Lee Krasner Bio

Lee Krasner was born in Brooklyn, New York on October 27, 1908 to immigrant Russian-Jewish parents. Lena Krassner was her birth name but she preferred to be called Lenore, then just Lee, and changed her last name to Krasner. She begins her art schooling at The Cooper Union, Art Students League, and the National Academy of Design in New York from 1928 to 1932.

When she graduated from the academy, Krasner took college courses toward a teaching certificate and worked as a model and waitress. In 1934, she was accepted for employment by the Public Works of Art Project, the first of the New Deal art patronage programs. she would depend on government work principally for the WPA's Federal Art Project (FAP), until the agencies were disbanded in 1943. Krasner wasn't satisfied with her development so she went back to art school in 1937. But, this time she went to the 8th Street atelier of the celebrated German Ð"©migrÐ"© Hans Hofmann. She was associated with Hofmann's school through 1940, and during that period radically revised her visual language.

Krasner joined the American Abstract Artists, showed her paintings in the group's exhibitions, and rapidly gained credibility as a younger-generation modernist. Krasner prided herself on knowing all the notable members of the city's tiny avant-garde. She came across the unfamiliar name of Jackson Pollock. She went to his studio unannounced, introduced herself and asked to see his work. She was amazed by the creative vigor and emotional intensity his paintings embodied, as well as what she sensed was his latent genius. Those meeting in 1941 ultimately lead to their marriage four years later and a mutually professional relationship.

During their early years together, Krasner underwent a profound reappraisal of her artistic direction; she struggled, in her words, to "lose Cubism" and "absorb Pollock."

Krasner would periodically revise her earlier work. She sometimes reworked pieces more than once and occasionally destroyed whole bodies of work. This led to a series of collage paintings done in the mid-1950's that gave her work favorable attention in the New York art world after nearly ten years of little or no recognition. She and Pollock moved from New York to a homestead in The Springs, near East Hampton, in November 1945, Krasner used a small bedroom as her primary studio. She had only two solo exhibitions and had work included in two group shows before her 1955 collage exhibition at the Stable Gallery in Manhattan re-established her as among the foremost abstract artists of her generation.

Her painting titled "Prophecy"

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