Lee Krasner by Gail Levin Page A

of 1931, she attended lectures on the history of architecture, stained glass, and mosaics; the latter would prove particularly useful.
    With Krasner in Curran’s class in 1930 and 1931 was Joseph Vogel, a Polish-born Jewish immigrant, who lived with his family in the Bronx. Vogel’s family was also poor and struggling to make ends meet. By January 1931, the Depression hit hard, and his registration card noted: “Given time to pay; Entire family out of work.” Vogel and Krasner took a class in the fall of 1931 with a new instructor named Leon Kroll.
    Kroll had just arrived at the academy and was teaching Life in Full. He was gregarious, short, Jewish, and he painted portraits, figures, and landscapes. But most important, he was sophisticated enough to admire and talk about Cézanne, which caused the students to view him positively as a more progressive teacher. They did not know that Kroll’s background included painting with the realist Edward Hopper in Gloucester in 1912, and, just before World War I, befriending the modernist artists Sonia and Robert Delaunay in Paris, who were already painting adventurous, colorful cubist-inspired abstractions. Vogel remembered Kroll as the “Bolshevik of the Academy,” which, considering Vogel’s politics, was a compliment. 69
    Krasner recalled that “when it was announced that Leon Kroll was coming to the National Academy, it was as if Picasso was coming.” But she soon found him to be “very academic and hostile.” 70 Kroll, once ensconced at the academy, seemed to have forgotten the modernist colors of the Delaunays. Krasner recalled that “one day this model came in and she was wild, her face was white, her hair was orange, she had purple eyelids and black round the eyes. I was the class monitor, and booked her right away, even though she wasn’t exactly academy stock. Kroll came in and took one look at the model, and demanded loudly which one of us was the monitor. He came over, took one look at my painting and screamed, ‘Young lady! Go home and take a mental bath.’” 71
    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-seekingbrush 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.” 72
    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. 73 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.’” 74 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