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women, so there didn't seem anything unusual about being an artist and a woman.....

The next step, however, was her first into contradiction, away from the easy givens of school days. Krasner chose the National Academy of Design, bastion of American conservatism. [[strikethrough]]self-perpetuating center showing ? the watered down, ingratiating landscape and ?? style by then familiar to half-a-century of middle-brow ????? [[/strikethrough]] There she was a square peg from the beginning. [[strikethrough]]As a kind of ??? to her teachers [[/strikethrough]] Was it as a challenge that, as an assignment, she presented one of the self-portraits [[strikethrough]] that hangs [[/strikethrough]] in her house today? It shows no conventional salon figure[[strikethrough]] lady or even art student in smock and ? [[/strikethrough]] but a stalwart, muscular [[strikethrough]] vivid [[/strikethrough]] young woman in overalls, painting outdoors in a grove of trees onto one of which she had nailed a [[strikethrough]] the [[/strikethrough]]mirror.[[strikethrough]] into which she looked.[[/strikethrough]] The [[strikethrough]] very concept [[/strikethrough]]ideal of painting oneself in [[strikethrough]]in the nature [[/strikethrough]] the open air was a surprise and therefore a suspected trick. The student was warned and put on probation. [[strikethrough]]The ? about a step in her defection ?[[/strikethrough]] In 1929 [[strikethrough]] when [[/strikethrough]]the Museum of Modern Art opened and began to show [[strikethrough]] works of the French [[/strikethrough]] Picasso, Matisse, Braque and others still considered radical by her teachers at the Academy:

When I first saw the living Matisses and Picassos, it was an upheaval for me, something like [[strikethrough]] what [[/strikethrough]]reading Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. A freeing...an opening of a door. I can't say what it was, exactly, that I recognized, any more than some years earlier I could have said why it was I wanted to have anything to do with art. But I know one thing, beyond the esthetic impact: that seeing those French paintings stirred my anger against any form of provincialism. When I hailed those masters, I didn't care if they were French or what they were. 

Nowadays, again, when I see those big labels, "American," I know someone is selling something. I get very uncomfortable with any kind of chauvinism--male, French or American.

Krasner went back to [[strikethrough]] the academy [[/strikethrough]] class and turned out a picture in [[strikethrough]] the bright [[/strikethrough]] bright colors; her teacher Leon Kroll told her to go home and "take a mental bath." Painting light [[strikethrough]] in a dark-toned [[/strikethrough]]