Early Life Abstract artist and collage artist Lee. Krasner was born on October 27, 1908 in Brooklyn, New York as Lena. Krasner (within the family she was known as Lenore. Krasner ) to Russian Jewish immigrants from Bessarabia.
Krasner studied at the Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design and worked from 1935 to 1943 on the WPA Federal Art Project. She has also been an active member of the Union of Artists and American Abstract Artists…. Long overshadowed by Pollock, Krasner was actually an accomplished abstract painter long before she met him.
Beginning in 1937, he took lessons from Hans Hoffmann who taught Cubism principles, and his influence helped to steer Krasner’s work towards the Neo-Cubist abstraction and began exhibiting his work with a group of American abstract artists in 1940.
Krasner often cut out his drawings and paintings to create collages, sometimes re-revising or deleting an entire series. As participant, he usually displayed a black cloisonné style cubist still life heavily mixed and gestured.
Krasner took Pollock’s artistic achievements in terms of size, overarching composition, method of gestures and interaction with Jungian psychology which emphasizes the importance of the individual psyche and the personal pursuit of integrity in the 1960s paintings. His more than 50 years of work involve constant and hectic rethinking, including portraits, cubist specializing.
Lee Krasner, a pioneer in Abstract Expressionism, was also one of Jackson Pollock’s major crusades. The first generation of Abstract Expressionist painters of the second half of the 20th century, Lee Krasner continue to explore new approaches to painting and collage for six decades, which radically influenced his mature and abstract style.
Working in his upstairs bedroom study Krasner began his groundbreaking series of Small Images – his canvases are small enough to fit on a nightstand – and made mosaic countertops. He imagined the dense compositions of his Small Images as illegible hieroglyphs of paint, sometimes directed straight from a tube.
A New York Times review noted that she “clearly defines Krasner’s place in the New York School” and that “she is a leading and independent artist of the groundbreaking generation of Abstract Expressionism whose gripping work is at the top of the line. Here in the latter half of the century.” Her articles were submitted to the Archives of American Art in 1985, digitalized and published online for researchers.
Krasner is also one of the few artists to have a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Krasner will have the first retrospective exhibition of this magnitude in Europe since the 1960s, particularly American Abstract Expressionism in a more general sense. The new study is published by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in New York and provides insight into the evolution of Krasner’s work and her relationship with her husband Jackson Pollock, “taking her out of Pollock’s shadow forever,” according to the foundation
For the first 25 years after Pollock’s death, Krasner’s reputation overshadowed his own, in part because of his relentless defense of his work throughout his life and after his death. A major retrospective of his work in 1983 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas and the Museum of Modern Art in New York strengthened his reputation and is included in the collections of the world’s leading museums and a major traveling retrospective at Brooklyn Museum in January 2001.
While researching the Gettys archival collections of Irving Sandler, the American art historian who coined the phrase New York School ” to describe Abstract Expressionist artists, I came across his typed notes of thirteen questions about Pollock to ask Krasner – none of them touched on the possible role they could play in his creative life – one particular dilemma was how Pollock should have carved some of the teardrop-shaped paintings he created in his Springs studio into huge strips of unprepared canvas.
I’m looking for traces of his extraordinary and immensely talented wife Lee Krasner, who will release a large retrospective of her work at London’s Barbican Art Gallery later this month.
