FIVE

Enduring the Great Depression, 1932–36

Lee Krasner with her nieces Muriel Stein and Bernice Stein and her nephew (their half brother), Ronald Stein, in her parents’ garden in Huntington, Long Island, c. 1934–36.

KRASNER “MOVED IN TOGETHER” WITH PANTUHOFF ON HIS RETURN from Europe, where he went in the spring of 1930 on the traveling scholarship that the academy had awarded him.¹ Their relationship would prove momentous and lasting. Years later she described the relationship as “a togetherness.”² And many, including Krasner’s parents, saw this togetherness as marriage. At times even Krasner called herself “Mrs. Igor Pantuhoff,” making it easy for acquaintances to assume something that wasn’t true. In the late 1940s, Pantuhoff would be introduced to Joop Sanders as “the former husband of Lee Krasner” by either Willem de Kooning or Aristodimos Kaldis.³

Companionship without the legal ties of marriage was trendy at this time. New ideas about the relations of the sexes both within and outside of marriage generated a lot of discussion and controversy. In 1927 The Companionate Marriage, a book written by Ben Lindsey and Wainwright Evans, urged legal marriage, birth control, counseling, and divorce if all else failed, but it admitted alternatives to the Victorian model, which served to protect child-bearing and child rearing.⁴ Krasner, having watched her mother struggle to support and care for a large family and having to cope with the Depression’s economic hardships herself, did not appear to obsess over dreams of motherhood. She seemed suited to her relationship with Pantuhoff.

Krasner did take an active part in raising the Stein children—her nieces Muriel and Bernice and nephew Ronnie. Muriel recalls that her Aunt Lee sometimes brought Igor along to the family Passover seders. Muriel adored both her aunt and Igor, whom she described as “such a character, charming, so charming.”⁵ She remembers when her aunt took her to the Paramount Theatre at Times Square to see Ella Fitzgerald and Chick Webb, the orchestra leader who became Fitzgerald’s mentor.⁶ Muriel’s father and her stepmother, Ruth, wondered about Lee: “Where did she come from?” They observed that Lee “dressed magnificently,” wearing makeup and high heels. It was a flare for style that none in her family could match, but which owed much to her collaboration with Igor.⁷

Without their own children, there was nothing to tie Lee and Igor together. According to contemporary theorists, the woman had to keep “the flame of romance alive.” A woman’s “status must be won and rewon by personality and attractiveness if she is to get and keep a husband under the dissolving bans of modern marriage,” wrote sociologist Robert S. Lynd, an observer of American customs during the 1920s.⁸ To meet this challenge, Krasner brought an outgoing personality, keen intelligence, and a dry wit. Though not blessed with a conventionally beautiful face or classic “Anglo-Saxon” features, she had a stunning slim figure. Her hair was auburn and luxuriant. Many friends remarked on her “animal energy,” “voluptuousness,” and “sex appeal,” which is evident in some early photographs.⁹

Judging simply from a gouache sketch Igor did of her posing in a sultry profile, he felt the same way. In Krasner he must have also found the kind of physical abandon that satisfied his own often-expressed sexuality. “With Igor, Lee had a sparkle and gaiety,” said Fritz Bultman, although he claimed to have heard Igor remark in her presence: “I like being with an ugly woman because it makes me feel more handsome.”¹⁰ It’s hard to fathom why Pantuhoff felt so insecure as to make a comment like this—he was tall, slender, and some even said he was as handsome as a movie star. Pantuhoff clearly found in Krasner’s self-assurance a quality he needed. He was invested in the relationship and made sure that Krasner exuded style. He helped her apply elaborate makeup and picked out her clothes, including colorful stockings to show off her legs.

But despite their relationship’s sexual sparkle, it suffered from the economic challenges of the Depression. Things were already so bleak for artists in 1932 that a committee formed to raise money to see that artists and writers, “who were quite literally starving,” could have “one square meal a day,” recalled Krasner’s academy classmate Balcomb Greene, the son of a Methodist minister, who became her colleague in several artists’ groups. Eating in McFadden’s restaurant, which had “an idea about the nutritional value of wheat germ,” recalled the artist Bob Jonas, who met Krasner during the 1930s, meant “asking for hot water in a bowl,” to which they would add “ketchup, salt, pepper, anything that was around.”¹¹ “It was a period of great privation, hunger stalked the country, and that’s not putting it dramatically, but that’s a fact,” said Boris Gorelick, who had been with Krasner at the academy. “Millions of people were involved in very desperate circumstances, and the professions were down the drain because they were at the bottom of the economic ladder, especially the art profession.”¹²

“After the ’29 crash, there was a tremendous amount of unemployment in New York. There were a lot of people who were willing to do anything for a quarter. There were the usual apple sellers, and there were guys shoveling snow for the twenty-five cents or whatever it was they could get as a handout. There were people working in restaurants for just the room and board,” recalled the artist Reuben Kadish.¹³ At the time, he was close to the Dutch immigrant Willem de Kooning and to Jackson Pollock.

“None of us were established in any way,” Kadish remembered. “De Kooning was a house painter, and Jackson was doing odd jobs and getting by…. There was a lot of bartering going on. People bartered with doctors and dentists, but not Jackson. Jack had such a highly developed sense of professionalism that even then there wasn’t any question of him going to Washington Square and hanging a painting over the railing. He’d never go to the market with a painting and trade it for a bowl of soup. Others would.”¹⁴

Artists were frequently evicted from their simple quarters. Some began to help others by returning their furniture, which had been placed out on the streets. With all the economic tension, art was the last thing that most people thought about. Artists needed work. In his acceptance speech before the Democratic National Convention on July 2, 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised to help, announcing “I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people…. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.”¹⁵

As president he would eventually include visual artists among the recipients of federal help.

