Lee Krasner: The Complete Story
Lee Krasner was a founding force of Abstract Expressionism who spent decades in the shadow of her husband, Jackson Pollock. She was a tougher, more restless painter than that story allows, forever tearing up her own work and rebuilding it into something new.
When grief and insomnia struck, she answered with some of the most powerful canvases of her life.
She is one of the few artists who regularly destroyed her own paintings in order to make better ones.
Born: Brooklyn, New York, 1908
Known for: Abstract Expressionism, fierce reinvention, collage paintings
Died: New York City, 1984
For a proper sit down read
Three that take a single painting apart, properly:
Vermeer, Woman Holding a Balance, what is actually on those scales
Inside Monet house at Giverny, room by room, including his own bedroom
The Ambassadors, detail by detail, the object at the bottom that only works from one side
More than Mrs Pollock
Krasner trained hard and was already a serious abstract painter when she met Pollock. She championed his work, ran their household, and watched the art world treat her as a wife first and an artist second. See what is abstract art.
She never accepted it. Across her career she kept changing style, refusing to settle into one signature look the way the market preferred.
Cutting up her own work
When a painting failed her, Krasner did not hide it. She tore or cut her canvases and drawings into pieces and reassembled them into strong new collages, turning self criticism into a method.
It took nerve to shred finished work, but it freed her. Destruction became a tool, a way to keep moving when a picture would not come right.
Painting through the dark
After Pollock died in a car crash in 1956, Krasner moved into his larger studio and, unable to sleep, painted at night in browns and creams. These Umber or Night Journey paintings are huge, raw and surging. See what is expressionism.
Grief did not silence her. It pushed her into the strongest work of her career, made in the small hours when sleep would not come.
The keeper of two legacies
Krasner also managed Pollock's estate with great care, protecting and placing his work for decades. Some say this generosity slowed recognition of her own.
Recognition came in the end. In 1984 she became one of the very few women of her generation honoured with a full retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
What readers want to know about Lee Krasner
What is Lee Krasner famous for?
Being a founder of Abstract Expressionism and for her fierce, ever changing abstract paintings.
Was she married to Jackson Pollock?
Yes, and she long championed his work while her own was overlooked.
Why did she cut up her paintings?
She reworked failed canvases into new collages, using destruction as a creative tool.
When did she die?
In 1984, in New York, the year of her Museum of Modern Art retrospective.
Why her reputation keeps rising
For years Krasner was a footnote to Pollock. Now major museums build whole shows around her, and her night paintings are seen as some of the finest of the entire movement. The wife in the story turned out to be one of its giants.
One last detail. She signed many early works only L.K., partly so dealers would not dismiss them as a woman's. The initials that once hid her are now a collector's prize.