Lee Krasner: Painting as Life

Lee Krasner was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1908 almost nine months to the day after her parents were reunited. Joseph, Krasner’s father, had emigrated to the United States from a small village in Russia three years earlier to escape brutal anti-Jewish violence and to seek a new home for his family. The first of the Krasner children to be born in America, Lee joined three sisters and a brother, and a younger sister, Ruth, was arrived in 1910.  Krasner’s family were Jewish Orthodox and spoke a mixture of Russian, Yiddish and English. However, Krasner began to rail against the treatment of women in Jewish scripture, renouncing religion completely by the time she was a teenager.

‘I was a woman, Jewish, a widow, a damn good painter, thank you, and a little too independent…’

Krasner grew up against a backdrop of increasing liberation for women in the United States, who were granted the right to vote in August 1920.

When she was just 14, fuelled by this spur towards ambition and independence, Krasner decided to pursue an artistic career. First at Washington Irving High in Manhattan – at the time, the only school in Greater New York to offer an art course for girls – and then at Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design, Krasner learned to draw and paint in the manner of the period.

This conventional approach and style was to undergo a dramatic transformation in 1930, when she discovered Modern art. She fell in love with the work of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso after viewing their work at the Museum of Modern Art, which first opened its doors on 8 November 1929, describing the occasion as ‘an upheaval for me… an opening of a door’.

Krasner’s fascination with modernism led her to Hans Hofmann, the German artist and teacher who had known Picasso and Matisse in Paris, and had established his avant-garde school in New York in 1934.

Krasner immersed herself in Hofmann’s teachings on Cubism and the pair developed a mutual respect for each other’s practice – with Hofmann bestowing on one of Krasner’s paintings the (shockingly backhanded and sexist) praise:

‘This is so good, you would not know it was painted by a woman!’

While Krasner was gaining recognition and respect within the New York art scene, she continued to rail against the discrimination rife within the male dominated world of artists, writers and critics in the city. Although she faced this with her usual tenacity, Krasner was frequently overshadowed by surrounding male artists – notably by her partner, and later husband, the artist Jackson Pollock.

Despite the immense period of grief that followed Pollock’s death, Krasner’s artistic output never waned, and the paintings made at this time were described as a ‘stunning affirmation of life’.

‘Painting is not separate from life. It is one. It is like asking - do I want to live? My answer is yes - and I paint’

A year after Pollock’s death, Krasner decided to move her studio into the barn in Springs. Although it must have been a space loaded with painful memories, it was also the largest working area on the property which finally allowed her to work on a bigger scale.

The paintings swelled in size, with canvases reaching up to 4.4m in length.

In 1960, after overcoming her insomnia, Krasner allowed colour to burst back into her painting. A riot of dissonant hues emerged – fuschia pink, hot orange, vibrant Kelly green – in what Krasner called her ‘Primary Series’.

Continuing to work at a large scale – some of the canvases were almost 5 metres in length – these eye-watering colours confronted the viewer in vast unflinching planes.

‘Painting is a revelation, an act of love… as a painter I can’t experience it any other way’

Krasner was working with frenetic energy at this point in her career, producing more than 160 paintings and experimental works on paper in 7 years.

Forthright, independent and strong, Krasner spent her life defending herself, her practice, and the work of her husband Jackson Pollock against an often cruel art world.

By the 1970s however, she was finally yielding the respect and recognition she so richly deserved, with the art critic Emily Genauer declaring in 1973: ‘surely she’s painting better now than ever before’.

Another key factor in the somewhat belated recognition of her work was the rise of second-wave feminism in the 1970s, about which Krasner quipped:

‘It’s too bad that the women’s liberation didn’t occur thirty years earlier in my life. It would have been of enormous assistance at that time’