During this time, Krasner was still at City College with the ultimate goal of working toward her teaching certificate. She was waitressing, but she was also taking life classes with the painter Job Goodman, a Russian-born Jew who had emigrated in 1905 at the age of eight. He had studied at the Art Students League and later taught there.¹⁶ After returning from a Guggenheim grant to the Netherlands and Belgium, he became the director of art instruction at Greenwich House, which had been founded by social reformers in 1902, to improve living conditions among the immigrants who then populated Greenwich Village. From the start, Greenwich House held a strong commitment to the arts “as a dynamic stimulus for cultural enrichment and individual growth.”¹⁷

Goodman stressed the “hollow and bump” method he had learned from the American artist Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League. It was a method adapted by Benton from the abstract painters known as Synchromists (whose name for themselves meant “with color,” as symphony means “with sound”) with whom he exhibited in New York during the 1910s.¹⁸ The Synchromists Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright had painted abstractions based on figures by Michelangelo, whose work they studied attentively. Benton adapted their practice and later stressed Michelangelo’s forms with his own students at the Art Students League, among whom in 1932 were Axel Horn and Pollock. In one exercise, Horn, recalled analyzing famous works of art, “stressing the interplay in the various forms by simplifying and accentuating changes in plane.” Michelangelo was one of the “popular subjects.”¹⁹ Benton wrote of his “continued study of Michelangelo’s sculptural structures, which soon was expanded to his paintings.”²⁰

In Goodman’s class, Krasner produced a copy of one of Michelangelo’s ignudi flanking the creation of Eve on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. While study of Michelangelo’s forms was a standard assignment for a Benton disciple like Goodman, he might have noted the irony of Krasner’s choice of subject and of the assignment itself. At the time, there was a slight controversy surrounding a number of rotogravure reproductions of Michelangelo’s ceiling that had been held up by United States Customs, which charged that the nudes were “obscene.” What really mattered, according to a New York Times article covering the controversy, was that the art importer was “dumping” reproductions of a foreigner’s art “on this country at a time when thousands of American artists are without a market for their work. We have talent enough in this country to produce a fair substitute for the Sistine paintings.”²¹

Goodman’s drawing classes also attracted Harold Rosenberg (whom Krasner had met at Sam Johnson’s) to Greenwich House. “There was a fellow teaching there and they had a live model, so we’d go there in the afternoon and draw a bit, you know,” Rosenberg later said. “I think it was just a matter of liking to do it, no particular aim in mind. I liked to draw. They had the model; all you had to do is register.”²²

Apart from Michelangelo, Krasner focused on drawing from life, working mainly in Conté crayon. She drew the male and female nude life models with candor and ease. Although Goodman taught courses also in murals and painting in oil and tempera, buying paint was also too costly at this time. Krasner’s family was in no position to help her, so she depended on her own labors and wit, and was not able to hire her own model. When she later quipped about those customers at Sam Johnson’s who were lousy tippers, she was talking about the difference between being able to pay for paint herself or having to borrow from her friends who had very little to lend.

Krasner gravitated toward others suffering poverty, and eventually they organized to address their plight. In 1932, the Society of Independent Artists made front-page news by deciding to barter work in exchange for some necessities of life. “Artists are always on the bread line, but this year they are in even worse straits than usual and we hope to make sales a special feature of the show. Dental services will be one of the most welcome media of exchange for works of art. Medical care and clothing will also be acceptable. Best of all, however, will be the offer of rent for six months or a year,” declared a spokesperson.²³

In the summer of 1933 the John Reed Club, which had been founded in 1929 as a Communist organization of artists and writers and was named for the American journalist, poet, and Communist activist, whose firsthand account of the Bolshevik revolution is called Ten Days That Shook the World, gave birth to the Unemployed Artists Group. Creation of the group was perhaps prompted by the Cultural Committee of the Communist Party, to act as the “Emergency Work Bureau Artists Group, the bargaining unit for artists on government projects.”²⁴ After holding meetings in various halls for a few months, it changed its name to the Artists Union in February 1934, when it rented a loft in Chelsea.²⁵ The founders argued “that in presenting resolutions to the State, numbers and organized strength counted.”²⁶

Boris Gorelick, who served as its president for three years, said that “it started in New York with possibly twenty-five or thirty people, but it quickly grew into an organization of about fifteen hundred to two thousand people with auxiliary groups which included women as separate sympathetic groups, students, young students in the art field who also became members of auxiliary groups.”²⁷ Krasner favored the Artists Union because it looked out for artists’ rights.

“The big meetings at the Artists Union…were held in a place called Germania Hall, on Third Avenue,” recalled an artist named Irving Block. “That’s an old parlor and beer hall, and they had a big meeting hall in the back, and they would have these meetings and they would go on interminably. They would begin by talking about the needs of the art project, about the artist role in society, and then they would just end up by general argument that the brushes were no damned good and the paints were no good.”²⁸

One issue raised at the Artists Union was that “easel” artists were lending to shows that attracted crowds to be exploited by businesses. The union contended that these artists should receive direct payment for participation, as would commercial artists or mural painters for their work. Instead, as Max Spivak pointed out in an article he wrote for the union’s journal, Art Front, sponsors like Wanamaker’s Department Store or Rockefeller Center might support an art show at which “the easel painter is promised ‘pie in the sky’” but instead receives nothing for taking part in “promotional schemes” of “big business.”²⁹

