Lee Krasner got a barely passing 65 in high school art, was later accused of cheating because a self-portrait was too good, and received the backhanded compliment that her work was so strong no one would suspect a woman made it. This episode follows her from a Brooklyn childhood as the daughter of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants through rigorous classical training at Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design, the 1929 opening of MoMA that scrambled her worldview, and studying under Hans Hofmann, who taught her to flatten the picture plane.

We examine her WPA mural work during the Depression, the 1942 visit to Jackson Pollock’s studio, and the symbiotic exchange in which she gave him modernist theory and connections while he gave her permission to loosen control. The conversation covers the gray slabs she destroyed, the Little Images painted in a cramped upstairs bedroom, collages made from her own torn paintings and Pollock’s discarded work, the Earth Green and Umber series after his 1956 death, painting left-handed after breaking her wrist in 1963, and the grammar-tense collages that mocked the critics.

• Why the action widow myth gets the Pollock-Krasner relationship backwards
• How her right-to-left painting habit links to Hebrew script and other scholarly theories
• Why insomnia and artificial light drove the palette of the Umber series
• How her stewardship of Pollock’s estate built a fortune of over 20 million dollars
• Why she founded the Pollock-Krasner Foundation to support struggling artists