Lee Krasner: A Biography
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Lee Krasner: A Biography Details
Perhaps best known as the long-suffering wife of Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner is now, finally, being recognized as one of the 20th century’s modernist masters. In Lee Krasner, author Gail Levin gives us an engrossing biography of the painter—so memorably portrayed in the movie Pollack by actor Marcia Gay Harden, who won an Academy Award for her performance—a firebrand and trailblazer for women’s rights as well as an exceptional artist who led a truly fascinating life.
Reviews
Gail Levin acknowledges that she is an advocate for her subject, as Irving Sandler admitted that he was an advocate for the Abstract Expressionist movement in art. Does this vitiate her take on Krasner's personal and professional life, on the importance of her contribution to Jackson Pollock's success or on the importance of her own art to Abstract Expressionism or to American (or World) art history? Each reader will have to make his/her own assessment. On the basis of her previous work, particularly the classic book on Edward Hopper, I respect her scholarship, and expect that she did the best that could be done with the material which was available to her. The story she tells is an interesting one of commitment to the life of an artist and a traditional Jewish Woman's commitment to her husband's success through exercise of maternal strength, forbearance and will to survive. While a "modern" woman in career terms, in the unwillingness to bear children, and in being sexually "free",the closer look that Levin allows shows that that in most of her sexually active years she was fully committed to a single partner and these were men whom she called "husband', whether or not they were legally married. In this duality (more likely multiplicity)of contrasting roles and impulses which drove her, lies a paradigm of the transition in the set of roles which were open and yet not open to women in her time. The paucity of evidence, the absence of a full panoply of letters from each period of her life and the absence of detailed diaries and personal statements, leads Levin to be suggestive at many points, to offer hypotheses which cannot be tested. That is fine so long as the reader recognizes the difference between a fact statement and a guess statement. The fact that some of the people with whom Krasner shared experiences were still alive to speak to the author is welcome, but as Levin wisely points out, memory is faulty and not always judicious. Biographer and Reader Beware.On the professional side, Levin acknowledges her membership in the school of feminist revisionists (her term) who are seeking to remedy what they see as the product of sex bias by men both in withholding opportunity for women to achieve in Art and to be acknowledged in their achievements. Having seen little of Krasner's work (outside of the books on her I own) I can make no judgment (although I must admit, I really liked the self-portrait she did as a student in 1930 which was displayed in a recent exhibition of women's work at New York's Jewish Museum...I took a reproduction, framed it and have it hanging as I write),. If I recall correctly, in his most recent summing up of Abstract Expressionism, published within the last few years, Irving Sandler did add a woman to his list (in addition to Jack Tworkov) of most notable abstract expressionists, but I do not think it was Krasner. (I am writing while away from my library, museum going in NYC, where Lyonel Feininger at the Whitney and the German Expressionists at MoMA are the center of my attention). At any rate, given the nature of the process by which reputation is achieved and maintained in the Art World, for men and woman, Levin and her fellow-advocates may well turn the scale of current evaluations on its head.In sum, I heartily recommend the book for the interest of it's story and the skillful presentation by its author. One might want to accompany the reading with reference to one of the volumes which contain reproductions of her work.