Meanwhile, a combination of forces from the art world and society persuaded the federal government to fund patronage programs for artists as part of the New Deal recovery effort. Established in late 1933 as part of the New Deal, the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) would employ more than 3,700 artists to decorate federal and other public buildings, including post offices “now under construction throughout the country.” “Artists to Adorn Nation’s Buildings” read the headline in the New York Times for December 12, 1933. The article reported a meeting at the home of the painter Edward Bruce, “attended by Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, leaders of American Art, and government officials.”³⁰ Eleanor Roosevelt told the press, “I think this plan has tremendous possibilities for awakening the interest of the people as a whole in art and for developing artistic qualities which have not come to light in the past and for recognizing artists who already have made their names among their fellow-artists, but who have had little recognition from the public at large.”³¹

Eventually, under various programs administered by the Treasury Department, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and the Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration), more than 10,000 artists and support staff received commissions or salary jobs that rescued many of them from intense poverty. The WPA’s Federal Art Project reflected President Roosevelt’s belief that in order to retain human dignity, people needed jobs rather than direct relief. He later expressed this in a radio address from the White House. “The Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration is a practical relief project which also emphasizes the best tradition of the democratic spirit. The WPA artist, in rendering his own impression of things, speaks also for the spirit of his fellow countrymen everywhere. I think the WPA artist exemplifies with great force the essential place which the arts have in a democratic society such as ours.”³²

“Once the WPA jobs were opened to the unemployed,” Lionel Abel recalled, “real change came over the city. The breadlines disappeared, and that was very important because of the psychological effect the lines had had…. The artists were helping the government by their work, saying, there can’t possibly be a sea of blood here, for look, here are works of art!”³³ Yet all of the WPA artists, Krasner included, lived with the insecurity of not knowing when a government project would end.

Krasner recalled how she was chosen for her initial job doing illustrations for the Public Works of Art Project. While she was studying with Job Goodman a government official visited the class and announced that there were jobs for indigent artists. She immediately raised her hand and was told to report for an examination. Given her education, skills, and proven financial need, she was able to meet the criteria for acceptance.³⁴ Rosenberg described a similar experience at Greenwich House: “So I was there drawing one afternoon and a guy came rushing in like a messenger in an old-fashioned play, who announced that they were hiring artists up at the College Art Association…the agency appointed…to run the project in New York.”³⁵

In January 1934, Krasner attained a paid position at the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP). She worked through March, assisting a geology professor doing a book on rocks.³⁶ She was “drawing fossils,” she recalled, “so that I was working [on] very detailed drawing. I don’t remember how long it lasted as it was an extensive project with a loft full of artists working on these things.”³⁷ The assignment brought back girlhood memories of working from nature at Washington Irving High School. “There I was with a hard pencil, and what came to me was the memory of all those butterflies and beetles, only now in more abstract form. I was happy as a lark doing that stuff!”³⁸ She earned $23.65 per week, which was enough to survive, even thrive, compared to the dire straits of life without the Project.

Under the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA), which took over from the PWAP in April, Krasner began as a teacher, but was soon reassigned as an artist. Her salary was a weekly wage of $24.00 for “thirty to thirty-nine hours’ work, that is, about $4.80 per day.” The Artists Union raised the issue that only pressure from a strong union would give artists a chance to retain the union wage scale. An article in Art Front illustrated the meager artist’s wage when compared to those of other skilled workers. “Union plumbers, for instance, receive $12.00 per day, house painters receive $11.20, plasterers, $12.00, stone carvers, $14.00. The Artists Union, after careful consideration of comparative wages, has determined on $2.00 per hour as a fair wage for artists, for a maximum 30-hour, and a minimum 12-hour week. Artists who now receive $24.00 for a 30-hour week will, under the new rate, receive the same sum for 12 hours of work.”³⁹

Krasner knew well many of those involved in the Union, including Balcomb Greene and his wife, Gertrude “Peter” Glass Greene, Ibram Lassaw, Michael Loew, Robert Jonas, Willem de Kooning, and the muralist Max Spivak, whom Krasner was assigned to assist at the WPA in 1935. Krasner also recalled that the Russian-emigré painter Anton Refregier was very active at the Union.⁴⁰ Having studied in Paris and then with Hofmann in Munich, Refregier was a friend of de Kooning’s in New York, though he was much more politically active than his pragmatic Dutch friend.

De Kooning was four years older than Krasner, and they had first met at his loft on West Twenty-first Street in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood when he was living with the dancer Juliet Browner. Krasner described Browner as “an exceptionally beautiful young girl [who] played the viola beautifully…. Many years later I learned that Julie became the wife of Man Ray.”⁴¹

Since de Kooning did not move from Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street to his Chelsea loft until late that year, Krasner probably met de Kooning in late 1934 or early 1935. Krasner described the encounter many years later, making only a vague reference to the man who had been her lover before Pollock: “I do remember it was someone called Igor Pantuhoff, who…took me up to Bill’s studio, a loft converted into a studio, on Twenty-second Street and introduced me to him. And it was quite a few years, maybe about three or four, before I met someone called Pollock.”⁴²

De Kooning, using income earned from working regularly as a commercial artist for A.S. Beck (a chain of shoe stores), had purchased a Capehart high-fidelity system with an automatic record changer.⁴³ The Capehart was advertised as “the finest gift it is possible to provide for a home and its family and friends. For the Capehart virtually brings the operatic stage, the symphonic festival, the theatre, the ballroom, the whole world of recorded and radio diversions, right to your living room.”⁴⁴ De Kooning, like Krasner, liked to listen to classical music and to modernists like Stravinsky, as well as jazz, yet she was in no condition to acquire the best and most expensive record player available.⁴⁵

