by Gail Levin
At the end of July 1939, friends of Krasner and Pantuhoff still considered them to be an item. While vacationing in Provincetown, George Mercer even sent them a postcard that read “Dear Lee Gor: How are you kids?” He encouraged them to join him and some of their friends attending the Hofmann summer school, including Bultman, Mercedes Carles, and Wilfrid Zogbaum. He included a hint of their aesthetic interests of the moment. “How is ‘Can-Can’ Kandinsky & Mother Miró?”84 Mercer had managed to buy a Kandinsky, perhaps even from Hofmann.
Krasner had been attracted both to modernism and to Pantuhoff’s keen interest in the avant-garde just after his return from his European tour in 1930. But as Igor’s interest in modernism waned, her commitment strengthened, causing a growing tension in their relationship. Other troubling issues that divided them, as observed by friends like Michael Loew and Robert Jonas, were Pantuhoff’s womanizing and the fact that his family refused to meet Krasner because she was Jewish.
Regardless, Igor gave Lee the book Paintings and Drawings of Matisse by Jean Cassou, which he inscribed: “To Lee with admiration from Igor, 1939, New York.”85 Beyond recognizing her passion for Matisse with this gift, Igor eventually gave or left other books to Krasner, including Picasso by Henri Mahaut, published in 1930 and inscribed “Igor Pantuhoff 1932,” and Raoul Dufy by Jean René, published in Paris in 1931 and inscribed “Igor Pantuhoff 1931.”86
Krasner ended her job on the WPA once again on August 31, 1939, under a ruling that discharged all who had been employed for more than eighteen months. She did not get rehired until November 29. The three months of virtual destitution further stressed her relationship with Pantuhoff, who friends recalled always lived beyond his means.87
Money was so scarce for them that she looked around to see what she could sell to raise some funds. On September 10, she ran an ad in the New York Times offering to sell a “Copehard Radio-Phonograph” with an automatic record changer for $100. The ad noted “Call between 5–7 o’clock. Lenore Krasner, 44 East 9th Street.”88 This ad obviously misspelled the “Capehart Radio-Phonograph,” purchased by the often extravagant Pantuhoff, either in advance or in imitation of de Kooning’s similar acquisition. Now with both of them broke, it had to be sacrificed to pay for basic living expenses.
Evidently Krasner informed Mercer that Igor was thinking of going to Florida. Mercer wrote her on September 18, 1939: “Glad to hear Ig’r still with…. Ask Ig’r who is going to Florida and g’ve the big br’ser a k’ck in the a’s for me.”89 Perhaps pressured by his inability to support himself, Igor departed suddenly, leaving a note that said, “Dear Lee I’m going to Florida this morning. Will you take care of yourself. I will right [sic] as soon as I get there. Igor. My Florida adress [sic] is 811 Hunter St. W. Palm Beach Fla.” On October 19, 1939, he sent a postcard from the Philco Race Track in Baltimore: “On the way Down South the Old bum. P.S. Say goodby to the gang.”90
Desperate, discouraged, and hoping for better fortune, Pantuhoff had gone to see his parents in Florida, from which he sent Krasner a letter on his second day. He illustrated his note with an elaborate sketch of himself reclining under the skimpy shade of a palm tree that he represented as an erect phallus with four fronds attached. He added a caption beneath the tree: “The large plant that you have does not lick [sic for like] sun. It must have shade to exist.” He was clearly hard up for cash because he implored Krasner to “try to sell Jules portrait for anything you can get? My parents turned out to be much poorer than I expected.” He reassured her, “I will give you 50% of the sum—I go to bed 8 p.m.” He also wrote: “It seems to me that sun is shining especially for me,” adding, “(The day before I araved [sic] hear [sic] three baby skunks came to my father’s estate and nobody has a nurve [sic] to talk to them. Father promises 50 cents for me for each skunk I will persuade to go away.) P.S. But I am wise I will not talk to them.”91
A week later, Igor sent Lee a note telling her, “I have a place to exibit [sic] Joans [sic] portrait so will you send it to me together with the strecher [sic]. When you roll it up, roll it with the fase [sic] outside. Send by American Express.” He wanted it right away and asked that she also send him six black soft Conté sticks collect. He added: “I’m righting [sic] to Nat that if you need any money and if he has any to give to you. There is not very much to say about this place it is raining and my parents are much purer [sic for poorer] then [sic] I expected. (father is crazy) Mother is sick.”92
By then Krasner had moved from 44 East Ninth Street to a cheaper place a block away at 51 East Ninth—Mercer’s former apartment. A few months later, Krasner had discovered the French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, in a new translation by Delmore Schwartz that was published on November 5, 1939. She enlisted her friend Byron Browne to put the following lines on her studio wall because she liked his handwriting, which was bold and clear.93
To whom shall I hire myself out? What beast must one adore? What holy image attack? What hearts shall I break? What lie must I maintain? In what blood must I walk?94
The words were entirely in black paint except for “What lie must I maintain?” in blue. Krasner would have been drawn to the title, A Season in Hell, at the moment that Schwartz’s translation appeared, for it seemed to capture what she had been going through between unemployment and Pantuhoff’s abrupt departure. In fact someone may have recommended Rimbaud’s poem to her because it speaks about departure, suffering, and anger. Rimbaud even wrote denying a departure—just what Krasner did at first when trying to deal with Pantuhoff’s absence.
