Female friends of Krasner’s watched in dismay as the artist they admired disappeared into a role much too small for her. One said it was like watching “a ballerina being diminished.” The painter Charlotte Park said, “Lee was her own woman before and after Pollock, but not during.” Krasner was too savvy not to recognize what was happening, but she was also too much an artist to care. “I went about my business,” she said. “I am painting.”
There is art, and there is a career in art. Krasner chose the former, which she considered more spiritually enriching, continuing to work for decades, mostly quietly, without an audience. And she was not alone.
For many of Krasner’s contemporaries — Perle Fine, Anne Ryan, Hedda Sterne, Michael (Corinne) West, to name a few — money and fame weren’t motivating factors because they weren’t even within the realm of possibility. With paths to a professional career largely blocked by a gallery system imbued with the myth that only men were serious artists, their work was wonderfully untainted by the concerns of commerce. Self-realization was its own reward.
But that course also wasn’t easy. Some of the women in Krasner’s circle succumbed to the demands of their relationships. But others risked their lives to save their creative selves.
Dorothy Dehner, for example, who was part of the artistic milieu in New York along with Krasner, drew and painted, but when she began sculpting, she did so in secret, destroying what she had made out of fear of provoking her sculptor husband David Smith’s jealous wrath. To no avail. A fight, during which she suffered several broken ribs, proved a turning point. She left Smith in 1950, divorced him in 1952 and, in 1955, began a 40-year career sculpting in bronze, wood and steel. She also married a new, supportive husband — not an artist.
— Mary Gabriel, The New York Times