Krasner recalled: “Bill had a beautiful recording machine and wonderful records, and he always encouraged the idea of people coming to his studio so that one rarely saw him alone, there would always be a kind of entourage, three or four people if one went there on a Sunday.”⁴⁶ He also hosted informal loft parties, where artists brought their own liquor and danced.⁴⁷

 

EVEN WITH THE HELP OF THE PWAP, KRASNER AND PANTUHOFF REMAINED anxious about getting by and being able to feed themselves. Leon Kroll, their former teacher at the academy, who was now one of the confidential advisers at Yaddo, encouraged them to correspond with Elizabeth Ames at the artists colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. In a letter to Ames, Kroll recommended the couple as “desirable candidates for scholarships” and included “Igor Pantuckoff” on a list of the people he thought most important to go to Yaddo. Lee and Igor were invited to come between August and October 1934.⁴⁸

The colony offered room, board, and studio space for two-month periods to those artists “who have achieved some measure of professional accomplishment.”⁴⁹ In his rankings, Kroll placed Igor third, after artists Maurice Becker and Alix Stavenitz. He described Igor as “a talented young painter and an agreeable person. His wife not as good as he is. Both in the middle twenties. Pantukoff had won the Pulitzer Prize at the National Academy two or three years ago. His wife was one of his fellow students. They both studied under me and I thought they were of my best as students.”⁵⁰

By then, Igor and Lee were living in the Village at 56 West Eighth Street, and they signed their application to Yaddo as “Mr. and Mrs. Igor Pantuckoff.” Even in their application letter, written in February, Igor referred to Lee as his wife. Both Kroll’s letter and Pantuhoff’s make clear that Lee and Igor pretended to be legally married. One note, saying that any time Yaddo accepts them would be “quite satisfactory,” is signed “Igor and Lenore Pantukoff.”⁵¹ There is, however, no evidence that they ever did marry or that they ever went to Yaddo. The reason must be that by the time they were scheduled to go, they feared losing their federal employment.

 

KRASNER AND PANTUHOFF GREW TO ENJOY THE COMPANY OF HAROLD Rosenberg, whom she first met while waitressing at Sam Johnson’s, and Rosenberg’s wife, the writer May Natalie Tabak. Both couples were fascinated with politics and joined others in various causes, occasionally attending political rallies together. They also talked about French poetry, Russian novels, Marxist literature, and “the eternal verities.”⁵² Tabak remembered, “Igor began to attend the newly opened Hans Hofmann art school. Other artists we all knew had gone to Europe to study with Hofmann; and, although familiar with much of his vocabulary (like ‘push and pull,’ which was interpreted by every artist in a personal way), the school in New York was an exciting curiosity. We were all fascinated by Igor’s reports of what went on there.”⁵³ Hofmann, a German modernist painter who had studied in Paris, opened his first school in America at 444 Madison Avenue in 1933.⁵⁴ Krasner too was curious about Pantuhoff’s new venture.

The couple then moved to 213 West Fourteenth Street, just west of Seventh Avenue.⁵⁵ Their apartment building offered access to the roof, from which Krasner painted a typical city scene called Fourteenth Street.⁵⁶ Although the catalogue raisonné identifies this canvas as “one of Krasner’s few attempts to paint in the Social Realist vein,” it is not overtly political and is, in fact, much closer to the realist subject matter and the emphasis on painting light and shadow of an artist like Edward Hopper, who a few years earlier painted City Roofs (1932), a similar view from his own roof.⁵⁷ Hopper delivered City Roofs to the Rehn Gallery in New York in October 1932, so it’s possible Krasner saw it there. Though Rehn is not a gallery she recalled frequenting, the entire art scene was then quite small, and eager artists looked everywhere for potential places to show their own work.

For another 1934 canvas, Gansevoort I, Krasner walked along the West Side of Manhattan, where she observed ships tied up at the docks. Gansevoort Street extends through its gritty riverfront neighborhood east to the point where both it and West Fourth end at West Thirteenth, a block south of West Fourteenth. The barren roughness of this meatpacking district, with its old cobblestone street and austere brick warehouses, seemed to have attracted her.

In her pencil sketch Study for Gansevoort I, Krasner included on the sidewalk’s right side a pair of figures sitting and reclining. Given the context of the Depression, the men are probably homeless.⁵⁸ The drawing also includes trash cans and assorted debris that she eliminated in her final painted composition; and she moved the fire hydrant from the street’s left to its right side. Reducing the details, she sought to achieve an urban modernity worthy of the French painter Fernand Léger, who first visited New York in 1931. She nonetheless captured the neighborhood’s exoticism, which long attracted artists to its cheap loft spaces located above ground-floor warehouses. Two years later, the prolific Berenice Abbott would photograph the same area that attracted Krasner.

Krasner and Pantuhoff enhanced their urban life by continuing to go to the beach on Long Island and to her parents’ house. May Tabak recounted how, while Igor was driving Harold Rosenberg out to Jones Beach, a policeman stopped them for speeding.

“‘Where’s the fire?,’ he asked irritably.

“Igor, blond, young, startlingly handsome, with a heavy Russian accent, drew himself up with White-Russian-tsarist-officer disdain and snorted, ‘I am Igor Pantuhoff, Great Artist!’ ‘Oh!’ said the startled cop. ‘OK, then,’ said Igor and, shifting gears, drove off.”⁵⁹ Igor’s father had seen his promise as an actor.

