Lee Krasner

Lee Krasner was born Lena Krassner on 27 October 1908 in Brooklyn, New York, to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. She trained at Washington Irving High School's studio-art program, then at the Women's Art School of Cooper Union (1926 to 1928), the Art Students League (1928), and the National Academy of Design (through 1932). In the mid-1930s she worked on the WPA Federal Art Project as a muralist and was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group. In 1937 she began studying with Hans Hofmann, whose teaching pushed her toward a more analytical, structured abstraction.

She met Jackson Pollock in the early 1940s and married him in 1945, and the couple settled in The Springs, East Hampton, on Long Island. Krasner continued to develop her own practice alongside Pollock's rise, producing the small, densely worked "Little Image" paintings in the late 1940s. After Pollock's death in 1956, she worked in a converted barn studio, producing some of her largest and most ambitious paintings, including the collage and cut-canvas works for which she later became known.

Recognition of her independent achievement grew markedly late in her career. She was given her first retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1965 and was included in the Whitney Museum's 1978 survey Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years. In 1983 she received her first major American retrospective, organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which traveled across the United States. She died on 19 June 1984 at New York Hospital in New York City, at age 75, from internal bleeding attributed to diverticulitis. She was buried alongside Pollock in Green River Cemetery in The Springs, East Hampton. Six months after her death, the Museum of Modern Art in New York held a retrospective of her work, and her estate established the Pollock-Krasner Foundation to support working artists.

Krasner's critical reputation shifted substantially in the last decade of her life and after her death, as scholars and curators worked to separate her achievement from her marriage to Pollock. The critic Robert Hughes described her as "the Mother Courage of Abstract Expressionism." Her 1978 inclusion in the Whitney's Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years and the 1983 to 1984 traveling retrospective organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston are generally treated as the turning points that secured her place among the movement's originators rather than at its margins. The 1984 Museum of Modern Art retrospective, mounted six months after her death, was read at the time as confirmation of her standing as a major, independent figure of the pioneer Abstract Expressionist generation.

Krasner's auction record is The Eye Is the First Circle (1960), which sold for USD 11,654,000 at Sotheby's New York on 16 May 2019, more than doubling her prior record of about USD 5.49 million set by Shattered Light (1954) at Christie's New York in November 2017. An earlier benchmark, Polar Stampede, sold for USD 3.18 million at Sotheby's New York on 14 May 2008. The pattern across these results is a market that has moved in sharp steps rather than a smooth climb, consistent with an artist whose institutional reassessment has outpaced her auction history.

No published catalogue raisonne for Krasner was confirmed in research for this profile, so provenance and studio or foundation-based verification carry extra weight; the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, which now works with Kasmin Gallery in New York on estate representation, is the central reference point for authentication questions. Her auction history is comparatively thin and has moved in large jumps rather than steady increments, so any single result should be read in that context rather than as a smooth trend line. A run of institutional attention, including a 2024 Kasmin exhibition, a solo show planned at Gagosian Paris in 2026, and a dual survey with Pollock planned at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for 2026 to 2027, may continue to shape demand for her work.