Lee Krasner

Lee Krasner , 1911-84, American artist, b. Brooklyn. She studied with Hans Hofmann and became a leading figure in abstract expressionism along with her husband, Jackson Pollock . Her compositions are intellectually controlled and characterized by broad gestural brushstrokes. She often utilized collage, usually cut-up sections from her own earlier work, in her paintings. Notable examples of her work include The Bull (1958) and Polar Stampede (1960).

Bibliography: See biography by R. Hobbs (1999); study by B. Rose (1983); E. G. Landau, Lee Krasner: A Catalogue Raisonné (1995).

Krasner, Lee (1908–1984). American painter, born in Brooklyn, New York. Between 1926 and 1932 she studied at the Cooper Union School and the National Academy of Design, and in 1937 she was a pupil of Hans Hofmann. Her early work was naturalistic, but by 1940 she had turned to abstraction and was exhibiting with American Abstract Artists. In 1941 she met Jackson Pollock, and she married him in 1945 (they separated shortly before Pollock's death because of his affair with another woman). They sometimes exhibited together in group shows, and Krasner was an important source of encouragement and support to Pollock, whose attitude to his work fluctuated from supreme confidence to dismal uncertainty. She was herself an Abstract Expressionist painter of some distinction, but it was only after her husband's death in 1956 that she began to receive serious critical recognition. David Anfam (Abstract Expressionism, 1990) writes that ‘Prejudice alone kept Lee Krasner outside standard histories … her fellow artists held the same assumptions about gender that most Americans had then. At one of their hangouts, the Cedar Tavern, Krasner recalled women being “treated like cattle”.’