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.’”⁶⁰

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.⁶¹ 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.”⁶²

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.”⁶³ 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.”⁶⁴

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.”⁶⁵ 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.”⁶⁶ The Artists Union insisted “only the artist can define the artist’s needs and the conditions necessary for his maintenance as an artist.”⁶⁷

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…’”⁶⁸

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.”⁶⁹ 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.⁷⁰

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.”⁷¹

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.”⁷²

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.⁷³ 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.”⁷⁴ 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.”⁷⁵ Loew also recalled Pantuhoff as “a real man of the world but wild, running around with women. I could hear them scrapping a lot.”⁷⁶

“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.”⁷⁷

Jonas also recounted that Pantuhoff “would say [to Krasner] as a put-down, ‘you’re common, like the rest of them.’”⁷⁸ Others directly cited Pantuhoff for anti-Semitism, which characterized his family’s culture.⁷⁹ 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.⁸⁰

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.⁸¹ “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.”⁸²

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.”⁸³

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.”⁸⁴ 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.”⁸⁵

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.”⁸⁶ 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.⁸⁷

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.”⁸⁸

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.”⁸⁹ 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.”⁹⁰ 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.”⁹¹ 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.⁹²

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.”⁹³ Another plus for Krasner was “the camaraderie, instead of isolation…. But basically, it was a living for us all.”⁹⁴

Krasner received a pay adjustment on March 12, 1936, and her monthly salary was lowered to $95.44.

Since insecurity remained high and money was still in short supply, Krasner and Pantuhoff arranged to rent space for twenty-three dollars a month in an eight-room cold-water flat at 333 West Fourteenth Street.⁹⁵ “When I met them about the time the Art Project began, they were living together,” Tabak recalled. “After a while they, we, and a bachelor friend [named Bobby Dolan]⁹⁶ rented an eight-room top-floor apartment on Fourteenth Street, opposite a church. We divided the space so that we would not need to intrude on each other. We also shared the bathroom and the telephone.

“We had each kept a simple record of each telephone call we made, for example, and not once had the total varied by as much as one nickel,” recalled Tabak. “It was possible for us to entertain without needing to invite the others; they did likewise. Sometimes we’d be joint hosts. When it proved impossible to find another shareable apartment, we moved into smaller quarters but continued our close friendship.”⁹⁷

Meanwhile, with the assistance of Krasner and Rosenberg, Spivak was working on a series of murals on the theme of puppets for the downstairs playroom of the Astoria Branch of the public library in Long Island City. There were nine panels in all that took up 260 square feet. He made studies on paper and completed a model of the interior showing the murals in place. He exhibited these with one completed panel, in oil on canvas, in “New Horizons in American Art” in 1936, which opened on September 16, 1936, at the Museum of Modern Art after being shown at the Phillips Collection in Washington.⁹⁸

In this same show, Pantuhoff exhibited Ventilator # 2 of 1936, one of his canvases influenced by Surrealism during the mid-1930s—a time when he briefly shared Krasner’s interest in the avant-garde. Ventilator # 2 includes a Picassoesque head in profile, floating in space in the upper left of the composition. The central image, a metal construction mounted on a brick tower, distantly echoes both the Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico and Russian constructivism, including, strangely enough, Vladimir Tatlin’s concept for the gigantic Monument to the Third International of 1920, designed at the time when Pantuhoff’s family had been forced to flee Russia. Because Tatlin’s Monument was re-created for the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, where it was awarded a gold medal, it certainly would have been known to Pantuhoff. Despite his recent study with Hans Hofmann, Pantuhoff lacked commitment to be avant-garde. Instead, encouraged by his parents, he seems to have wanted to break into the conservative establishment that he had known briefly as a prizewinner at the academy and to exploit his considerable skills as a portrait painter.

Krasner, however, kept her focus on the avant-garde. Surrealism affected her more profoundly than she later recalled, although her interest in the movement was fleeting. Her Untitled (Surrealist Composition) (1936–37) depicts a classical female figure floating in space, which indicates her continuing interest in de Chirico—she must have just seen the exhibition “Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism,” which Alfred H. Barr, Jr., opened to great fanfare for the Museum of Modern Art on December 7, 1936.⁹⁹ De Chirico’s painting provided inspiration for her composition, which features two eyes floating in and above a landscape. For the motif of the eyes, she turned not to a Surrealist image, however, but to earlier fantastic art. For instance, she draws from two nineteenth-century French graphics: J. J. Grandville’s First dream—crime and expiation and Odilon Redon’s The eye like a strange balloon mounts toward infinity, both of which are reproduced in the show’s catalogue.¹⁰⁰ In both artists’ works, she found a similar horizon line defining a rather empty landscape. Krasner not only seized on these images of disembodied eyes, using the single round eyeball of Redon, but took a cue to multiply it from Grandville, as well as adopting the cross that he places in the landscape. She made pencil sketches on pages of notebook-size paper on which she began working out her own images.¹⁰¹

Surrealist films were also shown at the museum in conjunction with this show, and she certainly may have been affected by these films. Krasner’s focusing again on eyes may reflect the notorious scene of a razor slicing a young woman’s eye in Luis Buñuel’s 1929 film, Un Chien Andalou, the script of which he wrote jointly with Salvador Dalí.¹⁰²

Since discovering Matisse at the Modern, Krasner’s passion for his work was also intensifying.¹⁰³ Her Untitled (Still Life) of 1935 closely resembles Matisse’s Gourds of 1916, which the Museum of Modern Art acquired the same year she painted her homage. Her flat ground as well as the placement and shapes of the separate objects tilted toward the picture plane evoke this Matisse.

