Lee Krasner Exhibition

B. Krasner was a quasi-member of the Abstract Expressionist group of painters throughout her career.

1. Received professional training in the 1930s and became friends with the painters and critics who came to form the Abstract expressionist movement.

2. Married Jackson Pollock in 1940s and enabled him to become leading artist.

3. Her own work was largely ignored by critics, museums, galleries, and fellow artists and she was not considered a real part of the group.

C. Reasons for her exclusion and obscurity.

1. Overshadowed by Pollock, an idea she rejected.

2. Male artists and critics, like most Americans, did not believe women could really paint.

3. Abstract expressionism embodied a notion of masculinity based on intensive personal expression, huge scale, action, and energy. Krasner resisted revealing personal expression because it placed her at odds with prevailing "male heroics" of abstract expressionism.

D. Comparison of 1940s paintings by Krasner and Pollock demonstrates the difference in approach between his expressionism and her more careful attention to structure and surface.

E. Krasner's work only valued after women's movement began to call attention to her exclusion and explain the reasons for it.

The Los Angeles County Museum's (LACMA) exhibition of the life's work of Lee Krasner (1908-84) sets out deliberately to redefine the param

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When painter Barnett Newman, another good friend, called Pollock to ask for his signature on what was to become a famous protest letter to the Metropolitan Museum he did not bother to ask Krasner for her signature as well. Dealers were not interested in her work and "museum curators continued their habit of not giving her work any serious attention" for a long time after Pollock's death (Kingsley 255). The constant repetition of slights such as this made Krasner "furious," as she later reported, "but she said nothing" (Kingsley 255). It is sometimes difficult to assess the degree to which the exclusion and lack of attention actually affected female artists who gained some degree of success--as Krasner did. In most cases, of course, these women did not pass through periods when feminist initiatives radically altered the ways in which many women thought of themselves and their work. Krasner, however, lived and worked into the mid-1980s and had the opportunity to look back on her career after the women's movement of the 1970s was well underway. As Kingsley notes, Krasner's later statements sometimes take on a certain "post-women's movement defensiveness," but Krasner was afforded the opportunity to assess what she had made of
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Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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