Lee Krasner: A Biography Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Are you looking to buy Lee Krasner: A Biography? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Lee Krasner: A Biography. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Lee Krasner: A Biography ReviewFinally a real down to earth book on Lee Krasner's life and art by a first rate art historian. Gail Levin tells the heart-felt story of Lee Krasner's struggle to be seen as an artist in her own right instead of being folded into the Jackson Pollock legend she helped to create. I interviewed Lee in the 1980s and found her to be a warm, witty and intelligent woman willing to talk about Jackson Pollocks life and art as well as her own.
She was a powerful artist in her own right who because of the art world's discrimination against women was not given her due. Gail Levin's new biography is a much needed corrective to the view that Lee was just the little wife painting in the bathroom who kept shinning up Pollock's tarnished image.
As this book shows Lee was an artist of some note before she ever met Jackson. She was the one who shored him up and helped him find his own style as well as introducing him to an art world he did not know.
What emerges from this biography is a fresh look at Lee Krasner as a woman from a Jewish family trying to make a name for herself in art. It shows her to be a devoted wife and friend to Jackson Pollock despite his drinking and abuse of her love for him. It details her struggles to keep the marriage together and somehow integrate her art into this volitile mix. Levin's strong writing style, her intimate knowledge of the artist and the art scene give us a moving picture of what it meant to be a woman artist emerging during the 1940s and finally getting some recognition because of the women's movement in the late 1970s.
This book is a triumph of scholarship and will stand the test of time and those who refuse to take a fresh look at this extraordinary woman.Lee Krasner: A Biography Overview
Lee Krasner is best known as the artist-wife of Jackson Pollock, the renowned abstract expressionist painter. Yet in this riveting new biography, the first full-length account of her colorful life, distinguished art historian Gail Levin challenges previous portrayals of Krasner, and shows that she was an independent and resourceful woman of uncompromising talent and prodigious energy. Krasner emerges as a significant artist who deserves her place in the twentieth century's cultural lexicon and artistic pantheon.

The daughter of Jewish immigrants newly arrived from Russia, Krasner grew up impoverished in Brooklyn. With no support or role model, she began to make her own way during the late 1920s and early 1930s as a talented, outspoken artist and political progressive. Krasner's contemporaries, who took notice of her remarkable sex appeal, drive, and ambition, were either captivated or threatened, but they all found her memorable. During the Great Depression, she supported herself painting murals for the WPA, was called a Trotskyite for speaking out at the Artists Union, and got arrested for demonstrating on behalf of workers' rights.

In 1936 Krasner first encountered an intoxicated Jackson Pollock at an Artists Union dance. They met again by chance when both were about to be featured in the same group show in 1942, and soon they were a couple, marrying three years later. To nurture Pollock and his talent, Krasner gave up her life in the city, where she had socialized easily with fellow artists such as Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, and Piet Mondrian. Once they moved to Long Island's rural East End, Krasner and Pollock became the center of a new avant-garde community. In this captivating book, Gail Levin probes Krasner's relationship with Pollock, examining how this strong woman struggled to meet the challenges of their poverty, as well as her husband's alcoholism and extramarital affairs, all the while encouraging his art. Levin uncovers never-before-told stories of how Krasner managed so skillfully to market Pollock's work and how this eventually raised prices for all the abstract expressionists.

Drawing on new sources and numerous personal interviews-including with Krasner, whom Levin knew and interviewed during the last years of the artist's life-Levin has written a dynamic, compelling, and moving portrait of a brilliant woman that recovers Krasner's voice and allows us to see that her life intersected with and informed her art.


Want to learn more information about Lee Krasner: A Biography?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now