63 Facts About Lee Krasner

Lee Krasner received her early academic training at the Women's Art School of Cooper Union, and the National Academy of Design from 1928 to 1932.

However, Lee Krasner's career was often overshadowed by that of her husband, Jackson Pollock, whom she married in 1945.

The late 1950s to the early 1960s in Lee Krasner's work were characterized by a more expressive and gestural style.

Lee Krasner was born as Lena Krassner on October 27,1908, in Brooklyn, New York.

Lee Krasner was the daughter of Chane and Joseph Krasner, Russian-Jewish immigrants from Spykov.

Lee Krasner's parents were Russian-Jewish immigrants who fled to the United States to escape antisemitism and the Russo-Japanese War, and Chane changed her name to Anna once she arrived.

Lee Krasner was the youngest of six children, and the only one to be born in the United States.

From an early age, Lee Krasner knew she wanted to pursue art as a career.

Lee Krasner's career as an artist began when she was a teenager.

Lee Krasner specifically sought out enrollment at Washington Irving High School for Girls as they offered an art major.

Lee Krasner pursued yet more art education at the National Academy of Design in 1928, completing her course load there in 1932.

When Lee Krasner attended high school, she almost didn't graduate based on her grade in art, which was the subject she attended the school for, and was only given 65 to pass the class.

Lee Krasner became highly skilled in portraying anatomically correct figures.

Lee Krasner submitted it to the National Academy in order to enroll in a certain class, but the judges could not believe that the young artist produced a self-portrait en plein air.

Lee Krasner briefly enrolled in the Art Students League of New York in 1928.

Lee Krasner was influenced by the opening of the Museum of Modern Art in 1929.

Lee Krasner was very affected by Post-Impressionism and grew critical of the academic notions of style she had learned at the National Academy.

Lee Krasner began taking classes from Hans Hofmann in 1937, which modernized her approach to the nude and still life.

Lee Krasner emphasized the two-dimensional nature of the picture plane and usage of color to create spatial illusion that was not representative of reality through his lessons.

Lee Krasner typically created charcoal drawings of the human models and oil on paper color studies of the still life settings.

Lee Krasner typically illustrated female nudes in a cubist manner with tension achieved through the fragmentation of forms and the opposition of light and dark colors.

Lee Krasner supported herself as a waitress during her studies but it eventually became too difficult due to the Great Depression.

Lee Krasner's job was to enlarge other artists' designs for large-scaled public murals.

Murals were created to be easily understood and appreciated by the general public; however, the abstract art Lee Krasner produced did not meet this need.

Lee Krasner continued working for War Services by creating collages for the war effort that were displayed in the windows of nineteen department stores in Brooklyn and Manhattan.

Lee Krasner was intensively involved with the Artists Union during her employment with the WPA but was one of the first to quit when she realized the communists were taking it over.

Lee Krasner met future abstract expressionists Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline, Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, and Bradley Walker Tomlin through this organization.

Lee Krasner is identified as an abstract expressionist due to her abstract, gestural, and expressive works in painting, collage painting, charcoal drawing, and occasionally mosaics.

Lee Krasner commonly revised or completely destroyed an entire series of works due to her critical nature; as a result, her surviving body of work is relatively small.

Lee Krasner was often reluctant to discuss the iconography of her work and instead emphasized the importance of her biography since she claimed her art was formed through her individual personality and her emotional state.

Lee Krasner was highly affected by seeing Pollock's work for the first time in 1942, causing her to reject Hofmann's cubist style which required working from a human or still life model.

Since Lee Krasner used a drip technique, many critics believed upon seeing this work for the first time that she was reinterpreting Pollock's chaotic paint splatters.

Many scholars interpret these images as Lee Krasner's reworking of Hebrew script.

When she completed the Little Image series in 1949, Lee Krasner again went through a critical phase with her work.

Lee Krasner tried out and rejected many new styles and eventually destroyed most of the work she made in the early 1950s.

Between the summer and the fall, Lee Krasner again had shifted her style to color field painting and destroyed the figurative automatic paintings she made.

Lee Krasner explored contrasts of light and dark colors, hard and soft lines, organic and geometric shapes, and structure and improvisation through this work.

Lee Krasner used brighter colors which were more vibrant and commonly contrasted other colors in the composition.

Lee Krasner would dilute paint or use a dry brush to make the colors more transparent.

In 1958, Lee Krasner was commissioned to create two abstract murals for an office building at 2 Broadway in Manhattan.

Lee Krasner was still dealing with the death of Pollock and the recent death of her mother, which led her to use an aggressive style when creating these images.

Lee Krasner continued working in this style until she suffered an aneurysm, fell, and broke her right wrist in 1963.

In 1969, Lee Krasner mostly concentrated on creating works on paper with gouache.

Lee Krasner began working on these after cleaning out her studio and discovered some charcoal drawings mostly of figure studies that she completed from 1937 to 1940.

Since Lee Krasner had learned from Hans Hofmann while Pollock received training from Thomas Hart Benton, each took different approaches to their work.

Lee Krasner learned from Hofmann the importance of the abstracting from nature and emphasizing the flat nature of the canvas while Pollock's training highlighted the importance of complex design from automatic drawing.

Lee Krasner was therefore able to make works that were more organized and cosmopolitan.

Additionally, Lee Krasner was responsible for introducing Pollock to many artists, collectors, and critics who appreciated abstract art such as Willem de Kooning, Peggy Guggenheim, and Clement Greenberg.

Pollock helped Lee Krasner become less restrained when making her work.

Lee Krasner inspired her to stop painting from human and still life models in order to free her interior emotions and become more spontaneous and gestural through her work.

Lee Krasner struggled with the public's reception of her identity, both as a woman and as Pollock's wife.

Lee Krasner takes her husband's paint and enamels and changes his unrestrained, sweeping lines into neat little squares and triangles.

Lee Krasner died on June 19,1984, age 75, at New York Hospital.

Lee Krasner led a successful commercial career and was in charge of her husband's estate, and at the time of her death, her estate was worth over $20 million.

Lee Krasner's papers were donated to the Archives of American Art in 1985; they were digitized and posted on the web for researchers.

Lee Krasner's work was included in the 2021 exhibition Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou.

Lee Krasner was portrayed by Marcia Gay Harden in the film Pollock, which is about the life of her husband Jackson Pollock.

Lee Krasner was intrigued by his work and the fact she did not know who he was even though she knew many abstract painters in New York.

Lee Krasner left in the summertime to visit friends in Europe but had to quickly return when Pollock died in a car crash while she was away.

Lee Krasner was brought up in an orthodox Jewish home throughout her childhood and adolescence.

Lee Krasner's family lived in Brownsville, Brooklyn, which had a large population of poor Jewish immigrants.

Lee Krasner's father spent most of his time practicing Judaism, and her mother kept up the household and the family business.

Lee Krasner appreciated aspects of Judaism like Hebrew script, prayers, and religious stories.