Lee Krasner (9 page)

Krasner had just seen the Matisse retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in the fall of 1931. Though her enthusiasm for Matisse would last a lifetime, not all the public was so positive. In his review of the show in
Art News,
Ralph Flint expressed real reservations about Matisse and his influence. “His sensation-seeking
brush has quickened many a brother artist into new flights of fancy. He has served as driving wedge to weaken those stubborn walls that stand in the way of all insurgent investigation. And yet, withal, he has remained a brilliant but signally uninspired master.”
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Despite her newfound inspiration, disaster soon struck Krasner. A fire at her parents' home in Greenlawn destroyed the house and most of the work she had produced to date. One of the only surviving items was her small self-portrait on paper, which she always kept with her after that. In later years, she had it hanging in her parlor. The fire could have been ignited by her father's cigar, but the real cause is not known.

The fire and the economic loss it caused came at a time of great uncertainty for the Krasners and for Jews in America in general. With the house destroyed, Krasner's parents were reduced to living in their garage as they survived in a weakened national economy that fostered the growth of anti-Semitism, nationalism, anti-immigration sentiment, and local hate groups.
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From afar, they witnessed the rise of Nazism in Europe.

In view of growing nationalism and its connections to anti-Semitism, it is not surprising that Krasner repeatedly said, “I could never support anything called ‘American art.'”
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She had no doubt seen the new Modern's second show, “Paintings by Nineteen Living Americans,” and followed the discussion it elicited in the press. The critic Forbes Watson attacked the foreign-born (and Jewish) Max Weber for taking “no account of the American tradition” in his painting and for being tied to “European standards.” Watson denounced “American laymen,” for whom “the modernity of all art depends upon the degree of success with which it emulates painting in Paris.”
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At the same time, he defended Edward Hopper, John Sloan, Charles Burchfield, and Rockwell Kent against those who perceived “a disturbing conservative quality” in their work.

On a wave of cultural nationalism, the Whitney Museum of
American Art was founded in 1930 and opened on Eighth Street in 1931. It would feature what some saw as a more parochial choice of American artists than the Museum of Modern Art. The Whitney was aware of its problem, but it was not always sensitive to the identity issues it raised. One of the museum's earliest publications, a monograph on Edward Hopper by Guy Pène du Bois, described Hopper as “the most inherently Anglo-Saxon painter of all times.” This was actually a distortion of Hopper's ancestry, which was half Dutch and part French.
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Krasner must have known that the artist Thomas Hart Benton and the critic Thomas Craven were not alone in denouncing immigrants, ethnics, leftists, and Jews, claiming that they were incapable of painting the “true American” experience.
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To many eyes, the Jews were not the same race as Anglo-Saxons; they were not technically “white.” They were still not allowed to join exclusive clubs, stay in restricted hotels, attend all schools, or live in certain areas. In her relationship with Pantuhoff, however, Krasner clearly hoped to transcend this inferior status.

