by Gail Levin
Mercer’s grudging admission of the importance of the designers Ruth Reeves and Alexey Brodovitch must be aimed at Krasner’s interest in the world of high fashion. Brodovitch shared the White Russian background of the Pantuhoff family. More than a decade older than Igor, Brodovitch had also left Russia in 1920. He began his career in Paris and immigrated to America in 1930. As art director of Harper’s Bazaar, Brodovitch had a significant impact on American graphic design and photography. Krasner would later pose for photographs by some of his best students, including Hans Namuth and Irving Penn, but at this time she was modeling for Herbert Matter, who did assignments for Brodovitch.
Krasner knew Matter, an avant-garde photographer and innovative graphic designer, through his wife, Mercedes Carles, who had been her friend since the Hofmann School. She attended their 1941 wedding, to which Mercer jokingly referred as the marriage of “Kitty Carles” and “Hairbert.”48
Matter often blurred the boundaries between commercial and fine art. Swiss born, he arrived in New York as a staff photographer for the touring Trudi Scoop dance troupe. When the tour ended, he went to work for Condé Nast publications taking photographs for Fortune, Harper’s Bazaar, House & Garden, and Vogue. By early 1939, he was working on exhibition design for the Museum of Modern Art, assisting the curator James Johnson Sweeney. Matter got to know Sweeney through his friendship with the artist Alexander Calder, whose mobiles Matter photographed in motion. Sweeney was then writing about Calder and using Matter’s photographs as illustrations.49
Around the time Krasner and Mercedes met, Mercedes was attempting to make money in the fashion industry.50 She was encouraged by her aunt, Sara Johns, a rather successful fashion illustrator. Johns often employed both Carles and Krasner as models—an important source of income for Krasner in these lean years. While both Krasner and Carles were modeling for Herbert Matter by this time, Krasner’s posing for Matter did not engage the same intimacy and passion.51
Krasner, who had lovely hands, modeled for Matter’s photographs of Calder’s jewelry and accessory designs. An excellent dancer and well coordinated, she also posed for a photograph Matter made as an advertisement for a client, Container Corporation, and the agency N. W. Ayer, which appeared in Fortune magazine in November 1941. Matter cropped his photograph to show Krasner’s feet, clad in laced high-heeled shoes, and her legs below her knees; he recorded her mounting a staircase over and over again to put away a container of groceries for an avant-garde ad that recalls Marcel Duchamp’s famous painting Nude Descending the Staircase or Fernand Léger’s film, Ballet Mécanique. Matter’s surviving notes and maquette document the identity of the model as Krasner.52
It was probably Herbert Matter who helped Lee get a brief stint at the Museum of Modern Art in 1940. The job was to take over from the Utah Federal Art Project a full-size painting reproducing a monumental pictograph from the sandstone walls of Barrier Canyon in Utah.53 Measuring 12 by 60 feet, this painting was part of an installation designed by curator René d’Harnoncourt, who sought to evoke the aura and ritualism of the Native Americans. Gerome Kamrowski recalled that “Lee…did the wall painting for the Indian show at the Modern, just a motif from pottery.”54
The show, “Indian Art of the United States,” ran from January 22 to April 27, 1941.
News of the Indian exhibition prompted Mercer to write Krasner, asking if she had seen it and if it was as good as the Mexican one. He referred to two loan shows of non-European art held at the Modern, including the influential “Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art” from 1940. She had in fact done a lot more than visit the Indian exhibition. Mercer also asked about the “Greco show,” which was at the Metropolitan Museum and featured El Greco, who was much beloved by modernists.55 Mercer’s interest in these three shows hints at their impact on Krasner and her contemporaries who were then searching for new ways to expand their imaginative range.
