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Born in Brooklyn in 1908, Lee Krasner was a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism and a driving force behind abstraction in art. Krasner long knew she wanted to be an artist and attended the Women’s Art School at Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design. She was deeply influenced by the opening of the Museum of Modern Art in 1929, where she absorbed Post-Impressionist works and began to feel critical of much of the art education she had received. During the Great Depression, Krasner painted murals for the Works Progress Administration and, in 1937, began to study under Hans Hofmann.

Krasner joined the New York-based American Abstract Artists group in 1940, where she encountered similarly minded artists including Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and others. In 1942, artist John Graham included both Krasner and Pollock in a New York exhibition, which would mark the beginning of the pair’s relationship; they married in 1945. Recalling the influence of Jackson Pollock on her own approach to life and art, Krasner once reflected that “It was like a bomb that exploded…nothing else ever hit me that hard, until I saw Pollock’s work.”

As an abstract expressionist, Krasner created gestural, expressive works that she often took apart and reworked, or sometimes destroyed completely. She was known to change and adjust her style, never adopting a singular approach, but themes of the self, nature, and modern life remained central to her oeuvre. Among Krasner’s most well-known works are her Little Images series, small canvases created between 1946 and 1949 that she envisioned as indecipherable hieroglyphics. By the early 1950s, Krasner was exploring collage techniques as a primary means of composition and would continue to experiment and evolve her style for decades.

Krasner’s first solo exhibition was hosted at London’s Whitechapel Gallery in 1965. Ten years later, the Whitney Museum of American Art hosted another major solo exhibition. Krasner passed away in 1984 only a few months before her major retrospective was to open at the Museum of Modern Art. Today, her works are held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the National Gallery of Art, among many others.