Lee Krasner (12 page)

At the beach Harold and Igor “had played handball, gone into the surf, played darts, gone swimming again. In and out, over and over again, hither and yon, from one sport to another. Finally, when they had just about seated themselves once more, Igor suggested they do something else. ‘Sit still for a while and meditate,' Harold told him; ‘Try it,' he told him. ‘I've tried it,' said Igor. ‘It's no good. As soon as I get set to meditate, I get a hard-on.'”
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Krasner seemed to have retained no inhibitions from the modesty of her observant Jewish home. She was so relaxed about her body that she posed for nude photos with Pantuhoff on the beach. In fact, the sexual electricity in their relationship caught the attention of their close circle. An estimate of their sexuality may be
encoded in a brightly colored crayon drawing of 1934 by Esphyr Slobodkina entitled
Lee Krasner Astride a Fighting Cock.
It shows three female figures, repeated as if in a cubist painting or film, mounted on a rooster's back. The faces on the three heads evoke Krasner, as do the three energetic bodies. The figure has hinged limbs, like those of paper dolls that Slobodkina remembered making as a child.
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While a female doll astride a cock is an obvious sexual metaphor, whether Slobodkina meant to express envy or complaint is unclear.

Slobodkina and another friend from the academy, Ilya Bolotowsky, decided to marry in 1933; but lacking a sexual charge like Igor and Lee's, they were divorced by 1936, though they remained close friends for some time after. Esphyr later wrote that during “the Great Depression at its worst, every right-thinking artist's idea was to marry a good-looking, capable, young woman—preferably a teacher—thus acquiring in one fell swoop a model for his work and an economic anchor in what was usually a miserable bohemian existence.”
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Krasner started working for the WPA at its inception in August 1935. Her experience was so satisfying that she rejected a career teaching. May Tabak recalled that Krasner and Pantuhoff “both got jobs on the WPA. For a while Igor continued to paint lovely landscapes and even lovelier portraits. On the Project he had immediately been assigned to the easel project, a ‘sinecure' greatly coveted by the painters; for one thing, it meant working at home.”
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Being on the easel project also meant that Pantuhoff had more independence to work within his own aesthetic, while those on the mural project had to work on what the recipients wanted.

In contrast Krasner, who had not won acclaim at the academy, held firmly to her modernist vision. When a critic asked her years later whether her involvement with the WPA affected her aesthetic in any way, she responded, “To a degree it did, as the work that was called for didn't quite line up with what I was interested in. On the WPA an order for work—murals, easel paintings—
was to be placed in public buildings. Someone from the public buildings had to designate what kind of art they wanted. Needless to say it moved a little away from my own interests in art. Nevertheless, its validity I would never deny. It kept a group of painters alive through a very difficult period.”
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Because the WPA was necessary for the survival of many artists, there was always the worry that the WPA would end. According to Harry Gottlieb, another artist on the Project in New York, “There were always problems…. Whenever they tried to get rid of the WPA we had picket lines set up.”
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On October 27, 1934, an artists' demonstration had marched on City Hall to protest the lack of jobs for artists and to demand “immediate relief for all artists.”
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The Artists Union insisted “only the artist can define the artist's needs and the conditions necessary for his maintenance as an artist.”
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When asked if she was only concerned with art issues, Krasner answered: “Primarily, we were protecting our rights. However we did join some marches on social protest issues. For example, we marched [with] the workers picketing Ohrbach's. We carried signs with our names like ‘I am Stuart Davis and I protest the firing of…' My sign said ‘I am Lee Krasner and I protest the firing of…'”
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The picket line she recalled at Orhbach's department store on East Fourteenth Street formed in December 1934 when the workers demanded union recognition, a forty-hour week, and a ten-cent wage increase. The
New York Times
reported that the police broke up a line of 125 “snake dancing pickets in front of Orhbach's” and charged them with “disorderly conduct.”
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Those arrested were held until they paid $5 each in bail. The hearings took place the next day.