Ominously for Krasner, Mercer complained about having to usher at a friend’s wedding. He had planned to “get roaring, boreing [sic] drunk” at the ushers’ dinner and at the wedding the next week. He asked Krasner and himself, “Why can’t I shake myself free of my past? Answer that one.” The question was about a problem that would haunt her and the men in her life.56
By March 10, 1941, Krasner heard from Mercer that he had been drafted and had become a private in the army. He had moved to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and was in the 84th Engineer Battalion.57 He expected to be there for three years, working in camouflage. He told her that he hoped to get a weekend off to visit her in New York, and apologized for not being able to “get down that night. It was impossible.” He wrote: “Krasner, I both like and dislike your voice on the telephone. You sound so blasé. I like you better when I see you.”58
After describing the army routine, Mercer reported, “The fellows down here are surprisingly nice. One is a ‘modern’ artist, likes Picasso, Kandinsky, Miró and all! What a surprise for me.” He wrote also about his Kandinsky, which he was preparing to sell. He signed the letter “Love toots, Private Mercer.”59 Enthusiasm for Kandinsky, which reflected Hofmann’s influence, also affected Krasner, who had admired Kandinsky’s early pictures from around 1913–14 in the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (the future Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Collection), then housed at the Plaza Hotel.60
In a letter a month later, Mercer wrote from Washington, D.C., about “an interesting friend who was on the stage before he entered the army. His outlook is both interesting and somewhat amusing to me. He is essentially a person of a good deal of integrity and determination but has that peculiar communist leaning so accessible to those who are looking for it. I think he will outgrow it. He reminds me of many New York Villagers.”61 By writing to Krasner of “that peculiar communist leaning,” Mercer suggests that he knows that she too disdains communism. He complained that “the officers are passive. They have not faced the issue of war by a long shot…. The underlying outlook is very British—before Dunkirk. There are no Nietzchians [sic]. We do work hard but there is no yen amongst us to fight a war.”62
He then confided: “Another thing (probably peculiar to our group) is an underlying dormant bisexuality. Certainly this is outside the mind intent on war—or is it? Female company is scarce and much sought after. There is not enough of it to encourage a completely natural life. Strange thing this war business.”63 Mercer sent his greetings to Carles and Herbert [Matter] and “good old Hans,” signing himself “love, George.”64 Krasner’s response to Mercer’s comment about “dormant bisexuality” was to send him a photograph of Joan Bennett, the femme fatale of film noir movies such as Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt of 1941. It was an interesting choice, considering all the photographs she had of herself, some of them intentionally seductive.
Krasner felt close enough to Mercer that when she had a health crisis and was broke she appealed to him for help. Unfortunately Mercer did not get her message in time. On March 25, 1941, he wrote, “I’m terribly disappointed that I didn’t help. I was in the infirmary when I got your telegram. I managed to get a blank check on another bank and sent you $50 in a Special Delivery envelope the same day (Tuesday). I suppose it just wasn’t mailed, damn those ward-boys and nurses.”65 He told her that she could cash the check or tear it up. In his note dated two weeks later, he thanked her for her “nice letter” and noted that she sounded better. “You do sound in a bit of a blue funk but I felt an undercurrent of optimism ready to bubble forth—your typical self.”
Not hearing from Mercer and feeling desperate, Krasner had sought aid from Igor. Not knowing how to contact him, she tried through his parents. On March 20, 1941, his mother, Nina, wrote from Florida, “My dear Miss Krasner: I received your letter today and I am sorry about your circumstances, but I made up my mind not to forward your message to Igor. I know quite definitively that he is not able to help you out and it would only disturb him, without doing you any good. I hope that your relatives will assist you and that you will get well soon.”66
Somehow or anot
her, Krasner did manage to contact Pantu hoff, because nearly a week later, he sent her a note postmarked Palm Beach, Florida: “Dear Lee I’m sorry not to be able to send you more than this.”67 He evidently wanted or felt that he should try to help.
Eventually the WPA temporarily rehired and promoted Krasner to the rank of “Senior Artist,” but her salary was reduced once again to $87.60 per month. On April 16, 1941, Mercer wrote to confirm that she was “off the Project.” He asked if she had cashed the check that he sent.68 Termination from the WPA came about almost a week after. (She was, however, reinstated a few weeks afterward. Her last assignment came when she had to work with aviation sheet metal from January 4, 1943, through April 3, 1943. Her salary was reduced even further, to $52.80 per month.)
