Lee Krasner life and biography

Lee Krasner, also known as Lena Krassner, Mrs. Jackson Pollock born October 27, 1908 in Brooklyn, New York, United States - died June 19, 1984 in New York, New York, United States was an American artist and painter.

Lee Krasner comments (1983):

It is difficult for me to state the intentions of my painting. Some of my preoccupations are whether a canvas allows me to breathe or not. If it is earthbound, I find it difficult to breathe. I try to merge the organic with the abstract--whether that means male or female, spirit and matter, or the need for a totality rather than a separation are questions which I have not defined as yet.

It was only in the later years of her life that Krasner received the credit she deserves as a first rate, first generation Abstract Expressionist painter. Krasner's pictures from the 1940s are informed by her understanding of the Abstract Expressionist idea: to infuse abstract painterly form with mysterious and significant content. The substantial body of work she created from that period until her death shows her continuous push into finer painterly expression of this idea and her particular abilities to attain freshness and spontaneity with a character and personality that never allow her work to rest on previous accomplishments.

During the 1930s, Krasner was working her way through major modernist painting of the earlier 20th century, especially that of Mondrian, Picasso, and Matisse, and, with their help and her talents as a painter, she was beginning to locate the components for her personal route. Because she lacked money, the paintings Krasner made from 1943 to 1945 were mostly scraped down so that she could reuse the canvas. The first major evidence that Krasner had begun to visually realize her individual statement of Abstract Expressionist aims is in the group of paintings called the Little Image series which began in 1945 and continued until 1950. The densely-painted, light-filled surfaces on these small pictures vibrate with abstract shapes, simultaneously readable as eyes, spirals, calligraphic hieroglyphs, microscopic organisms and/or constellations. These multi-referential signs are arranged in an all-over manner over an underlying grid structure. Krasner had been painting for nearly two decades by this time, and she had reached the point where the painterly process was so well understood that she could work her way intuitively through layers of painted color until she reached the point at which everything seemed right, the signal that the picture was finished.

Krasner worked in cycles. Never content to stick to one series for more than four or five years, she continually sought out new configurations of her vocabulary and syntax, each interconnected with her past works but also building new syntheses for the present. In 1951, pictures became broader and thinner; vertical strips incorporated calligraphic shapes and painterly atmospheres. Between 1953 and 1956, she became discontented with these most recent works, and used all but two of them to make her first series of collages. Krasner used collage at times when she felt the need to revamp and make a move. They signify an experimental attitude which has produced many of Krasner's finest works. For this series, Krasner cut or tore up the works into strips and then arranged and pasted these fragments from her own past. Some of the resulting collages, such as City Verticals (1953), are composed of predominantly vertical motions which appear as if bars are holding from view some cryptic element subsumed beneath the surface. Others, such as Bald Eagle (1955), have clusters of irregular swatches which dance rhythmically across the surface, butting and overlapping while also cohabiting with overpainted areas. Krasner used similar configurations in her two murals for 2 Broadway in Manhattan (1958-59), colorful, light filled mosaics that still grace that area.

The group pictures, which evolved from 1959 until 1963, are closely related to her Little Image series, but are larger and more all-at-once and indicative of Krasner's increased ability to handle monumental scale with freer, more rugged and more rapidly painted gestures. Pictures of this group are well exemplified by the ruggedly painted, swirling patterns of organic shapes in almost monochrome tonalities which characterize The Eye is the First Circle (1960). In a further motioning shift of mood, pictures from the late 1960s and early 1970s evolve Krasner's vocabulary into more monolithic, monumental shapes in more openly expansive atmospheres. Here she used very high-key colors, combining pinks, grass greens and yellows with a more lighthearted quality that loses none of its thrusting, emotive energies.

In 1976, Krasner produced another series of collages, using pieces of charcoal drawings she had made between 1937 and 1941 and subsequently put away. These works are among Krasner's finest, masterful in underlying structure and visually exciting in their mixed charcoal and oil textures and in their variously interacting areas of empty field and fragmented figural imagery. Titles are various tenses and moods of verbs, each suggestive of the state of mind implied in the title. Imperative, for example, is packed full or imagery and sharply edged diagonals, while Present Conditional is more emptied of incident and arranged in a more regularized grid in which blacks, whites and grays are accompanied by a few arcs of ochre.