In Bathroom Door, painted in 1935, Krasner adapted Matisse’s strategy of painting a still life in the foreground with a view into another space visible in the distance. In Krasner’s case, this is through the bathroom door to an image of a female nude in the tub. Her composition brings to mind Matisse’s 1924 canvas of an interior in Nice, which appears in Henry McBride’s 1930 monograph on Matisse and presents a similar spatial arrangement.¹⁰⁴ Krasner’s figure in the tub, with her raised arm bent at the elbow, repeats the form of Matisse’s sculpture of a reclining nude or of his painting Blue Nude of 1907. Krasner’s nude seems like a self-portrait, and her treatment is intentionally erotic, signaled by the Cézannesque still life—the two ripe oranges in the foreground evoke the nude’s round breasts. Were this a painting of the eighteenth century, one would interpret the broken pottery like the broken eggs in Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s still life—as referring to the woman’s lost virginity.¹⁰⁵ Krasner’s subtle, yet teasing expression of sexuality suggests that she might have been momentarily interested in the erotic humor of Marcel Duchamp or the Surrealists, whose work she later discounted.

As Pantuhoff strayed, Krasner surely began to look around. In an unusually candid interview with Anne Bowen Parsons in 1967 or 1968, she acknowledged that she first met Jackson Pollock when he cut in on her dancing at an Artists Union party in December 1936. Parsons asked Krasner, “Did you feel that contacts initiated through working together on the project carried over into increased interaction, dialogue, ferment? Did you feel there was a lasting effect?”

“Of course,” she responded, “in my own case, I met my husband as a result of the Project, and as a result of my involvement in the Artists Union, which was a related organization. There’s no question that we continued to meet, to concern ourselves with one another and one another’s work after the project was terminated.”¹⁰⁶

Krasner met Pollock at an Artists Union dance in 1936. Already suffering from alcoholism, Pollock was drunk when he approached Krasner. Nothing came of it, but she later repeated a version of the story in which she did not remember meeting Pollock in 1936 and did not get his name at that first meeting. Yet, in what she told Parsons, she seems to have known more about Pollock in 1936 than she later let on. In fact, B. H. Friedman recorded in his journal how Krasner asked him to suppress the story of that first encounter (which he had heard about from their mutual friend, the painter Fritz Bultman), in which Pollock’s only words to her were “Do you like to fuck?”¹⁰⁷

Krasner also told Parsons about Pollock’s work on a float for the May Day parade: “He worked with [David Alfaro] Siqueiros in his studio. At any rate, we felt a sense of community, of course for the rights of all artists. Stuart Davis was very active, for one.”¹⁰⁸

Davis, who first marched in the 1935 May Day parade, remarked that it was “a necessity to be involved in what was going on, and since it had a specific artist section connected with it…the artists felt themselves part of everything else, general depression, the needs of money and food and everything else.”¹⁰⁹

At one May Day parade organized by the Artists Union, de Kooning helped the abstract expressionist painter Arshile Gorky build a float. “It was Gorky’s idea,” said Robert Jonas. The float took the form of an abstract tower, produced in painted cardboard.¹¹⁰ Its immense size required six people to carry it. Gorky had emigrated from Armenia, where he was born Vosdanik Adoian in the village of Khorkom.

In fleeing the Turkish invasion, Gorky arrived in the United States in 1920 and shortly after changed his name to Arshile Gorky. From 1926 to 1931, he was a member of the faculty at the Grand Central School of Art in New York. Gorky was known to study the work of other modern artists intensely, especially Cézanne and Picasso. He became close friends with Stuart Davis, John Graham, and de Kooning. From 1935 to 1937 he worked on murals for Newark Airport under the Federal Art Program, although he painted in an abstract style. In a lecture at the Art Students League, rejecting Soviet orthodoxy, he disparaged the vogue of overtly political, proletarian art when he declared it “poor art for poor people.”¹¹¹

While Gorky, just four years older than Krasner, was already very prominent among their contemporaries, Pollock was virtually unknown during the 1930s. Artists close to Gorky, from Stephen Greene to Willem de Kooning, later recalled that Pollock did not get along with Gorky, whom, according to Krasner, he did not actually meet until 1943.¹¹² The painter Milton Resnick allowed that Gorky “influenced Lee Krasner, who in turn influenced Pollock.”¹¹³

Likewise, though Jackson Pollock worked with the activist David Alfaro Siqueiros, his politics have been described as “of the parlor and not of the activist variety. He was ultimately more interested in the revolution that would come from within, not one prescribed by sociopolitical agendas.”¹¹⁴ According to Harold Lehman in Art Front, the float Pollock worked on with the Siqueiros Experimental Workshop “crystallized practically all the outstanding ideas about which the shop had been organized. It was in the first place Art for the People, executed collaboratively; and into it went the dynamic idea, new painting media, mechanical construction and mechanical movement, polychrome structure, and the use of new tools. Certainly a message in such striking form had never been brought forward in a May Day parade before.”¹¹⁵

Siqueiros began his Experimental Workshop on Fourteenth Street just after arriving back in New York in February 1936 as one of the official delegates from Mexico to the American Artists Congress. In 1932, he had been deported from New York for political reasons. His March 1934 show at Alma Reed’s Delphic Studios in New York was reviewed for the New Masses that May by Charmion von Wiegand, who would become a disciple of the Dutch modernist painter Piet Mondrian. Von Wiegand stressed Siqueiros’s commitment to revolution and viewed his art as “one form of revolutionary agitation.”¹¹⁶

