Free Lee Krasner by Gail Levin

in the mirror, the heat and the bugs.” 4
    Krasner showed herself in a short-sleeved blue shirt and painter’s apron. Her hair is cut short; her rouged cheeks stand out; her eyes are just intense white dots that glint from beneath her trademark heavy eyebrows. One full arm extends across her body to the focal point where her hand grasps a paint-spattered rag and three brushes tinted with color, while the other arm just vanishes at the canvas. By depicting herself in the act of painting, she thus asserts her identity as a painter. Yet the picture contains a puzzle: why does it show her clutching her tools in her right hand while working on the canvas with her left? She was right-handed and painted with her right hand. 5 Evidently her mind had not reckoned with the mirror’s reversing effect, exhibiting left-right confusion that today is often considered a symptom of dyslexia. 6
    Though dyslexia is today known as a common disability caused by a defect in the brain’s ability to process graphic symbols, it was not understood during Krasner’s lifetime. Considered a learning disability, dyslexia does not reflect any lack of intelligence. Dyslexics might start math problems on the wrong side, or want to carry a number the wrong way. Similarly, Krasner habitually began herpaintings from right to left, working in a manner that was atypical in a culture that reads from left to right. A dyslexic’s unique brain architecture and “unusual wiring” also make reading, writing, and spelling difficult. Many dyslexics, however, are gifted in areas that the brain’s right hemisphere is said to control, among them artistic skill, vivid imagination, intuition, creative thinking, and curiosity—characteristics that could be used to describe Krasner.
    Her lifelong propensity for asking people to read aloud to her as well as her frequent spelling errors and dislike of writing suggest that she suffered from a dyslexic’s confused sense of direction, which often impedes reading and writing. However, as was the case with Krasner, comprehension through listening usually exceeds reading.
    On September 17, 1928, nineteen-year-old “Lenore Krasner” formally applied to the National Academy of Design, then located “in an old wooden barn of a building” in Manhattan at 109th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, not far from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. 7 A little more than a week later, she gained admission, with free tuition for the seven-month term. There were about six hundred students there, and for the first time since elementary school, she was with females and males. 8
    The academy’s creed seemed to mesh with Krasner’s ambition to become an artist: “Only students who intend to follow art as a profession will be admitted.” 9 The academy advertised “a balanced system of art education, combining both practical study and theoretical knowledge.” 10 Applicants had to practice drawing from casts of famous ancient sculptures until they could qualify for the life class by submitting an acceptable full-length figure or torso drawn from a cast.
    Despite her new self-portraits, Krasner had to begin again by drawing from the antique. Even worse, she again faced her old nemesis from Cooper Union, Charles Hinton, who taught the traditional introduction at the academy. Neither the teacher nor the rebellious student wanted to repeat their previous clash. Krasner remembered: “He looked at me and I looked at him, and this time there wasn’t anything he could do about getting rid of me [by sending me to the next level] as it took a full committee at the Academy to promote you.” 11
    Her opinion of Hinton was shared by her classmate and friend Esphyr (Esther) Slobodkina, who referred to him, with irony, as “our pretty Mr. Hinton” and as a “genteel mummy of a teacher.” She complained that “if not for that dear, kindly Mr. [Arthur] Covey, our