Lee spent most of her secondary education at Washington Irving High School in Manhattan, where she devoted three years to major in art. In 1925, she left the school.
College/University
Gallery of Lee Krasner
215 W 57th St, New York, NY 10019, United States
Krasner briefly attended Art Students League of New York.
Gallery of Lee Krasner
1083 5th Ave, New York, NY 10128, United States
From 1929 to 1932, she attended the National Academy of Design.
Lee spent most of her secondary education at Washington Irving High School in Manhattan, where she devoted three years to major in art. In 1925, she left the school.
Lee Krasner was an American painter, who represented Abstract Expressionism movement. Working in oil on canvas, ink on paper and mixed-media collage, she produced works, characterized by a sensuous painterly style. Krasner was a key transitional figure within abstraction, who connected early 20th-century art with the new ideas of postwar America.
Background
Lee Krasner was born on October 27, 1908, in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, United States. She was a daughter of Chane (Weiss) Krasner and Joseph Krasner. Her parents were Russian-Jewish immigrants, who fled to the United States in order to escape anti-Semitism and the Russo-Japanese War.
Education
By the time of her graduation from public elementary school in 1922, Lee had shown strong inclinations towards the art. She spent most of her secondary education at Washington Irving High School in Manhattan, where she devoted three years to major in art. In 1925, she left the school.
Krasner also attended the Women's Art School of Cooper Union during the period from 1926 to 1929, followed by a short period at the Art Students League of New York. From 1929 to 1932, she attended the National Academy of Design, where, upon her first trips to the newly established Museum of Modern Art, Krasner encountered and was deeply influenced by the School of Paris.
Also, since 1937 till 1940, Lee studied art under the guidance of Hans Hofmann. During that period, Krasner dramatically modified her style, moving away from naturalistic works towards an abstracted geometric aesthetic.
In 1984, Krasner received Doctor of Fine Arts Honorary Degree, awarded by the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Having graduated in the midst of the Great Depression, Krasner held different positions to make both ends meet — including modeling and waitressing. Despite her initial struggles, Krasner didn't give up her dream of making it as a full-time artist. She was given a good reason to believe, that her dream could become a reality, when in 1934, she was hired by the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project to paint murals. Some time later, she was promoted to the post of supervisor. Thanks to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal art program, Krasner was able to work fairly steadily for the WPA's Federal Art Project up until 1943, when the agency was dissolved.
In 1939, Krasner joined the American Abstract Artists (AAA), which afforded her more opportunities to exhibit her work as a burgeoning young modernist painter. In 1941, she participated in the fifth annual exhibition of the AAA and showed her works at New York's McMillan Gallery. The same year, she first viewed Jackson Pollock’s work at an exhibition. Having never heard of the artist before, she visited his studio and immediately recognized his talent. They became close friends and married in 1945. After that, the couple settled down on a farm in East Hampton, New York, where they were to produce a large body of work.
In 1946, Lee began to create her "Little Image" paintings, a tightly focused series of works, in which her use of dots and drips of paint were inspired by Pollock’s "drip paintings" of the period. In these and her collages of the early 1950's, Krasner often worked on a small scale, which separated her work from that of the other Abstract Expressionists. After the death of her husband in 1956, she created a series of enormous paintings, filled with thick, expressive strokes of umbre paint, that abandoned figuration and instead presented raw energy, perhaps in an attempt to express her overwhelming sense of grief.
In 1951, Krasner was given her first one-person show at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York. It was during this period, that critics began to recognize her as a major contributor to the new American painting. Krasner's work was characterized by shallow space, a legacy of Cubism, reductive color, and an insistent concern with progress.
Krasner's collage work can be dated from 1953, a period, during which she began to rework extensively her earlier painting, a recycling process she continued to exploit throughout her life. In 1954, she exhibited in her first group show, composed of all women artists, and the following year, Krasner held her first one-person exhibition of collages at the Stable Gallery.
During the period from 1970 till 1973, Lee produced large horizontal paintings, made up of hard-edge lines and a palette of a few bright colors, that contrasted one another. The 1976 marked new work in collage and a partial return to the more gestural handling of her earlier career. Krasner continued to freely combine media, such as painting, collage and printmaking. In her last years, the painter examined subjects of life and death.
In 1983, a major retrospective of her work was held at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Lee grew up in an orthodox Jewish home. Her father practiced Judaism. Krasner appreciated aspects of Judaism, like Hebrew script, prayers and religious stories.
As a teenager, she grew critical of what she perceived as misogyny in orthodox Judaism. Later in her lifetime, Lee also started to read existentialist philosophies, causing her to turn away from Judaism even further.
Views
Quotations:
"The key is what is within the artist. The artist can only paint what she or he is about."
"I am never free of the past. I have made it crystal clear that I believe the past is part of the present which becomes part of the future."
"All my work keeps going like a pendulum; it seems to swing back to something I was involved with earlier, or it moves between horizontality and verticality, circularlity, or a composite of them. For me, I suppose, that change is the only constant."
"I think my painting is so autobiographical if anyone can take the trouble to read it."
"I never violate an inner rhythm. I loathe to force anything. I don't know if the inner rhythm is Eastern or Western. I know it is essential for me. I listen to it and I stay with it. I have always been this way. I have regards for the inner voice."
"I have never been able to understand the artist whose image never changes."
"I think, if one is a painter, all you experience does come out when you’re painting."
"With Jackson there was quiet solitude. Just to sit and look at the landscape. An inner quietness. After dinner, to sit on the back porch and look at the light. No need for talking. For any kind of communication."
Membership
Krasner began attending the meetings of the Artists' Union as early as 1936, and by 1939, she had become a member of the organization's executive committee. Also, she was a founding member of American Abstract Artists group, that was formed in 1936.
American Abstract Artists group
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United States
1936
Connections
Lee Krasner married Jackson Pollock, a painter, in 1945. But their marriage didn't last long — Jackson died in a car accident in 1956.