Siqueiros described the float as “an essay of polychromed monumental sculpture in motion,” but he appears to have adapted the image from a poster for the Farmer-Labor Party, which was another one of his causes. His aim was to demonize Wall Street and convey its fascistlike control of U.S. mainstream politics and encourage a backlash from the people. In order to do this, the workshop produced a huge figure with a swastika on its head and outstretched hands holding the symbols of the Democratic and Republican parties. At the same time, the float displayed a ticker tape machine from Wall Street being smashed by a gigantic hammer emblazoned with the hammer and sickle of the Communists, who were also supposed to represent united American resistance, shown triumphant as ticker tape spewed like blood over the figure of the capitalist.¹¹⁷

The 1936 May Day parade was said to have brought “the Communists and Left-wing Socialists together in a united demonstration for the first time in many years.” News reports estimated that from 45,000 to 60,000 people paraded and attended rallies in Union Square and on the Polo Grounds.¹¹⁸ The WPA’s Dance Unit demonstrated with its slogan “Build Your Bodies But Not for War” and staged impromptu dances.¹¹⁹ Krasner might well have participated in the parade and seen the float Pollock had worked on.

For Siqueiros’s workshop, the artist Harold Lehman, who knew Pollock from Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, had already worked with Siqueiros in Los Angeles. He recruited some of the Americans, including Pollock and his brother, Sande McCoy, while Siqueiros brought in artists from Mexico and South America. The stated aim of the workshop, held at 5 West Fourteenth Street, was “to raise the standard of a true revolutionary art program,” and as such, it served as “a Laboratory of Modern Techniques in Art.”¹²⁰ The workshop intended to explore making large-scale political art using modern technology (such as painting with spray guns) and new, inexpensive materials. Instead of oil paint or canvas, industrial paints such as automotive enamels and lacquers on wood panels were materials of choice at the Siqueiros workshop. The artistic technique of dripping industrial paint here preceded Pollock’s later use of that technique.¹²¹

Given that in the late 1940s Krasner also dripped paint on horizontally placed canvases for her Little Image series, she too may have taken a cue either from Siqueiros or indirectly by way of Pollock. But it seems that her initial attention to Siqueiros in the 1930s was both for his artistry and for his leftist politics. Given her social networks at the time, she had obviously noticed his participation in the first American Artists Congress. The theme of the gathering was the struggle against war and fascism.

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.”¹²² 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.”¹²³

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),¹²⁴ 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.”¹²⁵

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 Artists Union had organized. They did not meet to discuss any problems in painting…. Their full emphasis was a political move, a power move.”¹²⁶

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.¹²⁷ 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.”¹²⁸

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.’”¹²⁹

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.”¹³⁰ 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.¹³¹ 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 1936.¹³² The artist Bernarda Bryson recommended particular works of Trotsky to Krasner, who in turn urged them on Pantuhoff.¹³³ 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:

The official formula reads: Culture should be socialist in content, national in form. As to the content of a socialist culture, however, only certain more or less happy guesses are possible. Nobody can grow that culture upon an inadequate economic foundation. Art is far less capable than science of anticipating the future. In any case, such prescriptions as, “portray the construction of the future,” “indicate the road to socialism,” “make over mankind,” give little more to the creative imagination than does the price list of a hardware store, or a railroad timetable.¹³⁴

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.¹³⁵

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 several 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.¹³⁶

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.¹³⁷

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.”¹³⁸ 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.¹³⁹

“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 together 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.”¹⁴⁰

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.”¹⁴¹ Nonetheless, another friend recalled that Gorky was actively interested in the Spanish Civil War and took part in demonstrations.¹⁴²

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.”¹⁴³ Trotskyists in the Socialist Party quickly rallied to the Spanish workers’ revolution and funded a military unit to join the battle in Spain.¹⁴⁴

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.”¹⁴⁵ 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.¹⁴⁶ 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.”¹⁴⁷

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.”¹⁴⁸

Krasner’s friend Balcomb Greene recalled, “We spent long evenings in arguing and discussing painting. A great many were opposed to social realism. I remember Gorky, in particular, was strongly of this opinion.” Greene had written for Art Front, the union’s magazine, and served as the union president for a year.¹⁴⁹ “Meetings grew very excited with discussions on art and politics,” he reflected. “There was considerable difficulty in combating attempts of the Communist members to take over the union. It was hard to know exactly who they were at times, some but not all were openly Communists. You had to judge by a man’s actions in the long run. It was this political rough stuff that put the artists off the Communist Party.”¹⁵⁰

Art Front magazine, the union’s official publication, “was a broad cultural publication for which many very prominent people, international names from Man Ray to Léger, would write.”¹⁵¹ The journal did not promote art as propaganda but instead suggested that modernist forms themselves could be progressive, or even revolutionary.¹⁵² Spivak recalled how the artist Hugo Gellert tried to make Art Front a completely proletarian magazine and that it was sold at the union parade on May Day. Circulation reached about three thousand.

