ART, LOVE, & LEGACY

AN INTRODUCTION TO ARTIST LEE KRASNER’S AMERICAN SAGA

For decades, American artist Lee Krasner was cast aside as a bit player in the art world, better known by her married name, Mrs. Jackson Pollock. Rumors were astir following his 1956 death that the artist’s widow secured exhibitions on name alone, besmirching her long, distinguished career. She died at 76 in 1984 just months before her retrospective opened at the Museum of Modern Art, righting so many wrongs she had suffered in life.

“[She] demanded the quality she gave,” playwright Edward Albee said at her memorial service held in the Medieval Sculpture Court at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. ''Lee always looked you straight in the eye – the same eye, painter's eye, which looked at the world about her and translated it to order,'' he continued. ''She looked you straight in the eye, and you dared not flinch.”

Because you can take the girl out of Brooklyn, but she’s always going to represent the County of Kings. Born in 1908, Krasner was a first generation Ukranian Jew who, like so many native New Yorkers, began pursuing her dreams of becoming an artist from a young age. She studied at the Women's Art School of Cooper Union on scholarship, and the National Academy of Design before joining the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art in 1934.

The WPA provided Krasner steady work over the next decade, allowing her to focus on her fine art career. In 1937 she studied with artist and theorist Hans Hoffmann at his 8th Street atelier integrating aspects of Cubism into her practice. Here she created the “all-over” style that would later inspire Pollock. Of her work, Hoffmann raved, “This is so good, you would never know it was done by a woman."

In 1940, Krasner became a founding member of the American Abstract Artists and was the rare woman in a young coterie including Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Clyfford Still, Franz Kline, and Arshile Gorky. In 1941, she met Jackson Pollock, who then had the style of a regional American painter in the tradition of Thomas Benton, and introduced him to the bohemian scene in Greenwich Village.

They married in 1945 and moved to a village called Springs just outside East Hampton on Long Island. They were broke, living in an unheated clapboard farmhouse with a view of the Accabonac Creek. In lieu of a car, they rode bicycles through the town and along the beach; cooked, gardened, and pushed themselves to the edge with intense periods of work that spoke to the inevitable collapse of modernism as a rational idea. 

“We didn't talk art – we didn't have that kind of a relationship at all. In fact, we talked art talk only in a shop sense, but never in terms of discussions about art,” Krasner said in 1964. “For one thing, Pollock really felt about it. When he did talk it was extremely pointed and meaningful and I understood what he meant.”

Assuming the mantle of artist as anti-hero amidst the backdrop of postwar America, theirs was an epic chronicle of art, fame, addiction, and tragedy that cast a long shadow over Krasner in both life and death. As his widow, she remained committed to stewarding his legacy, while continuing to pursue her lifelong passion for elegiac painting rife with intimacy and restlessness, intuiting the hypnotic color fields of French painters Henti Matisse and Pierre Bonnard.

Throughout her life Krasner continuously reinvented her aesthetic, which she described as “breaks”, moving from the late 1940s Little Image series to bold, experimental collages in 1955, which renowned art critic Clement Greenberg decreed as one of the most important shows of the decade. In the years following Pollock’s death in 1956, Krasner suffered an aneurysm and resumed working on large color canvases in the late 1960s and ‘70s.

“I seem to go through a cycle of painting and then a change occurs, I'm not really aware at this point whether such a change has taken place,” Krasner said. “I don't feel, for instance, that a painting like this, which is 1960, departs that strongly from what I'm doing now. However, I'd probably be the last one to see it or feel it.”