Lee Krasner Paintings: Famous Artworks, Style & Legacy
Lee Krasner
Paintings
Lee Krasner paintings occupied the center of postwar American abstraction — large-scale, physically demanding canvases driven by recurring destruction and reconstruction of her own previous work, producing one of the most genuinely evolving bodies of art of the twentieth century.
A major figure of postwar American abstraction — explore Krasner's works at Zephyeer
Shop Lee Krasner Prints →Who Was Lee Krasner?
Lee Krasner paintings hold a position in the history of postwar American art that has been progressively reassessed upward since her death in 1984. Born Lena Krassner in Brooklyn in 1908 to Russian Jewish immigrant parents, Krasner committed to art at an early age, enrolling at the Cooper Union in 1926 and later at the National Academy of Design, where she was one of very few women to receive formal academic training in the mainstream tradition. In the late 1930s she studied with Hans Hofmann, whose rigorous instruction in pictorial structure and color became a lasting foundation. Hofmann reportedly told her at the time that her work was so good he had assumed it was made by a man — a remark that captures precisely the critical climate she would spend her career navigating.
Through the 1940s, Krasner worked within the emerging Abstract Expressionist community in New York, developing a series of densely painted, heavily worked canvases that she called the Little Image paintings — grid-based surfaces covered in hieroglyphic marks that registered influence from Mondrian and from Cubism while moving toward something more visceral and private. Her marriage to Jackson Pollock in 1945 and their subsequent move to Springs, Long Island, placed her at the center of the most significant social network in postwar American art. It also, for a period, subordinated her own practice to the management of Pollock's — she took primary responsibility for the practical organization of their lives and his career while maintaining her studio work with whatever time and energy remained. After Pollock's death in 1956, Krasner had the East Hampton studio to herself for the first time, and produced some of the most expansive work of her career, including the large-scale canvases of the Late Paintings series. She continued working at high intensity until shortly before her death in New York on June 19, 1984.
Krasner's relationship with her own earlier work was notably recursive: she repeatedly cut up, rearranged, and recomposed previous paintings and drawings into collages and new canvases, treating her accumulated production as raw material rather than archive. This method — which she pursued across multiple decades and in different formal registers — produced a body of work that is harder to survey than most artists' because it incorporates its own revision history. The Krasner retrospective at the Barbican Centre in London in 2019 drew significant critical attention and helped establish the current view of her as a major rather than secondary figure of her generation.
Krasner's habit of cutting up and recombining earlier drawings and paintings into new works was not collage as decoration but a form of continuous formal revision — her earlier self becoming a collaborator with her current one.
Lee Krasner paintings span nearly fifty years of practice that moved through rigorous academic training, gestural abstraction, large-scale color painting, and collage — each phase driven by internal necessity rather than external fashion. The following works represent the key phases of her development.
Little Image Series
The Little Image paintings are Krasner's first fully mature works — dense, physically worked surfaces covered in grids of impasto marks that suggest calligraphy, number systems, or ancient script without resolving into any of them. Produced in a small studio while Pollock worked in the larger barn, they have an intimacy of scale that contrasts with their visual density. Critics reading these works in the 2010s and 2020s have begun to see in them a formal intelligence that the original reception, dominated by attention to Pollock and the broader male AbEx narrative, consistently undervalued.
The grid structure connects Krasner's Little Images to Hans Hofmann's teaching and to Mondrian — but the marks within the grid are neither geometric nor restrained. They carry the energy of automatic writing while maintaining structural discipline, a combination that defines Krasner's synthesis of European modernism and American gestural impulse.
Bald Eagle
In 1953, dissatisfied with a group of paintings she had been working on, Krasner cut them up and recombined the fragments with torn drawings into collages. The act — destruction in the service of new composition — became one of her most distinctive methods. Bald Eagle is among the most celebrated of these collage works, its title applied retrospectively by the artist to a form that seemed to her to suggest a bird in flight. The resulting image is simultaneously violent and graceful, made from the residue of earlier efforts and assembled into something that could not have been planned.
The collage series placed Krasner in an interesting position relative to her contemporaries: while Pollock was developing the drip technique and de Kooning was working through his Women series, Krasner was exploring a form of material recycling that had no clear precedent in the Abstract Expressionist milieu. Her collages connect forward to the assemblage practices of the following decade without belonging fully to any period.
Earth Green and Umber Series
Following Pollock's death in August 1956, Krasner moved into the large East Hampton barn studio and began working at a scale she had not previously been able to access. The paintings of this period — often more than three metres across — are among the most physically ambitious of the entire AbEx generation. Working through the night in the months after Pollock's death, she produced canvases of exceptional force, their large organic forms rendered in the earth tones and deep greens that gave this body of work its period designation.
