Lee Krasner

Fine Artist

  • Born: October 27, 1908
  • Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York
  • Died: June 19, 1984
  • Place of death: New York, New York

American painter

Krasner was a leader in the development of abstract, nonrepresentational, experimental art styles in the United States. She was one of the first artists in the country to explore the use of color, form, line, and gesture to express inner psychological, spiritual, and emotional realities. She was also one of the first artists in the United States to explore widely diverse painting techniques such as automatism, dripping, and collage.

Areas of achievement Art, patronage of the arts

Early Life

Lee Krasner (KRAZ-nuhr) was the fourth of five children born to Russian parents who had emigrated to the United States. Krasner’s parents were Orthodox Jews who owned and ran a produce store in Brooklyn.

As a girl, Krasner was drawn to the visual arts. From 1922 to 1925, she attended Washington Irving High School in Manhattan, the only secondary school that allowed girls to study art. From 1926 to 1929, Krasner attended the Woman’s Art School of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York. In 1929, Krasner enrolled at the National Academy of Design in New York, a traditional art school, where she studied life drawing, painting, and techniques of the Old Masters. It was also during this year that Krasner was first introduced to the more radical, experimental art of modern European artists such as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. The work of both of these artists was to be highly influential in the development of Krasner’s own art.

Because of the ensuing Depression economy, Krasner dropped out of art school in 1932 and began working as a waitress. She also attended City College of New York, working toward a high school teaching credential, but she soon realized that she had no interest in teaching. By this time, Krasner had become dedicated to living her life as an artist; although she had taken many years of traditional art training, she was becoming increasingly interested in more modern, experimental art.

Life’s Work

Krasner’s career as a professional artist began in 1935, when she was hired by the WPA (Works Progress Administration) Federal Art Project. She was hired as part of the mural division of this government-subsidized project, which had as its goal the decoration of public spaces with large-scale realistic, socially conscious painting. Krasner worked for the WPA until 1943, making murals, posters, and displays for department store windows. During this period, she began calling herself Lee and dropped an “s” from her last name.

Although Krasner’s work for the WPA was primarily realistic, her personal style was becoming more abstract. In 1937, Krasner entered the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in New York. Hans Hofmann was a German artist who emigrated to New York in 1932 and became an influential exponent of modern European art in the United States. He served as a link with artists such as Picasso and Matisse, and he taught their ideas and techniques at his school. He emphasized the tenets of cubism, spatial tension, and all-over composition. Hofmann believed in painting subjects from nature but emphasizing energy, tension, form, and color rather than detail and scientific accuracy.

Krasner had already become interested in Hoffman’s ideas. At Hofmann’s school, she studied the cubist style and began creating in a more abstract style that emphasized form, color, line, and rhythm. She retained subject matter but presented it in a simplified, abstract, and geometric manner. Her focus became self-expression rather than the duplication of particular subjects.

By 1937, Krasner had read System and Dialectics of Art by the writer and artist John Graham, who was to become a major inspiration to the abstract expressionists. Graham promoted the idea that pure feeling could be represented on canvas through automatic, spontaneous movement of the brush. He emphasized psychological content, emotionality, and drama in painting. Graham’s concepts appealed to Krasner, since she was already moving away from the more intellectual, analytical thought of Hans Hofmann. She was searching for a means of painting that would be more directly emotional, spiritual, and psychological in nature.

In 1940, Krasner began to exhibit with the American Abstract Artists (AAA). She participated in the First Annual Exhibition of the American Modern Artists, held at Riverside Museum in New York (1940), and the Fifth Annual Exhibition of the American Abstract Artists, which was organized by the WPA and traveled throughout the United States in 1941. At that time, Krasner was showing abstract paintings with thick black outlines, bright colors, and heavily impasted oil paint. Many of her paintings from this period were based on subjects from nature or still lifes; others were nonrepresentational (without recognizable subject matter).

John Graham invited Krasner to show her work in French and American Painting, an important exhibition he organized in 1942 in which the work of young modern American artists would be shown alongside that of famous modern French artists, including Matisse and the cubist painter Georges Braque. Jackson Pollock, who was to become one of the most famous modern American painters, was also invited to participate in the exhibition. It was at this time that Krasner and Pollock met. They were married in 1945 and purchased an old farmhouse in Springs, East Hampton, Long Island, where they both had studios.

