Read Lee Krasner for Free Online Page B

banister in her home when she was about five years old. 3 Poe’s use of fear and his evocative and stylized language meshed strongly with Krasner’s lifelong preoccupation. 4 Krasner was most likely drawn to Poe’s story “The Oval Portrait,” which tells of an artist “who took glory in his work, which went on from hour to hour, and from day to day. And he was a passionate, and wild, and moody man.” Poe also describes the artist’s wife as suffering “withered” health and spirits by the behavior of her oblivious self-involved husband. Poe wrote: “Yet she smiled on and still on, uncomplainingly, because she saw that the painter (who had high renown) took a fervid and burning pleasure in his task.” 5
    While it would be absurd to suggest that Krasner’s future fate was determined by reading Poe as a teenager, this was the time in which she formed the values and fantasies that would help to shape her adult life. Such a romantic fantasy of a woman’s devoted role as an artist’s wife also echoed the kind of role that pious Jewish women assumed when they married men who devoted their lives to religious study, a common occupation among Jewish men in the Eastern Europe of Krasner’s parents’ generation. It is, after all, Krasner who, years later, volunteered that Poe resonated for her during these formative years. If she did not know then that she was destined not only to be an artist, but also to marry a self-destructive one, she certainly would make serious efforts to do both. Thus it is tempting to believe that she read and absorbed Poe’s account of a crazed painter with his wife as a model, whose “deep love for her whom he depicted so surpassingly well. But at length, as the labor drew nearer to its conclusion, there were admitted none into the turret; for the painter had grown wild with the ardor of his work, and turned his eyes from the canvas rarely, even to regard the countenance of his wife. And he would not see that the tints which he spread upon the canvas were drawn from the cheeks of her who sat beside him.” Poe told of a manicself-absorbed painter who after he cried out at last “with a loud voice ‘This is indeed Life itself!’ turned suddenly to regard his beloved:— She was dead .” 6
    Lena might well have come across her new name while reading Poe’s Gothic fantasy poem “Lenore” (1831), which also focuses on a woman’s death:
    See! on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore!
    Come! let the burial rite be read—the funeral song be sung!—
    And, of course, the name also appears in Poe’s “The Raven” (1845):
    From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—
    For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
    Nameless here for evermore.
    Maurice Maeterlinck, who wrote in French, but whom she and her brother Irving read in translation, also probably had an effect on Krasner’s other tastes in reading. 7 His book On Emerson and Other Essays, published in 1912, incorporated essays by Emerson, Ruysbroeck, and Novalis, three men “to whom the external event was nought beside the inner life.” 8 Krasner was so engaged by Emerson’s work that she later titled one of her major paintings after the first line in his essay “Circles.” But both her new name and her memories of writers show that her interest in the mystical or inner nature of man began at an early age.
    When it came time for high school, Lenore’s first choice was Washington Irving High School in Manhattan: unique in the history of women’s education in New York City, it described itself as “the only school in greater New York offering an industrial artcourse for girls.” 9 But Washington Irving rejected Krasner’s first application. Her disappointment was all the more intense because she had seen high school as an opportunity