Lee Krasner (1908-1984) was an American artist who was part of the abstract expressionist group. Krasner was also the wife of abstract expressionism's leading light, Jackson Pollock.
Lena Krassner (who changed her name first to Lenore, then to Lee, Krasner) was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Oct. 28, 1908, to a Russian Jewish immigrant family. She studied at Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design (later, National Academy Museum and School for Fine Arts), both in New York City, and found support through the Work Projects Administration's Federal Art Project for much of her early career. From 1937 to 1940 she furthered her studies under Hans Hoffman, the important German artist who was instrumental in introducing European modernist concepts to an entire generation of American artists
Krasner and Pollock became acquainted in 1941, when their works were exhibited together in a group show. They soon became close, married four years later, and moved to the Springs, on the eastern end of Long Island, N.Y. Pollock was a brooding, unpredictable, and violence-prone alcoholic, and although Krasner did much to keep her husband's career on track, their relationship was a stormy one. In 1956, with their marriage finally in shambles, Krasner took a much-needed break and made her first trip to Europe. While staying at the Paris studio of fellow New York artist Paul Jenkins, she received the fateful telephone call from Clement Greenberg, the influential art critic and friend of the couple, informing her that Pollock had been killed in an automobile accident. After his death she continued to be devoted to his work and his memory, assiduously promoting his legacy for the rest of her life.
During their years together, Krasner was largely overshadowed, personally and artistically, by her more famous husband, who was widely recognized by the late 1940s as the great genius of American painting. Nevertheless, her work developed independently, and during the late 1940s and 1950s she produced important paintings, in spite of a lack of serious support from her husband and his circle. Krasner's early works were inspired primarily by cubism and fauvism, but by the late 1940s her combination of cubist principles with the painterly methods of abstract expressionism produced striking allover abstractions, such as Untitled (1949; Museum of Modern Art, New York City) and Abstract No. 2 (1946-1948; Instituto Valencia de Arte Moderno, Centro Julio Gonzales, Valencia, Spain), that were quite advanced, even by the standard of New York's avant-garde. Unlike Pollock's work, however, her paintings always retained a distinct underlying organizational structure. In the large paintings and collages of her later years, among them Gothic Landscape (1961; Tate Gallery, London) and Gaea (1966; Museum of Modern Art, New York City), this structure became ever more apparent, and the early influences of cubism and fauvism, notably the work of Henri Matisse, returned to a more prominent position in her vocabulary.
It was only in the later 1950s that her paintings began to draw serious attention, but by the mid-1960s she was firmly recognized as a great contemporary master in her own right. London's Whitechapel Gallery presented a retrospective of her work in 1965, and the Whitney Museum of American Art presented a solo show in New York in 1973. Her first full retrospective in the United States was under way at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, at the time of her death, in New York City, on June 19, 1984. The retrospective made several stops before appearing at New York's Museum of Modern Art late in 1984.
Beyond her own work, Krasner's other great legacy is the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Inc., which dispenses grants to working artists. Awarded on the basis of artistic merit and financial need, these subsidies provide significant nourishment to new generations of artists. The artists' Long Island home is now open to the public as the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center. In addition to offering tours of the residence and studio, the center maintains research facilities to promote scholarship in the field of 20th-century American art.