Lee Krasner

Biography

In 1976, while clearing out her studio, Lee Krasner found a stack of charcoal life drawings she had made under Hans Hofmann in 1937–1940. She kept a few sheets and cut up the rest, pasting them onto canvases next to bright paint and turning the student figures into curving, almost floral forms. She gave these collages grammatical titles: forms of verb tenses. The exhibition at the Pace Gallery in 1977 was a great success.

She was nearly seventy. It was not the first time she had put old work to new use.

She was born on 27 October 1908 in Brooklyn, the youngest of the six children of Joseph and Chane (in America, Anna) Krasner, Jewish immigrants from the shtetl of Shpykiv in Podolia Governorate; her parents had moved to the United States a few years before she was born. The family lived in Brownsville, spoke Yiddish at home and kept a strictly Orthodox household. Lee loved the Hebrew alphabet and the prayers, but as a teenager she rebelled at the way a prayer had men and women thank God differently for their creation, and she gradually drifted away from religion, though she never stopped calling herself Jewish. She decided early to become an artist: she chose the Washington Irving High School for Girls herself because it offered an art major, then studied on a scholarship at the Women’s Art School of Cooper Union, where she earned a teaching certificate, and in 1928–1932 attended the National Academy of Design. Most of her early work was lost in a fire. A self-portrait of 1930 survives, painted out of doors: the academy did not believe she could have painted herself like that en plein air. The Museum of Modern Art, which opened in 1929, introduced her to Post-Impressionism, and from then on her academic training no longer satisfied her.

During the Great Depression she worked as a waitress, and from 1935 in the mural division of the Federal Art Project, as an assistant to Max Spivak: she enlarged other artists’ designs onto large walls. She dreamed of an abstract mural and made gouache sketches for one; her proposal for a New York radio station was even approved, but then the programme was turned over to the war effort. Krasner then made propaganda collages for the windows of nineteen department stores in Brooklyn and Manhattan. In 1937 she went to study with Hofmann, painting nudes and still lifes in a Cubist manner. Once he praised a canvas of hers by saying that no one would guess it had been painted by a woman. Mondrian advised her never to lose her strong inner rhythm. In 1940 Krasner joined the American Abstract Artists, and through the group she met de Kooning, Gorky, Kline, Gottlieb, Rothko, Newman and Still.

In 1942 she and Jackson Pollock took part in the same exhibition at the McMillen Gallery. Krasner knew many of New York’s abstract painters but had never heard of him, and she went to his place to introduce herself. In the summer of 1945 they were married in a church with two witnesses and moved into a farmhouse in Springs, near East Hampton. Pollock worked in the barn in the yard, she in an upstairs bedroom. The early 1940s had been an agonising time for her: she would rework the same canvases for months until they became almost monochrome, and then destroy them. Of these “grey slabs” a single painting survives. Pollock freed her from working from the model, and she brought him into a circle of artists, critics and collectors, from de Kooning to Peggy Guggenheim and Clement Greenberg.

In the small bedroom at Springs, in 1946–1949, she produced the series “Little Images”, some forty small canvases. Some look like a mosaic of thick paint, others like a web of drips, still others like a grid of signs resembling an unknown script. Krasner later admitted that she had unconsciously worked from right to left, and many scholars see in these signs a reworking of Hebrew script. To my mind, this is her most personal series.

In 1949 “Mr and Mrs Pollock” took part in the exhibition “Artists: Man and Wife” at the Sidney Janis Gallery, and the ARTnews reviewer wrote that the wife was tidying her husband’s sweeping lines into neat little squares and triangles. At that time she signed her works with the initials “L.K.” or hid the signature in the paint. In 1951 Betty Parsons gave her a solo show of colour-field paintings. Onto all but two of these canvases Krasner later pasted cut and torn shapes, and so her collages began: she gave up the easel and worked on the floor. In 1953–1954 she used scraps of unsuccessful works, including canvases with spattered paint that Pollock had discarded. The collages of 1955 were shown at the Stable Gallery; the exhibition drew little public attention, but Greenberg wrote well of it.

In the summer of 1956 Krasner went to Europe to visit friends and came back on hearing of Pollock’s death. The “Earth Green” series, begun while he was still alive, is filled with hybrid, flesh-coloured bodies with blood-red patches. In 1959–1961, suffering from insomnia, she painted at night by artificial light, and her palette came down to white, grey, black and brown: this was the “Umber Series” of huge canvases tacked straight onto the wall. In 1963 she broke her right wrist and began painting with her left hand, squeezing paint directly from the tube. Her first retrospective was held in 1965 in London, at the Whitechapel Gallery.

Lee Krasner died on 19 June 1984 in New York. Six months later the Museum of Modern Art opened a retrospective of her work, and The New York Times called her a major, independent artist of the first generation of Abstract Expressionists. The house in Springs became the Pollock-Krasner House, and under her will the Pollock-Krasner Foundation was set up in 1985 to help working artists in need.