Krasner’s interest in these lines ran deep, as Eleanor Munro discovered when she asked Krasner about them in an interview. “She [Krasner] is not about to go back and expose those feelings now. But clearly there was a bond felt during those fraught and frustrating years with another artist [Pantuhoff] who had begun in full hopes only to find himself negating his gifts ‘in the hell-fires of disgust and despair.’” Munro had stumbled upon pain Krasner suffered from Pantuhoff’s self-destructive habits, especially his excessive drinking, but also his sudden abandonment of their relationship, their “togetherness.”95
Krasner may also have been thinking about the consequences of choosing to live the artist’s bohemian lifestyle with its copious consumption of alcohol. This might have been how she interpreted the line “What beast must one adore?” for herself. Certainly Pantuhoff’s behavior at times qualified as that beast, beyond her control.
It is not certain where Krasner first encountered Rimbaud, but the poet is a logical extension for someone who admired the work of Poe. During this time art talk, exhibitions, and publications were discussing André Breton and his Surrealist colleagues, who believed that the unconscious mind was a source of inspiration and found examples in the work of earlier artists and poets, including Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Rimbaud. Because we know that Krasner made art influenced by images in the 1936 MoMA show “Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism,” it is likely that she once had a copy of the show’s catalogue, which discusses “the revolutionary aspects of Rimbaud.”96 That description alone was enough to provoke the curiosity of a woman who wanted to be part of what was new and revolutionary.
Harold Rosenberg, who shared her interest in Rimbaud, quoted the first two phrases of the same passage in a 1938 article for Poetry magazine entitled “The God in the Car,” although his translation is not the one Krasner used, for she used more lines and did not know French.97 At the time Delmore Schwartz’s translation of Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell was published, both he and Clement Greenberg were writing for Partisan Review, so Krasner could have met Schwartz through her friendship with Greenberg.98
The Rimbaud lines offered some solace, but Krasner was stunned by losing Igor, with whom she had made her life over the last decade. Other friends tried to cheer her up. That same fall, Krasner accompanied John Little to an artists’ costume ball given by the management of a new Viennese restaurant on East Seventy-ninth Street. As a publicity stunt, the restaurant
invited all the students from the Hofmann School. “I invited a few students from the school to meet at my studio and go uptown together,” recalled Little. “Lee was my date. She wore gray robes, a carrot-red wig made of yarn, and carried in her hand a real Madonna lily—the Raphael Madonna replete! I went as Mephistopheles [the name of the demon in the Faust legend]. As soon as all our friends arrived we had a few drinks and went off to the ball well prepared.” For Little, it was “a memorable evening; and we danced until dawn.”99
On November 23, 1939, just before the WPA hired Lee again, Igor wrote her from Miami Beach, telling her that he had received her air mail. “No I’m quite all right there is nothing rong [sic] I received your package for which I thank you very much. Sorry to hear you have not got your job back.”100 On February 26, 1940, he wrote again from West Palm Beach. “You ask me in the last letter if I’am [sic] coming back to New York? I dont think so I’am [sic] leaving for Texas soon where I hope to find work. About Nat and the money He rought [wrote me] and said that he did not have in mind paying me money but only building phonograp [sic].” He then asks her to send “C.O.D.” all the things that he had left behind in New York: his leather jacket, shirts, and his sketch stool. If she doesn’t want the large canvases he left behind, he requests that she give them to Hans Hofmann.101
This definitive break left Krasner bereft after living so long together and sharing so much. After all, they had given the impression that they were married, perhaps not only to others. Socially this was tantamount to a divorce. On March 7, 1940, Igor wrote again, noting that he had received her letters and the portrait that he had asked for. He requested her once again to send all of his things, enclosing a long list with such essentials as his “Burrbary coat [sic],” Mexican shoes, his blue raincoat, his underwear, and his “large palett [sic].” He concluded only “I hope you are well.” Apparently, when he had left for Florida, he had intended to return. Perhaps his family, who had refused to meet Krasner, had helped to convince him not to go back to her.
