Viewing page 13 of 32

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

12

paintings and also - for anyone who cares to see it - in Pollock's as well.[[strikethrough]][?][[/strikethrough]]

The next year, the WPA began to operate and Krasner, along withRosenberg and so many others, [[strikethrough]]went to work[[/strikethrough]] began making art for a nation to [[strikethrough]] salvage [[/strikethrough]] rescue itself. The kind of work turned out was far from advanced; social realism and regionalism were now given the government stamp of approval for public building projects; but the essential was the artists were working and earning enough to live. [[strikethrough]]and out of the camaraderie fostered among many of them [[?]] during those bleak but active years, the post-war art movements would take root. [[/strikethrough]] There was no discrimination against women that I was aware of in the WPA. There were a lot of us working then - Alice Mason, Suzie Freulingheusen, Gertrude Greene and others. The head of the New York project was a woman.

It was my job eventually to execute murals for people who left the project. One was by de Koonig. He worked on it and then was fired bedause he wasn't a citizen, so I was called in to do it. He gave me a life-size sketch and he'd come unofficially to my studio and see what I was doing. It was hard-edged for deKooning and very abstract. Later, I did someone else's History of Naviagation for Brooklyn. That mural seemed to be two or three miles wide. I worked from the original small sketch and blew it up. I had assistants and we worked on a pier over the river. Eleanor Roosevelt came to see us working there.

That whole experience introduced me to scale—none of this nonsense they call scale today. So by the time I came to do the mosaic in the Uris Brothers building, 86 feet long, that scale was nothing new to me. Long before I met Pollock, too, I had been working that large.

Beyond that there was the camaraderie instead of isolation, and that led eventually to other feelings. But basically, it was a living for us all. During the years of intense political activity when the Spanish Civil War was [[strikethrough]]proceeding[[/strikethrough]] going on and the greater one preparing itself, the battlelines were drawn here too. The project began to be attacked by militant conservatives; there was counter agitation from the artists. Krasner became an activist leader in the Artists' Union set up to fight the issues She was fired and rehired twice and more than once jailed for illegal activities. At those times, she booked herself into prison as Mary Cassatt