Lee Krasner

But in 1934, Roosevelt set up the Federal Arts Project, which was quite an incredible undertaking and became a lifeline for American artists.

Some of those artists included, those have become well-known artists, including Arshile Gorky, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, Gottlieb, and also Mark Rothko.

And they all met each other there working on this federal arts project because part of it was the mural program.

And it's important that the artists came together.

Yeah, I feel like he was very influenced by Picasso and it feels like sometimes he can compress all the drama of that period coming out of the Second World War at the time.

But I just wanted to take us very quickly to Frankenthaler to move from abstract expressionism to colour field painting.

But, you know, it's really important to look at the work of Lee Krasner who was, you know, really a force of nature and at the time was really a very important figure.

She also was one of the mural painters.

There was Wilhelm de Koning, a Dutch immigrant whose slashing, almost violent paintings of women could make people genuinely furious.

There was Robert Motherwell, there was Lee Krasner, a formidable painter in her own right who also happened to be married to Pollock, and there was a whole wider circle beyond them.

They all had different styles, but what tied them together was an attitude.

Their canvases were big, raw, and emotional, and they flatly refused to show you anything you could recognize.

I mean, you know, it's not every autumn New York City museums have such a strong lineup, but this autumn, I mean, the, the number of really enticing exhibitions to me that are on the horizon is staggering.

The Met has this Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock exhibition coming up in October-

Mm

... which I think is gonna be hugely important.

At the moment in Canberra, it's displayed in a great gallery, um, just inside the National Gallery.

Next to it on the wall is a fabulous painting by Lee Krasner, Pollock's wife.

Blue Poles is all about color and energy and movement, and the painting just to its left by Krasner is dark and still, almost black and white.

And if you look at the date next to her signature on that painting, you can see that it's painted just a few years after Blue Poles, but also after Pollock's death, and clearly the, um, manifestation of her grief is evident on that canvas.

He had completely won the game.

But then you look at the accounts from his wife, Lee Krasner, and you realize he felt trapped by his own success.

He felt he had exhausted that particular cycle of art.

'Cause he was an artist, you know.

And then after that, there are a series of less important painters.

They usually have something by Lee Krasner, who was Jackson Pollock's wife.

and then a variety of increasingly unimportant painters.

And we get sort of into a pop art area with Andy Warhol and Klaus Oldenburg.

And by we, I mean Jennifer Coates and myself.

Come with us as we deep dive into two collage artists, Jess, a queer artist who worked in San Francisco in the latter half of the 20th century, and Lee Krasner, an abstract expressionist artist who turned to collage during times of artist block.

If you're a collage fan or are currently experiencing artist block, or just like to hang out with Jennifer and me, stay right here.

Be back in a jif.

Um, but today, because I've done a little bit of talking about collage as an endpoint, artists that use collage as their main medium and stuck with it and made their artwork about collage and they devoted their lives to collage.

Today, I'm going a different direction, and I'm going to focus on a painter who chose to use collage more as a breakthrough or a transitional medium during times of artistic block.

So I'll be focusing on the painter Lee Krasner, the abstract expressionist.

And Jennifer, who are you gonna bring to us today?

...

there is Lee Krasner and there is Joan Mitchell and Elaine de Kooning and all of these female artists that did so many wonderful things that, that just get ignored.

So you can use Joan Mitchell as a stand-in for any of those abstract expressionists that you should-

Yes