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[[inset photo of Lee Krasner]]

While still at Cooper Union she attended classes in 1928 at the Art Students League, studying life drawing with George Bridgman.

From 1929 to 1932 Miss Krasner studied at the National Academy of Design, where her teachers included Sidney Dickenson and Leon Kroll.  To advance from antique to life classes at the academy she had to submit an oil painting to a jury.  A 1930 self-portrait with trees in the background, which she painted outdoors, earned her only a promotion on probation, but her picture holds interesting promises fulfilled in her later work.  With several other students from the academy she went to the Museum of Modern Art to see an exhibition of contemporary French painting.  "I flipped my lid," she has related, as quoted in Newsday (November 12, 1973).  "When we came back to the academy. . . , we staged a revolution.  We pulled the model stand away from the wall to the center of the room to free it from the eternal red and green background, and irritated the teachers.

To help meet expenses as an art student, Miss Krasner waited on tables in Greenwich Village restaurants.  During 1933, while considering the possibility of becoming an art teacher, she took courses at City College of New York.  She was employed for a few months early the following year as an artist of the Depression-spawned New Deal art programs. From mid-1935 to 1943 she worked intermittently for the federal Work Projects Administration.  As assistant to the muralist Max Spivak in the project's mural division, she was associated with Harold Rosenberg, who became a prominent art critic.

Many WPA artists were regionalists or social realists or leftists reflecting their political tenets in their style.  Discussing her alienation from a group whose work she considered banal and provincial, she commented in an interview with Bruce Glaser for Arts Magazine (April 1967), "Painting is not to be confused with illustration."  In the development of her own style, she was profoundly affected by Matisse, Picasso, Mondrian, and other European painters.  Her preferences, especially for Matisse, were reinforced by her study from 1937 to 1949 with Hans Hofmann, who, on his way to abstract expressionism, synthesized cubist structure with the exuberant colors of the French moderns.

In June 1940 Lee Krasner exhibited her paintings for the first time with the avant-garde American Abstract Artists in its fourth annual show in New York.  At the invitation of the painter John Graham she took part in January 1942 in an exhibition of American and French paintings organized by him at the McMillan Gallery.  Among the French painters represented were Picasso, Matisse, and Bonnard.  Some of the Americans participating were WPA painters, such as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.  Miss Krasner, as she later realized, had met Pollock a few years earlier, in 1936, at a party given by the Artists Union, an organization set up to protect the rights of WPA artists.  She had apparently been unimpressed, however, by the meeting and knew nothing about his work until just before the 1942 show when she went eagerly to his studio to satisfy her curiosity about the type of pictures that would be shown with hers.  "I was totally bowled over by what I saw," she told John Green (Close-up, 1967).  "One work——the painting he later titled 'Magic Mirror'——just about stunned me.  We talked about his painting and the others. . . . We met again, and a courting period began."

Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock were married on October 25, 1945 and the following month left the city for The Springs, a community in East Hampton, Long Island, where they settled in an old $5,000 farmhouse.  Largely because of Pollock's severe drinking problem, which he was able to control with only sporadic success, the marriage was a difficult one, but it lasted until his death in an automobile accident in August 1956.  During those eleven years they had much enthusiasm and respect for each other's painting.  They customarily visited one another's studio by invitation.  Lee Krasner worked in an upstairs room of the farmhouse and Pollock used a barn near the house as his studio.  According to Lee Krasner, there was no rivalry between them.  One of the ways in which Pollock encouraged his wife was to help arrange for her first solo show, held at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York in the fall of 1951.

For Lee Krasner, the marriage meant the eclipse of her career by Pollock's.  Both painters, however, made important contributions to the New York School of abstract expressionism.  After she had absorbed or discarded various elements of surrealism and cubism and other outside influences, Miss Krasner went through a period of intense introspection and stylistic groping from which she emerged in 1946 with the first of her series of Little Images paintings.  From that year through 1949 she produced thirty-five or more small, exquisite canvases pulsating with an assortment of tiny, crowded images.

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Many of the Little Image paintings are untitled; among those to which Lee Krasner gave titles are Noon (1947), Shell Flower (1947), White Squares (1948), Continuum (1949), and Night Light (1949).  Although the paintings fall into three general groups, they all share certain characteristics, including, as Cindy Nemser described them in Artforum (December 1973), "an unceasing flow of movement sustained by a non-hierarchical organization of line, shape, and color."  She went on to point out, "All these works manifest an intensely personal, highly distinctive kind of handwriting, 'a calligraphy of the soul.'"

