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Lee Krasner LP: A Biography (2011)

by Gail Levin(Favorite Author)

3.63 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0062017799 (ISBN13: 9780062017796)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

HarperLuxe

review 1: I will say Levin is thorough but it does get somewhat boring with all of her "list's" of who's who at what opening - school etc in the first half of the book. Then is gets bogged down with Pollock which I guess is natural. The book really takes off after the death of Pollock. It is then that I feel I finally got into the person Lee Krasner really was. I would recommend plugging through because the outline of the abstract expressionist movement can be found in the Krasner life story.
review 2: The Brooklyn-born daughter of Jewish immigrants from Russia, by the time Lena Krasner was thirteen, she knew she wanted to be a painter. She studied art at Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design, worked as a nude model and waitress, enrolled in teaching classes a... moret City College, and, during the Great Depression, took WPA jobs (one involved drawing fossils for a geology textbook). An early abstract impressionist, Krasner was already peers with artists like Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, and Piet Mondrian, when she met and married Jackson Pollock. But due to the pervasive sexism of her times—and of the art world—it would take many years for her to achieve real critical recognition of her own. Krasner and Pollock enjoyed a productive creative marriage, but it was also a troubled one. A heavy drinker, Pollock was saddled with a host of psychiatric problems (as Pollock’s brother put it, “We are sure that if he is able to hold himself together his work will become of real significance,”). As Pollock’s career took off, Krasner directed her considerable energy and talents towards promoting his work and trying to keep his destructive alcoholism in check—while dealing with the frustration of suddenly being known simply as “Mrs. Jackson Pollack." Later critics would acknowledge that the marriage was “at once the greatest single advantage and the greatest handicap to her career.” Even after her husband’s tragic, tabloid death, over and over again, Krasner’s life story was “picked over for tidbits to serve other agendas.” Later in life, Krasner called herself a "survivor" and it's easy to see why. The cultural, historical and political movements she lived through were diverse, and weathering them as both an individual and an artist clearly was no small feat. No portrait of Jackson Pollock—or the abstract expressionist movement at large—is complete without a picture of Krasner’s life, but her life story is also very much a story about feminism’s battles, a struggle best summed up by a few lines of French poet Arthur Rimbaud painted on her wall: “To whom shall I hire myself out? What beast must one adore? … What lie must I maintain?” less

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