Lee Krasner (14 page)

Though Krasner and the Communists shared a common interest in workers' rights, Krasner rejected the representational work of artists on the left, including social realism and such names as Raphael Soyer, William Gropper, or Philip Evergood. As Reuben Kadish once put it, “The social realists…produced art for the moment only. Think of the difference between Gropper and Daumier or Goya.”
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Krasner told an interviewer that the prominent leftist movements of the late 1930s “made me move as far away as possible, as they were emphasizing the most banal, provincial art…. French painting was the important thing at that point. Not the social realism that was going on here under our nose. Pictures of the Depression. Painting is not illustration.”
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Krasner eventually served on the Artists Union's executive board, but even so, she and Jackson “never joined the party, proper,” for the Communists were
the
party. Though a recent book-length exhibition catalogue in Switzerland calls Krasner “a committed Communist” (without citing any evidence),
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this was not true. “We weren't organizational types, but we felt at that time that they fought for our interests. I feel that the degree of an artist's involvement can't possibly be measured by a literal representation of problem areas in his art. That is a naive position.”
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Another time she spoke of “a big power move” at the union: “The Communist Party had moved into the Artists Union and started to shove around very heavily and I said, bye, bye. I am about other things. Other things interest me. And I would like to restate that I felt the full validity of the WPA around which the so-called Art
ists Union had organized. They did not meet to discuss any problems in painting…. Their full emphasis was a political move, a power move.”
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Though Krasner never joined the Communists, Gerald Monroe, who interviewed her around 1970 about her participation in the Artists Union, still recognized that Krasner was “sympathetic.” Monroe reported that she was occasionally invited to “the fraction meeting,” which was the executive committee subject to party discipline. It was composed of those members of the union who were in the party or close to it, and they met secretly to get guidance from the party and work out the strategy for the meetings.
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Krasner's friend B. H. Friedman wrote, “It would seem in retrospect that Lee on the Communist-dominated executive committee was a ‘patsy' or dupe; although she was liberal in politics and committed to the rights of the artist, she was never a Communist.”
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Monroe wrote that Krasner chaired many meetings and was “known to be very militant in union fights with government.” Monroe's notes state that Krasner “headed committee to get fired (pink slip) artists back on WPA. By & large chairman ran an open meeting but when a crucial issue was on floor, discussion was controlled—through chairman (‘via me') by selecting speakers from sea of hands on the floor. She was known not to be in party nor under strict control, never attended ‘inner inner sanctum.'”
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Krasner recalled that after she had been relieved of her work with the WPA, she was on a committee of three or five people elected to meet with the WPA to get union members first priority in being rehired. When she found that her name had not made the list for reinstatement, she complained to an executive board member of the Artists Union that she was being overlooked. Her name was put on the list for reinstatement at the next meeting, where the director, Audrey McMahon, instructed her, “Miss Krasner this is something that you should discuss with your union, not me.”
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Then, weeks after being told that the union's policy was
that active members of the Artists Union, not Communist Party members, got preference, a board member told her, “[Communist] Party members are being reinstated first.” Just before a meeting of the union was to begin, she told the board member, “What a dirty little trick! I am going to get up on the platform and inform membership what you just told me.” He warned her not to do it, and she said, “Can't stop me.” To which he replied, “OK you'll be on the job next week.” He kept his word, and she was reinstated the following week.
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That was a turning point for Krasner, who became less active in the union.

Years later, Krasner recalled a regular Wednesday-night meeting of the union in 1935 or 1936 when she questioned an issue on the floor only to hear several shouts of “Trotskyite.” She didn't know much about politics, but the label so angered her that she actually began to read Trotsky. From the publication dates of books in her library—Leon Trotsky,
The History of the Russian Revolution
(1936), and Leon Trotsky,
The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going?
(1937)—this angry encounter at the union meeting may have come in late 1935 or in 1936.
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The artist Bernarda Bryson recommended particular works of Trotsky to Krasner, who in turn urged them on Pantuhoff.
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Krasner also kept two books by Karl Marx:
Class Struggle in France
(which is inscribed “Igor Pantuhoff”) and
The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
(Marxist Library v. 35), as well as Nikolai Bukharin's
Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology
(New York, 1934) and Lincoln Steffens's autobiography of 1931.

From Trotsky's
The Revolution Betrayed,
Krasner could understand his views on nationalism and culture:

Krasner made clear her attitude toward Trotsky and Siqueiros in a 1975 videotaped interview with Christopher Crosman, then on the staff of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. He asked her directly about “unsubstantiated rumors floating around in Pollock's name…. The Mexican muralist Siqueiros was being sought by the American authorities, the FBI, I suppose, with regards to an attempted assassination plot against Trotsky and that Pollock had hid him out for maybe a day or two in his apartment. Have you ever heard anything to that effect before?”

“I have and it's not true because I was already living with Pollock at that point,” she responded in good humor, but definitively.

