by Gail Levin
Krasner’s ultimate evaluation of American Abstract Artists was somewhat critical: “I found them a little provincial after a bit in so far as they became exclusive; that is to say at one point—I was then working with Hofmann; I suggested that he be invited to lecture or do something and they turned that down. I wanted to know why they didn’t include [Alexander] Calder, for instance, who was American, and so forth. And there was a no-no to that, so they were already ruling in and out certain things.”10
This exclusivity was definitely a cause for irritation. “I can remember having some hair-splitting fights within my avant-garde group because I thought we were getting a little provincial and wanted to expand its dimension,” she recalled. “Provincial in being a closed shop, as any group tends to become no matter what it is called.”11
Despite her complaints, Krasner was happy meeting with the AAA once a week. “Their sole purpose was to put up a show once a year at the Riverside Museum and if you paid your dues and were a member you would put up two or three paintings depending on how much space one had…. You did submit work to be accepted [to AAA]. Once you were accepted that was it. You did your own selection of what went in.”12
Krasner showed in AAA’s Fourth Annual group show in June 1940, which was held at the Fine Arts Building at 215 West Fifty-seventh Street. Jerome Klein, writing in the New York Post, poked fun at the group. “American Abstract Artists, the national organization of adherents to squares, circles, and unchecked flourishes, are holding…their fourth exhibition.” He listed Lenore Krasner as a participant, making this her first published notice as a professional.13 In the New York Times, Edward Alden Jewell panned the show, declaring, “Most of this non-representational art is instinct with academicism of its own particular brand.”14
The summer of 1940 was hot, and Krasner was stuck working in New York. She read Carl Jung’s Integration of Personality, about which she later remarked, “I thought it was fabulous, and I thought how marvelous, you know, that he speaks in my language, even though it has nothing to do with art—until he gets to the point where he starts talking about painting, where he starts analyzing some of his patients’ drawings. And that was for the birds; I lost interest in Jung instantly.”15
While Lee was alone in the city, her old Hofmann School crowd was on their breezy hillside in Provincetown, wondering about Lee. George Mercer wrote that Mercedes Carles was asking about her, whether she would come up again; Hofmann and his wife, Miz, and Fritz Bultman also sent greetings.16 Despite her friends’ affection, Krasner seems to have told someone she had imagined ending her life, because it prompted Mercer to write to her from Brookline, Massachusetts, on November 24, 1940, referring to “her projected trip up the river” (presumably the river Styx). He proposed, breezily, “Why not wait for me? Maybe we’ll get some publicity out of it and a couple of sweet-scented pine coffins!” Mercer’s jocular vein shows that he trusted that she was too tough to let self-pity win out.
Mercer admitted that he had been wondering whether the month would bring Krasner to Provincetown and told her that he had sold his soul “to the bitch-goddess of success.”17 Mercer was referring to his recent commitment to work for a National Defense Project to do camouflage work. “I am the artist, or one of the artists who has been placed in the den of scientist lions and must not be devoured but must teach science the gentle way of art. It’s the same old plot about which many stories have been told as perhaps you know.”18
While Mercer compromised his artistic goals by working on camouflage, Krasner had to continue to work on finishing other artists’ mural designs for the WPA. She was glad to have the income, but she longed to create her own abstract mural, more in keeping with the abstract images she exhibited with the AAA. She had watched enviously as Gorky produced his abstract but metaphoric mural Aviation for the administration building at Newark airport in 1939–40. She also saw that some of the men in the AAA had been given the opportunity to design abstract murals, among them her old pal from the academy Ilya Bolotowsky, who had first designed one for the Williamsburg Housing Project in 1936–37 and then another for the Hall of Medical Science at the New York World’s Fair in 1938–39, for which de Kooning also designed an abstract mural.
Finally, in 1940, Krasner was given a chance to design an abstract mural for the WPA, but she never got to paint it because the project ended just after she had produced the studies for it. All that remains of her designs is a photograph of a lost work and some small studies executed in gouache on paper. Her combination of red, yellow, and blue with black, white, and gray was inspired by Mondrian. Her shapes were hard-edged but biomorphic, suggesting the influence of Miró and Picasso. The forms are ambiguous—calling to mind both an artist’s palette and musical notes or instrument parts.
