Lee Krasner (1908-1984)

An avid exhibitor with the Abstract American Artists association in the 1940s who studied under Hans Hofmann in the 1930s, Lee Krasner was among the most sophisticated and promising young artists in New York during this time. Developing strong bonds with Jackson Pollock and Arshile Gorky, she won rare acceptance as one of the few female artists in the downtown art world. Her work of the early 1940s such as Untitled, 1940, was described as "abstract, Picassoid, with heavy black lines, brilliant intense colors, and thick impasto" which tied her to both the classic abstraction and modernism well-established in the current art world as well as the contemporary market (E. Landau, Lee Krasner: A Catalogue Raisonné, New York, Harry Abrams, 1995, p. 75). One of the most thickly painted of her early 1940s still lifes, Untitled, evidences the artist's continuing interest in the work of Mondrian with its bold use of geometric forms in primary colors.