeth Olds, and Nahum Tschacbasov. Some of the contributors—including Krasner, Joseph Stella, and Isaac Soyer—had already stood out among their contemporaries. Krasner’s work joined sixty-eight paintings and ten sculptures.14 The work Krasner submitted was ambiguously titled Still Life. This painting was possibly her still life on canvas from 1935, where flattened forms, in heavy black outlines against a solid ground of gray and blue, echo Matisse’s influence.15
The show’s catalogue reprinted a statement that the novelist Ford Madox Ford had delivered over WABC Radio: “In arranging this exhibition by artists dismissed from the FAP, the Artists Union feels that it is placing the very real question of the future of American art before the public. The public is to decide, in the long run, whether or not these artists and many others are to bring art to institutions and people hitherto unaware of the meaning of plastic beauty.”16 Ford also mentioned economic need, “with all its harrowing consequences for the artists and their families.”17
The catalogue also included Lewis Mumford’s open letter to President Roosevelt, which had originally appeared in the New Republic. Mumford urged the president to stop cutting off public support for the arts. “I wish to persuade you that indifference to the arts projects of the WPA would not merely be unjust to the artists themselves who have worked with a zeal and devotion of which we must all be proud, but it would be an outright betrayal of a unique opportunity…. It is ti
me that art be taken for what it is, a realm like education which requires active and constant public support.”18
Besides her work at the WPA and the political activism it triggered, Krasner continued to develop her artwork by enrolling in classes at the Hans Hofmann School of Art at 52 West Ninth Street:19 “I joined the class because I wanted to work with a model again. This was close by to where I lived, it was available, and I was interested in what was happening there,” she explained.20 She had also heard a lot about Hofmann from Pantuhoff. Hofmann considered that he taught “progressive art students” about “pictorial space.”21
Krasner’s arrival at the Hofmann School made a lasting impression on Lillian Olinsey (later Lillian Kiesler, married to the artist Frederick Kiesler), a student who volunteered as the school’s registrar. Seeking to be admitted, Lee breezed into the school carrying a portfolio with her black-and-white figure drawings, which Olinsey judged “unusually dynamic.” “Here was a very original talent,” she recalled, “I was thoroughly convinced about Lee…this quality of energy, her power of articulation…so vital. She was just unique.”22 Also impressed by Krasner’s appearance, Olinsey described her on that first encounter as dressed in a black blouse, a black tight skirt with black net stockings and high-heeled shoes. “She had an animal magnetism, an energy, a kind of arrogance that commands…an energy that makes the waves happen.”
Olinsey rushed downstairs to see Hofmann in his small office, telling him about the new student, whom she considered “unique”: “You must give her a scholarship.” She had judged Krasner’s work as superior to that of the other students. Hofmann took the advice of his trusted volunteer, and Krasner entered the school on a scholarship. All she had to do was buy the required Strathmore paper, charcoal, an eraser, and a board on which to work.
Despite Olinsey’s enthusiastic initial evaluation, Hofmann felt that he had something to teach Krasner. Olinsey recalled that it was at Krasner’s first Friday-morning “crit,” after a life class, that Hofmann took Krasner’s drawing and tore the lower part of it into pieces, reassembling them on the left to demonstrate how to achieve greater dynamism and “a distinct movement” in relationship to the picture plane. Olinsey too was stunned and spoke about this incident to Hofmann, who later explained that he was demonstrating what he saw as Krasner’s need for the theories of modern art, that one could not just work from the center, but should consider all four sides of the composition. Krasner, who had grown accustomed to receiving harsh criticism from her teachers, weathered the shock of having Hofmann rip up her drawing before her classmates.
Much later she would complain that she had a hard time understanding Hofmann’s English at first. She recalled that he “would come in twice a week and move from student to student.23 For the first six months I was there I couldn’t understand a word the man was saying because he had such a heavy German accent. So I’d wait until he got through with the critique and there would be like thirty students—then when he left the room, I’d call George McNeil [the class monitor] over…and say ‘What did he say to me?’ so I really got George’s version of what he thought Hofmann had said to me.” Yet, given how many students were in the class, Krasner doubted that the monitor had really absorbed the master’s words about her work. But “after a while,” she added, “I could understand him directly.”24
She remembered that Hofmann taught “the two-dimensional surface to be punctured and bring it back to the two-dimensional again; in effect he was teaching the principles of cubism.”25
Though cubism suggests showing multiple viewpoints simultaneously, this was her attempt at describing Hofmann’s famous “push and pull” theory. He taught that the illusion of space, depth, and movement could be achieved on a flat canvas even in abstract art by using color principles and abstract shapes. At another time she described Hofmann as “one of the leading exponents in terms of explaining it [cubism] in this country…. I really didn’t get…the full impact of [cubism] until I worked with Hofmann.”26 She concluded, however, “The most valid thing that came to me from Hofmann was his enthusiasm for painting and his seriousness and commitment to it.”27
Hofmann brought extensive experience with modernism to his teaching. Born in 1880 in Bavaria, he grew up in Munich, then studied for a decade in Paris, beginning in 1904, where he met Braque and Picasso. He became a friend of Robert Delaunay, who prompted him to focus on color through his own colorful abstract cubist style. The outbreak of World War I caused Hofmann to stay in Munich, and during this time he got to know Gabriele Münter, the former companion of Wassily Kandinsky, and read Kandinsky’s book On the Spiritual in Art. Münter even persuaded Hofmann to store some of the art abandoned by Kandinsky when he fled to Russia as war broke out. Despite the fighting, Hofmann opened his own art school in 1915, and over the coming years it began to attract American students.
