Lee Krasner

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(b New York, 27 Oct 1908; d New York, 19 June 1984). American painter. She decided at an early stage to become an artist, and in 1926 she enrolled at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Art and Science in Manhattan. In 1928 she transferred to the National Academy of Design, and although her tenure there was unpromising (her teachers considered her incorrigible), she painted her first important work there, a forthright and psychologically revealing Self-portrait (1930; artist's estate, see 1965 exh. cat., no. 1). Due to the Depression she was forced to work at menial jobs by day and attend art classes at night. In the early 1930s she experimented with the prevalent style of social realism and the enigmatic imagery of Giorgio De Chirico and Joan Mir?, but it was not until 1937, when she entered the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts, that she found an environment in which her art could flourish. Immediately grasping the most radical tenets of Fauvism, Cubism and Hofmann's own theories, she began to create powerful abstract still-lifes (e.g. Still-life, oil on paper, 1938; New York, MOMA) and diagrammatic figure studies.

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Lee Krasner (1908-1984), American painter and collage artist, served as an important inspiration to contemporary women artists. A major figure in the Abstract Expressionist milieux, she successfully extended the New York School sensibility into the present.

Lee (Lenore) Krasner was born in Brooklyn, New York, on October 27, 1908, to Russian emigre parents, Joseph and Anna Krasner (Krassner). By the time of her graduation from public elementary school in 1922 she had shown strong inclinations toward the arts. She spent most of her secondary education at Washington Irving High School in Manhattan, where she devoted three years to a major in art. Krasner attended the Women's Art School of Cooper Union from 1926 through 1929, followed by a short period at the Art Student's League. From 1929 to 1932 she continued working at the National Academy of Design where, upon her first trips to the newly established Museum of Modern Art, Krasner encountered and was deeply influenced by the School of Paris. It was then that she had the good fortune to meet such subsequently important figures in the New York art world as Parker Tyler, Harold Rosenberg, and Lionel Abel, all of them conversant with the problems of European modernism.

With these experiences behind her, she found brief employment with the Public Works Administration project in 1933 (first of the New Deal art projects) and with the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration. In 1935, alongside Harold Rosenberg, Krasner served as assistant to Max Spivak in the mural Division of the Works Projects Administration (WPA) Federal Arts Project. Based on her concern for the problems of art and politics, Krasner began attending the meetings of the Artists' Union as early as 1936 and by 1939 had become a member of the organization's executive committee. Employed off and on as part of the WPA project through 1942, she found time from 1937 to 1940 to study with the widely known painter Hans Hofmann. During the same period she came to know the critic Clement Greenberg who, along with Rosenberg, rose to prominence in the 1940s and 1950s.

Throughout the 1940s Krasner explored and assimilated a variety of modern idioms and internationalized her art attitudes. She began to exhibit in 1940 with the American Abstract Artists group, an important organization of American artists, famous for their reactions against social realism, regionalism, and other brands of aesthetic conservatism. Based on her modernist leanings she was invited by John Graham to exhibit at New York's McMillan Gallery in 1941 and 1942. The second of these shows, entitled "American and French Paintings," included among its American exhibitors Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Stuart Davis, and Walt Kuhn and among the Europeans Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Bonnard, and Modigliani. In 1945, three years following this exhibition, Lee Krasner married Jackson Pollock and moved to The Springs, East Hampton.

By 1945 Krasner was painting full-time. The extent of her early success can be measured by her inclusion in the group exhibition "Challenge to the Critics" organized by Howard Putzel at his newly opened gallery in New York. Others exhibiting included Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Richard Pousette-Dart, and Mark Rothko - all of them, including Krasner, later to be considered founding members of the New York School.

Following the so-called "Grey Paintings" of this period, Krasner began producing the famous "Little Image" paintings from 1946 to 1949, works highly graphic in their notation and frequently characterized by her critics as "hieroglyphic." In 1951 Krasner was given her first one-person show at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York. It was during this period that critics began to recognize her as a major contributor to the new American painting. Krasner's work was characterized by shallow space, a legacy of Cubism, reductive color, and an insistent concern with progress. Her position was fundamentally anti-formal and anti-ideological. Krasner's collage work can be dated from 1953, a period during which she began to extensively rework her earlier painting, a recycling process she continued to exploit throughout her life. In 1954 she exhibited in her first group show composed of all women artists, and the following year held her first one-person exhibition of collages at the Stable Gallery. On August 11, 1956, the year of Krasner's first trip to Europe, her husband Jackson Pollock died in an automobile accident.

