Lee Krasner

Basic Information
1. Lee Krasner was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1908 to two Jewish immigrants from Shpykiv in modern-day Ukraine. She was also married to Jackson Pollock, another abstract artist.
Art Career
1. After graduating high school, Krasner studied at the Women’s Art School of Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design. Her education at these technical schools gave her a strong knowledge of artistic fundamentals like human anatomy.
  1. She also studied at the Art Students League of New York where she gained even more expertise on the human form by taking a class from George Bridgman.
    1. Upon the opening of the Museum of Modern Art in 1929, Krasner grew critical of the traditional academic art styles she had learned in her art studies. She began to pursue the principles of modern art, especially interested in post-impressionism.
      1. Her early career did not allow her to pursue this art. During the Great Depression she worked in the mural division of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) as an assistant to Max Spivak.
        In this division, she would simply scale up work of other artists to public mural size. She disliked the figurative approach of other artists and would make abstract sketches in the hopes she could one day make an abstract mural.
        One of her murals was approved just as the WPA refocused their public art efforts onto war propaganda, so Krasner now worked making war propaganda collages. During this time she also participated in the Artists Union.
2. In 1937, she began studying under Hans Hofmann. Her classes with Hofmann modernized her approach to art and led her to begin to work in the style of neo-cubism in her still lifes and nudes.
  1. In 1940 she joined the American Abstract Artists, an organization which included Willem de Kooning and Barnett Newman. At this time she worked in a unique highly gestural and gridded cubist style.
    1. For many of her paintings, she would work on a single piece for months, slowly building up thick layers of impasto then scraping off layers and putting on more pigments. This slow process of painting would eventually leave her paintings in a monochromatic color palette from the extreme amount of mixing between layers.
      1. An example reflective of this art style is Seated Nude (1940). This piece is charcoal on paper, so it is not an example of her highly impastoed work. However, it does reflect her highly gestured and gridded monochromatic cubist style.
        This piece also reflects Hofmann’s influence on her art style as it is representational and was created using a live model. This piece shows Krasner’s experimentation with the abstraction of real life objects and people.
3. In 1942, Krasner saw Jackson Pollock’s work for the first time and was highly influenced by it. This led her to reject the neo-cubist style she had learned from Hofmann which would lead to her Little Images series. She referred to her cubist pieces from this time as her “grey slab paintings” and she destroyed most of her work from this time period.
  1. From 1946 to 1949, Krasner mostly worked on her Little Images series. These paintings were small, likely because they were made in her small studio apartment.
    1. These paintings were created without real-life models as a rejection of Hofmann’s staunch adherence to the use of still life or nude models. Within this series, there were three main types of images (not mutually- exclusive): mosaics, drip paintings, and hieroglyphic works. All of these paintings were allover paintings, meaning they utilized the entire canvas.
      1. Her mosaics were created with a thick build of paint, similar to her heavily impastoed monochromatic neo-cubist works. Her drip paintings were created by dripping paint from a brush onto a painting laying on the floor, a technique which critics assumed she had adapted from her husband Jackson Pollock whom she had married in 1945.
        This drip technique created highly gestural webbed patterns as in her piece Shattered Color (1947). The webbed patterns in this piece were created with a much thicker layer of oil paint than in Pollock pieces during this period, giving it a unique texture.
        This piece and similar pieces use the entire canvas in a way that suggests the canvas is an arbitrary border and continues beyond the confines of the canvas. This painting is also completely abstract.
        The final type of painting in Krasner’s Little Images series were her gridded hieroglyphic paintings. These paintings are gridded and contain what appears to be a personal script created by Krasner. This script is written right-to-left and many believe it is a reworking of the Hebrew script.
        In the 1950s Krasner shifted her focus to automatic paintings, which she quickly destroyed due to her critical nature. She then switched her focus to color field paintings which she then quickly began to cut up in order to use them in her collages. Due to Krasner’s critical nature and her tendency to use previous paintings in her collages, there is not a lot of surviving work of hers, especially from the 1940s and 1950s.
4. In 1962, Krasner began to experiment with bright colors and plant-inspired imagery. After breaking her dominant arm, she began to apply paint directly onto the canvas with a tube because it required less dexterity. This style left large areas of white space on the canvas.
  1. After healing from her broken arm, Krasner would continue to work with bright colors, but with a more patterned and calligraphic style as in her piece Towards One.
    1. This painting utilizes bright, acidic (but nature-inspired) colors in large continuous gestural brush strokes. Similar to the pieces in her Little Images series, this piece is an allover painting. This piece is oil on canvas with thick layers of paint as in many of Krasner’s works.
      1. The image is completely abstract, has no depth or space, and all of the action takes place on the picture plane. It was at this time that Krasner’s role within the art world was reevaluated by critics.
        Most had assumed she simply supported Pollock in her art, but that she ultimately had little influence. Due to her critical nature, many even assumed that she did not make art at all through the 1940s and 1950s after marrying Pollock. This opinion was changed to reflect the more recent idea that she had a large influence on the New York School and on Pollock and Clement Greenberg.
        In her late career, Krasner became influenced by postmodern art, seeking to explore the inherent issues within art and communication. In this period she continued to make collages with her previous work. Many of these she would cut out into natural shapes, such as floral or leaf shapes.
        Because many of her previous works are taken out of context in these collages, she creates a retrospective juxtaposition of her many different styles in these works, so many consider these works a statement on the need for an artist to continually adapt their style as they get older.
Art Style
1. Lee Krasner was an abstract expressionist painter and she also had a strong background in collage. Her art style defies any simple definition. She would often flip-flop between seemingly opposing styles, from charcoal monochromatic cubist styles to colorful action paintings.
  1. For the purposes of the competition, the three of Krasner’s art styles which matter are: her early cubist- inspired work, her non-objective work, and her works with a lack of depth or space.These categories are not mutually-exclusive (i.e. some pieces may be in multiple categories).
    1. An example of one of her later works is Rising Green (1972) (pictured right). This piece includes Krasner’s repeating use of nature-based imagery, including a flower-like shape and many leaf-like shapes.
      1. Rising Green is an allover painting despite many areas of the painting remaining blank. This painting uses similar acidic but nature-inspired colors of her previous works (though less acidic in this case), as in Towards One.
        This piece also contains no depth or space and all of the action is on the picture plane.

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Lee Krasner

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