Eventually Hofmann was invited to be a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley, where he taught during the summer of 1930. He returned the next year, when he had a show of his work at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. Not surprisingly, he closed his Munich school in 1932 and settled in the United States, and went on to run schools both winters in New York and summers in Provincetown.
“To avoid being academic” was Hofmann’s byword. He said his philosophy was to be “a vital participant in contemporary aesthetics,” insisting that “teaching which represents the Renaissance tradition has deteriorated to a method of mere visual representation, where perspective, anatomy, dynamic symmetry and other scientific formulas have been placed as obstacles to the natural creative process of painting.”28 He argued that the American reaction against the academic had resulted in “an exclusive interest in subject matter and neglect of aesthetic considerations.”29 He rejected the focus on representation of an Edward Hopper or a Raphael Soyer. He also rejected Surrealism and would not have liked either Krasner’s Gansevoort I or Gansevoort II, despite the latter’s abstracted shapes.
At the same time, Hofmann emphasized that “a student’s talent should be estimated by his instinctive faculty of plastic sensitivity: the power, when applied to the experience of nature, to penetrate the relationships of its colors, forms, weights, textures, etc.”30 He emphasized life drawing and still life in the winter classes in New York and added landscape in his summers on Cape Cod, high above Provincetown overlooking the sea. He encouraged his students to work and rework their drawings before moving on to paintings. The student would then reduce what was observable to express only volumes that exist in nature through planes of abstract color.
Krasner began making charcoal drawings of still life setups. The students often worked on these in afternoon sessions: fruit, objects, textiles on a tabletop. Some of the objects were bottles, glasses, melons, or a bunch of grapes. From these, she quickly moved into colors, letting planes and spots of color dominate her composition. She didn’t focus on edges but rather emphasized the contrasts of colored shapes as they vibrated (pushing and pulling) against one another in space. The hot colors like red seemed to jump out at the viewer, while the cooler blues and violets appeared to recede. Sometimes the objects almost seemed to dissolve into the surrounding space, creating an abstract composition.
The mornings at the school were reserved for sketching in charcoal from the human figure. Hofmann liked to set the model in a space defined by the light and surrounding objects. Students were to capture the push and pull, positive and negative space, which articulated the figure. Krasner sketched seated female models by employing bold lines and planes of paper left white for contrast. Before long, she opened up the figure and depicted a fragmented view, implying movement, as if exploring the dynamics of how the limbs functioned.
Krasner depicted the figure in a shallow space with a contrast of values that came out of cubism. Krasner acknowledged that she was familiar with Picasso’s 1910 drawing Standing Figure, which the photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz gave to the Metropolit
an Museum in 1949.31 Krasner would have seen this drawing in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1936 show “Cubism and Abstract Art,” just in time to incorporate what she had observed in her own work at the Hofmann School.32 Some of the nude studies she made in class repeat these axial lines of motion; they are a far cry from the figure drawing she had done at the National Academy or with Job Goodman, not even aiming at the subtle chiaroscuro of the old masters.
Her classmate Perle Fine recalled Krasner’s distress when she arrived late one Monday morning after the class had been sketching from the same model for two or three weeks. Taking one look at her drawing, Krasner began to exclaim aloud, “It’s all wrong. It’s all wrong! It’s all changed!”33 The other students looked to Krasner and her drawing. She explained, “She’s cut her hair,” a deed that, while seemingly meaningless, changed the abstract planes Krasner was translating directly from what she observed.
Hofmann taught how colors interacted optically when juxtaposed. He had students try applying colored paper shapes to their drawings. Sometimes students felt that he went too far, especially when he seized a drawing and tore it in two pieces, hoping to show how to create vitality by shifting the paper to show a less rigid composition. His exuberant demonstrations might have unintentionally suggested the possibility of collage to Krasner. In connection with her Stable Gallery show of collages in 1955, Krasner reflected, “Back in the ’30s, as a Hofmann student, I had cut and replaced portions of a painting.”34 “It was a result of the Hofmann classes that I painted my first abstract compositions. The physical break in my work occurred at the time I was attending Hofmann’s class. I didn’t go regularly, but I was there off and on for three years or so.”35
