Krasner, Lee (1908-1984), an American painter, was an important member of the Abstract Expressionist movement beginning in the 1940’s. Krasner’s career was closely associated with Jackson Pollock, a leading Abstract Expressionist artist and Krasner’s husband from 1945 until his death in 1956. See Abstract Expressionism .
Krasner met Pollock in 1941, and her support and encouragement boosted his career. She was influenced by Pollock but still retained her own stylistic tendencies. Her paintings also show the influence of the Dutch abstract artist Piet Mondrian and the brightly colored work of the French artist Henri Matisse. Some of Krasner’s most powerful abstract paintings, such as The Guardian (1960), reflected her grief at Pollock’s death in an automobile accident.
Lena Krassner was born on Oct. 27, 1908, in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. She changed the spelling of her last name to Krasner in the early 1940’s. She decided to become an artist while a teenager. She studied with the German-born abstract artist Hans Hofmann at his School of Fine Arts from 1937 to 1940. Hofmann encouraged her to devote herself to pure abstraction. Krasner exhibited for the first time with the American Abstract Artists group in 1940.
Krasner’s first mature abstract works were her Little Image series, begun in 1946. The paintings featured dabs and drips of paint or tiny rows of letters from Hebrew and other alphabets. She held her first one-woman show in 1951. A series of collages done in the mid-1950’s brought her to the attention of critics as an artist in her own right. The number of her surviving works is small because she constantly reworked and sometimes destroyed her paintings. Krasner died on June 19, 1984.
