Free Lee Krasner by Gail Levin Page B

gangs sometimes caused havoc—a precarious situation all too similar to the one her family had faced as Jews in Russia.
    Of the 580 students (238 women, 342 men) who attended the academy that year, only 479 survived the entire school year. Krasner made friends with both men and women, but later mentioned only the men that she’d made friends with, most of whom later won recognition as artists: Byron Browne, Ilya Bolotowsky, Giorgio Cavallon, Boris Gorelick, Igor Pantuhoff, and Pan Theodor. 20 One classmate opined that two of the best-looking men were Browne, who was “tall, blond, strong and as radiantly handsome as a summer morning in a northern country,” and Igor Pantuhoff. 21
    Although most students at the academy were Americans, there were also many international students, including some from Austria, China, France, Hungary, Canada, England, Italy, and Russia. Besides Esphyr Slobodkina, who was only there on a student visa because recently imposed quotas impeded her from immigrating legally, the “Russian” contingent included Eda Mirsky, her sister Kitty, Gorelick, Bolotowsky, and Pantuhoff.
    Krasner became especially close to the Mirskys, Eda and her older sister Kitty. The sisters worked in contrasting styles: Eda painted flowers and children in “lavish colors, sensuous shapes,” while Kitty preferred dark and brooding seascapes and kittens. Eda won the School Prizes of $15 for both the Still Life class and the Women’s Night Class—Figure in 1932.
    Their Russian-Jewish family had emigrated from Ukraine to England, where the girls were born, then to the United States, settling in the Bronx when the girls were still children. They eventually moved to Edgemere, Long Island. Their father, Samuel, was a self-taught portrait painter who earned a good living, working on commissions from his studio at Union Square. Kitty started studying at the academy two years before Krasner. By the time Krasner encountered the Mirskys, they were living in Manhattan.
    The Mirskys were conversant with their father’s work as an artist, and this gave them a sophistication about art that Krasner lacked because she had no such role model at home. Yet the Mirsky daughters also had to deal with their father’s judgment—both his criticism of their work and his high standards for what it took to be an artist. Nevertheless this did not deter them from pursuing art. Eda told her daughter, the author Erica Jong, that she “could have gone to college anywhere I chose—but since Kitty quit school and went to the National Academy of Design, and since she was always coming home with stories of how splendid it was, how many handsome boys there were, how much fun it was, I decided I wanted to leave school too…. Papa let me.” 22
    Eda became a star at the academy, but with a bitter twist: “the teachers always twitted the boys: ‘Better watch out for that Mirsky girl—she’ll win the Prix de Rome,’ which was the big traveling scholarship. But they never gave it to girls and I knew that. In fact, when I won two bronze medals, I was furious because I knew they were just tokens—not real money prizes. And that was because I was a girl. Why did they say ‘Better watch out for that Mirsky girl!’ if not to torment me?” 23 Eda was so frustrated by the sexism that years later she discouraged her daughter, Erica, from pursuing a career in the visual arts when Erica went to the High School of Music and Art and the Art Students League. 24
    Eda’s granddaughter, the author Molly Jong-Fast, recalled her grandmother “screaming about socialism,” a concern that would have interested her friend Lenore. 25 Lenore and Eda’s friendship was so close that Lenore agreed to pose for at least two portraits. They capture Lenore’s likeness and personality with extraordinary confidence. One shows her long, luxuriant hair, while in the later one, clad in