Histories of the first generation of Abstract Expressionists often include Lee Krasner as the sole woman artist She had major exhibitions during her lifetime, from her first retrospective at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London in 1965-6, to an exhibition that toured from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in the year before her death. A recent show organized by Independent Curators International toured from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California from 1999 to 2001. But despite Krasner's stature, discussion of her work has often concentrated on her relationship with her husband of eleven years. Jackson Pollock. Although she undoubtedly drew stimulus from his art, recent criticism has begun to address issues specific to Krasner, notably her identity as a Jewish woman artist.
Although she lived in Brooklyn, New York, Krasner chose to go to a school in Manhattan, Washington Irving High School as, unusually for a public school, it allowed girls to major in art. She went on to train at the Women's Art School of the Cooper Union, and the Art Students League. Her early work embraced Realism and Surrealism, as in the painting Gansevoort I, (1934. Pollock-Krasner Foundation). She also studied under Hans Hofmann at his School of Fine Arts from 1937 to 1940, working from the model in a style that drew upon her knowledge of Cubism, Picasso and Matisse. Krasner became politically active, working as a muralist for the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project and then joining the American Abstract Artists group in 1939. This internationalist left-wing organization contrasted with the regionalism and isolationism of some American art, and Krasner is likely to have been partially motivated by her position as a Jew during the rise of the Nazis.
In 1942 Krasner was invited to show her work in the exhibition French and American Painting at the McMillen Gallery, New York. Fellow exhibitors included Matisse, Picasso, de Kooning and Pollock. Three years later she and Pollock married and moved out of the city to The Springs, East Hampton. There, having turned their living room into a studio, Krasner made her abstract Little Image paintings. Her self-professed aim to 'absorb Pollock' is evident in the all-over compositions, but Krasner developed her own pictorial vocabulary. As Robert Hobbs elaborates in his book accompanying her 1999-2001 retrospective, other Abstract Expressionists also made use of sign systems. However, Krasner's method of painting from right to left, and her mark-making, which sometimes seems to draw upon her knowledge of Hebrew, could be linked to archaeological finds of ancient texts at the time, suggesting that she may have been making 'efforts to keep the faith of Jewish solidarity while still remaining resolutely modern and avant-garde in a post-Holocaust world- Krasner also made two mosaic tables in 1948. Contemporary in style, low and round, with triangular feet, their surfaces were made into abstract works of art, using tile, pieces of Krasner's jewelery and everyday objects such as keys and coins. Rather than being purely modernist, they can be interpreted as crystallizing the combination of domesticity and artistic practice in her own life.
In the early 1950s Krasner created her 'personage paintings', and collages such as Desert Moon (1955, Robert Miller Gallery, New York), with its contrasting black, hot pink and orange. The collages made use of a mixture of media, sometimes incorporating fragments from both her and Pollock's works, and she exhibited them in a critically successful solo show at the Stable Gallery, New York in 1955. The following year Pollock died, and Krasner was able to move into his spacious studio. With the freedom to work on a much larger scale, she produced paintings known as the Earth Green series, including The Seasons (1957, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), with its massive curving rhythms, pinks and greens and organic, sexually suggestive forms. By contrast, the more than thirty paintings known as the Umber and White series of the early 1960s are characterized by somber, heavy color, and slashing brushwork, and have sometimes been interpreted biographically as expressions of unresolved anger and the pain of loss. In the 1970s Krasner created the series of collages Eleven Ways to Use the Words to See, titled after verb tenses and moods, as in imperative (1976, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC). Again she re-used past works, slicing up drawings from her time as a Hofmann student and adding flashes of painted color. Her bold juxtaposition of parts of different pieces, disrupting their original significance, has been critically linked to postmodern concerns with the instability of meaning in language. The changes in Krasner's art throughout her career can be seen as driven by an energetic drive towards formal development. But it is also possible to read them in the light of Krasner's life, without interpreting them as simplistically autobiographical. Some of their characteristics, their scale and the media she used were shaped by her shifting work arrangements. The changes in her practice also suggest that she was applying her knowledge of psychoanalytic models of subjectivity as fluid and fractured rather than fixed (she underwent psychoanalysis in the mid-1950s) and perhaps offer a critique of the dominant cultural image of artistic genius as a male producing one signature style, that she had experienced at such close quarters. At the age of sixty-four, Krasner joined the group Women in the Arts to protest at the discrimination against women artists by the Museum of Modem Art, New York.
As the wife of a famous painter, Krasner has sometimes served as Pollock's foil in critical writing. Her awareness of her distance from representations of herself, and her understanding of identity as a shifting construct, is evident as far back as Self-Portrait (1930, Pollock-Krasner Foundation). She pictured herself as an artist, wearing practical overalls and in the act of painting, but also as a transient reflection in a mirror. Other strategies involved changing her name to Lee from her feminine birth name of Lena, and signing canvases with the ambiguous 'LK'. Images of her vary from informal 'family' photographs taken with Pollock and their dog in the 1950s to late portrait photographs by Irving Penn and Robert Mapplethorpe, in which she is an imperious grande dame. |
