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something for formalist abstraction of the Constructivist Bauhaus mode. Krasner was a member of this group, the Abstract American Artists, [[strikethrough]] from its [[/strikethrough]] soon after its founding in 1936 and a number of gifted women, including Alice Mason, [[strikethrough]] and [[/strikethrough]] Charmion von Wiegand and Kell Blaine were active contributors, but its doctrine soon struck Krasner as limited and by prejudiced, and she left them in '43. 

The AAA wouldn't allow a Surreal breath to pass the door. They were provincial like any groupie. I tried to keep it open. I tried for example to get Calder invited and was told No. Tried to get Hofmann to lecture and was told No. On the other hand, they did invite Leger and Mondrian. 

For Krasner, the important sources would be Hans Hofmann's classes in drawing and painting, and the ideas of the Russian Surrealist-mystic John Graham.

Hofmann, here from Munich since 1931, would have a galvanizing influence on two generations of American artists and art critics (one of whom, Clement Greenberg, was introduced to the classes by Krasner), most of whom all the sources would be hard-put to describe the jist of [[strikethrough]] his [[/strikethrough]] a doctrine [[strikethrough]] since [[?]] [[/strikethrough]] from which lyric landscapists got as much [[strikethrough]] from them [[/strikethrough]] as [[strikethrough]] those who would be called [[/strikethrough]] future Abstract Expressionists. Basically, he taught a Germanic feeling for nature imploded into the rational structure of Cubism. As an engineer and inventor in his youth, he may have retained something of a [[strikethrough]] the [[/strikethrough]] pragmatic feeling for balance of stress. A work of art, drawing or painting, was to have its own life as a system of pushes and pulls acting across the whole surface. Then these inter-related pressures would generate an all-over field of dynamic energy. Nature, however— a still-life, a figure, landscape— was always the model, not to be copied, but to be referred to. For it was in the natural world that the most charged relationships between shapes and colors were to be studied.  

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