Description: Lee Krasner never took the easy way out-not in life, not in art. Brought up in a poor Brooklyn neighborhood and originally named Lena Krasner by her immigrant parents, she decided early on to create a new name and a new identity for herself. Later, as one of the few female painters in the aggressively male circle of Abstract Expressionists, she had to contend not only with the critics' skepticism about their new way of making art but also with the skepticism that greeted any woman's attempts to become a professional artist.
Review Quotes: This impressive critical-biographical study confirms Lee Krasner (1908-1984) as one of the major abstract expressionist artists. Though heavily influenced by her husband Jackson Pollock, she challenged and eventually abandoned his style through a series of paintings that Hobbs interprets as a feminist critique of the macho-oriented art of Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and their cronies. An art history professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, Hobbs follows Krasner, daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn, as she transforms herself from well-connected, belligerent young avant-garde painter to supportive, possessive, acquiescent wife and then to an eclectic pioneer who used her art as an intense confrontation with her subconscious. Her swirling biomorphs, jagged collages, radiant lush abstractions, mythic fragments and apocalyptic images of cities are among the works reproduced in 48 color and 67 b & w plates.--Publishers Weekly