Creativity Quote by Lee Krasner

Krasner is doing two things at once here: staking her proximity to genius and quietly indicting the machinery that turns studio labor into public legend. The line starts with credentials, almost brusque in its plainness: she knew de Kooning, she was there, she saw the work in the place where it was actually becoming itself. In the art world, access is a currency as real as paint, and Krasner knows it.

Then she narrows the aperture: “only a little handful,” “maybe there were ten people.” That specificity is doing cultural work. It punctures the myth that great art arrives already anointed, already understood. Instead, it’s a private language spoken among a tiny circle before critics, dealers, and institutions translate it into consensus. Her offhand “you know” isn’t filler; it’s a gesture toward complicity, the shared understanding that reputations are built on who gets in the room early.

Context matters: Krasner was an abstract expressionist in a scene that routinely treated women as adjacent to the “real” protagonists. She’s describing de Kooning, yes, but she’s also describing how exclusion operates: the studio as sanctum, the network as gate. There’s admiration here, but also a cool realism about how few people actually see the work before the story of it hardens.

The subtext: history is made by witnesses. Krasner positions herself as one of the rare witnesses who can speak with authority about the work before it became a brand. That’s not gossip; it’s a claim to agency in a narrative that too often wrote her out.