In 1941, Krasner submitted a sketch for an abstract mural at the radio station WNYC, which they accepted and commissioned for Studio A, then located on the twenty-fifth floor of the Municipal Building in downtown Manhattan. Other early abstract murals at the station had been produced by Stuart Davis, John Von Wicht, Louis Schanker, and Byron Browne. Working at the Hofmann School, Krasner adapted her abstract study from a still life on a table, although only few original elements are easily recognizable. Once again, she utilized primary colors along with black, white, and gray. Before she could execute the mural, she was taken away from the project to join the war effort. Instead of abstractions for walls, the government needed propaganda posters and designs for camouflage.
The last days of the WPA were upon Krasner and her friends. Gerome Kamrowski, an artist who was then working on the mural project with Byron Browne, Ilya Bolotowsky, and Krasner, recalled, “One time we went out to Flushing—it was the second year of the [1939–40] World’s Fair.19 The idea was that the murals were starting to fade and it was cheaper to use us than house painters. But nothing came of it. We just walked around looking at the place. On the way back [John] Graham was on the train carrying this large object like a baby—it was a beautiful piece of African sculpture that he had gotten from the Belgian pavilion. I was sitting next to Gorky and Graham opposite.”20
Kamrowski did not make clear whether Krasner was on that particular excursion, though he mentioned her in the same interview. It’s not likely that she was, because she only remembered meeting John Graham for the first time in late 1941. However, Krasner had already read Graham’s book, System and Dialectics of Art, published in 1937, and had liked Graham’s emphasis on Picasso, but also that he had introduced so-called primitive, non-Western tribal arts as a concept for artistic consideration.21
After the outbreak of war, a number of European modernists, and AAA favorites, fled wartime Europe for New York. Among them was Mondrian, who, at the age of sixty-eight, had been afraid to cross the Atlantic. He had left London on October 3, 1940, by convoy ship in the midst of the blitz. Not long after Hitler came to power, Mondrian discovered that he was on Hitler’s list of those who made entartete Kunst, or so-called degenerate modern art. Having already had to abandon his paintings in Paris during World War I, Mondrian, who had been living in Paris since 1919, left for London in September 1938, when the Spanish Civil War was raging and wider conflict seemed inevitable. Only after a bomb exploded in the building next to his London studio did Mondrian urgently leave for New York.
Harry Holtzman had helped Mondrian make his way to the States. Holtzman was a member of AAA and was a former student of Hofmann. He had discovered Mondrian’s paintings on exhibition in the Gallatin Collection at New York University’s Gallery of Living Art.22 He felt so inspired that he went to meet Mondrian in Paris in 1934. The two men, four decades apart in age, developed a close friendship. Thus Holtzman, financed by his wife’s money, was able and eager to help Mondrian immigrate to the United States. Holtzman took care of Mondrian, finding him a New York studio (near his own) where he could live and work.
Holtzman also introduced Mondrian to boogie-woogie music, which refers to a new form of jazz, which had become popular in t
he city, especially for dancing, after concerts in the late 1930s. It featured short melody lines broken by open rhythmical patterns.23 Holtzman later recalled that Mondrian was “long an admirer of real jazz, but had never heard of Boogie-Woogie, which was fairly new. I had a fine High-Fi set and discs that had just appeared. He sat in complete absorption to the music, saying ‘Enormous, enormous…’ After several months…we got him a player and a collection of his favorite discs—all Boogie-Woogie, and the real Blues.”24
The AAA meeting in November 1940 opened with a discussion of the plight of refugee artists in France. Together with Werner Drewes, Gertrude Glass Greene, Bolotowsky, and Morris, Krasner formed “a committee to investigate and report any action by members to help particular artists.”25 As a result of their report, the AAA voted at that November meeting to invite both Mondrian and Fernand Léger, another artist who had fled Europe, to join the organization.