All of Krasner's pictures are the accumulations of her past experiences and memories, transformed by a painter's intuitions into statements of deeply emotional significance, and her series called Solstice (1980-81) carries yet another move deeper into this realization. These combinations of oil and collage on canvas contain sweeping statements which incorporate elements from each of Krasner's previous series to attain a gestural forcefulness which is very much in the present.

PERSONAL INFORMATION

Born: Lenore Krassner, in Brooklyn, New York, 27 October 1908. Education: Washington Irving High School, New York, 1922-25; Women's Art Schools of Cooper Union, New York, 1926-29; Art Students League, New York, 1928; National Academy of Design, New York, 1929-32; City College and Greenwich House, New York, 1933; studied with Hans Hofmann, New York, 1937-40. Family: Married the artist Jackson Pollock in 1945 (died, 1956). Career: Worked as mural painter for the Public Works of Art Project, New York, 1934; Temporary Emergency Relief Administration, New York, 1934-35; Works Project Administration (W.P.A.) Federal Arts Project, New York, 1934; Federal Arts Project, Mural Division, 1938-42; joined American Abstract Artists (AAA), late 1930s; oversaw Pollock's work, estate after his death; major retrospectives of her work given at Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1965, and Whitney Museum of American Art, 1973-74. Awards: The Augustus St. Gaudens Medal, Cooper Union Alumni Association, New York, 1974; Lowe Fellowship for Distinction, Barnard College, New York, 1974; Outstanding Achievement in the Arts, Women's Caucus for Art, 1980. Agent: Pace Gallery, 32 East 57th Street, New York, New York 10022. Died: New York, 19 June 1984.

WORKS
* Individual Exhibitions
* 1951: Betty Parsons Gallery, New York
* 1954: The House of Books and Music, East Hampton, New York
* 1955: Stable Gallery, New York
* 1958: Martha Jackson Gallery, New York
* 1960: Howard Wise Gallery, New York
* 1961: Sigma Gallery, New York
* 1962: Howard Wise Gallery, New York
* 1965: Paintings, Drawings and Collages, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (retrospective; toured the U.K.)
* 1965: Franklin Siden Gallery, Detroit
* 1967: Paintings, University of Alabama Art Gallery, Tuscaloosa
* 1968: Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, New York
* 1969: Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, New York
* 1969: Reese Palley Gallery, San Francisco
* 1973: Recent Paintings, Marlborough Gallery, New York
* 1973: Large Paintings, Whitney Museum, New York
* 1974: Miami-Dade Community College, Florida (travelled to Beaver College, Glenside, Pennsylvania)
* 1975: Collages and Paintings 1933-1974, Corcoran Museum of Art, Washington, D.C. (toured the United States)
* 1975: Marlborough Gallery, New York
* 1977: Pace Gallery, New York
* 1977: Susanne Hilberry Gallery, Birmingham, Michigan
* 1978: Janie C. Lee Gallery, Houston
* 1979: Paintings 1959-1962, Pace Gallery, New York
* 1980: Tower Gallery, Southhampton, New York
* 1981: Pace Gallery, New York
* 1981: Janie C. Lee Gallery, Houston
* 1982: Robert Miller Gallery, New York
* 1983: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (retrospective; toured the United States)
* 1986: Robert Miller Gallery, New York

* Selected Group Exhibitions
* 1963: Nine Artists through Six Decades, Howard Wise Gallery, New York
* 1974: In den Unzähligen Bildern des Lebens: Surrealität/Bildrealität 1924-1974, Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf (travelled to Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden 1975)
* 1975: Subjects of the Artist: New York Painting 1941-1957, Whitney Museum (Downtown Branch), New York
* 1977: Women Artists: 1550-1950, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, (travelled to the University of Texas at Austin; Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; and the Brooklyn Museum, New York)
* 1978: Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years, Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (travelled to Whitney Museum, New York, and Seibu Museum, Tokyo)
* 1979: American Painting of the 1970s, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York (travelled to Newport Harbor Museum, Newport Beach, California)
* 1979: Around Jackson Pollock, East Hampton, The 1950s, Centre Culturel Americain, Paris
* 1980: 17 Abstract Artists of East Hampton: The Pollock Years 1946-56,Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York (travelled to the Benton Museum of Art, University of Connecticut, Storrs, and the Zabriskie Gallery, New York)
* 1980: The 50s: Aspects of Painting in New York, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.
* 1981: Tracking the Marvelous, Grey Art Gallery, New York University

* Collections
* Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Neuberger Museum, State University of New York at Purchase; Philadelphia Museum of Art.

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