Lee Krasner

Lee Krasner’s importance as an American abstract expressionist painter has often been unfairly overshadowed by her marriage to Jackson Pollock. Born in New York, she studied both at National Academy of Design and with the German abstract painter Hans Hofmann. During Roosevelt’s New Deal, her time as a muralist for the Works Progress Administration exposed her to painting on a large scale. An influential figure within New York’s avant-garde art scene, she was already producing abstract pictures before she met Pollock, whom she married in 1945. They lived and worked on Long Island, where she developed her densely layered ‘Little Image’ paintings. After her husband’s death in a car crash, she was instrumental in promoting his work and ensuring its place within the art historical canon. Her own work was constantly shifting, integrating elements of representation, collage, Cubism and Fauvism. Towards the end of her life, she finally began to receive long-overdue public recognition.