These late 1950s paintings were exhibited at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York in 1958, receiving serious critical attention for the first time since the Little Image period. Clement Greenberg, who had written dismissively about Krasner's work relative to Pollock's, acknowledged the quality of the new canvases. The Whitechapel Gallery in London gave her a solo exhibition in 1965 — an earlier and more substantial recognition in Britain than she received in her home country.
Night Journeys
A period of eye problems in the early 1960s prevented Krasner from painting for extended stretches and led her to work with charcoal drawings made in the dark — literally without sight, in the middle of the night when she could not sleep. These nocturnal drawings, which she later used as source material for the Night Journey paintings, carry a different quality of mark from her previous work: less controlled, more automatic in the strict surrealist sense, shaped by the absence of the eye's corrective feedback. The resulting paintings translate this nocturnal rawness into large-scale compositions that feel excavated rather than constructed.
The Night Journey series is now considered among the most significant bodies of work in her career. It demonstrates Krasner's ability to convert circumstantial limitation — the eye condition that prevented direct observation — into a formal method, and to sustain the quality of that method across multiple years of work.
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Lee Krasner's Influence on American Art
The trajectory of Krasner's critical reputation is itself a significant story in art history. During her lifetime, she was consistently positioned as secondary — as Pollock's wife, as a supporting figure, as a painter whose work was noted by critics primarily in relation to the men around her. Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, and Grace Hartigan — the second generation of New York School women painters — were in different ways indebted to the formal independence Krasner maintained under these conditions: her example demonstrated that a woman could sustain an ambitious, evolving practice at the center of the AbEx world without subordinating it entirely to the social dynamics of that world. The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, which she established before her death, has supported thousands of artists internationally through grants since 1985, making her legacy material as well as artistic.
Institutionally, the reassessment of Krasner's work has accelerated significantly since 2000. The Museum of Modern Art holds major works including The Seasons (1957). The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum all hold significant holdings. The 2019 Barbican Centre retrospective, organized by art historian Eleanor Nairne, was the most comprehensive survey of her work ever mounted and traveled to several institutions. The catalogue produced for that exhibition is now the standard scholarly reference. Krasner was awarded the Mayor's Award of Honor for Arts and Culture in New York in 1979, and received an honorary doctorate from Harvard in 1982.
For collectors seeking work from the abstract art tradition, Krasner occupies a distinctive position: her paintings are among the most physically energetic and formally inventive of the postwar generation, and they carry the added resonance of a practice sustained against consistent institutional and critical resistance. Bringing a Krasner print into a living space means living with one of the strongest wills in American art history as well as one of its most compelling visual signatures. Browse the full collection at zephyeer.com/collections/lee-krasner.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Lee Krasner most famous for?
Krasner is most famous as a major figure of Abstract Expressionism — specifically for her Little Image paintings of the late 1940s, her large-scale Earth Green canvases made after Pollock's death in 1956, and her collage works in which she cut up and reassembled her own earlier paintings and drawings. She is also known for her role as executor of Pollock's estate and for founding the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, which has distributed over $75 million in grants to visual artists since 1985.
What style of art did Lee Krasner create?
Krasner worked within Abstract Expressionism — the broad postwar American movement characterized by large-scale gestural painting and the foregrounding of the creative act. Within that movement, her practice was distinctive for its structural rigor (rooted in Hans Hofmann's teaching), its recurring use of collage and material recycling, and its willingness to work through radically different formal registers across successive periods. She did not develop a single immediately recognizable signature style, which partly explains the delayed critical recognition — her work required sustained engagement rather than immediate identification.
What do Lee Krasner paintings look like in a home setting?
Krasner's work covers a wide range of formal registers, but her most characteristic paintings — the large gestural canvases of the late 1950s and early 1960s — bring physical energy to a room. The earth-toned works have warmth and organic presence; the brighter, more chromatic pieces from other periods introduce intensity without decoration. Her collage works have a different, more intimate quality. All of them reward time and attention — the surface detail of Krasner's painting becomes more visible the longer you look.
Where can I buy Lee Krasner art prints?
Zephyeer carries museum-quality Lee Krasner prints, professionally framed and ready to hang. Browse the full collection at zephyeer.com/collections/lee-krasner.
What size Lee Krasner print works best for a living room?
Krasner's major canvases were typically large — many exceed two metres — and the scale is part of their physical argument. For a living room, a 60×80 cm or larger print preserves some of that expansive quality. Her work benefits from being viewed at a distance as well as close up, so giving it a wall with some open space around it allows both the overall gestural movement and the surface detail to register properly. See our wall art guide for room-specific recommendations.