KRASNER, LEE

KRASNER, LEE (1908–1984), U.S. painter. Born Lena Krassner in Brooklyn, New York, to Orthodox, Russian immigrant parents, early on she studied art at the Women's Art School at Cooper Union (1922–25), Art Students League (1928), and National Academy of Design in New York (1929–32). Beginning in 1935 she worked as a Works Progress Administration artist. Although she designed one mural, for the WNYC radio station building, which was never executed, Krasner did work as an assistant to the muralist Max Spivak. During the 1930s she experimented with various styles and forms, including Social Realism and Giorgio de Chirico's mysterious perspectives. Resuming her art studies in 1937 with the avant-garde, German expatriate Hans Hofmann, Krasner absorbed aspects of Pablo Picasso's Cubism and Henri Matisse's color. She showed her Cubist inspired still-lifes, semi-abstracted from nature, in the annual group exhibitions of the American Abstract Artists from 1940 to 1943. In 1941 Krasner met Jackson Pollock, soon to be recognized as the pioneer abstract expressionist, when the pair were asked to show their work in a group exhibition. She and Pollock married in 1945. Throughout their relationship, Krasner and Pollock engaged in an aesthetic dialogue as Krasner schooled Pollock in European modernism while she adopted Pollock's synthesis of abstraction and automatism. Her Little Image paintings (1946–49) employed and reinterpreted Pollock's allover technique. The Hieroglyphs, one of the three cycles of Little Image paintings, have been interpreted by some scholars as influenced by Hebrew script. Throughout the years Krasner engaged collage techniques, sometimes on a large scale. In Black and White Collage (1953, Hans Namuth Estate, New York), Krasner utilized her own cut up drawings rearranged in the new, abstract work. In the mid-1950s she also cut up several of Pollock's discarded canvases and used them in collages. Her collage paintings first showed at New York's Stable Gallery in 1955 to acclaim. After Pollock's death in a car accident in 1956 Krasner began her Earth Green series (1957–59), a colorful and rhythmic group of images exploring growth and nature; and the gloomier Night Journey series (1959–62; also known as the Umber series), the latter promoted by her turbulent state and also bouts of insomnia. In these paintings she reduced her palette to gradations of blacks, whites, and browns so that the artificial light she was working in would not undermine her color choices. Throughout her career, Krasner continued to reinvent herself and her style. She consistently reacted to the current trends in the art world, absorbing and modifying the work of artists such as morris louis , philip guston , and Frank Stella, much as she had done with Pollock's example. Indeed, in the 1970s Krasner eschewed her spontaneous working method, instead creating hard edge paintings in the vein of Stella. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: B. Rose, Lee Krasner: A Retrospective (1983); R. Hobbs, Lee Krasner (1993); E.G. Landau, Lee Krasner: A Catalogue Raisonné (1995); R. Hobbs, Lee Krasner (1999). (Samantha Baskind (2nd ed.)