The Female Painter Who Ushered in a New Era of American Art
She refused to be eclipsed by her more famous husband
Lee Krasner’s marriage to Jackson Pollock was already mortally fractured by 1956.
Later that year, Pollock — driving under the influence — lost control of his Oldsmobile, veered off the road and struck a tree. The crash claimed the life of one of Abstract Expressionism’s most celebrated figures.
Pollock and Krasner came from different artistic backgrounds, and first met in 1942 while exhibiting at the McMillen Gallery. After marrying, she devoted much of her energy to advancing Pollock’s career, often placing it alongside or even ahead of her own. It was only after his death that she began to explore her own painting techniques on a larger, more ambitious scale.
Many interpreted her new style as simply picking up from where Pollock had left off, but Krasner’s more mature work was never the tangled criss-cross of dripped paint that Pollock perfected. Her style had a history of its own, an intense weave of energetic brush marks influenced by the tenets of Cubism and European Expressionism.
I was lucky enough to see a retrospective of her work in London a few years ago, an experience that left an indelible mark.
