Borëd Artist Spotlight | Lee Krasner
- Bored B.B
- Nov 10, 2021
- 3 min read
Lee Krasner’s career was often overshadowed by her role as supportive wife to Jackson Pollock. However, she deserves to be recognized as the trailblazing abstract expressionist that she was. The American artist painted with “controlled chaos,” resulting in works that can be characterized by her gestural style, innovative use of color, texture, and depiction.
Lee was a Scorpio born on October 27, 1908 in Brooklyn, New York, to a Russian Orthodox Jewish family. Krasner was the first in her family to be born in the United States, just nine months after her parents and older siblings emigrated due to growing anti-Semitic sentiment in Russia.
During high school, Krasner abandoned her given name "Lena" and took on the name "Lenore," inspired by the Edgar Allen Poe character.After graduation, Krasner attended the Cooper Union. She was very popular (though not necessarily academically successful) and was elected to various school offices. At Cooper Union, she changed her name once again, this time to Lee: an Americanized (and, notably, androgynous) version of her given Russian name.
In the late 1930s, Krasner took classes led by the expressionist painter and famed pedagogue Hans Hofmann. She was also an active member the Artists Union and American Abstract Artists, and her commitment to such activism continued throughout her life. In 1936, at an Artist Union dance, Krasner met Jackson Pollock, whom she would meet again several years later when they both exhibited their work in the same group exhibition. In 1942, the couple moved in together.
Krasner married the gifted, but troubled painter Jackson Pollock in 1945. Long overshadowed by Pollock, Krasner was actually an established abstract artist well before she met him. Fully engaged in the New York art scene of the ’30s and ’40s, she introduced Pollock to the artist Willem de Kooning and critic Clement Greenberg, among other key figures. In 1949 (the year he and Krasner married), Pollock was featured in Life Magazine under the title, “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?”
During her time with Pollock at their home near Springs, Long Island, Krasner developed her Little Image paintings. Thickly painted with abstract symbols, these works are today considered among her most significant contributions to Abstract Expressionism. Krasner used an upstairs bedroom as her studio while Pollock worked in the barn. Both were known to work furiously, and would (when invited) visit each other's studios for advice and critique.
In 1956, their marriage ended with a tragic story. Krasner was away in Europe, and Pollock was driving under the influence of alcohol with his mistress and another passenger. Pollock crashed his car, killing himself and the other passenger (though sparing the life of his mistress). Krasner was bereft at losing her husband, and ultimately channeled this emotion into her work.
In 1965, she had her first solo exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery in London, and in 1975, at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She experienced a surge of interest in her work in the 1970s, as the feminist movement was eager to reclaim art history’s lost women. She died at age 75 in 1984, just a few months before her retrospective opened at the Museum of Modern Art Her legacy lives on at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center at Stony Brook University.
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