Lee Krasner by Gail Levin Read Free Book Online Page B

jobs in the thriving garment industry. For Lenore, determined to become an artist, the menu offered at least some of what she sought.
    The all-female student body at Washington Irving was quite comfortable for Lenore. In 1921, the New York Times described the school as having “6000 pupils, almost wholly Jewish.” 24 The school’s industrial art department had been the project of the progressive Dr. James Parton Haney, secretary of the National Association for the Promotion of Industrial Education and thefirst art director of New York City’s high schools. Haney’s singular achievement was praised in his obituary in March 1923. 25 The popular school was so overcrowded that in 1921 there were two sessions for academic classes and another two for students who elected commercial or industrial subjects. 26
    As a student Lenore certainly worked hard. Even years later, she was proud to state: “I earned my own car fare…. I had all kinds of jobs. I painted lamp shades. I put vertical stripes on felt hats.” 27 These types of artistic odd jobs served as practice drills that prepared Lenore for technical labor later on, such as her work on the WPA during the 1930s. Many such tedious jobs depended on the labor of poorly paid young women. An immigrant she met a few years later described such subsistence-level factory jobs then available in New York, this one on the sixth floor of a large loft building just east of Washington Square. She was told to “fill in the ‘modernistic’ raised design on one of the parchment shades…they paid four cents a piece.” 28
    Lenore preferred illustrating over needlework or other crafts identified with women’s work and the Old World. Her early love of nature came in handy at Washington Irving. “We drew big charts of beetles, flies, butterflies, moths, insects, fish and so on. We would get models of a fly or butterflies in boxes with glass tops. Then it would be up to us to pick the size of sheet or composition board and the range of hard pencils and to decide how many to put on the page. And we would get anatomical assists from books. I loved doing those!” 29
    She recalled, however, that she did well in all her subjects, except art. “By the time one gets to the graduation class you’re majoring in art a great deal, you’re drawing from a live model and so forth,” Krasner later recalled. She remembered taking “more and more periods of art.” 30 Her determination and sense of purpose were not, however, enough to win her art teacher’s praises. Her originality was still too roughly formed. She possessed neither the charm nor the beauty of some of the school’s earlier success stories.The French immigrant and future actor Claudette Colbert, for example, preceded her by only five years, moving on first to study fashion design at the Art Students League. 31 When Lenore decided in her senior year to go to a woman’s art school, Cooper Union, she recalled that her high school art teacher “called me over and said very quietly and very definitely, ‘The only reason I am passing you in art [sixty-five was the passing mark at that time] is because you’ve done so excellently in all your other subjects, I don’t want to hold you back and so I am giving you a sixty-five and allowing you to graduate.’ In other words, I didn’t make the grade in art at all.” 32
    Undaunted even by harsh criticism and confident in her own abilities, Lenore remained resolute. “You had to apply with work, so I picked the best, or what I thought was the best I’d done in Washington Irving and used that to get entrance into Cooper Union. I was admitted.” 33 Her unflappable resolve and persistence would prove invaluable. She probably knew well the lesson of Rabbi Hillel, who was renowned for his concern for humanity. One of his most famous sayings, recorded in Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers,