Lee Krasner Destroyed Her Own Paintings to Keep Reinventing

Feature image: Lee Krasner, Night Watch, 1960 via Seattle Art Museum

Lee Krasner had been serious about painting since she was fourteen. She trained at the Women's Art School of Cooper Union, the National Academy of Design, and the Art Students League, then spent the early 1930s working for the WPA Federal Art Project, where she advanced into a supervisory role on public mural commissions. In 1937 she began studying under Hans Hofmann, whose emphasis on structure and push-pull composition reshaped her painting toward abstraction. By 1936, she was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group, showing in their exhibitions and building a reputation among the small, tight downtown circle that included Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Arshile Gorky.

This added up to a full career already underway. By her own late-1930s standards, Krasner had arrived: trained, exhibiting, and embedded in the exact scene that would go on to define American painting for the next twenty years.

Krasner carried that same rigor into how she treated her own finished work. She held it to a standard most of it failed to meet, and she was willing to destroy it to keep moving. In 1945, ready to leave her Cubist training behind, she cleared a large body of earlier paintings to make way for what became the Little Images series, dense, hieroglyphic-looking canvases she began in 1946.

She did this again in 1951, after her first solo show at Betty Parsons Gallery: of the fourteen geometric abstractions she exhibited, only two survive intact today, the rest destroyed or painted over. She did it a third time in 1953, cutting up a collection of her own paintings and drawings and reassembling the fragments, along with scraps salvaged from around the studio, into a new body of collage work. Her surviving early output is thinner than that of almost any of her peers as a result. The destruction functioned as a working method: everything stayed subject to her own judgment, and discarded pieces became raw material for whatever came next.

Krasner's style shifted just as often as her canvases got recycled, and always on her own timeline. She moved from academic realism into Hofmann-influenced Cubism, out of that into the small-scale Little Images, through a geometric period, and into the collage work of the mid-1950s, abandoning each mode before the art world had finished cataloging her for it. Somewhere in the middle of that progression, in 1941, she met Jackson Pollock, the one unfamiliar name on the roster of a group show at the McMillen Gallery, organized by the dealer John Graham, that otherwise hung her alongside Matisse, Picasso, de Kooning, and Stuart Davis.

Krasner prided herself on knowing every serious painter in a downtown scene small enough to know completely, so the gap struck her as strange enough to investigate. She tracked down his Eighth Street studio and showed up unannounced. He was, at that point, essentially unknown, even to the one person in New York whose job it was to know everyone. They married in 1945 and moved to a farmhouse in Springs, Long Island, where Krasner took the small upstairs bedroom as her studio, and Pollock worked in the barn.

Once married, Krasner became as central to Pollock's career as to her own. She introduced him to the critic Clement Greenberg, the dealer Peggy Guggenheim, and de Kooning, and took on much of the practical work of getting his paintings seen, sold, and reviewed. The two painted within a few hundred feet of each other, and the influence ran in both directions: her Little Images, begun the same year Pollock arrived at his drip technique, absorbed some of the same all-over rhythm. Scholars now describe her as instrumental to the machinery behind his rise, a role she took on with real conviction even as her own exhibition record slowed under the weight of it.

The marriage grew harder as Pollock's drinking worsened and his affairs became public. He began a relationship with the artist Ruth Kligman in 1956, and Krasner, furious and worn down, left for Europe that summer to put distance between herself and the collapse at home. She was in Paris on August 11, 1956, when Pollock, driving drunk with Kligman and her friend Edith Metzger in the car, crashed on a road near their home. Pollock and Metzger were killed; Kligman survived. Krasner flew back to bury her husband and, within months, became executor of his estate, a role she held for the rest of her life alongside her own painting. Her will later established the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, a grant program that continues to support working artists, closing out a partnership that had shaped, strained, and outlasted both of them.

In 1958, the real estate firm Uris Brothers commissioned Krasner to design a pair of mosaic murals for their new office tower at 2 Broadway in Lower Manhattan. Krasner worked in glass tesserae for the first time, collaborating with her nephew, Roland Stein, on a larger mural measuring 86 feet by 12 feet for the building's main entrance and a smaller companion piece for the entrance facing Broad Street.

Completed in 1959, the murals gave Krasner her first opportunity to work at true architectural scale, translating the interlocking planes and rhythms of her paintings into green, blue, gold, black, and crimson glass. The commission stood apart from anything else in her output: a public, permanent work, designed for a building lobby rather than a gallery wall.

Physical limits shaped Krasner's practice as much as her own restlessness did. In 1962 she survived a near-fatal aneurysm, and in the fall that followed she broke her wrist. She kept painting throughout her recovery with her nondominant left hand, applying paint straight from the tube to compensate for the loss of fine control. Bird Image and Flowering Limb, both made in 1963, carry the evidence of that constraint directly: paint built up in short, finger-scaled strokes in place of her usual sweeping gesture.

Two deaths in close succession brought on the most demanding shift in her career. Her mother died in 1959; Pollock had died in a car accident in 1956. Chronic insomnia followed, and Krasner turned the sleepless hours into studio time, working in Pollock's former barn studio, which she had claimed for herself, tacking unstretched canvas directly to the wall at a scale her old upstairs bedroom could never have held.

The hours dictated her palette. Color required daylight, as far as she was concerned, so the night work stayed limited to raw umber, burnt sienna, and white, a constraint that produced one of her most recognizable bodies of work. Her friend, the poet Richard Howard, called the series her Night Journeys. Polar Stampede and Night Watch each stretch to more than fourteen feet across, built from broad backhand sweeps she made standing at a canvas nearly a foot and a half taller than she was. She later said the work was so biographical that anyone willing to look closely could read it: grief, insomnia, and a stubborn persistence through bad working conditions, all visible directly on the canvas.

British audiences saw Krasner's work for the first time in September 1965, when the curator Bryan Robertson staged Lee Krasner: Paintings, Drawings and Collages at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London.

The feminist art movement of the 1970s brought fresh critical attention to her paintings on their own terms, prompting a wave of reassessment among scholars who had spent two decades filing her under someone else's story. By the early 1980s, a full retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art confirmed what Krasner had spent five decades building. The years between her first destroyed canvases and that retrospective hold together through her own restlessness: an instinct to keep changing before any single version of herself, or any single painting, could stay finished for long.

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