By April 28, Mercer wrote again to explain that he had sent her some checks meant to be for “when the Project fell from under you. Has it yet? Let me know and I’ll send another ‘$25er’ along.”69 From his comfortable existence and his military salary, Mercer was able to help out. Not only was he generous, but he also had few needs while in the army. Mercer wrote that “the painters here are all half-ass…. Hofmann…looks so very good from this place.”70 He liked, he wrote, her story of Carles’s wedding to Herbert Matter. He missed speaking with Lee.
Though Krasner’s letters to Mercer have not yet come to light, his letters to her represent more than just the complaints of an artist unhappily enlisted in the army. They reveal how closely Krasner experienced the problems of those artists forced to be soldiers in the months leading up to Pearl Harbor and during the war itself. Mercer complained that in the army “the ruthless have the best chance of survival. And that ruthlessness seems outside of me. So I try to capture it only to find I am outside of it. Try to be that way in outlook? If I do, I’m afraid that I’ll never regain enough sensitivity to paint—which I really want to do. Be a painter—sensitive—thoughtful. That is badly out of place in a world like today’s. I want to continue to live—for some reason. That doesn’t seem to be in line with Army policy.”71
Mercer’s letters to Krasner show both her empathy and intellect. She was sympathetic and receptive to the Harvard-educated Mercer, who wrote discussing everything from Nietzsche and T. S. Eliot to his own passion to paint.72 While Krasner too had her own struggle to paint, her struggle was economic and social—she was a single woman struggling with poverty and loneliness, when most eligible men were serving in the armed forces. She consoled Mercer, and he replied that her letter was just what he needed and he had reread it and would “use it again as a booster at the time of decision-making. Your saying that sensitivity minus survival isn’t much use to anyone is rather true. I hadn’t thought as bluntly and as clearly as you on that point. And then, you speak of the ‘cultured intellectuals’ one unavoidably must spend time with.”73
Krasner’s equanimity was invaluable to Mercer at a time when he felt alienated and threatened by the prospect of war. Having had his budding artistic career completely interrupted by circumstances beyond his control, he had to decide whether to give in to his fate or protest it.
She recommended that he read Henry Miller’s The Cosmological Eye, where she found a worldview that was similar to the one they now faced: “The times are permanently bad…. To imagine a way of life that could be patched up is to think of the cosmos as a vast plumbing affair. To expect others to do what we are unable to do ourselves is truly to believe in miracles.”74 Miller shared her dislike of nationalism: “I should hate to be a French or a German or a Russian or an American writer. It must be hell. I am a cosmological writer, and when I open my trap I broadcast to the whole word [sic, world] at once.”75 Krasner might also have recommended the book to Mercer because of Miller’s antiwar sentiments: “A real man has no need of governments, of laws, of moral or ethical codes, to say nothing of battleships, police clubs, high-powered bombers and such things.”76
Mercer clearly wanted the exchange with her to continue. “I don’t like the idea of my being in a war,” he wrote. “Not at all. I can hardly believe it. It isn’t I that’s going to war. I have no desire to. I want to paint a picture.”77 He wrote on July 7, 1941, that “I like Henry Miller. He seems a little contradictory at times, but I will be able to judge him better at a later date. I’ll let you know. Sometimes he hits the nail on the head with perfect precision and I laugh with delight.”78 By this time Mercer had begun to sign his letters “Love, George.”
Some weeks after, he wrote, “The day ahead looked very glum and your words saved me from gloom (two words). Honey you’re my inspiration. There’s so much rot around here that I think writing about it will save me from death. It’s impossible to know where to begin. (Remember Prufrock, hon)…. This Goddamn situation just makes things worse again. I was beginning to get out of the Prufrock snarl through painting but now I’m thrown with this normal, so called, world again and protest quite naturally.”79
Mercer questioned why he couldn’t “have my paroxysms of pain in relation to painting? That would be bad enough—trying to face making a living and painting, too.” He expands his reference to T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.80
“God how I’d like to tell a few people around here ‘off.’ But I’m never destined to do it. I just don’t dare to eat that God Damn peach that Eliot urges me to swallow. Well, the old son-of-a bitch couldn’t swallow it himself.”81 Mercer may obliquely refer to Prufrock’s peach as a much-discussed metaphor for his own anxiety about sexual inadequacy with women, his worry that his advances will be scorned.
