Lee Krasner by Gail Levin Page B

were men, role models for women were very scarce. Ethel Traphagen, who taught courses in fashion design, was a notable exception. 13 She had made an impact in the world of fashion and is said to have brought attention to the United States as a fashion center. She worked then on the staff of the Ladies’ Home Journal and Dress Magazine . She also resurrected and depicted “costumes of Indian maidens” and collected nineteenth-century garments. Traphagen had started out at Cooper but eventually graduated from the National Academy of Design and also studied at the Art Students League and the Chase School. In 1923, she founded the Traphagen School of Design with her husband, William R. Leigh, a painter who fiercely opposed modernism. 14
    Traphagen’s Costume Design and Illustration was a “two years course, designed to develop the taste of its students and to fit them for immediate practical work.” The first year’s focus was on “drawing and sketching the human figure in action, proportion and details; also from garments and drapery. Historic costume; color theory; dressmaker’s sketches.” By the second year, the focus was on “drawing for publication in pencil, pen-and-ink, wash, color, etc. Composition and grouping of figures. General preparation for practical work.” 15 Students also began to sketch garments and drapery as well as historic costume. They studied color theory and made dressmaker’s sketches. Krasner, who had enjoyed drawing fashions as a girl, came out of the course with a respect for clothing design and designers.
    Krasner was interested in clothes and style. However, her own look must have appeared very relaxed to her classmates. In the February 4, 1927, issue of The Pioneer, the student newspaper,the female columnist asked: Would the world come to an end if “Kitty Scholz quit believing she was the ‘Princess’? Mickey Beyers favored long skirts? Betty Augonoa and Sadie Mulholland ‘grew up’? Lee Krasner at last put her hair up?” 16
    This is also the first documented use of Krasner’s nickname, “Lee,” rather than Lena or Lenore. In a gossip column about women students, the school paper again identified her as “Lee Krasner” when it commented positively on her eyelashes. 17 Of Cooper Union, Krasner later said, “I’m surrounded by the women that are going to be artists so there’s nothing unusual about women artists, it’s a natural environment for me.” 18 Changing names was commonplace among Krasner’s immigrant siblings. Her name appears as “Lee” on the U.S. Federal Census for 1930, so she had definitely made the switch from Lenore by that time. 19 Though some have alleged that Krasner later took the androgynous name Lee so that it would seem that her art was made by a man, her earlier use of the name in her single-sex school casts doubt on that theory. 20
    At this time, Krasner was five feet five, with blue eyes, and she had developed a model’s slender figure. Her hair was auburn and usually worn in a pageboy cut, just above the shoulders. Her smile was warm, though her facial features were far from classical. Greenwich Village was becoming home to women said to be sexually uninhibited, glamorous, and free. The feminists who fought for suffrage had been eclipsed by the flapper. The struggle of revolutionary women such as Emma Goldman and Crystal Eastman seemed over. With the economy booming and garrets in dilapidated buildings available at cheap rents, a bohemian existence at society’s fringes became a viable option for many. Couples living freely together made traditional marriage and families look less like an inevitable destiny than a limiting choice.
    Studies of the “New Woman” blossomed in the popular press. Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, wrote that having gained the vote,“woman is now