In a postcard dated to early January 1941, Mondrian accepted the invitation with pleasure and thanked Holtzman, his most loyal supporter and the organization’s secretary.26 Mondrian even volunteered to pay the annual dues of four dollars.27 At the AAA meeting of January 24, 1941, it was announced that Léger had also accepted membership. The group immediately began to plan a reception to honor the two new distinguished members.
Krasner recalled first meeting Mondrian at the reception. It was hosted by fellow AAA members George L. K. Morris and his artist wife, Suzy Frelinghuysen, at their apartment on Sutton Place, the elegant lane adjacent to the East River in Midtown Manhattan—an address that reflected the hosts’ background from wealthy and prominent American families. In fact, Morris’s ancestors included diplomats and statesmen, as well as Lewis Morris III, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. George L. K. Morris had graduated from Groton and Yale, traveled to Paris in 1927, together with his cousin, the abstract artist and collector Albert E. Gallatin. Morris was well connected, and in Paris, he met Picasso, Braque, and Brancusi. Two years later, he returned to study with both Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant.
Morris’s wife came from the politically prominent New Jersey Frelinghuysens, who saw to it that she toured Europe and was privately tutored in art. Morris and Frelinghuysen had married in 1935. She was three years younger than Krasner, and he was three years older than Krasner. As an artist couple, their lives contrasted with that of Krasner and Pantuhoff, who at the time were struggling to get by with precarious and intermittent employment on the WPA. Morris encouraged Frelinghuysen to paint, and in 1938, she became the first woman to have work placed in the permanent collection of the Museum of Living Art, which had been founded by Gallatin, who was heir to a large banking fortune. His great-grandfather and namesake had served as secretary of the treasury under Presidents Jefferson and Madison. These urbane and elegant friends, known as the “Park Avenue Cubists,” were not Krasner’s usual social circle, but all the members of AAA were invited to celebrate the two immigrant guests.
Morris remembered that “Léger swept in with about five girls in tow, spoke only French, stayed just a few minutes, and swept out again.”28 Krasner recalled that she “met Léger; but he was not one of my gods as Mondrian was. Léger did not speak English; I didn’t speak French, but we worked out some way of communicating. Léger was…a delightful presence. I never missed one of his shows in New York, but he was not one of my heroes.”29
Krasner’s close friend Mercedes Carles was closer to Léger. She had got a job translating for Léger when he was working on murals for the French Lines Pier in 1935. The company had begun to suspect that Léger was a Communist and soon aborted the project. When this happened, Léger recommended that Mercedes work for Herbert Matter, a Swiss photographer and former student of his at the Académie Moderne in Paris. Matter shared a commission with his compatriot, the architect William Lescaze, for the Swiss Pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair.
Mondrian, who had just recovered from the risky journey across the Atlantic on a convoy ship during wartime, turned out to be “the life of the party.”30 He had such a good time he made a date for a few nights later to go dancing with about eight of the members, Krasner among them.31 Meeting Mondrian thrilled her, and she no doubt relished the ambiance and posh setting provided by Morris and Frelinghuysen.
Krasner recalled that Mondrian “was very much here for me before I met him.”32 She meant that Mondrian had already made an impact on American artists interested in abstraction. His work had been on her mind during the previous two years, when she had been emulating his geometric abstractions.
