Hans Hofmann's highest praise for Lee Krasner was a backhanded insult
When her notoriously harsh teacher finally praised a Lee Krasner canvas, he said nobody would guess a woman had painted it. Krasner spent decades in the shadow of her husband Jackson Pollock, yet critic Robert Hughes later hailed her as the Mother Courage of Abstract Expressionism, and MoMA gave her a posthumous retrospective.
She was born Lena Krassner in Brooklyn on October 27, 1908, the youngest of six children of Jewish immigrants from the Ukrainian village of Spykov who had fled antisemitism and the Russo-Japanese War. She was the only one of the siblings born in America. Determined early on to be an artist, she chose Washington Irving High School for Girls for its art major, and nearly failed the very subject she came for, scraping through with a 65.
A scholarship took her to the Women's Art School of Cooper Union, and from 1928 to 1932 she studied at the National Academy of Design. A fire destroyed most of her early output, but a defiant 1930 self-portrait survives at the Jewish Museum in New York; the Academy's judges doubted she had really painted it outdoors. MoMA's opening in 1929 exposed her to Post-Impressionism and made her impatient with academic rules. From 1937 she studied with Hofmann, who taught her to treat the picture plane as flat and use colour to build space, and she worked in a neo-cubist manner. Piet Mondrian told her she had a strong inner rhythm she must never lose.
The Depression ended her waitressing income, so in 1935 she joined the Federal Art Project's mural division, enlarging other painters' designs. When the programme turned to war propaganda she made collages displayed in nineteen department store windows. Through the American Abstract Artists, which she joined in 1940, she came to know Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and others of the coming New York School.
She married Pollock in 1945, a union strained by his drinking and affairs. His death in a drunk-driving crash in 1956 left her executor of his estate. Her work grew more gestural into the early 1960s, and late in life she turned to wide canvases of hard edges and bright clashing colour. She died on June 19, 1984. The Pollock-Krasner Foundation now funds new artists and scholarship.
Source: Lee Krasner
