Lee Krasner valuation
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.
What a work by Lee Krasner is worth
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Bio
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.
At a glance
- Born
- 27 October 1908, Brooklyn
- Died
- 19 June 1984, New York City
- Movement
- Abstract Expressionism
More on Wikipedia.
Landau's catalogue, Springs and the Barbican
Ellen G. Landau's Lee Krasner: A Catalogue Raisonné, published by Abrams in 1995, lists some six hundred works in oil, collage, mosaic and on paper, with their exhibition history, provenance and changes of title, and is the first place to look, given how often she retitled and redated pictures. The house and studio at Springs in East Hampton that she and Pollock moved into in 1945 became, under her will, the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, run with Stony Brook University, which holds the catalogue archives.
The Barbican's Lee Krasner: Living Colour in 2019 was the first major showing of her work in Europe for more than fifty years, with nearly a hundred works, from self-portraits and charcoal life drawings to the Little Image paintings.
Cooper Union, the WPA and the grey slabs
Krasner was the youngest of six children and the only one born in the United States; her parents came from Shpykiv in Ukraine. She chose Washington Irving High School for Girls for its art course, then studied at the Women's Art School of Cooper Union on a scholarship, qualifying to teach art. Seeing Post-Impressionism at the newly opened Museum of Modern Art in 1929 started her lasting interest in modern art. From 1935 she worked in the mural division of the Federal Art Project as an assistant to Max Spivak, enlarging other artists' designs, and one of her own abstract mural proposals was approved for the radio station WNYC.
After she saw Pollock's work in 1942 she gave up Hofmann's practice of working from a model, and the grey slab paintings of the next years, overpainted and scraped for months until almost monochrome, were nearly all destroyed. The 1951 collages began when she pasted cut and torn shapes onto the colour field paintings made for her Betty Parsons show, working with the canvas on the floor. In 1963 she broke her right wrist and painted with her left hand, squeezing paint straight from the tube. In 1976, clearing her studio, she cut up figure drawings of 1937 to 1940 for a second series of collages. The Museum of Modern Art gave her a retrospective in 1984.
Best auction results
- The Eye Is the First Circle $11.7m
- Oil on canvas, 1960 · New York · May 2019
- Publicly reported
- A record for the artist at auction when sold.
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
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.
