A Retrospective on Lee Krasner
A look into one of my favorite American Abstract Artist, Lee Krasner.
Lee Krasner is one of the highly regarded artists and one of the most important of the first generation of New York School Abstract Expressionists. Independent and committed to being an artist from a very early age. She became an artist in her twenties. It is during the period when it was not easy to be a committed artist for economic reasons. She was working in a man’s world. She was born into a first-generation Jewish-Russian family. She and her family came from Ukraine. However, they lived in Brooklyn, New York, in a community of poor families. She moved away from her faith. However, a lot of art historians think that she reacted to the different aspects of her Orthodox Judaism faith. She worked for the Work Progress Administration. A government entity that was set up during the Great Depression. Employed members of the arts community on public works, public art projects, painting murals in airports, post offices, and other city buildings. She was a part of a group that allowed for artists not to starve. From 1931-1932, she made her way to New York and lived her early career there in great poverty. These Abstract Artists sacrificed everything and lived in difficult and humble conditions. Krasner was born Lena Krasner. Outside of her family, she was known as Lenore or Lenora. She's also known for being the wife of Jackson Pollock. Krasner and Pollock met in 1942.
Their relationship was extraordinarily collaborative. Krasner and Pollock married in 1945. Pollock died in 1956. She was an early practitioner of the all-over surface. There isn't a focal point in her works; that the eye moves across the surface but doesn't land anywhere. She was painting non-objectively; there wasn't an object that she was trying to render that one could see in the physical world. She was a gesture painter, first small gestures. After Pollock died in 1956, her work became larger and her gestures became larger. She now fits in with those general characteristics, the larger scale and the drama of painting in her later career. She was a first-class premier collage maker. We see her recycling and synthesizing her work and sometimes the work of Jackson Pollock. The scale change of her work and her collaging started towards the end of her relationship with Jackson Pollock.
When she made her way into her artistic career, she changed her first name to Lee because it was not gendered specific. She signed her work “L.K.” This is because she didn't want people to know that she was a woman. She felt like her work would be considered more seriously if people did not think of her as a woman artist. Krasner took lessons from the German artist Hans Hofmann. Hans Hofmann came from Paris, where he spent a lot of time before World War Two. Hoffman knew Baroque, Picasso, and some of the major artistic characters of the early modern period. Hoffman came to the United States and settled in New York City to open up a school. Artists mainly came to listen to his lectures. Once a week, Hoffman would critique their works. Lee Krasner was one of Hoffman’s best pupils. He taught with a cubist persuasion, and non-objectively.
Hoffman stated, “Lee Krasner’s work is so good you'd hardly know it was made by a woman…”
These reactions are why Lee Krasner felt like being a woman was a disadvantage in the art world. Krasner painted from a model once Hoffman set up a modeling class. These are very abstracted figural paintings. Pollack encouraged her to paint from her interior life. Krasner went from a cubist approach to the abstracted figure to the little image series.
Krasner and Pollock started living together in late 1942 to early 1943. Lee Krasner started devoting herself to promoting Jackson Pollock. At the same time, she recognized that he was an alcoholic who had periods of clarity when he painted and then times when he was not able to paint. Krasner was forced into helping Pollock sell his works so that they could live. In 1945, Krasner and Pollock married. Krasner decided that the best thing for Pollock would be for them to move out of New York City to a remote area of Long Island, the Hamptons. Pollock started making larger paintings. Krasner’s space was smaller, and so she made her first important series called Little Images. Little Image Series is considered Krasner’s breakthrough series. She made those images in a restricted bedroom space. These images now are highly regarded. They're all small. They’re all over the surface. They're non-objective. Sometimes we can interpret them as an ancient script or hieroglyphic. Historians think that Krasner's father's practice of orthodoxy would have exposed her to a lot of Hebrew scripts. She admitted that might have been buried in her subconscious, although in her adult life, she chose not to practice Judaism. It was after Pollack’s death that Krasner was taken seriously as an artist by art critics. The circle of Abstract Expressionists acknowledged the greatness of Lee Krasner. Krasner was one of those important links that helped Pollock and others make the move from European-inspired Cubist Abstraction to larger, scaled, more robust characteristically American non-objective art. Krasner was highly self-critical. Many of her works were destroyed by herself. She felt like they weren't what she wanted them to be. By the end of her life, there are about 600 of her works were saved, but a lot of her work was destroyed.
Krasner first started making collages from 1951 to 1955. These are the years when Pollock was being acknowledged as the greatest living painter in the United States, and his alcoholism was troubling to Krasner. Their relationship towards 1955 was disintegrating.
She was destroying a lot of her work at this time and Pollock was destroying his work at the same time. She began to collage by Krasner collecting both she and Pollock’s work and sometimes combining those work. Imperative is a collage from Krasner’s later series. From 1976. She's including the work of Pollock that was saved from his destroyed canvases after his death. Her cuts are sharp and they have a cubist precision to them. There is a meaningful gesture behind this work. To destroy work, to combine her work and Pollock's, and in some way to come to terms with her history with Pollock. They both are genius and bold forays into non-objective art. In her way, she synthesizes their two styles.