Lee Krasner (Modern Masters Series, Vol. 15)

This work chronicles the life and work of Lee Krasner, one of the most inventive Abstract Expressionist painters. Lee Kranser occupies a special place in Abstract Expressionism as a major female painter in a group of artists known for their macho individuality. Aproaching art-making as a forum for communicating her discoveries about the self, nature and modern life, she turn the process of her painting into a debate with herself and other artists, ranging from Picasso and Matisse to her husband, Jackson Pollock. Often painting in a large scale, she created canvases overflowing with colour and intensely personal content. Fearless in her readiness to explore new styles, she created an extraordinary range of works, from her early Cubist-based abstractions to ambitious late canvases related to the postmodernism of the 1980s. The abrupt changes in her style, coupled with her feuds with powerful critics, delayed critical acceptance of Krasner's art.

At nearly every stage of her 15-year marriage to the universally recognized Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner was quicker to respond to stylistic innovations in the art world than her husband. Pollock either didn't catch on to the art-world developments that surrounded him or incorporated changes much later than Krasner did. Some critics read Krasner's dynamic painting style as evidence of her superiority as an artist, but others saw her porousness as a problem, and Pollock's comparative insularity as one key to his uniqueness. In Lee Krasner, Robert Hobbs gracefully analyzes the many forces--of personality, education, and cultural and political milieu--that shaped Krasner's 60-year devotion to art; in the process, he elucidates the many reasons her "artistically constructed self remains provisional."

B.H. Friedman, Pollock's first biographer, introduces the book with a gripping series of intimate, you-are-there diary entries from the long years of his friendship with the two artists. Then Hobbs weaves biography and critical interpretation to develop the main text of the book. The reproductions of Krasner's drawings and paintings (97 in color) are excellent, giving a fair picture of her long career, and there are more than a score of black-and-white archival photos of Krasner and the other early abstract expressionists. The book has a few odd omissions though, such as any reference to Mark Tobey, whose "white writing" paintings and others are so closely related stylistically to Krasner's work of the 1940s. Still, this is the respectful but objective book Krasner's vigorous work and forceful personality deserve. It sheds sympathetic light on her lifelong, intellectually rigorous, artistic questing. --Peggy Moorman