Read Lee Krasner for Free Online

vote. Many of the immigrants had already been radicalized after fleeing oppression in Eastern Europe. Although the historian Daniel Bell has argued that “European enthusiasms were tempered” after immigrants accommodated to their new environment in America, it appears that the immigrants’ American-born children often not only acquired an instinct for radical politics but also their parents’ sense of social justice. 52
    Krasner was among those who developed a vigorous sense of social justice. The suffrage campaign must have been gripping forKrasner. Unlike her older siblings, she was American-born, and when American women achieved the vote in 1920, she only had to wait to come of age to enjoy that right herself. It is unknown what Krasner’s mother knew about the suffrage campaign, but her elder sisters must have been aware of it.
    Though she received a typical indoctrination in religious ritual and belief at home, like many of her contemporaries, Krasner felt an even stronger pull to separate from the Old World ways of her parents, especially from the household and family burdens placed on her mother and her elder sisters. Like so many first-generation Americans and immigrants who arrived as small children, Lena began to question traditions that were identified with the old country. Krasner’s inclination to independence was supported by popular culture, even Yiddish cinema, which featured rebellious “jazz babies,” who renounced the backwardness of their parents, adopting instead dreams of being American and individual. 53
    Lena’s role models at home were her father and brother, both of whom she favored over her sisters and her mother. Her brother Irving, who studied chemistry, introduced her to all kinds of cultural pursuits: he went to the library and brought home books by the great Russian authors, such as Dostoevsky, Gogol, Gorki, and Turgenev. Even though he could read in Russian, he probably read aloud to Lena from the English translations. There was also the Belgian francophone dramatist and poet Maeterlinck. And he listened to the music of Enrico Caruso, then the leading male singer at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. 54 Irving liked the visual arts; he never married, and as an adult, he even collected art. 55
    When Irving read to Lena from the translations of Maeterlinck, she would have found encouragement for her love of nature. Maeterlinck’s News of Spring and Other Nature Studies, including The Intelligence of Flowers, which was published in an American edition in 1913, could have reinforced the young Krasner’s love of flowers. 56 Not only do the irises, roses, and daisies that she recalledfrom her childhood all appear in this volume, but there is also an elaborate discussion of the lettuce leaf’s remarkable ability to defend itself against slugs, recalling the unusual metaphor of a lettuce leaf, which she drew upon to explain her art in the statement for her first retrospective in 1965: “Painting, for me, when it really ‘happens’ is as miraculous as any natural phenomenon—as, say, a lettuce leaf. By ‘happens,’ I mean the painting in which the inner aspect of man and his outer aspect interlock.” 57 In Maeterlinck, Krasner would also have been introduced to his use of symbols used to stand in for ideas and emotions.
    In one of Maeterlinck’s best-known plays, the fairy tale The Blue Bird (1908), the fairy Bérylune, a hunchbacked crone, sends the two children Tyltyl and Mytyl out to find the Blue Bird of Happiness for her sick daughter. She gives Tyltyl the visionary diamond: “One turn, you see the inside of things…. One more, and you behold the past…. Another, and you behold the future.” 58 Tyltyl rotates the diamond, and the fairy becomes a princess of extraordinary beauty. The subsequent adventures take the children to the graveyard in search of the Blue Bird, to the Land of Memory, the