page_title: Lee Krasner
section_title: Early career
hierarchical_section_title: Lee Krasner / Early career
caption_attribution_description: English: Lee Krasner, Untitled Mural Study, 1940. Gouache on paper, 17 x 22 inches. Study for a Mural Krasner did for the WPA, an American New Deal agency. Deutsch: Lee Krasner, Untitled Mural Study, 1940. Gouache auf Papier, 43 x 56 cm. Krasner gestaltete diese Murals im Auftrag der WPA, einer Bundesbehörde der USA.
context_page_description: Lenore "Lee" Krasner was an American abstract expressionist painter, with a strong speciality in collage, who was married to Jackson Pollock. Although there was much cross-pollination between their two styles, the relationship somewhat overshadowed her contribution for some time. Krasner’s training, influenced by George Bridgman and Hans Hofmann, was the more formalized, especially in the depiction of human anatomy, and this enriched Pollock’s more intuitive and unstructured output.
  Krasner is now seen as a key transitional figure within abstraction, who connected early-20th-century art with the new ideas of postwar America, and her work fetches high prices at auction. She is also one of the few female artists to have had a retrospective show at the Museum of Modern Art.
context_section_description: Krasner supported herself as a waitress during her studies but it eventually became too difficult due to the Great Depression. In order to continue provide for herself, she joined the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project in 1935, working in the mural division as an assistant to Max Spivak. Her job was to enlarge other artists' designs for large-scaled public murals. As murals were created to be easily understood and appreciated by the general public, however, the abstract art Krasner produced was undesirable. While happy to be employed, she was dissatisfied since she did not like working with figurative images created by other artists. Throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s, she created gouache sketches in the hopes of one day creating an abstract mural. As soon as one of her proposals for a mural was approved for the WNYC radio station, the Works Progress Administration turned into War Services and all art had to be created for war propaganda. Krasner continued working for War Services by creating collages for the war effort which were displayed in the windows of nineteen department stores in Brooklyn and Manhattan. She was intensively involved with the Artists Union during her employment with the WPA but was one of the first to quit when she realized the communists were taking it over. However, by being part of this organization, she was able to meet more artists in the city and enlarge her network.
  After she quit, she joined in 1940 the American Abstract Artists. While a member, she typically exhibited cubist still life in a black-gridded cloisonne style which were highly impastoed and gestural. She met future abstract expressionists Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline, Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, and Bradley Walker Tomlin through this organization. She lost interest in their usage of hard-edge geometric style after her relationship with Jackson Pollock began.
caption: Gouache study for a mural, commissioned by the WPA, 1940
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