By the late 1950s Krasner was widely exhibited (Martha Jackson and Howard Wise Galleries) for what she had by then achieved - a unique approach to painting. Never frozen into a style, strictly speaking, she nonetheless was consistently biographical in her approach to her art. Krasner inherited the "unfixed" image of Pollock and de Kooning and spoke persistently of "states of becoming," nature, and the spirituality of the "totality of nature." She greatly prized growth, change, and the involuntary surfacing of content, covertly symbolic, in her painting. Her collage mentality and her dedication to the concept of natural recycling (nature) never left her and was as apparent in her painting in the 1980s as it was 20 years previous.

Partially based on her mural work of 1959, Krasner monumentalized the scale of her 1960s work, simplified its form, and, in general, minimized the gestural nature of her handling, although not its personal and physical sense of the artist's "contact." Extensively shown throughout this period, she received her first retrospective in 1965 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. The exhibition subsequently toured England under the direction of the Arts Council of Great Britain. In 1967 Krasner moved to Manhattan.

The 1970s marked new work in collage and a partial return to the more gestural handling of her earlier career. Krasner continued to freely combine media such as painting, collage, and printmaking. Although her success was virtually assured as a pioneer of the New York School, she nevertheless continued to experiment and change.

Further Reading

To date discussions of Krasner are confined to periodicals and exhibition catalogues. Best accounts of her work may be found in the catalogues for her solo shows: Lee Krasner; paintings, drawings and collages, Whitechapel Art Gallery (1965), which includes an essay by B. H. Friedman; Lee Krasner, Marlborough-Gerson Gallery (1968 and 1969); Lee Krasner; Recent Paintings, Marlborough Gallery (1973); and Lee Krasner: Large Paintings, Whitney Museum of American Art (1978), which includes an essay by Marcia Tucker. The Art Index should be consulted for the periodical literature pertaining to her most recent work.

Lee Krasner
Lee Krasner, Cool White, (1959)
Birth name	Lena Krassner
Born	October 27, 1908(1908-10-27) Brooklyn, New York
Died	June 19, 1984 (aged 75) New York City
Nationality	American
Field	Painting
Training	Cooper Union, National Academy of Design, Hans Hofmann
Movement	Abstract expressionism
Influenced by	Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock

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Lee Krasner (October 27, 1908 — June 19, 1984) was an influential abstract expressionist painter in the second half of the 20th century. On October 25 1945, she married artist Jackson Pollock, who was also influential in the Abstract Expressionism movement.^[1]

Contents 1 Early life and education 2 Works 3 Legacy 4 Notes 5 Bibliography 6 Further reading 7 External links

Early life and education

Krasner was born as Lena Krassner in Brooklyn, New York to Russian Jewish immigrant parents from Bessarabia.^[2]

She studied at The Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design, and worked on the WPA Federal Art Project from 1935 to 1943. Starting in 1937, she took classes with Hans Hofmann, who taught the principles of cubism, and his influence helped to direct Krasner's work toward neo-cubist abstraction. When commenting on her work, Hofmann stated, "This is so good you would not know it was painted by a woman."^[3]

In 1940, she started showing her works with the American Abstract Artists, a group of American painters.

Works

Krasner would often cut apart her own drawings and paintings to create collages and sometimes revised or discarded entire series. As a result, her surviving body of work is relatively small. Her catalogue raisonné, published in 1995 by Abrams, lists only 599 known pieces. She was rigorously self-critical, and her critical eye is believed to have been important to Pollock's work.

Krasner struggled with the public's reception of her identity, both as a woman and as the wife of Pollock. Therefore she often signed her works with the genderless initials "L.K." instead of her more recognizable full name.^[4]

Krasner and Pollock gave each other reassurance and support during a period when neither's work was well-understood. Like Picasso during the brief period of his interaction with Braque, the daily give-and-take of Pollock and Krasner stimulated both artists. Pollock and Krasner fought a battle for legitimacy, impulsiveness and individual expression. They opposed an old-fashioned, conformist, and repressed culture unreceptive to these values, which was put off by the intricacy of Modernism in general.^[5]

Lee Krasner died in 1984, aged 75, from natural causes. She had been suffering from arthritis.

