Honestly, for a long time, if you talked about paintings by Lee Krasner, you were actually talking about Jackson Pollock. It sucks, but that’s the reality of 20th-century art history. She was "Mrs. Jackson Pollock." The woman who managed the booze, the bills, and the temper tantrums. But if you actually look at the canvases—I mean really look at them—you see an artist who was arguably more technically sophisticated and definitely more restless than her famous husband.
She didn't just have a "style." She had a dozen of them.
Krasner was a shapeshifter. While other Abstract Expressionists like Mark Rothko or Barnett Newman found their "thing" and stuck to it for decades, Krasner got bored. Or maybe she just grew too fast. She’d develop a brilliant technique, master it, and then literally rip it to shreds to start something else.
The "Little Images" and the Bedroom Table
In the late 1940s, while Pollock was out in the barn dripping paint onto massive canvases on the floor, Krasner was working in a tiny upstairs bedroom. She didn't have the space for "heroic" scale. So, she created the Little Images series.
These are fascinating. They’re small, dense, and jewel-like.
She wasn't just throwing paint. She was using tubes to squeeze pigment directly onto the surface or using sticks to create these tight, gridded patterns. A lot of people look at works like Untitled (1949) and see echoes of her childhood. She grew up in a Russian-Jewish immigrant household in Brooklyn. As a kid, she studied Hebrew, and you can see that "right-to-left" muscle memory in these paintings. The marks look like an ancient, unreadable alphabet. Hieroglyphics from a language only she spoke.
They’re claustrophobic but controlled. It’s the work of someone trying to find order in a life that was becoming increasingly chaotic as Pollock’s alcoholism spiraled.
Why She Ripped Up Her Own Art
Krasner was her own harshest critic. In the early 50s, she had a show at the Betty Parsons Gallery that basically flopped. No sales. No rave reviews. Most people would’ve just moped. Krasner went into her studio and started tearing things.
She didn't just throw the "failed" paintings away, though. She used them.
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This led to her collage paintings. She took the scraps of her own drawings and canvases—and sometimes Pollock's discarded scraps too—and pasted them into new compositions. Look at Milkweed (1955). It’s jagged and aggressive but strangely organic. She was literally recycling her "failures" to build her future.
It’s a gritty way to work. It’s also why her CV is so hard for some historians to track. She was constantly destroying the evidence of her previous selves.
Prophecy and the Ghost in the Studio
1956 was the breaking point. She was working on a painting called Prophecy. It was weird—fleshy, anatomical, and disturbing. It didn't look like the "pure" abstraction she’d been doing. It felt like a warning.
She left it on her easel and went to Europe to get some space from Jackson. While she was gone, he died in that famous car crash.
When she came back, she didn't move out. She moved in. She took over his big studio in the barn. For the first time, she had the physical space to go huge. But she wasn't happy. She was grieving, angry, and suffering from brutal insomnia.
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This gave us the Umber Paintings (sometimes called the "Night Journeys").
Because she was working at night under artificial light, she cut out all the bright colors. She worked with a palette of browns, creams, and whites. These paintings are raw. They’re violent. Works like The Eye is the First Circle are massive—nearly 16 feet wide. When you stand in front of it, the brushstrokes feel like they’re vibrating. It’s not just "pretty" art; it’s a record of a person trying not to fall apart.
Interestingly, The Eye is the First Circle sold for $11.65 million at Sotheby’s in 2019. It took decades, but the market finally caught up to the fact that her "widow phase" was actually a peak of American modernism.
What to Look for in a Krasner
If you're ever at MoMA or the Met and you see one of her works, don't just look at the middle. Look at the edges.
- The "Allover" Grid: Unlike some painters who have a clear "subject" in the center, Krasner’s energy is usually distributed everywhere.
- The "Backhand" Stroke: Critics often point out her rhythmic, sweeping motions that move from right to left.
- The Texture: She wasn't afraid of thick, ugly impasto. She wanted the canvas to "breathe and be alive."
The Legacy Nobody Talks About
Krasner was a better "looker" than almost anyone in the New York scene. She was the one who introduced Pollock to the heavy hitters like Willem de Kooning and the critic Clement Greenberg. She had the "eye."
She was also a woman in a "macho" art world. Hans Hofmann, her teacher, once gave her the backhanded compliment that her work was "so good you would not know it was painted by a woman." She fought that nonsense for sixty years.
By the time she died in 1984, she had finally secured her own retrospective at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and the MoMA. She wasn't "the wife" anymore. She was the survivor.
Actionable Insights for Art Lovers
If you want to understand her better, don't just read a biography.
- Visit the Pollock-Krasner House: Go to Springs, NY. You can literally see the paint splatters on the floor of the studio. It gives you a physical sense of the scale she was wrestling with.
- Compare the Collages: Look at a Matisse cutout and then look at a Krasner collage. Matisse is about joy and decorative beauty; Krasner is about tension and reconstruction.
- Check the Auction Trends: If you're into the business side of art, keep an eye on her 1960s gestural works. They are currently some of the most sought-after pieces in the Abstract Expressionist market because they represent a direct link to the "Action Painting" era but with a more disciplined, intellectual edge.
Krasner once said, "I was a woman, Jewish, a widow, a damn good painter, and a little too independent." She wasn't kidding about any of it. Her paintings aren't just decorations; they are the debris of a life lived at full throttle.
To see her work in person today, the Glenstone Museum in Maryland and the Whitney in New York hold some of the most significant examples of her large-scale transitions. Go there. Stand close. You can still feel the heat off the canvas.
Next Steps for Your Research
- Search for: "Lee Krasner Earth Green series" to see her transition back into color after 1959.
- Look up: The "Pollock-Krasner Foundation" to see how her estate continues to support struggling artists today.