Book Review - Lee Krasner

Lenore Krasner's parents lived in Russia with the hardship of poverty and Jewish persecution so in 1907 they immigrated to Brooklyn with their 3 children. A year later daughter Lenore-later labeled Lee- was born and she faced discriminatory hardships all her life as a female artist but in her new American culture she developed a tough fighting independent spirit.

She had trouble in school with undiagnosed dyslexia. Drawing and painting as a teenager she knew she wanted to be an artist so she attended a high school with an art program, then went to Cooper Union women's art program, spent time at the Arts Students League with Bridgman teaching Life Drawing, got accepted to the National Academy of Design learning classical methods and composition, and then studied modern art at Hans Hofmann's school. Her technical art training was superior to most but the times favored macho male artists. Even Hans Hofmann said in class of her work, "this is so good you would not know it was done by a woman.'

Krasner worked in the new Abstract Art which was struggling for acceptance. Her method of learning is important. Impatient with stasis and inertia she was constantly evaluating, reworking, and destroying her past work and moving to new challenges and fresh expressions-swinging back and forth between polarities of classic architectonic structure and baroque action, between open form and closed hard-edge shape, between brilliant color and monochrome.

Modern art was available to see in New York with the opening of the Museum of Modern Art's 1929 Post-Impressionist Show of Cezanne, Seurat, van Gogh, and Gauguin, with the opening of Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1931, and other venues.

Imitating Henri Matisse's development, she began investigating new ways of showing form creating volume through color rather than chiaroscuro, and modelling by studying Cezanne still lifes.

In Hans Hofmann's classes Krasner drew charcoal studies from the model in which lines of motion and muscular tension take precedence over literally descriptive reproduction. Teacher Hans Hofmann tore her figure drawing into pieces to reassemble it in a relationship of the figure to the picture plane, telling her not to just work from the center but consider all 4 sides of the composition. To pay attention to all four edges of your page and create a 'distinctive movement'.

For Krasner, making art was making a sublime statement with the artist trying to go beyond this real world to reach some transcendental reality. She listened to an inner rhythm and depended on an inner voice to let her work breathe and come alive.

Jackson Pollock who she later married also abstracted the figure into dynamic lines of action which he eventually converted into all-over gestural abstractions. Pollock's work in contrast with Krasners was an outward gesture that he threw about flamboyantly. He had the most fame of the New York School Abstract Expressionists but he suffered from alcoholism and self-doubt in their 13 years together.

She lived and worked another 25 years after his death until her recognition in a 1983 Museum of Modern Art retrospective, with her now over 70 years old. She said her 'slow recognition was a protection, a coating. I had to go into my studio and keep myself painting my own pictures because the outside world wasn't dealing with it anyway.'

• She was born in the USA without Old World religious and cultural baggage.

• She lived through the Great Depression and hard times
• She fought for acceptance of art by women as artists, not women artists.
• She constantly developed her own voice.
• She teaches us to learn by studying and absorbing aspects of all art, classical and modern.