The painter who already had her own work
Lee Krasner (1908–1984) was a serious abstract painter long before most people had heard her name, and long before the events that frame this picture. Born in Brooklyn to a Russian-Jewish immigrant family, she trained at the National Academy of Design, worked through the 1930s on the federal art projects of the Depression, and in the late 1930s studied under Hans Hofmann(1880–1966), the German émigré teacher who drilled a generation of New York painters in modern color and structure. By the early 1940s she was already showing alongside the artists who would become the Abstract Expressionists, the loose group of postwar American painters (Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, Newman, the rest) now lumped under that name. She was, in other words, a working modernist with her own decade of pictures behind her before the part of the story everyone knows begins.
The part everyone knows is the marriage. In 1945 she married Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), and over the next decade he became the most famous painter in America, the man pouring and flinging house paint across canvases on the floor in the barn behind their house in Springs, on the east end of Long Island. Krasner kept painting through all of it, in a small upstairs bedroom of the house, in the space and at the scale that were left to her. And she kept being folded into his shadow: a 1949 review of her own work billed her, in print, as “Lee Krasner (Mrs. Jackson Pollock).” That is the thing she spent her life fighting, and it matters here, because the picture in front of us is one of the answers she gave.
The crash, and the empty studio
On 11 August 1956, Pollock was killed in a car crash near the house in Springs. Krasner was in Europe when it happened and came home to bury him. What follows is factual and it is part of this painting, so it should be said plainly, and then kept in proportion. In the months after his death, Krasner moved her own work out of the small bedroom and into the barn behind the house, the far larger room that had been Pollock’s studio. For the first time in her life she had the wall and the floor to work at mural scale, and she used it.
The lazy reading of what came next is “the grieving widow paints her way through her loss,” and that reading is too small. The grief is real and the studio is real; both belong in the story. But Krasner had been a committed abstract painter for nearly twenty years before this moment, and she would go on painting for nearly thirty years afterit (she died in 1984). The pictures she began making in that barn are not a catharsis so much as an arrival: a painter who had finally been handed the room she needed, taking the scale and the ambition that had been kept from her, and making something with it. The first great result is the one we’re about to walk up to.