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Palace of Night, and the Kingdom of the Future. Years later Krasner would emphasize her interest in “time, in relation to past, present and future,” recalling Maeterlinck’s imagery, which appears to have contributed early on to the shape of her artistic imagination. She later affirmed: “All work has psychological content.” 59
    In Gogol’s novel Dead Souls, Irving and Lena could find analogies between Gogol’s treatment of the inequities of an unjust social order and their own poverty in immigrant Brooklyn. Krasner would feel too, as with so many modern writers, the power of Dostoevsky’s depictions of the human condition. Perhaps Irving read her both Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov and imparted ideas that anticipated psychoanalysis and existentialism. Turgenev’s most widely read novel in America was Fathers and Sons, featuring themes of conflict and love between generations. 60 This spoke powerfully to an American-born child growing up in a family of immigrants.

    Lee Krasner’s sister Rose, six years her senior, shared a bed with Lee and their youngest sister, Ruth. American born, the two youngest sisters vied for attention from their parents and older siblings, all of whom were immigrants.
    Lena’s favorite teacher at P.S. 72 was male. She was probably about eleven or twelve when she had Mr. Philip L. Walrath as her teacher. She recounted that he was “eccentric enough” to believe that girls should be allowed to play baseball with the boys: “Togetherness like that was my kind of thing!” 61 While it is not clear what art instruction this school offered, Krasner recalled the craft aspect of making a map of the United States: “Every time I see a Jasper Johns map, I remember how crazy I was for doing that thing. We had to figure out what each state was known for. I got tiny empty capsules and filled them with wheat or whatever andglued them onto a piece of beautiful blue paper. I had drawn the states in colored crayon. And I just loved that blue.” 62
    Lena could never say why she chose art as a career. “I don’t know where the word A-R-T came from; but by the time I was thirteen, I knew I wanted to be a painter.” 63 She once commented, “All I can remember is that on graduation from elementary school, you had to designate what you chose to do, in order to select the right high school. The only school that majored in art which is what I wrote was Washington Irving High School. On applying for entrance I was told that they were filled and as I lived in Brooklyn I couldn’t enter. It led to a good deal of complication as I had to go to a public high school.” 64
    She had already envisioned a better life, a creative career outside of her home, and she also wanted to become economically self-sufficient. Dreams of a husband might have been part of the picture, but certainly not the responsibility and burden endured by the mother of a large family.

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Breaking Away: Determined to Be an Artist, 1922–25
    Lee Krasner (far right) at the age of sixteen with her mother, Anna Weiss Krasner (far left), and her sister Rose Krasner Stein, with Rose’s two daughters, Muriel (held by Lee) and Bernice Stein, 1925.
    W HEN L ENA GRADUATED FROM P.S. 72 IN 1922, SHE BEGAN to see herself as “an independent girl” and started calling herself “Lenore.” 1 It is also possible that Krasner was trying to move away from the more ethnically marked name Lena, which had been popular in her parents’ Russia. “Lenore” was popular in America at the time, and Krasner later indicated that Edgar Allan Poe “had an enormous effect on me in my teens.” 2 Since Poe used the name Lenore prominently in his poetry, his work may also have influenced her to adopt that name.
    Krasner had been fascinated by the supernatural since her early childhood fixation on the monster that jumped at her across a