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-or wanted- but 2,000 showed up. Kosinski whittled the crowd down to twelve by explaining, in the course of his introductory lecture, that the seminar would confront the experience of death as directly as possible, through visits to hospitals, morgues, and mortuaries. "Regrettably," he solemnly added, " in order for the experience to be complete, it will be necessary for one member of the seminar to die." There was a mad, mass rush for the exits. 

Regarding the subject of death he has said: "You don't die in the United States. You underachieve. . . . Dying is merely a stage of being alive, slightly below the top." Kosinski believes that a person cannot live fully until he has faced and accepted his own morality. His own many brushes with death included the occasion in 1969 when he was delayed by airline baggage problems in New York just long enough to miss being at the Tate-Polanski home in Los Angeles the night of the tragic party there. 

Kosinski was for several years married to Mary Hayward Weir, the widow of an American steel magnate. She died in 1968. His constant companion since then has been the Baroness Katharine von Fraunhofer. The fastidious author, as meticulous in his life as in his craft, lives in a leanly appointed apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side, where he likes to "hide." He spends much of his time in the summer at the beach. Besides swimming, his recreations include skiing and photography (his second craft). In the arts he particularly likes Bosch, Auden, Beethoven, Pushkin, Faulkner, and Kuprin, and Socrates is his greatest historical hero. 

Jerzy Kosinski is five feet eleven inches tall and weighs about 132 pounds (eating is the least of his interests). He has thin lips, an aquiline nose, a hurried but graceful manner, an intense disposition, and a quick sardonic sense of humor. He speaks slowly, with a slight accent, in English. In addition to the latter language and Polish and Russian, he speaks French and reads Italian, Spanish, Ukrainian, and Esperanto. He had a Guggenheim fellowship in creative writing in 1967 and received the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Literature in 1970. He is currently president of the American chapter of P.E.N.

A pessimist about the course of civilization generally ("one disaster created to solve another"), he takes an especially bleak view of the immediate future: "This century, I am convinced, will totally and totalitarianly get rid of the liberal mind, the Renaissance man. This is the first time there is a perfect match between crude political ideas and the complex technology that makes those ideas acceptable." His motto is a phrase from Descartes, Larvatus prodeo: "I go forth disguised."

References
Guardian p10 Je 25 '73 por
N Y Times Bk R p8 O 3 '65
Newsday A p4+ Jl 1 '71
Sat R 54:16+ Ap 17 '71
Washington Post B p12 My 24 '71; B p1+ Ag 30 '71 pors
Contemporary Authors vols 17-18 (1967)
Who's Who in America, 1972-73

KRASNER, LEE

Oct. 27, 1908- Painter
Address: b. c/o Marlborough Gallery, 40 W.
57th St., New York 10019; h. The Springs,
East Hampton, N.Y. 11937

Along with Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, and similar experimental artists, Lee Krasner belongs among the first-generation action painters. They founded abstract expressionism, which expanded the definition of what a painting is and became the dominant movement in American art after World War II. Because of a combination of circumstances-including the expense to her career of her role as the wife and later the widow of Pollock, abstract expressionism's towering genius-Lee Krasner's place in contemporary painting has only recently been acknowledged. After abstract expressionism had fallen out of fashion, her work helped to restore the vitality of that idiom, while proving its own aesthetic merit, through a retrospective in Great Britain in 1965-66, appreciative articles in influential art magazines, and a prestigious exhibition in 1973-74 at the Whitney Museum in New York. Her multivalent paintings are perhaps primarily both pensive and energetic celebrations in color of movements and moods in nature-the rhythm of the sea. the process of growth.

Lee Krasner was born Lenore Krassner on October 27, 1908 in Brooklyn, New York, where her parents, Joseph and Anna (Weiss) Krassner, Jewish emigrants from Odessa, Russia, owned a small fish and vegetable store. She was the next to last of their seven children, six daughters and one son, and the first child born to them in the United States. In childhood Lee Krasner was exposed to much discipline at her home but to little culture. She can recall only a few Caruso records that her brother Irving occasionally brought in and a large picture of Queen Isabella of Spain that hung on the wall. She did, however, read fairy tales and Russian classics. Independent-minded from an early age, she rebelled at P.S. 72 in Brooklyn against singing Christmas carols because they celebrated beliefs she did not share. 

Deciding at the age of thirteen to become an artist, Lee Krasner transferred from Girls High School in Brooklyn to Washington Irving High School in Manhattan, which permitted girls to specialize in art. Although she was academically less successful in art than in other subjects, she enrolled in 1926 in the Women's Art School of Cooper Union, where the curriculum was rigorously classical. One of her teachers, Victor Perard, was impressed enough by her drawings from life to use some of them for his textbook of drawing.

CURRENT BIOGRAPHY March 1974  21

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