On August 11, Mercer wrote to Krasner and told her, “I like you.”82 His feelings for her intensified. Five days later, he wrote her twice. The first short note reported, “I had a good time in N.Y. with you but forgot to buy you the flower. Next time!”83 He added, “Why are all but a handful of woman (and males) so God Damn Dumb? (Please answer) Much love and best of luck, George.”84
On September 26, Mercer wrote that once again he had been passed over for promotion to corporal, based, according to him, on a popular vote by the noncommissioned officers. His camouflage “company” was living in pup tents about a mile outside of town and were having enactments of the enemy capturing their camp.85 “To be ‘popular’ is difficult for me,” he told her, adding, “Well, remember the words of Krasner’s Rimbaud ‘What lie must I maintain?’”86 His reference to the lines that were written on her studio wall confirms that she had had them there at least since his last visit in August 1941.
When Mercer finally made corporal in October and got a raise to $54 a month, he told Krasner he was pleased and he would not “need the $20 which you mentioned and which I had completely forgotten about. Take your time and more.”87 He lifts himself out of his self-pity for a moment to respond to her report of music: “The Brahms piano concerto with Horowitz and Toscanini sounds wonderful. And Tristan und Isolde. We shall enjoy them together some day.”88 Mercer addressed her worries from the third person: “Don’t get too down on Krasner. She’s a pretty good fighter, you know. And I am sure that it is those few who are willing to be critical of themselves; to subject themselves to self-torture, are the material nature uses to mould great character and understanding.”89
Krasner’s struggle was with both finding income enough to survive and coping with loneliness. Her $10 rent was modest, but her income was unsteady and minimal. She lived sparingly and occasionally borrowed from friends, such as “Sarah,” Mercedes Matter’s aunt Sara Johns, the commercial fashion artist for whom Krasner sometimes worked as a model.
On the back of Mercer’s last envelope, Krasner has made notes about her budget:
5 dia–
5 canvas–
3 coat
2 Carles [debt?]
>
1 Sarah [debt]
——
16
10 rent
——
26
Without Igor to keep her company, Krasner remained preoccupied with the AAA, but she continued to see Gorky and de Kooning, who shunned that group. Before long she met an acquaintance of theirs, John Graham, who was also an immigrant, through Aristodimos Kaldis, whom she knew from the WPA.90 Kaldis may have had more than a passing interest in Krasner. On January 1, 1941, he sent her a picture postcard of an Aztec Goddess of Flowing Water with the note: “I hope that during the coming year you’ll descend from the ethereal cosmos to our prosaic world. Aristo.” His choice of image reflects contemporary artists’ enthusiasm for the MoMA show “Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art” of the previous year, but his references to both a goddess and her place in “the ethereal cosmos” suggest that he was attracted to her but found her too aloof.
One day, while Krasner was walking near her apartment on Ninth Street, she ran into Kaldis, and he introduced her to Graham, who at once commented, “You’re a painter.”91
She remembered thinking, “My God, that man has magical insight.” She asked him how he knew, and he pointed to her legs, which had specks of paint on them.92 He then asked to see her work, and she agreed.
Graham had come to New York from Paris, but he was born Ivan Gratianovitch Dombrowski in 1886 of Polish parents in Kiev, Ukraine (then in the Russian empire). Like Pantuhoff’s father, he had fled the Bolsheviks in 1920 after fighting in the civil war on the side of the tsar. Graham enrolled at the Art Students League in 1923, where he worked as assistant to the realist painter John Sloan before getting his first solo museum show in 1929. During this time, Graham traveled between New York and Paris, dealing in African art and bringing the ideas of European modernism to America.
