Lee Krasner by Gail Levin

a tractate of the Mishnah ), is: “If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?” 34
    To study art, Lenore had to travel each day for about an hour each way to and from East New York. Manhattan must have seemed worlds apart from the provincial life she knew in Brooklyn. This was her first taste of real freedom—with galleries and museums to explore, including the Metropolitan Museum. There she saw the old masters and developed tastes that would last a lifetime, even after she rejected traditional art for modernism. She became particularly interested in paintings of the Italian renaissance, the Spanish masters, including Goya, and French painters such as Ingres.
    With equal passion she learned to savor great art and to dance the latest steps. Unlike her older sisters, who married young, sheneeded no further coaxing to move beyond her family’s cramped life to one of individualism. Greenwich Village, with its lively bohemian scene, soon beckoned to her from Irving Place. It was the heyday of free love, the new woman, the Jazz Age, the fast-dancing flapper, and other thrilling new types.
    While moralists attempted to prohibit “the shimmy” and other jazz dances during the early 1920s, a teenaged girl like Lenore was just getting her first taste of freedom. Drawn to the new and the chance to jettison her burdensome immigrant heritage, she was not encumbered by Victorian sexual mores. In her Jewish immigrant culture, sexuality in marriage, whether or not for procreation, was considered a positive value, not a necessary evil, as it was in Catholicism. As St. Augustine declared: “Intercourse even with one’s legitimate wife is unlawful and wicked where the conception of offspring is prevented.” 35 Though premarital sex was not permitted in strict Jewish culture, the religion did not associate the human body with guilt. Judaism assumed that a woman’s sexual drive was at least equal to a man’s and sex within marriage was sanctified—for both pleasure and procreation. In fact, the choice of a celibate life over a married life was condemned. 36
    As she graduated from high school in 1925, Lenore faced a world of new freedoms and possibilities in an economy that was robust.

T HREE
Art School: Cooper Union, 1926–28
    Lenore and Ruth Krasner at the beach, c. 1927.
    I N F EBRUARY 1926, THE SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD “L ENA K RASNER ” entered the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, a tuition-free college in Manhattan at the intersection of Fourth Avenue and East Eighth Street, known as Astor Place. Founded in 1859 by Peter Cooper, the school boasted that it had “a constant demand for the graduates in the commercial world.” 1
    The Woman’s Art School was meant to enable “young women, who expect to be dependent on their exertions for gaining a livelihood, to obtain, free of cost, a training that will fit them for useful activity in art work of one form or another.” 2
    The school’s supporters, visible on the long list that constituted its “Ladies’ Advisory Council,” included such prominent namesas Miss Helen Frick (Henry Clay Frick’s daughter), Mrs. Frederick W. Vanderbilt, and Her Highness, The Princess Viggo of Denmark (née Eleanor Green). Mrs. J. P. Morgan had also figured on the council until her recent death. The school had the attention of high society matrons, who contributed scholarship funds, money for student prizes, and even a summer art course in Paris.
    Applicants were admitted as space became available, “with some preference to such as submit work showing preparatory training or decided fitness for artistic pursuits.” 3 Lenore Krasner began in midyear. That academic year the Woman’s Art School enrolled 293 girls for training in design and applied arts, including fashion, furniture, illustration, interior decoration,