Around this time the Depression was beginning to hit hard. This was the overwhelming issue that led Krasner's classmate Vogel to join the Unemployed Artists Group in the summer of 1933. Some of Vogel's fellow members, who already belonged to Krasner's circle of politically radical friends or would soon, were Balcomb Greene and his wife, Gertrude “Peter” Glass Greene, as well as Ibram Lassaw (all of whom would remain lifelong friends); Boris Gorelick, Michael Loew, and Max Spivak, with whom Krasner would work on the WPA and in the Artists Union. This group of activists was formed within the John Reed Club, which was the main institutional base for Communist and fellow-traveling artists before 1935.
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Unemployment became an even more significant issue when landlords began to throw these workers and their families onto the street. On February 4, 1932, more than 3,500 unemployed workers braved cold rain to gather at Union Square and march in
protest to City Hall. A group of Communist organizers told the board of alderman (city council): “Unless the city finds some way to prevent further evictions of the families of the unemployed, the Unemployed Councils of New York will use force to ‘fight off the hired thugs of the landlords.' There are more than one million workers unemployed in New York City. The city is doing nothing to help them.”
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A month later, on March 6, 1932, a large group of artists gathered in Union Square. They called themselves the Unemployment Council and, for the first time, called attention to unemployment and poverty among artists. Their efforts led to the founding of the Artists Union. Krasner's fellow student Boris Gorelick recalled: “It was not one of the first organizations, but it was the first amongst the cultural workers and subsequently played a very leading and very important role in, for one thing, bringing about recognition of the responsibility of government to the artist per se and also the need for unity amongst the artists for their own survival.”
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Krasner had always suffered from her family's poverty, but at this time the harsh economy even impinged upon her ability to earn her own way through part-time jobs. Affected by the extreme poverty all around her and the bleak uncertainty for artists, Krasner left the academy in April 1932 and enrolled at the City College of New York on 139th Street and St. Nicholas Terrace in Manhattan, where tuition was free. Her purpose was to obtain a teaching certificate, which would allow her to teach art in high schools.
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She took Teaching in Junior and Senior High and Problems in Secondary School Teaching. At this time, she gave her address as 2511 New Kirk Street in the Ditmas Park neighborhood of Flatbush in Brooklyn. It was a long commute to upper Manhattan, where she was spending time with Pantuhoff.

City College was intensely intellectual and ideological in the 1930s. At the college on May 23, 1932, three thousand students, organized by the leftist National Student League, protested a fee increase for evening students. Ten thousand students signed peti
tions of protest, and the Board of Higher Education was forced to eliminate the fee. Although Krasner studied by day and worked at night, she can hardly have missed the night students' successful protest. Like most of her peers, she was struggling to survive. Among the other students that year was the future playwright Arthur Miller, who attended for only three weeks before he too had to give up. He was not able to make the commute from Brooklyn, hold down his job in a West Side warehouse, and complete his assignments.
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Krasner later recalled: “I decided to do something practical about livelihood, so I took my pedagogy, so I could qualify to teach art. I got through with it—I took it at CCNY—did waitressing in the afternoons or evenings, did this work in the daytime. I got my pedagogy and decided the last thing in the world that I wanted to do was to teach art so I tore that up.”
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She didn't finish the degree until 1935, so it was a considerable investment of time and effort that she eventually abandoned to pursue her long-held dreams of becoming an artist.

Krasner's decision to drop teaching might also have been a response to the times and the increasing difficulty of obtaining secure teaching positions. For example, Barnett Newman, a 1927 graduate of City College, tried unsuccessfully in 1931 to become an art teacher in the New York City public school system after his family's clothing business suffered from the stock market crash. Though he would later be famous as an abstract expressionist artist, he failed the exam for a regular teaching license and instead became a substitute art teacher, earning $7.50 a day, but only when work was available.

There was also Krasner's experience working at night as a cocktail waitress at Sam Johnson's, a bohemian nightclub and café, while attending college. Located on Third Street, between MacDougal and Thompson in Greenwich Village, Johnson's was a spot where artists and intellectuals liked to congregate and where poetry was read. The talk there was stimulating. Lionel
Abel once called Sam Johnson's “a sort of proletarianized version of the Jumble Shop,” another Village eatery where Krasner spent time with other artists.
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Krasner reminisced, “They collected a great many bohemians who did special things like reading of poetry for discussions.”
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For her job, she wore the required work attire, Chinese silk “hostess” pajamas, and enjoyed socializing with the customers: “They would come in the evenings and discuss ‘the higher things in life.' I was quietly in the background for a while and then I began to know them and I identified myself. But it was a short period while I was getting my pedagogy points at CCNY.”
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The club was co-owned by the poet Eli Siegel, described as having “a saturnine expression and the bent bearing of a
yeshivah bocher,
” and Morton Deutsch, a “defrocked rabbi.” Siegel, who once defined a poem as “A whirlwind with details,” liked to recite Vachel Lindsay's poem “The Congo” as it was intended to be, read aloud, making a theatrical production out of its jazz-inspired rhythms. Siegel won
The Nation
's poetry prize in 1926 and was the first American imitator of Gertrude Stein. According to Harold Rosenberg, Siegel “imitated Stein…quite well, too.”
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At this period Krasner may have intensified her interest in Emerson's writings on the meaning of life and art.
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His work as a poet, essayist, and philosopher could have caught her ear either in the talk about “higher things” at Sam Johnson's or it could have occurred during her classes at City College. The transcendentalism that Emerson expressed in his 1836 essay “Nature,” stressing an ideal spiritual reality over empirical and scientific knowledge, would have suited some of Krasner's own sensibilities, which also relied upon intuition. Later, she titled a painting
The Eye Is the First Circle,
after the first line of Emerson's 1841 essay “Circle.”

