Lee Krasner
Artist
Biography
Lee Krasner (1908–1984) was an American painter and a central figure of Abstract Expressionism and the New York School. Born in Brooklyn to a family of Russian-Jewish immigrants, she trained at the Cooper Union, the National Academy of Design and, from 1937, with Hans Hofmann, and was a member of the American Abstract Artists group. In 1945 she married Jackson Pollock, with whom she settled in Springs, East Hampton. Constantly reinventing her practice, she moved from the densely worked 'Little Image' paintings of the late 1940s to collage paintings in the 1950s, the large umber and white 'Night Journeys' made after Pollock's death in 1956, and the expansive, vividly coloured canvases of the 1960s and 1970s. Her work was the subject of a retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, in 1965 and at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1984, and of the touring European retrospective Lee Krasner: Living Colour (2019–21).
