‘I happened to be Mrs Jackson Pollock and that’s a mouthful’, Lee Krasner once said. Her marriage to Jackson Pollock, which lasted from 1945 until his death in 1956, was a partnership comprising equally strong artistic personalities. In his introduction to a show of Krasner’s collages at New York’s Robert Miller Gallery in 1986, Robert Hughes wrote evocatively of how, after Pollock’s death in a car accident, ‘all around his widow, American popular culture busily constructed its phantasy-image of Jackson Pollock as the James Dean of high culture, the solitary, auto-destructive, macho genius’. In addition to wrestling with this spectre, Hughes noted, Lee Krasner also had to contend with:
‘the bigotries of a phallocentric culture … all-pervasive in the 1950s and 1960s – the ruling assumptions whose writ ran from the Cedar Bar and Peggy Guggenheim’s salon to the offices of most curators and critics, regarding the inherent weakness and derivativeness of women artists … Hence by the ’70s there was no shortage of denigrators on both sides of the sex war tacitly writing her off as an art widow first, a painter second.’
This, despite the fact that Krasner had already held three solo exhibitions by the time of Pollock’s death and twelve solo exhibitions by 1970.
Beginning in the 1970s, however, a number of American critics began to re-evaluate Krasner’s own contribution to the development of American Abstract Expressionism. Prior to this, in 1965, curator Bryan Robertson staged the artist’s first retrospective exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, in which the NGV’s painting, Combat, 1965, was included. Then, as now, this painting’s aggressive title was softened by the work’s buoyant palette, lyrically gestural forms and rhythmic composition. Oscillating between two strong colours – alizarin crimson and orange – Combat‘s vigorously intertwined sweeps and stabs of the brush have been likened by Lee Krasner historian Barbara Rose to ‘the lush and unchecked growth of a tropical rainforest’.
Lee Krasner was born into a Russian Jewish immigrant family in Brooklyn in 1908. Called to art since her childhood, she studied drawing and painting at a number of secondary and tertiary institutions before gaining employment with the Public Works of Art Project in 1934 at the age of 26. In 1937, she studied under Hans Hofmann, a German proponent of Cubist abstraction and later a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism. Two years later Krasner joined the American Abstract Artists group, where she was to befriend other pioneers of Abstract Expressionism such as Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning.
In 1942 she began her relationship with Jackson Pollock, and the couple were married in 1945. At first subordinating her own art in favour of promoting Pollock in the New York art scene, Krasner commenced her first sustained body of abstract paintings after 1946, the Little Image series. In the early 1950s she experimented with large-scale collages. Following Pollock’s death, Krasner moved into the barn that had been his studio in rural New York state. The scale of her work now increased dramatically, and in 1960 and 1962 she held two exhibitions of large gestural paintings, the Umber and White series. Combat signalled her return to working with colour again. That same year her retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery was a triumph, although largely ignored by the American press. Krasner finally received her first solo show in a major New York museum in 1973, at the Whitney Museum of American Art. While this began a wave of new appreciation for her work, Krasner stressed that: ‘A woman must face prejudice in this field, and must be perhaps one and a half times as good as her male counterpart to gain recognition’.
Combat was loaned to the Barbican Art Gallery, London for its exhibition Lee Krasner: Living Colour, which opened in May 2019 and then travelled to the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt; the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern; and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Curated by the Barbican’s Eleanor Nairne, this was the first retrospective in Europe to consider the life and work of this pioneer of Abstract Expressionism. An important example of Krasner’s return to colour with her Primary series of 1965 onwards, Combat made a major contribution to this timely and comprehensive reassessment of Lee Krasner’s contribution to twentieth-century art.
Dr Ted Gott is NGV Senior Curator, International Art.
This article first appeared in NGV Magazine, issue 15, March–April 2019.