Lee Krasner

BY: Howard Karren

According to Patti Smith, writing in the catalog of this splendid show, Lee Krasner’s work “provides us with the markers toward her eventual full-bloomed entry into a male-dominated world, forever establishing herself on equal ground, where aspects of gender may enrich a work, but not determine its place within the circle of Art.” Last spring, the Robert Miller Gallery in New York did five decades of Krasner’s artwork justice.

The first and only child of a large family of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants to be born in the United States (in Brooklyn in 1908), Lee Krasner always knew she wanted to be an artist. She studied at Cooper Union, the National Academy of Design, the Art Students League of New York, and worked as an artist for the WPA during the Depression. But it was her training with Hans Hofmann and her association with such future stars of Abstract Expressionism as Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline, Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman that truly formed her as an artist. Even so, the movement was mostly male and the women who were part of it were often given short shrift. Krasner met Jackson Pollock in 1942 and in 1945 they moved to East Hampton together and got married. When Pollock started doing his “drip” paintings soon after, his career soared and Krasner remained in the shadows, though she was always working (and re-working) her paintings and collages throughout her husband’s decade of intense international fame. (He died in 1956.)

In the 1960s and ’70s, Krasner came into her own, and the art world itself started to open up to women artists. Her paintings now sell for millions, and her formal experiments are as beautiful and inspirational as ever. She died in 1984, leaving behind an amazing legacy and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, which helped to make this exhibition possible. Here’s a sampling of the work that was on view.

 

 

 

 

 

A video selection of Krasner’s artwork, with jazz accompaniment by Paul Horn (“Abstraction”):