At Sam Johnson's, Krasner worked not only for tips but also for dinner on the nights she worked. (In her later years, she continued to complain about the art critic Harold Rosenberg, who never tipped.)
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He later explained why he did not tip. “We didn't [have]
any dough, but we were more or less welcome because I suppose we provided local color or something…. The Sam Johnson was our hangout for quite a while. Lee [Krasner] Pollock used to be a waitress there.”
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“You see, we knew Deutsch, and he ran the place really; Eli was just sort of a semisilent partner. He would read poetry there. That was his main function. So it was understood that we have everything on the house,” rationalized Rosenberg, forgetting that Krasner still needed tips, even if he and his friends were feasting and drinking on the house. “So Lee would bring us sandwiches and coffee, or something. And once in a while we'd say to Deutsch, ‘Why don't you get rid of these lousy bourgeois and go and get some booze, so we can have a real discussion here?'”
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The future art critic's wife, May Tabak (Rosenberg), believed that the club presented good opportunities for college girls. “The women of Bohemia found themselves given a better break than men. Even at some unskilled jobs. An educated girl tended to make more in waitress tips than an equally good-looking ‘dumb' one. Male customers were more anxious to impress the smart girls. Bosses of restaurants believed that college dames added class to their joints.”
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Krasner met a number of people who were also customers at Sam Johnson's. Among them were Rosenberg's brother, Dave, Lionel Abel, the film critic Parker Tyler, the writer and poet Maxwell Bodenheim, and Joe Gould, a Village character who is best known for the vernacular oral history of life around him that he claimed to chronicle.
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The Dial,
then a sophisticated arts magazine, published his short essay called “Civilization” in its April 1929 issue. A legend in his own time, Gould appears nude in his portrait painted in 1933 by the artist Alice Neel.

Maxwell Bodenheim was successful and well known as the editor of the avant-garde poetry magazine
Others,
and as the author of the 1925 novel
Replenishing Jessica,
then characterized by some critics as cynical and indecent. In 1928, when Bodenheim was
thirty-five and separated from his wife and child, he became notorious for his connection to twenty-four-year-old aspiring writer Virginia Drew. Like Krasner, but just a few years older, Drew had attended both Washington Irving High School and Cooper Union. She had solicited Bodenheim for career advice. Desperate after Bodenheim condemned her literary efforts, she committed suicide in the Hudson River shortly after she left his MacDougal Street apartment. A young woman who was her friend told detectives that the two had made a suicide pact, which Bodenheim denied.
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Press accounts also reported Virginia Drew's complaint “that her mother did not understand her ambitions.”
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One newspaper also reported that, less than two weeks earlier, “a nineteen-year-old girl was found unconscious in her apartment in Greenwich Village. Gas was escaping from a stove, but the windows were wide open.”
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Gladys Loeb, who had studied at New York University, was rescued by her physician father, Dr. Martin J. Loeb, and taken home to the Bronx, having tried to kill herself after Bodenheim called her poetry “sentimental slush.”
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Even after Drew's suicide hit the press, Gladys Loeb once again approached Bodenheim. By then he had fled to Provincetown, where Loeb's father went in pursuit of his daughter, anxious that she too might again try ending her life.