lee krasner

Perhaps the bravest 20th-Century American painter—if not for her courageous approach to the balance of color and form, then for what was, by all accounts, a voluntarily marriage to renowned painter Jackson Pollock—Krasner explored the range of Abstract Expressionism as a disparate entity. This painting (Sun Woman 1) is, in the context of her work, somewhat conservative, though in other ways utterly gorgeous.

Another reason to love Krasner is for her very own love of the poetry of French Symbolist Arthur Rimbaud. According to a catalog from a 1999 retrospective, as a young painter she had scrawled these lines on a wall of her studio, from Rimbaud's poem Season In Hell:

To whom should I hire myself out? What beast must I adore?
What holy image is attacked? What hearts shall I break?
What lie must I maintain? In what blood must I tread?

Are these not the questions any modernist would have asked of herself, in so many words? All of the lines were written on the white wall in black chalk, with the exception of "What lie must I maintain?" which was rendered in blue.