While working on the Little Image paintings in East Hampton, in 1946-47 Miss Krasner used broken glass, tesserae, coins, and other flat objects to make for her new home a mosaic tabletop that was related in motif to her current paintings.  Besides several other small mosaics, she designed two mosaic glass murals, one of which is eighty-six feet long, for the Uris Building in Manhattan.  Completed in 1959, the mosaics were designed from collages in collaboration with Ronald Stein, her nephew.

After her 1951 show Lee Krasner cut up some of the paintings exhibited at the Parson gallery to work on a new series of pictures, this time of collage-paintings made in part from fragments of canvas and paper.  Black and White (1953), Forest No. 1 (1954), Bald Eagle (1955), and Porcelain (1955) belong to that series.  Some of the collages were shown at a solo exhibition at Eleanor Ward's Stable Gallery in the fall of 1955.

At her next one-man exhibition, in March 1958 in New York at the Martha Jackson Gallery, Lee Krasner showed seventeen canvases that she had painted during the year and a half since the death of Pollock.  Larger on the average than the collages, just as the collages had for the most part exceeded the Little Image pictures in size, the new paintings also followed a tendency toward freer, more aggressive gesture in sweeping forms and whirling shapes, an opening out of images.  To Emily Genauer, then of the New York Herald Tribune (March 2, 1958), the principal mood of the series was "evolution, that of masses burgeoning with growth, within the canvas."  Miss Genauer saw in the painter's light but virile color a "concern with the feeling of flowers as much as with the spirit of fish-laden streams, and the transmutation of the seasons."  The critic for Time (March 17, 1958), however, remarked on "somber blacks and greys on white, shades of fuchsia and ochre in thinly applied paint," and suggested that the abstract designs "mostly seem to express death-haunted themes."  One of them, entitled Birth, struck "a lonely note of hope."

The question of Pollock's influence on Lee Krasner's painting recurs persistently in critical discussions of her work.  While maintaining that she preserved her own artistic independence and identity, she has acknowledged his influence——an influence, she has pointed out, that she would have felt even if she had not been married to him, since he changed the whole art world.  Marcia Tucker, who wrote the introduction to the catalogue of Miss Krasner's Whitney show, has argued that Pollock's influence became more pronounced after his death and that a stylistic relationship is apparent in the umber and off-white canvases of 1959 and the early 1960's.

Of the large, sweeping, almost violent canvases like The Gate (1959-60), The Eye Is the First Circle (1960), and Night Birds (1962), Miss Tucker wrote, "The oppositions in these works——light and dark, opacity and translucence, detail and immensity——are visual metaphors for natural events, as well as formal elements that focus attention on the reality of the canvas as an event in itself."  The very characteristics that suggest Pollock, however, prevail in her work in almost all periods.  As Cindy Nemser observed, the Little Image paintings contained "all the stylistic and subjective themes" that appear in her later work: "the wild, rhythmic patterns, the mysterious hieroglyphic traces, the organic references to natural phenomena."  In a recent article in Art in America (November-December 1973) Bryan Robertson regarded Lee Krasner's search for images expressing her preoccupation with nature as an "initial premise" of her work.

In her more recent paintings Lee Krasner's individuality seems to have asserted itself through increased lyricism in line and color.  Kufic (1965), for example, has a Klee-like delicacy.  Reaffirmation of early affinities, especially with Matisse, is evident Pollination (1968), Palingenesis (1971), Mysteries (1972), and Peacock (1973).  However, as Hilton Kramer wrote of her pictures in the New York Times (November 22, 1973), "There is no suggestion of anything secondhand of merely appropriated."  Much of the imagery and symbolism in her work, moreover, is probably personal rather than formal, perhaps derived from her early reading of fairy tales or related to the analysis she underwent during her marriage.

A major retrospective exhibition of Lee Krasner's paintings, drawings, and collages at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1965 went far toward redressing the neglect that her work had long suffered,  The show was well received in the press and was late circulated by the Arts Council of Great Britain to museums in York, Nottingham, Manchester, and other cities.  Since then she has had solo shows in Tuscaloosa (Alabama), Detroit, and San Francisco, and her several shows of recent paintings and gouaches at the Marlborough (formerly Marlborough-Gerson) Gallery in New York have been both critically and commercially successful.  One of the many group shows in which she has been represented was the "Twenty-one Over Sixty" exhibition at Guild Hall in East Hampton in the summer of 1973, a show that she herself suggested.  The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York accorded her probably the most important acknowledgment she has so far received when, from November 13, 1973 to January 6, 1974, it showed a group of eighteen of her large-scale works of the period from 1953 to 1973.

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