The Art Front cover for March 1936 featured Igor Pantuhoff’s painting Ventilator No. 1, which, according to the caption, he painted for the Federal Art Project. Pantuhoff’s composition and subject matter, depicting the rooftop of an urban building with water towers and chimneys, were quite close to Krasner’s painting Fourteenth Street, of 1934. Both Krasner and Pantuhoff exploit a worm’s eye perspective, looking up at the water towers from the rooftop below. Although it is not known when Pantuhoff actually painted the work, his composition with repeated arches and brick walls visible through them suggests that he had just seen the show featuring twenty-six of Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York, which was reviewed in Art Front for January 1936 by the artist Joe Solman. Solman had praised both de Chirico’s “use of perspective” and his “fertile imagination.”¹⁵³

By January 1936, Harold Rosenberg had become a member of the Art Front editorial board alongside Solman, Joseph Gower, Murray Hantman, Jacob Kainen, Balcomb Greene, J. Yeargens, and Clarence Weinstock. Rosenberg had been added to the board by Spivak, who then resigned in February. Rosenberg became a regular contributor and wrote an essay, “The Wit of William Gropper,” for the March issue with Pantuhoff’s cover.¹⁵⁴

In that same March issue, Art Front reported that on the WPA project in New York City, artists “are being paid $103.40 a month, supervisors of murals, $115.00, for a 24-hour week.” The Artists Union was then pressing hard “for a $2.00 hour-rate, 15-hour minimum week.”¹⁵⁵ Because private patronage had all but dried up, government patronage was the artists’ only plausible salvation. Thus the union proposed that its funds be spent for “the benefit of the public, in the form of mural painting; decoration and sculpture in public buildings; the teaching of arts and crafts for children and adults; traveling exhibitions of paintings, drawings, small sculpture.”¹⁵⁶

Also featured in this March issue was Meyer Schapiro’s article “Race, Nationality, and Art,” in which he rejected nationalism. Schapiro condemned both the racialist theories of fascism that “call constantly on the traditions of art” and American critics who restricted what was “American” to those of “Anglo-Saxon blood.” He warned against the perils of racial antagonism, used as a means to weaken the masses and leave “untouched the original relations of rich and poor.”¹⁵⁷

Schapiro’s argument resonated with Krasner, who recalled these years not just as a time of austerity but also as a time of discovery. “At that point, the center of art for Gorky, de Kooning, and myself was the School of Paris. We used to go to shows at the Matisse and Valentine Dudensing galleries all the time.”¹⁵⁸

Dudensing, which became known as the Valentine Gallery around the time it showed Guernica, had presented exhibitions of Matisse in 1927 and 1928 and also hired Pierre Matisse, the artist’s son, then only in his twenties, to organize shows of contemporary French painting during the late 1920s. Then Pierre Matisse opened his own gallery in October 1931.¹⁵⁹

While living with Pantuhoff, Krasner hung out with fellow vanguard artists such as Gorky and de Kooning at the Jumble Shop, the venerable Village eatery then at 28 West Eighth Street. Krasner once quipped, “You didn’t get a seat at the table unless you thought Picasso was a god.”¹⁶⁰ Of the 1930s, she recalled: “I knew de Kooning and I went to his studio so I knew about de Kooning’s work. But only a little handful knew about it, you know. Maybe there were ten people who knew about it. That’s a lot. There wasn’t a movement. And Gorky one knew about and one went to his studio or sat and drank beer with him at the Jumble Shop and enthused about Picasso and the latest painting of Picasso’s or Giotto, if that came up, or Ingres.”¹⁶¹

Krasner does not say so, but she probably frequented the Jumble Shop with Pantuhoff: “We used to go there in the evening, settle down around the table, drink our beer, and have our big number on, say, Picasso. If Gorky was there, he dominated the conversation. And with Gorky, it was always Picasso.”¹⁶²

Another time, Krasner said of Gorky, “I had a great deal of fights with Arshile. Oh yes, it wasn’t a relationship which always flowed in glowing terms. These arguments might, at some point, involve philosophies of art. At that point, the image of Picasso was dominating the art world very strongly and one might feel, well maybe Matisse is really a better painter.”¹⁶³

The Jumble Shop was a longtime bohemian resort with an old-fashioned bar and flowery tablecloths. A small private dining room featured fanciful murals of nightlife, painted in 1934 by Guy Pène du Bois.¹⁶⁴ The shop was known for its “art-while-you-eat policy.”¹⁶⁵ Other habitués ranged from the modernist Burgoyne Diller to the traditionalist Henry Varnum Poor.¹⁶⁶ Group shows of contemporary American artists were regularly held (and noted in the weekly art columns). One could nurse a cup of coffee over a long conversation. The artists on view were not avant-garde or abstractionists, and the shows repeatedly featured the same circle, usually chosen by the troika, Guy Pène du Bois, H. E. Schnakenberg, and Reginald Marsh, who were representational artists that showed at the conservative Whitney Museum of American Art just down the street.

An exception to usual representational fare happened only occasionally when, for example, the abstract painter I. Rice Pereira exhibited at a Jumble show. A Jewish woman who was just six years older than Krasner, Pereira used the initial I instead of Irene to avoid gender discrimination.¹⁶⁷ Krasner was aware of Pereira’s work.¹⁶⁸ Jumble shows frequently included women, perhaps because both the stakes and the prices were low.¹⁶⁹

The critic Lionel Abel also recalled the Jumble Shop in the 1930s, but the conversations focused on names like the socialist Morris Hillquit, the Communist Earl Browder, and Karl Marx, whom they dubbed “Charlie.”¹⁷⁰ The more conservative, representational painters must have clustered at still another table. As the shop’s name might seem to imply, its customers were politically and aesthetically diverse. Harold Rosenberg described it as “for a more respectable element who had enough dough to buy a beer or something, you know. Most of us didn’t have very much money to spend, so we weren’t likely to go to a place that had middle-class tastes…. But Stuart Davis used to hang around in the Jumble Shop, and a few other guys, you know, the older guys who already had some cash.”¹⁷¹