Both Krasner and Pollock are identified as leaders in the first wave of the abstract expressionist movement, which was the first major modern art style to originate in the United States. Abstract expressionism is a nonrepresentational style in which line, form, and color are spontaneously arranged on a canvas or painting surface. Paint is brushed, swirled, dripped, or poured onto the surface in an automatic, gestural manner. The goal is to express one’s inner spirit. Many of the abstract expressionists, including Krasner and Pollock, were influenced by the writings of Carl Jung, Eastern religions, and mystical religious traditions in general. The movement stressed the spontaneous expression of the self, emotion, and the spiritual, through color, line, form, and gesture.

Although Krasner’s career was less public than Pollock’s, she has been recognized as one of the pioneers of the American abstract expressionist movement and as an artist who continually expanded and created innovative forms. While she was married to Pollock, Krasner was inspired by him, dedicated to him, and overshadowed by him. The public most often viewed her simply as Pollock’s wife. The Krasner-Pollock relationship was, however, based on mutual support and encouragement. Krasner was influenced by Pollock, but he was also influenced by her, and much of Krasner’s work presents ideas and techniques that are very different from Pollock’s.

In 1946, Krasner made two mosaic tables that may have been the inspiration for a series of paintings she executed between 1946 and 1950, called the “Little Image” paintings. On a series of small- to medium-sized canvases, she brushed, scraped, and dripped oil paint into dense arrangements of small rhythmic images encompassing the entire canvas surface and resembling hieroglyphics or intricate webbings.

Cyclical change is one of the hallmarks of Krasner’s career: She changed her subject matter, format, and technique every few years, but would often return to ideas that had interested her in the past. In the early 1950’s, Krasner made large-scale paintings based on mysterious figural and floral forms. Her technique was automatic drawing done directly on canvas with oil paint. Large, graceful forms moved rhythmically across the canvas, as in her Blue and Black (1951-1953). Krasner worked regularly throughout the 1950’s, but because the abstract expressionist movement was becoming increasingly male-dominated and because of her association with Pollock, she was not receiving much recognition from the galleries or the press.

Few paintings from Krasner’s earlier periods survive. Some were destroyed by fire; others she destroyed herself or cut up to use in collages. During the 1950’s, she began including bits of paper and parts of her old canvases in her new paintings. Continuing her interest in expressive, nonrepresentational paintings and nonillusionistic (without perspective) space, Krasner incorporated and overlapped abstract painted forms with frayed, torn, and cut areas of paper and old canvases. These collage paintings, which are among Krasner’s most innovative works, were exhibited at Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery in New York in 1955.

In July of 1956, Krasner took her first trip to Europe. It was there, in August, that she was informed that Pollock had been killed in a car accident. She returned to New York immediately. After Pollock’s death, Krasner painted large canvases with brightly colored, intensely energetic abstract compositions based loosely on natural forms such as flowers, fruit, and the human body.

Krasner returned to the medium of mosaic again in 1959, when she executed two large mosaic murals for the exterior of the Uris Brothers office building in New York. In 1959, she also began her series of huge, powerful umber and off-white paintings, which she worked on until 1962. These paintings were shown in solo exhibitions at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York between 1960 and 1962.

After 1962, Krasner returned to a more vibrant color scheme that included brilliant greens, raspberry, yellows, and oranges. Her forms were essentially nonrepresentational, but their organic and flowing quality suggests birds, flowers, and plants boldly surging across the canvases in joyous, lyrical moods. In 1965, Krasner was given a retrospective exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, England, which included these works. In 1966, she joined the Marlborough Gallery in New York.

During the early 1970’s, Krasner created several huge canvases in a more hard-edged style, composing crisp, spare geometric designs that seem to explode from the canvas, as in Rising Green (1972). Throughout the later 1970’s, she made another series of collage paintings, this time incorporating cut-up sections of her old charcoal drawings and combining fragments of figural forms with forceful abstract painted forms. In these works, she deconstructed past ideas, reworked them, and brought them into a new realm and into new paintings with titles that play on the idea of time, such as Past Conditional (1976) and Imperfect Indicative (1976).

