Lee Krasner (19 page)

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.
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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 the city, especially for dancing, after concerts in the late 1930s. It featured short melody lines broken by open rhythmical patterns.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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Mondrian even volunteered to pay the annual dues of four dollars.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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A reviewer for
P.M.
commented that the two Europeans had added to the group's prestige, improving its “creative production.”
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“Mondrian I saw on many occasions. We were both mad for jazz, and we used to go to jazz spots together,” Krasner recalled.
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For his part, Mondrian told Holtzman, “I have never enjoyed life so much as here.”
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He wrote AAA a thank-you note that was read aloud at the meeting of February 7, 1941.
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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.'”
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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.”
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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.”
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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, with 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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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Matter often blurred the boundaries between commercial and fine art. Swiss born, he arrived in New York as a staff photogra
pher 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.
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Around the time Krasner and Mercedes met, Mercedes was attempting to make money in the fashion industry.
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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.
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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.
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