Lee Krasner
Abstract Expressionist who cut up her own canvases to make better ones, and outlived the myth around her husband.
Lee Krasner was born in Brooklyn in 1908 to Russian Jewish emigrants, trained at the National Academy of Design and then for four years under Hans Hofmann, and was an established abstract painter before she met Jackson Pollock in 1941. She married him in 1945 and the standard account submerged her for decades. The work is restless by design: the dense small Little Image paintings of the late 1940s, the collages made by cutting up her own rejected canvases and Pollock's discarded drawings, and, after his death in 1956, the enormous Umber and Primary Series painted at night. She died in 1984 and the reassessment has been substantial.
The output is smaller than a fifty-year career would suggest, because she destroyed and recycled a great deal of her own work — which is also why collages incorporating earlier canvas are a significant category and why fragments of destroyed pictures occasionally surface. Paintings are unique. She reworked and re-dated pictures years later, so inscribed dates are not always the date of execution. The Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the catalogue raisonne are the reference. Works on paper and a small print output also appear.
If you own a work by Lee Krasner
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.