“I guess that pretty well nails that rumor down,” replied Crosman, as Krasner volunteered:

“It's a fact that Siqueiros was being sought and was accused directly of being tied into the assassination. He was not—He was not hidden out in Pollock's studio.” She chuckled, adding, “I wouldn't have allowed it if nothing else because I was a great admirer of Trotsky's.” She closed her sentence with a smile, evidently not particularly annoyed by the question.
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Unfortunately, Crosman missed the chance to point out to Krasner that in fact she was not yet living with Pollock when the unsuccessful attempt on Trotsky's life was made on May 24, 1940, nor by August 20, the day of Trotsky's assassination. Another curator says that Krasner “was particularly troubled that Pollock had admitted aiding Siqueiros during the time he was hiding from the police,” and that she “brought this fact up sev
eral times” during a visit in the summer of 1977. If so, then she reversed herself merely two years after denying this same story on camera.
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If Trotsky's ideas did not prompt her to reject nationalism in art along with socialist realism, they must at least have reinforced her convictions. Krasner did not value the accessible in art and instead favored the artist's personal expression. According to Trotsky, “The national form of an art is identical with its universal accessibility.” He denies the ideological decree that what the public wants must be the inspiration for significant art, which is what the Soviet propaganda paper,
Pravda,
dictated to artists.
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Trotskyism in America dates back to October 27, 1928, when the party expelled three leaders who had criticized the leadership of Joseph Stalin and sought to return to Lenin's original ideas. By 1933, the Trotskyists began to influence American workers with their well-orchestrated campaign against the rise of fascism in Germany. Intellectuals, such as those involved in the journal
Partisan Review,
joined the Trotskyists, whose influence grew.

Krasner's acquaintance Lionel Abel recounted that “in the spiritual life of the city during the thirties, the most important question discussed was whether to defend the Stalin government against those who criticized it, or to join the critics of that government's policies, the most important of whom was Leon Trotsky. So the Trotsky-Stalin controversy became the most bitterly discussed and violently argued issue where ever radical politics were discussed, and they were discussed in the city streets and cafeterias, in the unions and at universities.”
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The Trotskyists had their largest impact in America between 1937 and 1940, before Trotsky was assassinated on August 20, 1940, in Mexico by a Comintern agent.
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“Artists and writers were very radical in that particular period,” recalled Reuben Kadish. “I, for instance, was doing things for the Communist Party even though I wasn't a member. I wasn't alone. The party at that particular time was very forceful in bringing to
gether the efforts of union people and artists. If you went through those areas that suffered fantastically and saw the bread lines and saw the things that nobody else was doing anything about, you might have been sympathetic to the party, too.”
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Willem de Kooning recalled, “I was no Communist, no Stalinist. I was not so opposed to Russian art in principle, but all those other guys had made me a modern…. There were the ardent people like [William] Gropper, and they were so rigid, so doctrinaire. I remember their jeering at Gorky on the night when he stood up to speak at a union meeting.”
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Nonetheless, another friend recalled that Gorky was actively interested in the Spanish Civil War and took part in demonstrations.
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The Spanish Civil War (1936–39) motivated 2,800 Americans to voluntarily join the fight to defend the Spanish Republic against a military rebellion led by Francisco Franco, who was being assisted by the fascists Hitler and Mussolini. “In the Artists Union days, Spain was an issue,” Krasner recalled. “Fellow artists went to Spain. You put things on the line.”
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Trotskyists in the Socialist Party quickly rallied to the Spanish workers' revolution and funded a military unit to join the battle in Spain.
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Joris Ivens's film
Spanish Earth
, which was shown in 1937, further raised awareness in America. On December 19, 1937, Picasso's statement about the Spanish Republican Government's struggle was read to the American Artists Congress in New York. As director of Madrid's Prado Museum, Picasso assured the artists that “the democratic government of the Spanish Republic has taken all the necessary measures to protect the artistic treasures of Spain during the cruel and unjust war. While rebel planes have dropped incendiary bombs on our museums, the people and the military at the risk of their lives, have rescued the works of art and placed them in security.”

Picasso addressed artists directly when he said “artists who live and work with spiritual values cannot and should not remain indifferent to a conflict in which the highest values of humanity
and civilization are at stake.”
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Of the 2,800 Americans who went to Spain, many joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (Battalion), which fought from 1937 through 1938 against the rebel Nationalists. Others volunteered as doctors, nurses, medical technicians, and ambulance drivers.

Volunteers came from all walks of life and included visual artists such as Joseph Vogel from the National Academy and Emanuel Hochberg.
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Krasner surely recalled that she and Vogel had both studied with Leon Kroll. Vogel recalled, “Out of a sense of sheer belief in social justice…. I found there were others with me and some of them lost their lives. Paul Block lost his life. A few other artists lost their lives there…. There were two others, a man by the name of Taylor…. There were others who never came back.”
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The artists who responded to the Spanish Civil War and those who left for the front made a lasting impression on Krasner. The American Friends of Spanish Democracy, whose supporters included the influential critics Waldo Frank and Lewis Mumford and the philosopher John Dewey, donated an art award in 1937 to help focus public attention on the events in Spain. This was the same year that Joan Miró produced
The Reaper,
his famous mural for the Spanish Republican pavilion at the Paris International Exposition. He then produced a related poster of a raised clenched fist with the words “Aidez Espagne [Help Spain].” The image was also published by the journal
Cahiers d'Art.

In the same pavilion Picasso showed his monumental black and white painting
Guernica
(1937), which depicts the Nazi bombing on market day in April 1937 of this Basque town. The Nazis bombed the town, which was not a military objective, in order to spread terror.

Though Krasner was politically active, her painting was not explicitly political. “There was the Spanish Civil War, the clash of fascism and communism. In theory, we were sympathetic to the Russian Revolution—the socialist idea as against the fascist idea,
naturally,” she remarked. “Then came complications like Stalinism being the betrayal of the revolution. I, for one, didn't feel my art had to reflect my political point of view. I didn't feel like I was purifying the world at all. No, I was just going about my business and my business seemed to be in the direction of abstraction.”
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