Lee Krasner
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Lee Krasner (October 27, 1908 - June 19, 1984) was an influential abstract expressionist painter in the second half of the 20th Century. In 1945, Krasner married artist Jackson Pollock, who was also influential in the Abstract Expressionism movement.
She was born in Brooklyn, New York to Russian Jewish immigrant parents.
Krasner studied at The Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design and worked on the WPA Federal Art Project from 1935 to 1943. Starting in 1937, she took classes with Hans Hofmann, who taught the principles of cubism, and his influence helped to direct Krasner's work toward neo-cubist abstraction. In 1940, she started showing with the American Abstract Artists, a group of American painters.
She would often cut apart her own drawings and paintings to create collages and sometimes revised or discarded whole series. As a result, her surviving body of work is relatively small. Her catalogue raisonne, published in 1995 by Abrams, lists only 599 known pieces. She was rigorously self-critical, and her critical eye is believed to have been important to Pollock's work.
Krasner was portrayed in an Academy Award-winning performance by Marcia Gay Harden in the 2000 film Pollock, a drama about the life of her husband Jackson Pollock, directed by Ed Harris.
She died at age 75 in 1984.