I love hosting art programs at Alafaya. I like profiling artists that aren’t often taught in schools. Kids have heard of Picasso and da Vinci, but do they know Lee Krasner?
Krasner may be one of my favorite artists, and I wasn’t even aware of her until several years ago. Born Lena Krassner in Brooklyn in 1908, she was the daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. Interested in art as a teenager, she requested to only go to schools where there were art courses for girls. She excelled at lifelike drawings, to the point that people didn’t believe a young artist, a woman at that, created the pieces. Artist Hans Hofmann said, “This is so good, you would never know it was done by a woman.” Yikes.
In 1935, she joined the WPA’s Federal Art Project, where she enlarged other people’s art into murals, and later joined the group American Abstract Artists. These were artists dedicated to an expressive abstract art style unlike previous generations. Being a woman among mostly men didn’t stop her; determined, she was a force in an art world that didn’t want to listen to her.
Her art was like her—bold, fierce, and determined. She focused mostly on paintings, collage, charcoal drawings, and stone mosaics. Like her name (Lena to Lenore to Lee), she reinvented her art over and over. She would often paint over her artwork or rip it apart and collage it into something new. Because of this, only a handful of her works exist from the 1930s-40s! She reshaped her style, demanded attention, and tried to say as relevant in the art space as men were assumed to be.
When she married a much more respected artist, she kept up with her own work, never putting herself in his shadows. When she was disliked by Peggy Guggenheim (due to jealousy over her husband, of course), she still convinced the socialite art collector to give her $2,000 towards a down payment on a house on Long Island.
After her husband died, she painted day and night: small pieces in her bedroom, big pieces in their art studio on canvases taped to the wall. She once said, “I like a canvas to breathe and be alive. Be alive is the point.” She’d put thick paint drops onto the canvas and carve into it with the brush. She painted with her left hand when her right was broken.
She created art for five decades. After she died in 1984, she left her and her husband’s Long Island house to be reinvented as a foundation for artists. A major success, it’s still used to this day.
But she wasn’t honored with retrospectives until the end of her life. At one point, it was said she was inspired by male painters. But by the end of her life, it was understood that the male artists were influenced by her. Critic Robert Hughes said, “No one today could persist in calling her a peripheral talent.”
Oh, and her husband? Jackson Pollock. Maybe you’ve heard of him. But I find that, perhaps, the least interesting thing about her.
Register for Homeschool: Art Expressions – Lee Krasner on May 8 at ocls.org
Lauren is a librarian at OCLS
