Lee Krasner

Lee Krasner (born October 27, 1908, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.—died June 19, 1984, New York City) was an American painter and a pioneering figure of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Throughout her decades-long career, she resisted a fixed signature style and repeatedly reinvented her approach to color, form, and composition.

Early life

Krasner was the sixth of seven children of Jewish emigrants from Odessa, Russia (now Ukraine). When she was 13, she decided to become an artist and was admitted on her second application to Washington Irving High School, the only public high school in New York City at that time that offered women professional art training. After graduation she studied first at the Women’s Art School of Cooper Union and then, in her early 20s, at the National Academy of Design, both in New York City.

Early career

The New Deal’s Federal Art Project enabled Krasner to work full-time as an artist from 1934 to 1943. During that time she studied with the hugely influential German painter Hans Hofmann, who exposed her to Pablo Picasso’s use of form in Synthetic Cubism as well as Henri Matisse’s use of color and outline. Synthesizing these European influences, Krasner developed her own style of geometric abstraction, which she grounded in floral motifs and rhythmic gesture. In 1940 she began exhibiting her work with that of other American abstract artists. Her energetic personality and passion for painting soon brought her to the center of the New York art world, a largely male arena that was in a period of intense ideological ferment.

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Meeting Jackson Pollock

In 1942 Krasner met the painter Jackson Pollock, when work by both artists was exhibited in a show on French and American painting organized by the artist John Graham at an antique furniture store in New York City. Krasner was struck by the power of Pollock’s work, and the two artists became friends. She introduced him to a wide circle of artists, gallerists, and critics, including Willem de Kooning, Hofmann, and Sidney Janis. Most consequentially, she acquainted him with art critic Clement Greenberg, who became an influential advocate for Pollock’s work.

Work while in East Hampton

After their 1945 marriage, Krasner and Pollock moved to a farm in East Hampton, New York, where they produced a large body of work. Each artist influenced the other to some extent. In 1946 Krasner began her Little Image paintings, a tightly focused series of works in which her use of dots and drips of paint were inspired by Pollock’s “drip paintings” of the period. In these and her collages of the early 1950s, Krasner often worked on a small scale, which separated her work from that of the other Abstract Expressionists. Her work was also unique in terms of her commitment (in varying degrees) to maintaining some figuration—usually patterns from nature and sometimes calligraphic elements such as Hebrew letters—and a cerebral sense of control, in contrast to the less-controlled automatism being practiced by her contemporaries.

Later life

In the years after Pollock’s death in an automobile accident in 1956, which occurred while he was driving intoxicated, Krasner created a series of enormous paintings. They were filled with thick, expressive strokes of umber paint that abandoned figuration and instead presented raw energy, perhaps in an attempt to express her overwhelming sense of grief. In the 1960s and ’70s, Krasner continued her trademark explorations of color and graceful, rhythmic form in paintings and collages, building upon the passion of her large-scale abstraction but also returning to her love of hard-edged figurative elements and a certain amount of cerebral control.

Legacy

For the first 25 years after Pollock’s death, Krasner’s reputation was eclipsed by his, partly because of her tireless advocacy of his work during his life and after his death. Nevertheless, her stature gradually grew through major solo exhibitions, including a 1965 retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and “Lee Krasner: Large Paintings” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1973–74. This reassessment accelerated with the 1981 traveling exhibition “Krasner/Pollock: A Working Relationship,” at the Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, New York and the Grey Art Gallery, New York City. The show presented her as both Pollock’s artistic partner and a significant artist in her own right. Major retrospectives of her work were held internationally throughout the late 20th and the 21st century, including at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Pompidou Centre in Paris, and the Guggenheim Bilbao.

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