On the picket line, Krasner joined not just the store's workers, but also Office Workers Union members and others sympathetic to the cause—visual artists like herself, but also people such as the actor Dane Clark, who made his Broadway debut in Friedrich
Woolf's
Sailors of Catarro
. Though the protest was not advertised as Communist, the party probably organized it. And yet, even despite the arrests, the actors were somehow bailed out in time for the evening performance.
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Addressing the issue of women on the WPA, Krasner later reflected, “Of course there were many more men than women, but there were women. There was no pointed discrimination, but at that point there weren't many professional women artists. In the WPA you worked in your own studio and the timekeeper came to check you once a week to see that you were working. Once a week you reported to a meeting of all the mural artists. So you were necessarily with your fellow artists quite a bit. That meant you didn't feel totally isolated.”
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Krasner and Pantuhoff were anything but lonely. During 1935 they moved yet again to share a railroad apartment in the East Village with artists Bob Jonas and Michael Loew. A close friend of Willem de Kooning, Jonas had studied commercial art in his native Newark, New Jersey. Jonas's father abandoned his family, and he worked to support his mother and siblings. He was feeling desperate. He had just left his family's home for the first time and later claimed: “I was into very advanced thinking. It used to frighten Lee Krasner.”
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Krasner had worked with Loew on a WPA mural for the Straubenmuller Textile High School (now Charles Evans Hughes High School) on West Eighteenth Street. In addition to murals, Loew also worked on stained glass windows, but politics were his passion. He had come to the Artists Union from the John Reed Club and was very active.
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In Loew's view, “Lee was an intense, serious person who didn't go for small talk or nonsense. Her work was semi-Surrealist, and she was seeking the most advanced ideas in art. Mature and strong, but by no means affectionate, she had warmth about art and she could be a good friend if you went along with her ideas.”
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On the other hand, Loew saw Pantuhoff as “a caricature of the White Russian, charming and suave—
who used to do portraits on ocean liners.”
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Loew also recalled Pantuhoff as “a real man of the world but wild, running around with women. I could hear them scrapping a lot.”
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“They were all brilliant, talented,” Jonas recalled of this group of friends. “Lee was better than Jackson Pollock in talent. Everything Mike Loew touched was beautiful. Igor was brilliant. He could draw like a wizard…. He had it in his hands, muscular, dashing, not sensitive. Lee was a Marxist of the Trotsky variety.”
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Jonas also recounted that Pantuhoff “would say [to Krasner] as a put-down, ‘you're common, like the rest of them.'”
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Others directly cited Pantuhoff for anti-Semitism, which characterized his family's culture.
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Igor's parents declined to meet Lee because she was Jewish, and this may have caused her to refuse to marry him. But he clearly embraced her family, who thought the two were married. In 1934, Igor had painted an affectionate portrait of Lee's father, showing him holding one of his Yiddish texts. Igor took the trouble to carefully reproduce the Hebrew letters. Krasner owned and treasured the painting, later giving it to her nephew Ronald Stein.

Some years later, Igor sent Lee a drawing of a figure in a landscape (with the setting sun and his name inscribed on a rock). The drawing was at the bottom of a note that he headed with the words, “But love…Igor.” Above the drawing, he also inscribed: “Wonderful day…Full of Trust and confidance [
sic
]. Will be Sleeping Thursday with a friend there in Hospital…Hell with Christianity.” The last three words survive to document the conflict that he felt about the prejudice his Russian (Orthodox) Christian family had against Jews.
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Pantuhoff and Krasner both worked on the WPA. She was working at the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration until admitted to work on the Mural Division of the Fine Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration, where she was assigned to assist Max Spivak on August 1, 1935. While working with Spivak, her pay was raised to $103.40 per month.
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“To get
on the WPA,” she recalled, “you had to qualify for relief first. You had to prove you had no visible means of support. Then your work was looked at, and if you were accepted you were put on either the mural or easel painting projects. I was part of the mural painting project, even though I had never worked on a mural.”
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According to Krasner's old friend Esphyr Slobodkina, to meet the criteria to get on the federal payroll, it was necessary to endure “the bitter indignity of the Home Relief investigating, the demeaning visits to the local food distribution centers where they would supply you with a bag of half-rotten potatoes.”
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Spivak, a Polish-born Jewish immigrant who was just two years older than Krasner, remembered that he had five assistants. “There was Lee Krasner who married Jackson Pollock. She was my research girl. Harold Rosenberg, who was my reader, a very good reader. And then we had a guy to wash the brushes and so forth. Another one did odd jobs.”
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Spivak preferred to have his assistants run errands for him, and he liked to engage them in discussions of Trotskyist politics.

Though Spivak was in charge, he did not have better training than Krasner. He had spent six months studying at Cooper Union, before studying for a year at the Grand Central Art School and two years at the Art Students League. He then spent three years in Europe, including some work at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. A lot of his European training consisted of copying old masters in museums. Slobodkina recalled that Spivak stuttered.

And though Krasner was better spoken, Spivak was better connected politically. He had been a member of the John Reed Club, the Communist Party, and the four-man executive board that formed the Artists Union. “The WPA and Depression climate gave artists a sense of unity…,” he later reflected, “and the fact that they all shared the same experience of starvation, they weren't alone…. For the first time they were participating not as individuals but as a group.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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Another plus for Krasner was “the camaraderie, instead of isolation…. But basically, it was a living for us all.”
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