On March 19, Igor wrote again, acknowledging having received her letter about his things and “about Brodivish [sic].” He informed her that he wrote to Brodivish for information and tells her “the tools I imagine your father would lick [sic] to have. I hope you well Igor Will you do this as soon as possible? please.”102 On the back of the envelope, the word idiot is scrawled. The handwriting is Lee’s.
By March 24, 1940, Pantuhoff had yet to move to Texas. Instead he was partying with the Social Register set and clearly using his parents’ social connections in Russian high society in exile. The New York Times even reported his presence in Palm Beach at a Russian dinner given by Prince Mikhail A. Goundoroff for William C. Bullitt, the United States ambassador to France.103 One can only imagine how Krasner must have felt if she read this notice or heard about it from friends. Earlier that month the Times had reported that “Mrs. Evelyn McL. Gray had a cocktail party at her [Palm Beach] home, where the portrait of her daughter, Miss Elise Phalen, by Igor Pantuhoff, was shown for the first time.”104
On March 28, Igor sent Lee a postcard from West Palm Beach to acknowledge that he had received hers. “I ges [sic] I did not explain that I need my things now. Will you please send them as soon as possible. Igor.”105 By this time, Pantuhoff had clearly decided to abandon hopes of a career in the New York art world. It seemed like he just wanted the easier lifestyle of a society portraitist.
Using his connection to Fritz Bultman, whom he knew from the Hofmann School, Igor went on to New Orleans. There, in 1940, he painted the portraits of Bultman’s mother and, working from a photograph, his deceased grandfather, Tony Bultman. From New Orleans Igor moved on to high society in Natchez, Mississippi. He migrated from plantation to plantation, painting as he went, sometimes “servicing” the southern ladies as well.106 The young Dutch painter Joop Sanders recalled that by the late 1940s, Igor was known as “a walker,” someone who escorted rich women.107
Fred Bultman, Fritz’s father, helped Igor make connections in Natchez.108 He hit it off with Leslie Carpenter, a banker who lived at Dunley Plantation. The two men began to “hunt, drink, and womanize” together until Igor had a hunting accident. He moved on then, “everybody’s houseguest and bed mate,” while the menfolk were otherwise engaged. He painted the dowager empress of the garden club, Catherine Grafton Miller. Attentive to both high style and telling detail, Igor endowed his female subjects with the same kind of flattering small waistline that John Singer Sargent had painted in his idealized portrait of Isabella Stewart Gardner in 1888.
Igor did not enjoy his own family’s confidence. His father wrote to Igor’s brother Oleg, Jr.: “one must be very careful in talking with Igor, as he gets everything mixed up. Right now he is in New Orleans, I hope painting.”109 Igor not only put a greater physical distance between himself and Lee, but he also moved light-years away from modern art and the New York scene. If Krasner had so far held on to hope that he would come back soon and that they would resume the life that they had shared, she finally had to see that he was not capable of either being the man or the artist she needed. The time had come to move on.
SEVEN
Solace in Abstraction, 1940–41
Lee Krasner working at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts, c. 1940; on the easel is an early state of Untitled, 1940–43 (CR 133).
