Lee Krasner
Lenore "Lee" Krasner was an American painter and visual artist active primarily in New York whose work has been associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement.
She received her early academic training at the Women's Art School of Cooper Union, and the National Academy of Design from 1928 to 1932. Krasner's exposure to Post-Impressionism at the newly opened Museum of Modern Art in 1929 led to a sustained interest in modern art. In 1937, she enrolled in classes taught by Hans Hofmann, which led her to integrate influences of Cubism into her paintings. During the Great Depression, Krasner joined the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project, transitioning to war propaganda artworks during the War Services era.
By the 1940s, Krasner was an established figure among the American abstract artists of the New York School, with a network including painters such as Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko. However, Krasner's career was often overshadowed by that of her husband, Jackson Pollock, whom she married in 1945. Their marriage was marred by Pollock's infidelity and alcoholism. Pollock's untimely death in a drunk-driving incident in 1956, which left her as the executor of his estate at the peak of Pollock's career, had a lasting emotional impact on Krasner. The late 1950s to the early 1960s in Krasner's work were characterized by a more expressive and gestural style. In her later years, she received broader artistic and commercial recognition and shifted toward large horizontal paintings marked by hard-edge lines and bright contrasting colors.
During her life, Krasner received numerous honorary degrees, including Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts from Stony Brook University. Following Krasner's death in 1984, critic Robert Hughes described her as "the Mother Courage of Abstract Expressionism" and a posthumous retrospective exhibition of her work was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs, New York and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation were established to preserve the work and cultural influence of her and her husband. The latter has since focused on supporting new artists and art historical scholarship in American art.
Early life
Krasner was born as Lena Krassner on October 27, 1908, in Brooklyn, New York. She was the daughter of Chane and Joseph Krasner, Jewish-Ukrainian immigrants from Spykov. Krasner's parents were immigrants who fled to the United States to escape antisemitism and the Russo-Japanese War, and Chane changed her name to Anna once she arrived. Lee was the youngest of six children, and the only one to be born in the United States.
Education
From an early age, Krasner knew she wanted to pursue art as a career. Her career as an artist began when she was a teenager. She specifically sought out enrollment at Washington Irving High School for Girls as they offered an art major. After graduating, she attended the Women's Art School of Cooper Union on a scholarship. There, she completed the course work required for a teaching certificate in art. Krasner pursued yet more art education at the National Academy of Design in 1928, completing her course load there in 1932. When Krasner attended high school, she almost didn't graduate based on her grade in art, which was the subject she attended the school for, and was only given 65 to pass the class.By attending a technical art school, Krasner was able to gain an extensive and thorough artistic education as illustrated through her knowledge of the techniques of the Old Masters. She also became highly skilled in portraying anatomically correct figures. There are relatively few works that survive from this time period apart from a few self-portraits and still lifes because most of the works were burned in a fire. One image that still exists from this period is her "Self Portrait" painted in 1930, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She submitted it to the National Academy in order to enroll in a certain class, but the judges could not believe that the young artist produced a self-portrait en plein air. In it, Krasner depicts herself with a defiant expression surrounded by nature. She also briefly enrolled in the Art Students League of New York in 1928. There, she took a class led by George Bridgman who emphasized the human form.
Krasner was influenced by the opening of the Museum of Modern Art in 1929. She was very affected by Post-Impressionism and grew critical of the academic notions of style she had learned at the National Academy. In the 1930s, she began studying modern art through learning the components of composition, technique, and theory. She began taking classes from Hans Hofmann in 1937, which modernized her approach to the nude and still life. He emphasized the two-dimensional nature of the picture plane and usage of color to create spatial illusion that was not representative of reality through his lessons. Throughout her classes with Hofmann, Krasner worked in an advanced style of cubism, also known as neo-cubism. During the class, a human nude or a still life setting would be the model from which Krasner and other students would have to work. She typically created charcoal drawings of the human models and oil on paper color studies of the still life settings. She typically illustrated female nudes in a cubist manner with tension achieved through the fragmentation of forms and the opposition of light and dark colors. The still lifes illustrated her interest in fauvism since she suspended brightly colored pigment on white backgrounds.
Hans Hofmann "was very negative" his former student said "but one day he stood before my easel and he gave me the first praise I had ever received as an artist from him. He said, 'This is so good, you would never know it was done by a woman". She also received praise from Piet Mondrian who once told her "You have a very strong inner rhythm; you must never lose it."
Early career
Krasner supported herself as a waitress during her studies but it eventually became too difficult due to the Great Depression. In 1935 to continue providing for herself she joined the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project, working in the mural division as an assistant to Max Spivak. Her job was to enlarge other artists' designs for large-scaled public murals. Murals were created to be easily understood and appreciated by the general public; however, the abstract art Krasner produced did not meet this need. Although happy to be employed, she was dissatisfied because she did not enjoy working with the figurative images created by other artists. Throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s, she created gouache sketches in the hopes of one day creating an abstract mural. Soon after one of her proposals for a mural was approved for the WNYC radio station, the Works Progress Administration became War Services and all art had to be created for war propaganda. Krasner continued working for War Services by creating collages for the war effort that were displayed in the windows of nineteen department stores in Brooklyn and Manhattan. She was intensively involved with the Artists Union during her employment with the WPA but was one of the first to quit when she realized the communists were taking it over. However, by being part of this organization she was able to meet more artists in the city and enlarge her network.She joined the American Abstract Artists in 1940. While a member, she typically exhibited cubist still life in a black-gridded cloisonné style that was highly impastoed and gestural. She met future abstract expressionists Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline, Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, and Bradley Walker Tomlin through this organization. However, she lost interest in their usage of hard-edge geometric style after beginning her relationship with Jackson Pollock.
Career
Krasner is identified as an abstract expressionist due to her abstract, gestural, and expressive works in painting, collage painting, charcoal drawing, and occasionally mosaics. She would often cut apart her own drawings and paintings to create her collage paintings. She also commonly revised or completely destroyed an entire series of works due to her critical nature; as a result, her surviving body of work is relatively small. Her catalogue raisonné, published in 1995 by Abrams, lists 599 known pieces.Her changeable nature is reflected throughout her work, which has led critics and scholars to have different conclusions about her and her oeuvre. Krasner's style often alternates between classic structure and baroque action, open form and hard-edge shape, and bright color and monochrome palette. Throughout her career, she refused to adopt a singular, recognizable style and instead embraced change through varying the mood, subject matter, texture, materials, and compositions of her work often. By changing her work style often, she differed from other abstract expressionists since many of them adopted unchanging identities and modes of depiction. Despite these intense variations, her works can typically be recognized through their gestural style, texture, rhythm, and depiction of organic imagery. Krasner's interest in the self, nature, and modern life are themes which commonly surface in her works. She was often reluctant to discuss the iconography of her work and instead emphasized the importance of her biography since she claimed her art was formed through her individual personality and her emotional state.