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Combining curved and straight lines, the painting is one specific source that can be cited for the abstractions Krasner was drawing from the model in the late thirties.

Neither she nor Hofmann's other students knew it until Hofmann finally exhibited for the first time in New York in 1944, but Krasner's own paintings and drawings of the late thirties and early forties were more advanced, in the sense that they were more abstract, than those of her own teacher. Although she worked at the Hofmann school for three years, Krasner's relationship with Hofmann was not the normal student-teacher relationship. For one thing, she had independently come into contact with Cubism, and for another, as a result of Hofmann's heavy German accent, she did not readily understand what he was saying until well into her second year at the school.6 Nevertheless, Krasner is the first to admit her enduring debt to Hofmann's insistence that space is the fundamental consideration in painting; and that modern painting differs from traditional art in its consciousness that a painting is literally a two-dimensional surface, a fact the artist is obliged in some way to acknowledge.

According to Krasner, "What Hofmann taught, essentially, was that pictorial space is created by violating the plane, but that flatness had to be reaffirmed by balancing out of the forward and back, positive and negative movement of colors and lines depicted in that space. His message was the Cubist message, and I got it." Hofmann was the extraordinary teacher who did not try to influence his students into working as he did, but preached instead an aesthetic doctrine that could be interpreted as the basis for styles that ranged from the entirely figurative to the purely abstract. That Hofmann was unable to synthesize his own ideas regarding color and design until the sixties, when he finally became an abstract painter himself, did not inhibit younger artists inspired by his highly sophisticated and coherent approach to the principles of intellectual Cubist design and emotional Fauve color. It was this synthesis, of course, together with elements of Surrealist Automatism, that eventually became Abstract Expressionism. But before this fusion of drawing and painting could take place, which it did essentially for the first time in the works of Pollock, a major impedimet, i.e. the durability of the Renaissance polarization between disegno and colore, had to be overcome.7 The continuing dichotomy between the two is reflected in Hofmann's writings on art, as well as in the fact that he assigned two different types of class exercises--drawing lessons in creating space through the relationships of lines to each other as well as to the framing edge, and painting lessons in the use of the property of color to create an abstract pictorial space.8

As a result of the continued separation of design from color in the Hofmann school, Krasner's works of this period are basically of two types: charcoal drawings from the model and oil on paper color studies from still life.9 In opposition to any of the intellectual geometric styles of non-objective art that evolved out of Synthetic Cubism, Hofmann continued to insist on painting from nature. As we now know, in the thirties, painting from nature for Hofmann meant depicting, with some expressionist distortion, what he saw. It did not mean for him, at the time, as it did for Krasner, transforming nature into an abstract arrangement of lines and colors. We have spoken of Mondrian's influence on Krasner. Another, more schematic and literal source of the idea of using nature as a point of departure for an abstract composition was Theo van Doesburg's textbook demonstration of the process of the Esthetic Transformation of the Object, in which a cow is transformed in four stages into a series of colored rectangles. Illustrated in van Doesburg's widely circulated book on the principles of Neo-Plasticism, the now celebrated cow-into-rectangle was reproduced in Alfred Barr's 1936 catalogue accompanying the exhibition of "Cubism and Abstract Art."

We have already remarked that seeing early Analytic Cubist works by Picasso and Mondrian stimulated Krasner to interpret Hofmann's cryptic utterances in a manner that would lead her away from the representation of the external world toward an abstract art, based more on emotional expression than on objective representation. Barr's catalogue quickly became the handbook for young New York artists; his attempts to classify and identify the various modern art movements and their relationships to one another inspired a generation of American artists eager to absorb the lessons of a new art Europe had by and large rejected. Perhaps the greatest importance of Cubism and Abstract Art, however, was that it implanted with absolute conviction the idea that there was a mainstream of modern art, describing a line of stylistic evolution that had the legitimacy of a royal succession. Barr's genealogical tables had the attraction of encyclopedic inclusiveneess as well as a diagrammatic clarity that appeared to order the chaos of the multiple styles of modernism. Moreover, that modern art had an internal logic and derived from the great traditions of the nineteenth century was very reassuring to New York artists seeking roots that they could not trace in American art.10

Since Barr was an orthodox formalist disciple of Roger Fry and Dr. Barnes, however, any reference to psychology, meaning, emotion, and above all, any mention of the mystical sources of

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Fig. 2. Lee Krasner, Nude Study, From Life, 1938. Charcoal on paper, 31 x 25".

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Fig. 3. Lee Krasner, Nude Study, From Life, 1938. Charcoal on paper, 31 x 23".

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Fig. 4. Pablo Picasso, Nude, 1910. Charcoal on paper, 19 x 12 1/2" Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection.