Free Space

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Lee Krasner
Free Space
1975

About the Item

"Free Space" 1975 Color Screenprint Artist Signed Lower Center "Lee Krasner" and Numbered XXII/L Image Size: approx 19 x 26 inches Framed Size: approx 24.25 x 30.25 inchesmodern A major figure among 20th-century New York abstract painters, Lee Krasner became an acknowledged leader of the Abstract Expressionists. However, as the wife of Jackson Pollock, who emerged as the leading figure of that period, she was overshadowed by his accomplishments, and her reputation as an artist did not take hold until a decade after his death in 1956 Born into a strong matriarchal Russian Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, Krasner was raised in a highly cultured environment. In the 1920s, she studied at Cooper Union, the Art Students League, and the National Academy of Design. From 1934 to 1943, she was a WPA mural painter and also became involved with radical art and politics. During much of this time, she was a mural assistant to Max Spivak, prominent abstract artist. In 1937, she became a student of Hans Hofmann and then began exhibiting with the American Abstracts Artists, a group protesting the Social Realist movement led by Robert Henri. Like so many of her contemporaries, she felt that traditional representational art was too confining. In the early 1940s, Krasner started working with Jackson Pollock and she, with sophisticated understanding of European modernism, was a major influence on his revolutionary style of gestural painting. The couple married in 1945 and lived on Long Island near East Hampton in a Victorian style home. She outlived him by over thirty years and came to be recognized as a major force in avant-garde American art. From 1945 to 1950, she worked on her Hieroglyph Series, and also spent much time promoting her husband's career. She also did many gestural paintings, and some think that she was a big influence on her husband utilizing this style, for which he is so famous. As an artist, she worked in concentrated spells and then had times of waiting for inspiration to come. Much of her early work was either lost in a fire or cut-up by her for collages. A retrospective of Krasner's painting was held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from October 10, 1999 to January 2, 2000 with more than 60 pieces. It also traveled to the Des Moines Art Center, the Akron Art Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum. Source: "American Women Artists" by Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein Peter Falk, "Who Was Who in American Art" Ellen Landau, "Lee Krasner"

Creator:
Lee Krasner (1908-1984, American)
Creation Year:
1975
Dimensions:
Height: 24.25 in (61.6 cm)Width: 30.25 in (76.84 cm)
Medium:
Screen
Movement & Style:
Abstract
Period:
1970-1979
Condition:
Gallery Location:
Missouri, MO
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU74732379381

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Lee Krasner

A pioneer of Abstract Expressionism, artist Lee Krasner’s pivotal role in that movement and her exceptional contributions to it were largely overshadowed by those of her male contemporaries — in particular, Jackson Pollock, whom she married in 1945.

Lee Krasner was born Lena Krassner in Brooklyn, New York, to Russian-Jewish refugee parents. She attended the Women’s Art School of Cooper Union and the esteemed National Academy of Design, graduating in 1932 during the height of the Great Depression. Krasner supported herself as a model and cocktail waitress until 1934, when she began painting murals for the Works Progress Administration, which kept her steadily employed until the agency closed in 1943. During that time, Krasner studied under Hans Hofmann and became a fixture on the New York art scene, joining the American Abstract Artists and the Artists Union.

A World War II–era commission had Krasner overseeing the creation of 19 pro-war store window displays in New York City. She recruited a handful of artists she dubbed her “misfits” for the project. Among them were Willem de Kooning and Pollock.

Throughout their 11-year marriage, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner had an indelible influence on each other. While he painted in the bright, expansive barn studio, she worked in a small bedroom, where she produced her “Little Images” series, small-scale works loaded with paint, today considered among her most important contributions to Abstract Expressionism.

Lee Krasner’s art includes rich mosaics, Cubist drawings, assemblages and the epochal collages she produced in 1954–55, which incorporated scraps from her and Pollock’s discarded work and echoed the striking palettes of Matisse, one of her heroes. Krasner’s collages remain among her most celebrated pieces.

After Pollock’s death in 1956, Krasner moved into his barn studio, where she created large-scale paintings, including the 17-foot-wide The Seasons. She had her long-overdue first solo exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery in 1965, and her second in 1975 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Those and other major solo exhibitions finally brought her the recognition she deserved for her contributions to the art world.

In 1978, Krasner was given her rightful place next to the likes of Mark Rothko, de Kooning and Pollock in the Whitney’s exhibition “Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years.” Her U.S. retrospective opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in 1983 and ended at the Museum of Modern Art in New York after her death in 1984.

Lee Krasner’s paintings continue to be in high demand. In 2019, her 1960 work The Eye Is the First Circle sold at auction for $11.7 million, breaking her 2017 auction record of $5.5 million.

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