October 27: Krasner & Lichtenstein

Two influential modern Jewish artists were born on this date: Lee Krasner in 1908, and Roy Lichtenstein in 1923. Krasner, an influential Abstract Expressionist who trained at Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design, worked in the WPA Federal Art Project from 1935 to 1943. Two years later she married Jackson Pollack, who died in 1956. (“I would give anything to have someone giving me what I was able to give Pollock,” Krasner would say.) Krasner became one of only four women to have retrospective exhibits of their work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, six months following her death in 1984. She was highly self-critical and left a relatively small body of work (500-plus pieces). Roy Lichtenstein, a pioneer of the Pop Art movement, captured national attention in the early 1960s with his large-canvas comic-book paintings, which parodied the bathos of mass culture and appropriated the techniques of commercial printing (Pop Art, he said, is “not ‘American’ painting but actually industrial painting”). Although he largely stopped painting comic-book imagery by 1965, they remained his “signature works” throughout his career, in which he also created sculpture, prints, and more than four thousand other pieces. Lichtenstein was awarded the National Medal of the Arts in 1995, two years before his death. “Painting . . . in which the inner and the outer man are inseparable, transcends technique, transcends subject and moves into the realm of the inevitable.” —Lee Krasner