One of the most radical painters in the first generation of abstract expressionists, Lee Krasner devoted six decades of her life to making art. As a teenager, the Brooklyn native commuted into Manhattan to attend Washington Irving High School, an all-female institution where she majored in studio art. After graduating in 1926, Krasner continued her studies at the Women's Art School of Cooper Union, the Art Students League, the National Academy of Design, and City College of New York. Krasner also took classes with the avant-garde painter Hans Hofmann, who encouraged her to explore pure abstraction. A series of jobs in the Public Works of Art Project's Mural Division gave her valuable experience working on a large scale.

For eleven years Krasner was married to Jackson Pollock, the most famous, and most controversial, abstract expressionist painter. Inevitably, his career and his colorful lifestyle overshadowed her reputation, even though Krasner was producing pioneering, totally abstract, painterly canvases at least two years before Pollock developed his signature drip-painting technique.

While continuing to promote Pollock's art, Krasner kept discovering new approaches to her own paintings and collages. She had her first solo exhibition at New York's prestigious Betty Parsons Gallery in 1951 and her first major retrospective in 1965 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. During the early 1970s Krasner's contribution to abstract expressionism began to be reevaluated.