WITHOUT IGOR, KRASNER MAY WELL HAVE FOUND THAT their old coterie of male artists treated her differently. She liked Willem de Kooning and Arshile Gorky, but it is not clear that they respected or recognized women artists as more than sexual, if not life, partners. Around this time, Krasner began taking an active interest in the American Abstract Artists (AAA), an artist-run organization that included married artist couples such as Krasner’s friends Rosalind Bengelsdorf and Byron Browne and Gertrude “Peter” Glass and Balcomb Greene. This assured respect for women as artists and equals. Formed in 1936 exclusively for artists to show their work together, its founders included a number of Krasner’s other acquaintances and friends from her days at the academy, the WPA, and the Hofmann School—George McNeil, Burgoyne Diller, Harry Holtzman, and Ibram Lassaw.
The AAA supported “Peace,” “Democracy,” and “Cultural Progress,” though according to George L. K. Morris, an abstract artist and ideological leftist, the organization opposed the social realist art supported by the American Artists Congress.1 From 1937 to 1943, Morris wrote for Partisan Review, which he helped fund and edit and for which he was the first art critic; the Review became identified by many as espousing “Trotskyism,” since, like Morris, it was anti-Stalinist.
Krasner took action with the AAA on April 15, 1940, when the organization picketed the Museum of Modern Art, which had rejected the AAA’s request to show the group’s abstract art. “We were picketing the Museum of Modern Art and were calling for a show of American paintings and George L. K. Morris and I, when we knew that there was a trustee meeting, were given the task of handing [each] one of them, as they left the building, a leaflet saying, ‘Show American Paintings.’”2
The handouts, designed by fellow AAA member Ad Reinhardt, asked: “How Modern is the Museum of Modern Art?” It was a slogan that the New York Times called the “battle cry” of the “Avant Garde.” The pamphlet proclaimed, “In 1939 the museum professed to show art in our time—whose time—Sargent, Homer, Lafarge and Harnett? Or Picasso, Braque, Léger and Mondrian? Which Time?”3
The Times reporter also described “a handbill passed out to about a thousand artists who, by invitation, entered the museum at 11 West Fifty-third Street for a preview. Even the curlicue type in which the challenge was set expressed the contempt of the rebels, for it conjured up the velvet antiquity and the theatrical posters of the Gay Nineties.”4 The show that set off the protest was called “P.M. Competition: The Artist as Reporter” and ran from April 15 to May 7, 1940. Organized by P.M., “a projected afternoon tabloid newspaper,” the show was meant to attract publicity by searching for “new talent in the great tradition of Daum
ier, Cruikshank, Rowlandson, Winslow Homer, Nast, Luks, and Glackens.”5
Many bystanders mistakenly thought that the museum’s show of Italian Renaissance painting, which had been sent to the United States because of the war, had caused the artists’ protest, but Morris explained the picketers’ motive: “What they really were angry about was the show of drawings from the newspaper P.M.; Marshall Field [heir to the department store fortune and a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art] wanted them shown. American Abstract Artists felt that if the Museum of Modern Art had space for newspaper sketches it certainly wasn’t true that they had no space for abstract American art.”6
Field had hoped that the MoMA show would attract effective political art for the tabloid paper P.M., which he financed. Starting in June 1940, Ralph Ingersoll published the tabloid in New York for eight years. It attracted radical journalists and feature photographers as notable as Weegee (Arthur Fellig) and Margaret Bourke-White, and illustrators such as Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel) and Crockett Johnson, both of whom became beloved for their children’s book illustrations. At the time, Geisel was trying to drum up support for aiding Britain, especially because he believed war with Nazi Germany was inevitable.7 The first issue of P.M. had not yet appeared when the protested show was held.
Krasner believed that an artist had to struggle against—and also depend on—the Museum of Modern Art. The museum was “like a feeding machine. You attack it for everything, but finally it’s the source you have to make peace with. There are always problems between the artists and an institution. Maybe that’s healthy. You need the dichotomy—artist/museums, individual/society—for the individual to be able to breathe.”8 Even more important than the MoMA was the pantheon of French artists. “We acknowledged the School of French Painting—the Paris School of painting as the leading force and vitality of the time…. One didn’t miss a Léger show…. But the giants were unquestionably Matisse and Picasso.”9
