Lee Krasner: A Retrospective

ART: LEE KRASNER FINDS HER PLACE IN RETROSPECTIVE AR MODERN

By Grace GLUECK

FOR years, the name Lee Krasner didn't mean a lot in the art world. A dedicated painter herself, she was much better known as Mrs. Jackson Pollock, and for too long after his death, as Lee Krasner Pollock, the artist's widow. There were even those who said that she couldn't get a show were it not for the Pollock connection, a whispering campaign of which Krasner was bitterly aware. Yet she kept on painting, as she had always done, and gradually her work - and her name - emerged from the background to which her husband's fame had consigned it. Now, ''Lee Krasner: A Retrospective'' at the Museum of Modern Art, her first full museum retrospective, clearly defines Krasner's place in the New York School. She is a major, independent artist of the pioneer Abstract Expressionist generation, whose stirring work ranks high among that produced here in the last half-century. It's a pity she couldn't have lived to experience the triumph of her opening at the Modern this week, although by the time of her death in June, at 75, she had the satisfaction of knowing that many who mattered to her had come to believe in her work as strongly as she did.

New York Times • Arts • page 31 • 1,688 words