Lee Krasner

Artist Info

Lee KrasnerAmerican, 1908 - 1984

Lee Krasner (1908-1984)

Lee Krasner was born Lenore Krasner in Brooklyn. Her parents were Jewish immigrants from Odessa, Russia. She attended the all-girls Washington Irving High School in Manhattan, where she majored in art, and the Women’s Art School of Cooper Union, from which she graduated in 1929. Krasner also studied at the Art Students League (1928), National Academy of Design (1929-32), and City College (1933), all in New York City. From 1936 to 1940 she studied with the influential teacher and Abstract Expressionist painter Hans Hofmann.

Krasner worked as a supervisor on the WPA Mural Project in the mid-1930s, when she and Harold Rosenberg were assistants to the muralist Max Spivak. She was also an active member of the Artists’ Union and the American Abstract Artists group.

Through her participation in an exhibition at New York’s McMillen Gallery exhibition in 1941, she met the artist Jackson Pollock. To some, her 1945 marriage to Pollock was Krasner’s claim to fame. Yet Krasner was considered a formidable and well-connected artist at the time of her marriage, and she was actually important in the promotion of Pollock’s career. Krasner allowed her art to languish while she cultivated contacts for Pollock; she later referred to that time as her blackout period. Yet she never stopped painting, even during the most turbulent years of her marriage. Sadly, that marriage came to an abrupt end with Pollock’s death in an automobile accident in 1956.

Krasner’s first solo exhibition was at the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, in 1951, and her second, at the Stable Gallery, New York, in 1955. Her first retrospective exhibition was held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, in 1965; her first United States retrospective was at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in 1983. Today she is considered one of the most important first-generation Abstract Expressionists.

Bibliography:

Barbara Rose, "Lee Krasner and the Origins of Abstract Expressionism," “Arts” (February 1977): 96-100; Barbara Rose, “Lee Krasner: A Retrospective,” exhib. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1983); Robert Hobbs, “Lee Krasner” (New York: Abbeville Press, 1993); Ellen Landau, “Lee Krasner: A Catalogue Raisonné” (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995); Anne Middleton Wagner, “Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O'Keeffe” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)

“Nude Study (Cubistic)”, 1939

Charcoal on paper, 25 x 18 7/8 in. (63.5 x 47.9 cm)

Signed and dated (lower left): L. Krasner ‘39

Friends Purchase Fund (1985.9)

"Nude Study (Cubistic)" was done when Krasner was still a student of Hans Hofmann, the most influential teacher of his day in New York. A German who had worked in France, Hofmann had brought the School of Paris to New York. Krasner recalled the routine of the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts: "The classes were conducted in the most orderly sense. You drew from a model on a platform in the morning, and you drew a still life in the afternoon. You had the model again if you went to the evening class." (1) Krasner’s drawing is characteristic of Hofmann’s approach. The model is transformed into a series of planes that evolve from the constant erasing and reworking of the lines. Thus the work is more about the process of creation than about the product itself, and one may discern within it the creative mind of the artist at work.

This work was part of a series on which Krasner labored from the late 1930s until the early 1940s, producing many charcoal drawings of both male and female nudes. A prototype for those works was Picasso’s 1931 series of paintings of Marie-Thérèse Walter, in which his young mistress is metamorphosed into both a still life and the landscape surrounding her. Picasso’s Still Life on a Table from that series was exhibited in a 1939 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, where Krasner could have seen it. She adopted Picasso’s Cubist structure as well as his characteristic heavy black lines. (2)

When Piet Mondrian, the Dutch artist who pioneered pure abstraction, saw a Cubist still-life by Krasner at the annual American Abstract Artists exhibition in New York in 1941, he complimented her on the strength of her own "inner rhythm.” (3) That rhythmic, swinging characteristic of Krasner’s early drawings is even more apparent in her later work. One of the lessons that Hofmann taught her early on was that art has to express a definable rhythmic quality. Krasner remained mindful of that lesson throughout her artistic career: "I never violate an inner rhythm. I loathe to force anything . . . . I don't know if the inner rhythm is Eastern or Western. I know it is essential for me. I listen to it and I stay with it. I have always been this way." (4)

Although she painted many fine works while married to Pollock, Krasner really came into her own as an artist after Pollock's death. In 1956 she moved into the barn studio at their home near East Hampton, Long Island, increased the scale and intensity of her work, and tapped the more personal content that had been repressed and dormant during her marriage.

During the next quarter century, Krasner drove dynamically through a number of style shifts, achieving at her peak a powerful, dramatic, and at times disturbing imagery based on the forces of nature. Krasner's cubist background had given her a strong sense of how to manage her pictorial field as a whole. She should not be dismissed as a minor talent, working under the shadow of a great artist. Rather, her early work tells us that she was a deeply committed artist struggling with various styles and concepts long before she met Pollock.

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