John Frederick Peto
Lee Krasner (1908-1984)
Still-Life, 1939
Oil on canvasAbout the Artist:
Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1908, Lenore Krasner was raised by a matriarchal Russian Jewish family. She decided at an early age that she would become an artist. While working as a mural painter for the WPA she became very involved with radical forms of art and politics.
A leader of the first original American art movement, Abstract Expressionism, Lee Krasner had experimented with many styles when she finally found comfort with the challenging nature of abstract expressionism. The movement emerged with artists in the mid 1940s aspiring to share their feelings through their painting. Customarily these artists were not concerned with representing a subject, but rather believed that their own creativity or expressive method of painting was as important as the painting.
During the early part of the 1940s Krasner began working with artist Jackson Pollock, whom she later married. Pollock relied on her emotional support a great deal. A consequence of this was that her work was often set aside and overshadowed by his accomplishments. She, however, outlived him by more
than 30 years. In that time she became known, in her own right, as a key figure in American art of the twentieth century.
About the Art:
Still-Life, 1939, was completed before Krasner’s style turned to complete abstraction. Some of her strongest early paintings focus on the still life and her use of its subject matter to progress towards abstraction. The artist experimented with the still life on at least 14 canvases, most of which are untitled and date from 1940 to 1943. Here Krasner reduced the still life
elements to barely recognizable forms. She placed geometric elements within a tilted perspective and defined them by emphasizing them with outlines. It has been thought that Krasner’s husband and artist Jackson Pollock signed her name to this work, as in photographs of the 1950s show the painting without a number or signature. Pollock knew the importance of signing a work and the combination of script with printed letters, as well of the use of the artist’s full name, indicate Pollock signed the work.
