Lee Krasner — LLMpedia

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Lee Krasner was an American painter whose career spanned the interwar period through the postwar era, aligning her with Abstract Expressionism, Modernism, and the mid-20th-century New York art scene. A central figure in the New York School, she acted as both practitioner and organizer, engaging with contemporaries across Greenwich Village, SoHo, and institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Krasner’s work evolved through collage, biomorphic abstraction, and gestural canvases, intersecting with exhibitions at the Tate Modern, Guggenheim Museum, and regional centers including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Early life and education

Born in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrant parents from Ukraine and Bessarabia, Krasner attended the Leonard Street School and later the High School of Commerce (Brooklyn). She studied at the Vassar College equivalent preparatory environment before enrolling at the Wadleigh High School for Girls and then the National Academy of Design, where she learned techniques associated with the Beaux-Arts tradition and studied under instructors connected to the Art Students League of New York. Krasner supplemented academic training at the Greenwich Village Art School and received exposure to European currents through reproductions of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Paul Cézanne in collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Krasner began exhibiting in the 1930s with groups tied to the Works Progress Administration and the Federal Art Project, showing alongside artists linked to the Whitney Annual and the American Contemporary Artists. She entered the orbit of the New York School and associated with figures from The Club (New York City) including Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Franz Kline. During the 1940s and 1950s she navigated gallery spaces such as the Samuel M. Kootz Gallery and the Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century Gallery, participating in exhibitions curated by personnel from the Museum of Modern Art and critics from the New York Times and Artforum. Her role at the Pollock-Krasner Foundation later institutionalized her influence, while retrospectives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Tate Gallery cemented her career in museum narratives.

Krasner’s early cityscapes and figurative compositions gave way to the “Little Images” period influenced by motifs found in Surrealism and the work of André Breton and Max Ernst. The 1940s introduced collage experiments and the “Umber Series,” reflecting technical shifts echoing Arshile Gorky and Joan Miró. The 1950s and 1960s yielded large-scale gestural canvases bearing kinship to works by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Robert Motherwell, while later pieces from the 1970s employed hard-edge geometries that paralleled trends seen at the Whitney Biennial and in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Notable exhibitions featured alongside artists such as Jean Dubuffet, Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Bontecou, Agnes Martin, and Cy Twombly. Her signature works appeared in catalogues produced by curators from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Krasner’s personal life intersected with major figures: she studied with and befriended Hans Hofmann, collaborated with members of the American Abstract Artists group, and formed long-term associations with Clement Greenberg and Arnold Glimcher. Her marriage linked her to Jackson Pollock, with whom she shared a household in East Hampton, New York and a creative rapport highlighted by friends such as Gustav Obregon and visitors from Greenwich Village salons. Social networks included fellow artists Alfredo Boulton, Peggy Guggenheim, Dore Ashton, and collectors like Peggy Anderson and Samuel Kootz. Krasner engaged with universities such as Columbia University and institutions like the Women's Caucus for Art through lectures and panel discussions.

Critical response to Krasner shifted from marginalization in mid-century reviews in outlets like the New York Post to acclaim in later scholarship by critics associated with the New Yorker, Art in America, and curators from the Tate Modern. Posthumous reassessments situate her work alongside Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Jasper Johns in narratives of Abstract Expressionism and Postwar art. The establishment of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and major retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art influenced collectors, galleries such as Gagosian Gallery and Pace Gallery, and academic studies at institutions including Yale University, University of Oxford, Harvard University, and Courtauld Institute of Art. Krasner’s paintings remain part of permanent collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Tate Modern, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, shaping discussions in museum exhibitions, auction records at Sotheby's, and scholarship published by presses associated with Princeton University and University of California Press.

Category:American painters Category:Abstract Expressionist artists Category:20th-century American women artists