Lee Krasner was an American abstract painter, born in Brooklyn in 1908 and dead in New York in 1984. She was painting abstractly before she met Jackson Pollock in 1942, and she married him in 1945. For decades the histories filed her as his wife. Today she is ranked as a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism, a painter who cut up her own canvases and made her darkest paintings at night.
Her husband is the name most people already know. Hers took a lot longer to reach the museum walls.
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Her teacher Hans Hofmann once looked at one of her canvases and paid her what he thought was the highest compliment he had. "This is so good, you would never know it was done by a woman." Krasner said later that it was the first praise he had ever given her as an artist.
She did not take it as a verdict. She kept painting, and in 1956, when Pollock died in a car crash while she was in Europe, she came home and took over his barn as her own studio.
Six months after her death in 1984, the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened a retrospective of her work. Between Hofmann's sentence and that exhibition lay a career that history kept filing under someone else's name.
What You'll Discover
Who she was before Pollock.
What she painted in the bedroom.
How she used scissors on her canvases.
What she painted at night.