Politics & Power Quote by Lee Krasner

The slyness is in the self-correction: "As I say" pretends this is a settled point, then "I as an abstract artist" swerves into a category that American culture often treats as willfully aloof from public life. Krasner isn’t defending herself so much as refusing a bad premise: that abstraction equals escape, and that the politics of the mid-century art world belonged to the men who could afford to look above the mess.

Her phrasing works like a double exposure. On one layer, it’s a statement of fact: she made nonrepresentational work and she was politically engaged. On the other, it’s a rebuke to the Cold War story that Abstract Expressionism was pure individual freedom, conveniently useful as cultural propaganda against Soviet socialist realism. Krasner suggests that the supposedly "apolitical" style had consequences, affiliations, and stakes - and that the artist’s civic posture doesn’t vanish just because the canvas doesn’t depict a march or a flag.

The context matters: Krasner navigated a scene that canonized the heroic male painter while sidelining women as muses, wives, or footnotes. Saying she was "active politically" also reads as a claim to agency inside institutions that policed both ideology and gender. The subtext: don’t confuse the absence of imagery with the absence of position. Even abstraction can be a way of choosing sides - in the union hall, in the studio, and in who gets to be remembered.