Although Krasner was still not taken as seriously as the male artists of the abstract expressionist movement, she began to receive much more attention by the 1970’s. In 1974, she was awarded the Augustus St. Gaudens Medal by the Cooper Union Alumni Association and the Lowe Fellowship for Distinction from Barnard College. In 1976, she joined the prestigious Pace Gallery in New York, and in 1978 she was the only woman included in the major exhibition Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years, which was shown at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Seibu Museum in Tokyo, Japan.

During the early 1980’s, Krasner continued to paint and exhibit. She joined the Robert Miller Gallery, New York, in 1981. In 1982, she was awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French minister of culture. She traveled to Houston, Texas, in 1983 for a major retrospective exhibition of her work that was given at the Museum of Fine Arts. Krasner died in New York on June 19, 1984. She left funds and paintings to create a foundation for needy artists, and she asked that the house in Springs be given to a charitable institution. It was opened as the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in 1988.

Significance

Although Krasner is recognized as one of the pioneers of the American abstract expressionist movement and is identified as a member of the first wave, or first generation, of that movement, she has never received as much attention or serious study as the male members of that movement. Although women were involved, the abstract expressionist movement has most often been viewed as a male-oriented phenomenon. For this reason and because of her close association with Pollock, Krasner has been overshadowed.

Krasner herself was aware of this situation and often spoke out for women’s rights. She believed in equality for women and in women’s right to express themselves. She took her own work extremely seriously. Although she was married to Pollock and admired his work, her art was experimental and innovative, and her artistic explorations were most often very different from those of Pollock. In 1972, she picketed the Museum of Modern Art in New York because it was not showing enough work by artists who were women. She received an honorary award from the Long Island Women Achievers in Business and the Professions in 1977, and in 1980 she was presented with the Outstanding Achievement in the Visual Arts Award by the Women’s Caucus for Art.

Krasner was a leader in the development of abstract, nonrepresentational, experimental art styles in the United States. She was one of the first artists in the country to explore the use of color, form, line, and gesture to express inner psychological, spiritual, and emotional realities. She was also one of the first artists in the United States to explore widely diverse painting techniques such as automatism, dripping, and collage. For these reasons, Krasner’s importance in the history of modern American art cannot be overestimated. The ideas that Krasner brought forth in her art became some of the hallmarks of many modern artists in America in the twentieth century. In particular, her art, as well as the art of the other first wave abstract expressionists, was a direct and profound influence on the second wave of abstract expressionists, including Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler.

Bibliography

Brach, Paul. “Lee Krasner: Front and Center.” Art in America 89, no. 2 (February, 2001): 90. This article about a traveling retrospective of Krasner’s work also discusses her career, the art work she created during her relationship with Jackson Pollock, and how she became a major figure in the New York School.

Hobbs, Robert. Lee Krasner. New York: Abbeville Press, 1993. This well-written book chronicles Krasner’s life and career from childhood to death, with a focus on the development of her art. Includes ninety-three black-and-white and color illustrations as well as a chronology, bibliography, list of exhibitions, and “Artist’s Statements.”

Landau, Ellen G. “Lee Krasner’s Early Career.” Parts 1-2. Arts Magazine 56 (October-November, 1981). This two-part article is extremely important. It thoroughly documents Krasner’s early career, from her childhood to the 1950’s. The focus is on her education, influences, and the “Little Images” paintings. Includes twenty-three illustrations among them some of the rarely shown early works and footnotes.

Munro, Eleanor. Originals: American Women Artists. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979. Twenty pages of this book are dedicated to a discussion of Krasner’s life and career. The book also addresses the situation of twentieth century women artists in the United States and views Krasner in the context of “Women of the First Wave: Elders of the Century.” Includes a bibliography and five illustrations.

Rose, Barbara. Lee Krasner: A Retrospective. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1983. An extremely detailed, important work written in conjunction with Krasner’s 1983 retrospective in Houston. Documents Krasner’s life and career from childhood to 1983, focusing on her education, work for the WPA, influences, marriage, and philosophy. Includes more than 155 black-and-white and color illustrations, a chronology, and a bibliography.

Tucker, Marcia. Lee Krasner: Large Paintings. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1973. A brief but very informative discussion of the development of Krasner’s painting and collage styles and techniques, focusing on her work from the 1930’s through the 1960’s. Addresses the issues of Krasner’s philosophy, influences, and education. Includes eighteen color and black-and-white illustrations of paintings, a chronology, and a bibliography.

1941-1970: December, 1952: Rosenberg Defines “Action Painting.”