Legacy

Six months after her death, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City held a retrospective exhibition of her work. A review of the exhibition in the New York Times noted that it "clearly defines Krasner's place in the New York School" and that she "is a major, independent artist of the pioneer Abstract Expressionist generation, whose stirring work ranks high among that produced here in the last half-century."^[6] As of 2008, Krasner is one of only four women artists to have had a retrospective show at the Museum of Modern Art. The other three women artists are Louise Bourgeois (MoMA retrospective in 1982), Helen Frankenthaler (MoMA retrospective in 1989) and Elizabeth Murray (MoMA retrospective in 2004).^[7].

Her papers were donated to the Archives of American Art in 1985; they were digitized and posted on the web for researchers in 2009.^[8]

After her death, her East Hampton property became the Pollock-Krasner House and Studio, and is open to the public for tours. A separate organization, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, was established in 1985. The Foundation functions as the official Estate for both Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, and also, under the terms of her will, serves "to assist individual working artists of merit with financial need."^[9] The U.S. copyright representative for the Pollock-Krasner Foundation is the Artists Rights Society^[10].

Lee Krasner's grave in front with Jackson Pollock's grave in the rear in the Green River Cemetery

Krasner was portrayed in an Academy Award-winning performance by Marcia Gay Harden in the 2000 film Pollock, a drama about the life of her husband Jackson Pollock, directed by Ed Harris. In John Updike's novel Seek My Face (2002), a significant portion of the main character's life is based on Krasner's.

Notes

1. ^ Naifeh, Steven and Smith, Gregory White, Jackson Pollock: an American saga, p. 503, Published by Clarkson N. Potter, Inc.1989, ISBN 0-517-56084-4
2. ^ Naifeh, Steven and Smith, Gregory White, Jackson Pollock: an American saga, ibid., p. 366
3. ^ Nemser, Cindy. Art Talk: Conversations with Twelve Women Artists (New York, 1975), pp.80-112.
4. ^ Wagner, Anne. "Lee Krasner as L.K.", The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History (New York: 1992), p. 427
5. ^ Pollock and Krasner at Robert Miller, ARTINFO, June 28, 2006, http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/9146/pollock-and-krasner-at-robert-miller, retrieved 2008-04-22 
6. ^ New York Times "ART: LEE KRASNER FINDS HER PLACE IN RETROSPECTIVE AT MODERN" By GRACE GLUECK. Published: December 21, 1984.
7. ^ New York Times "A Visit With the Modern's First Grandmother" By CAROL KINO. Published: October 2, 2005.
8. ^ The Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
9. ^ The Pollock-Krasner Foundation website: Press Release page
10. ^ Most frequently requested artists list of the Artists Rights Society

Bibliography

• Naifeh, Steven and Smith, Gregory White, Jackson Pollock:an American saga, Published by Clarkson N. Potter, Inc.1989, ISBN 0-517-56084-4
• Krasner, Lee; Bryan Robertson; Robert Miller Gallery New York, Lee Krasner Collages (New York : Robert Miller Gallery, 1986)
• Krasner, Lee, Richard Howard, and John Cheim. Umber Paintings, 1959-1962. New York: Robert Miller Gallery, 1993. ISBN 0944680437
• Krasner, Lee, and Bryan Robertson. Lee Krasner, Collages. New York: Robert Miller Gallery, 1986.
• Krasner, Lee, and Marcia Tucker. Lee Krasner: Large Paintings. 1973.
• Rose, Barbara; Lee Krasner; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.; Museum of Modern Art New York, Lee Krasner: A Retrospective (Houston : Museum of Fine Arts ; New York : Museum of Modern Art, ©1983.) ISBN 087070415X

Further reading

• Marika Herskovic, American Abstract and Figurative Expressionism Style Is Timely Art Is Timeless (New York School Press, 2009.) ISBN 9780967799421. p. 144-147
• Marika Herskovic, American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s An Illustrated Survey, (New York School Press, 2003.) ISBN 0-9677994-1-4. p. 194-197
• Marika Herskovic, New York School Abstract Expressionists Artists Choice by Artists, (New York School Press, 2000.) ISBN 0-9677994-0-6. p. 16; p. 37; p. 210-213

• Robert Hobbs. Lee Krasner. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1999.

• Robert Hobbs. Lee Krasner. New York: Abbeville Press, 1993.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Lee Krasner

• Pollock-Krasner House & Study Center
• The Pollock-Krasner Foundation
• List of public exhibitions
• American Abstract Artists
• Lee Krasner at Find a Grave

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