It would have been nice to say that the Lee Krasner retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum [1] totally changed my mind about the work of this problematic painter, to say that the show makes a convincing case for Krasner as an important artist in her own right and that it makes you think of her primarily as an independent force in the heady days of postwar American painting and only secondarily as the long-suffering wife of Jackson Pollock. (It’s worth noting that Krasner’s marriage to Pollock, while unquestionably of crucial importance to his own short life and his evolution as an artist, occupied only about fifteen years of Krasner’s nearly half-century-long painting career.) Pace my revisionist and feminist colleagues, the Brooklyn exhibition simply reinforced the impression I had formed from the flurry of Krasner shows held in the 1970s and early 1980s at various New York galleries, the Whitney, a ...

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