Krasner, Lee

Lena Krassner is born on 27 October in Brooklyn, New York, three years after her Orthodox Jewish family had emigrated to America from a shtetl near Odessa, Russia (which today would be in the Ukraine) fleeing brutal pogroms and the Russo-Japanese War.

Graduating at the age of seventeen, she goes on to study at the Woman’s Art School at The Cooper Union and (after a brief spell at the Art Students League) at the National Academy of Design.

Krasner is assigned to the Mural Division of the Fine Arts Project (FAP), part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a federal initiative to help artists with public commissions.

Krasner enrolls at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts.

Krasner shows her work with the American Abstract Artists (AAA) for the first time as part of the Fourth Annual Exhibition at the American Fine Art Galleries, New York.

On the occasion of the exhibition American and French Paintings, at the McMillen Gallery, Lee Krasner meets Jackson Pollock.

Krasner designs large-scale displays for department-store windows in New York which promote war-training courses being made available at municipal colleges.

Krasner leaves the AAA, because of the group’s rigid mindset: they had denied membership to Alexander Calder and rejected the proposal for Hofmann to give a lecture.

Krasner participates in the exhibition Abstract and Surrealist Art in America, which is selected by Sidney Janis and organized by the San Francisco Museum of Art.

In October, Krasner and Pollock are married and later move to Springs, Long Island.

Krasner makes a breakthrough with a new series of works she calls her Little Images.

Krasner begins to be called ‘Lee Krasner’ in professional and public contexts. She exhibits a selection of her Little Images and one of her mosaic tables in the exhibition The Modern House Comes Alive 1948–49 at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in New York to critical acclaim.

In October, Krasner’s first solo exhibition, Paintings 1951, Lee Krasner, opens at Betty Parsons Gallery. Krasner reuses many of the canvases shown to create the collages she later exhibits in a solo exhibition at the Stable Gallery in 1955.

During the summer, Krasner works on a painting she will call Prophecy. Her relationship with Pollock is suffering from his alcoholism. She decides to travel alone to Europe for the first time. She is in Paris when she learns that Pollock has died in a car accident.

In February, Krasner’s recent paintings are shown in a solo exhibition at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York, and the Uris Buildings Corporation commissions her to design two large-scale mosaic panels for the company’s headquarters.

Krasner’s mother dies. She begins a new body of work all painted under artificial light at night, as Krasner is suffering from chronic insomnia. Richard Howard describes these paintings as ‘mourning’ pictures, each generated by a ‘night journey.’

In September, Krasner’s first retrospective Lee Krasner, Paintings, Drawings and Collages, opens at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

In March, Krasner has her first exhibition of new work at the Marlborough-Gerson Gallery in New York, Lee Krasner Recent Paintings.

In April, Krasner joins a group called Women in the Arts and pickets the Museum of Modern Art to protest its neglect of female artists.

In November, the Whitney Museum of American Art presents Lee Krasner: Large Paintings, Krasner’s first solo show at a major New York museum.

Lee Krasner: Collage and Works on Paper, 1933–74 opens in January at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. The exhibition tours to the Pennsylvania State University Museum of Art and the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Massachusetts.

Krasner joins Pace Gallery, becoming the third woman they represent; the following year she presents her series Eleven Ways to Use the Words To See at the New York gallery.

Barbara Rose’s documentary, Lee Krasner: The Long View, is released.

Krasner receives the Outstanding Achievement in the Visual Arts award from the Women’s Caucus for Art.

The Guild Hall opens Krasner/Pollock: A Working Relationship, curated by Barbara Rose. The exhibition tours to Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, New York University.

Krasner is awarded the ‘Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres’ in France, presented to her by the French Minister of Culture, Jack Lang.

The day of Krasner’s seventy-fifth birthday, Lee Krasner: A Retrospective, curated by Barbara Rose, opens at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The exhibition travels to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia; Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona; and the Museum of Modern Art.

On 19 June, Krasner dies in New York Hospital.