Lee Krasner, though an entirely genius artist in her own right, was doomed to live in the colossal shadow of her husband, Jackson Pollock 

If you ask me, this is a complete outrage because a) she was on the scene way before anyone even knew who Pollock was and b) she moved the needle for female artists so far forward that she is probably the “baby” referred to in the slogan, “You’ve come a long way, baby.” Her greatest weakness was her love for Jackson Pollock, putting her in the backseat of his artistic career rather than the other way around. This literally ended in a car wreck (one that killed Pollock) but luckily Krasner wasn’t in the car. Unluckily for us though, this didn’t put to rest the stereotype than men are better drivers than women.

In terms of her artistic style, Krasner had a very severe case of A.D.D. She was constantly switching styles and destroying her previous work, which as you can imagine was very frustrating to any museum trying to do a retrospective on her. Her own account of this stylistic restlessness, which she dubbed “breaks” is this: “My own image of my work is that I no sooner settle into something than a break occurs. These breaks are always painful and depressing but despite them I see that there’s a consistency that holds out, but is hard to define.” This consistency was in part due to the fact that she would recycle and repurpose her old work. Not only did she not follow the rules of Abstract Expressionism, but she also shattered them. She was described as violent, aggressive and fiercely independent aka the worst nightmare of the patriarchy that tried to put her down.

She was systematically dismissed by all of the men in the art world at the time. Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and Barnett Newman all refused to acknowledge her. One of her friends, Wilfrid Zogbaum described her ambition as “at times a bit frightening” and even her mentor, Hans Hofmann described one of her works as “so good you would not know it was made by a woman artist.” Obviously she overcame these douches (blunt, but honestly what else would you call them) because she became one of only six women to have a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and has since been an inspiration for the feminist movement of the 1960s. Take THAT patriarchy!