Krasner had spoken of her admiration for Mondrian with Mercer, who wrote to her from Boston on December 12, 1940, following a spontaneous visit to see her in New York, only to discover that she was away for the weekend. He imagined a short dramatic skit between the two of them, adding an “Author’s note: (Krasner is a highly flexible character. She can be a tiger but prefers humor and the making of fun of every situation.)” In the letter, Mercer referred to “Eleanor R. [Roosevelt] and Ooncle Piet [Mondrian]. And Leger. How does Piet look in bathrobe? What about P.P. [Pablo Picasso]? Will he be here next?” Mercer described his own “dreamy dabbles” and confided: “I’m very much excited about the idea of working on a ‘black’ ground with the brilliant lights to relieve it. I hope to get a subject of this kind which I can paint…a sort of negative Mondrian.” He concluded, “Carry on. I’ll see you before long, I hope,” and signed his name under a picture of a heart with an arrow through it, as if a child’s valentine sketch.33
Mondrian and Léger joined Krasner and thirty-three AAA members in their fifth annual exhibition at the Riverside Museum from February 9 through 23, 1941. On February 11, 1941, Krasner received her second notice in the press, now in the Times, though she was merely listed as a participant. The article said it was “a relief to find that these particular canvases are by Léger and Mondrian themselves rather than by their admirers. Both artists have had, and continue to have, a by no means trifling influence hereabouts.”34 Henry McBride was also critical of the American artists, writing that Mondrian and Léger had “a crispness in idea and a force in presentation that the American ‘comrades’ do not rival.”35 A reviewer for P.M. commented that the two Europeans had added to the group’s prestige, improving its “creative production.”36
“Mondrian I saw on many occasions. We were both mad for jazz, and we used to go to jazz spots together,” Krasner recalled.37 For his part, Mondrian told Holtzman, “I have never enjoyed life so much as here.”38 He wrote AAA a thank-you note that was read aloud at the meeting of February 7, 1941.39 Krasner recalled walking with Mondrian through this AAA exhibition. “He had a few comments about every painting. As we approached my work, I became very nervous. He said, ‘You have a very strong inner rhythm. Never lose it.’”40 At the time, Krasner was showing works that “were abstract, Picassoid, with heavy black lines, brilliant intense colors and thick impasto. But I wanted to do the maximum in color, and that lurked in the back of my mind.”41
Meeting Mondrian helped to ease Krasner’s worries about New York’s provinciality. “One couldn’t have imagined in the ’30s that the center of the art world would shift to New York,” Krasner later commented. “One has to be alive enough to recognize when it does change otherwise it can lead to nationalism, chauvinism or provincialism.”42
Krasner’s continual anxiety about nationalism and provincialism can be understood within the context of her childhood. In becoming an artist, she dreamed of leaving behind both the poverty and the restricted, burdened role of the woman in her immigrant culture. She sought to fit into an America that was increasingly troubled by anti-Semitism both within and outside of its borders. The politics of the left offered a cosmopolitan ideal—a world that looked beyond ethnicities to a universalism that was quite distinct from the limited view of some of the critics then promoting representational American art.
In connection with the AAA show, a symposium took place on Sunday afternoon, February 16, w
ith Balcomb Greene presiding and with Holtzman and, at long last, as Krasner had hoped, Hans Hofmann speaking. Holtzman, in his written statement for the “spring” 1941 show, expressed some ideas that connected well with some of Krasner’s earlier points of view. He argued that “a clear differentiation between esthetic values and national values is essential…. Even after more than fifty years of its development, the habit is to allude to the advanced phases of modern art as merely European idioms and to fail to see that art is not merely the expression of nationality…. This is the consequence of the failure to perceive that the real expression of art is always and every where profoundly the same: universal.”43
By stressing that “esthetic values do not change with latitude and longitude,” Holtzman rejected the calls for an “American” national art that then resonated at the Whitney Museum and in the writings of conservative critics of the day such as Thomas Craven.44 Earlier, the influential artist and teacher Robert Henri had also encouraged the search for a distinctive American art. Now this goal grew even bolder in the words of critics who championed artists such as Edward Hopper and Thomas Hart Benton.45
Krasner’s preference for European modernists was typical among her classmates from the Hofmann School, including George Mercer. In a letter dated January 4, 1941, Mercer had asked Krasner, “Why are so many women except yourself and a few others so dumb, so echoing?…Talk, talk, talk about nothing.”46 Mercer also shared his cynical opinions about success in art. “Are you a mural genius yet? Of course not. Why should you be? Realize before it is too late that geniushood belongs to the great—like Refégé [Anton Refregier], Ruth Reeves, etc., etc. and other adulterers of mankind. Even Brodovich [Alexey Brodovitch]; and Gorky, too, has a touch of genius. But I know a better one, that bloated genius called [Aristodimos] Caldis [Kaldis]. If ever there was a man with vision—with an eye for an opening. But let him go. He bores me.”47
