Lee Krasner was born on October 27, 1908, in Brooklyn, New York. She was an American painter recognized for her unique contribution to Abstract Expressionism.
Krasner was the sixth of seven children of Jewish emigrants from Odessa, Russia (now Ukraine). When she was 13 she decided to become an artist and was admitted on her second application to Washington Irving High School, the only public high school in New York City at that time that offered women professional art training. After graduation she studied first at the Women’s Art School of Cooper Union and then, in her early 20s, at the National Academy of Design, both in New York.
The New Deal’s Federal Art Project enabled Krasner to work full-time as an artist from 1934 to 1943. During that time she studied with the hugely influential German painter Hans Hofmann, who exposed her to Pablo Picasso’s use of form in Synthetic Cubism as well as Henri Matisse’s use of color and outline. Synthesizing these European influences, Krasner developed her own style of geometric abstraction, which she grounded in floral motifs and rhythmic gesture. In 1940 she began exhibiting her work with that of other American abstract artists. Her forceful personality and passion for painting soon brought her to the center of the New York art world, a largely male arena that was in the midst of a period of intense ideological ferment.
In 1942 Krasner met the painter Jackson Pollock, whose work was being exhibited along with hers at an important show in a New York gallery. She was struck by the power of his work, and the two artists became friends. After their 1945 marriage the couple moved to a farm in East Hampton, New York, where they were to produce a large body of work. Each artist influenced the other to some extent. In 1946 she began her Little Image paintings, a tightly focused series of works in which her use of dots and drips of paint were inspired by Pollock’s “drip paintings” of the period. In these and her collages of the early 1950s, Krasner often worked on a small scale, which separated her work from that of the other Abstract Expressionists. Her work was also unique in terms of her commitment (in varying degrees) to maintaining some figuration—usually patterns from nature and sometimes calligraphic elements such as Hebrew letters—and a cerebral sense of control, in contrast to the less-controlled automatism being practiced by her contemporaries. In the years after Pollock’s death in an automobile accident in 1956, however, she created a series of enormous paintings filled with thick, expressive strokes of umbre paint that abandoned figuration and instead presented raw energy, perhaps in an attempt to express her overwhelming sense of grief. In the 1960s and ’70s, Krasner continued her trademark explorations of color and graceful, rhythmic form in paintings and collages, building upon the passion of her large-scale abstraction but also returning to her love of hard-edged figurative elements and a certain amount of cerebral control.
For the first 25 years after Pollock’s death, Krasner’s reputation was eclipsed by his, partly because of her tireless advocacy of his work during his life and after his death. This perception changed when a 1981 show in New York, “Krasner/Pollock: A Working Relationship,” helped demonstrate that she was both his artistic partner and a significant artist in her own right. A major retrospective of her work held at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1983 further solidified her reputation. Her work is included in the collections of the world’s major museums, and a major touring retrospective ended January 2001 at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Krasner passed away on June 19, 1984, in New York City.