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Artist or Maker: Lee Krasner (1908-1984)

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Provenance: Martha Jackson Gallery, New York
Barbara Rose, New York
Robert Miller Gallery, New York
Roberta Rymer Balfe, Miami
By descent to the present owner

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Exhibited: New York, Martha Jackson Gallery, Lee Krasner: Recent Paintings , February-March 1958.
New York, Robert Miller Gallery, Lee Krasner: Paintings from the Late Fifties , October-November 1982.
Miami, Center for the Fine Arts, Abstractions: A Tradition of Collecting in Miami , November 1994-January 1995, no. 37.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Des Moines Art Center; Akron Art Museum and Brooklyn Museum of Art, Lee Krasner , October 1999-January 2001, pp. 138, 140, 150-151, no. 61 (illustrated in color).
Coral Gables, Loew Art Museum, (exhibited on long-term loan), 1996-2004.
Easthampton, Pollock/Krasner Study Center (exhibited on long-term loan), 2005-2007.

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Notes: Property from a Family Foundation


"I can remember that when I was painting Listen , which is so high-keyed in color...it looks like such a happy painting -- I can remember that when I was painting it I almost didn't see it, because tears were literally pouring down" (L. Krasner, cited in E. Landau, Lenore Krasner: A Catalogue Raisonne , New York, 1995).

One of Krasner's masterpieces, Thaw was painted in an outpouring of creative force the spring after the sudden death on August 26th of her estranged husband of eleven years, Jackson Pollock. She worked in the barn, which was his former studio, at their house on Long Island, and the exhibition of large scale oil paintings which were the result, was titled "Jackson." Other paintings made in this period were titled Spring Beat , The Gate , Celebration and Equasion, and the group of works, which are exuberant in color and rhythm, are sometimes referred to as the Earth Green series, because of the expression of natural forces, and the emerald and acid greens that she played against roses, reds and oranges.

Krasner was drawn to painting from early youth, when she broke from societal expectations to pursue the life of an artist. While at high school she recalled drawing, "big charts of beetles, flies, butterflies, insects and so on," then after a rich education that included Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design, in 1937 began several years of study with Hans Hoffman, developing a form of biomorphic abstraction which was also synthetic cubist and action oriented. She worked on the WPA Federal Art Project in the thirties and her first assignment was to make drawings of biological phenomenon called forminifera , about which she later recalled, "There I was with a hard pencil and what came to me was the memory of all those butterflies and beetles, only now in more abstract form. I was happy as a lark doing that stuff" (L. Krasner, quoted in Ibid , p. 303).

Krasner was keenly aware of the world around her, and she was extremely active politically in her 20s and 30s. She was on the executive board of the Artists Union, and centrally involved in the formation of the Abstract Expressionist canon. She had become acquainted with Harold Rosenberg, Lionel Abel and Parker Tyler at the club Sam Johnson's in the Village before she met and married Pollock in 1945. In the early 40s her paintings were exhibited in key shows, along with Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Mondrian, Leger, Davis and Pollock. When she went one afternoon, because of the forthcoming exhibition they were both in, uninvited to meet Jackson at this studio in her neighborhood, she was powerfully impressed by his work, and the rest is history.

24650526: Lee Krasner, circa 1957. c 1999 Estate of Hans Namuth.

24650553: Lee Krasner, 1957. c 1999 Estate of Hans Namuth.

24420785: Lee Krasner, circa 1958. c Fred W. McDarrah and Gloria S. McDarrah.