Lee Krasner 1908 – 1984

Biography

Lee Krasner is identified as an abstract expressionist due to her abstract, gestural, and expressive works. She worked in painting, collage painting, charcoal drawing, and occasionally mosaics. She would often cut apart her own drawings and paintings to create her collage paintings. She also commonly revised or completely destroyed an entire series of works due to her critical nature. As a result, her surviving body of work is relatively small. Her catalogue raisonné, published in 1995 by Abrams, lists 599 known pieces. Her changeable nature is reflected throughout her work, which has led critics and scholars to have very different conclusions about her and her work. Her style often goes back and forth between classic structure and baroque action, open form and hard-edge shape, and bright color and monochrome palette. Throughout her career, Lee Krasner refused to adopt a singular, recognizable style and instead embraced change through varying the mood, subject matter, texture, materials, and compositions of her work often. By changing her work style often, she differed from other abstract expressionists since many of them adopted unchanging identities and modes of depiction. Despite these intense variations, her works can typically be recognized through their gestural style, texture, rhythm, and depiction of organic imagery. Her interest in the self, nature, and modern life are themes which commonly surface in her works. Krasner is often reluctant to discuss the iconography of her work and instead emphasizes the importance of her biography since she claims her art is formed through her individual personality and her emotional state.