War & Peace Quote by Lee Krasner

Krasner’s line has the flat, practical bite of someone who lived through the romance that outsiders project onto wartime art and found it mostly unhelpful. She admits the obvious - people were shaken - then refuses the sentimental leap that trauma automatically produces either paralysis or instant masterpiece. War “affected” you, yes. It didn’t grant you an exemption from the daily discipline of making.

The key move is her conditional: the only real interruption she credits is bureaucratic and bodily, not psychological. “Unless you were called into the Army; then you just couldn’t paint.” That bluntness is doing more than describing logistics. It’s puncturing a cultural story that treats artists as uniquely fragile seismographs of history, when for many the decisive factor is simply whether you have time, space, materials, and a body not conscripted into violence. Art doesn’t stop because the world gets ugly; it stops when your labor and your life are commandeered.

There’s also an oblique feminist edge. Krasner, a woman in a scene that mythologized male genius (often in heroic, wartime-inflected terms), emphasizes continuity over spectacle. Keep going. Work through it. No grand narrative of the tortured male painter “responding” to history, just the stubborn fact of practice.

In the postwar glow of Abstract Expressionism, this attitude reads like a quiet correction: history isn’t a muse, it’s weather. You still show up to the studio, because that’s what an artist does - until the state makes it impossible.