Art & Creativity Quote by Lee Krasner

History arrives here as a half-shrug, half-claim. Krasner’s “Well, I’d say” sounds casual, even evasive, but it’s a practiced way of taking the wheel in a story that often wrote her out. She’s not mythmaking; she’s triangulating origins. “The beginning of this thing” isn’t just Abstract Expressionism as a style, but a scene: the machinery of attention, risk, and permission that let a new language of painting register as news.

The name-drop does the heavy lifting. Art of This Century wasn’t a neutral room; it was Peggy Guggenheim’s wager against taste as usual, a space where European avant-garde pedigree met restless American ambition. Krasner frames it as a gallery that “began showing some things,” a deliberately modest phrase that understates how radical the programming was. The understatement is the point: she’s signaling that revolutions don’t announce themselves with trumpets; they start as “a little talk” - gossip, scandal, arguments at openings, the social static that precedes canon.

That “talk” carries subtext, too. It’s how movements get made in public before they’re made in textbooks, and Krasner knows the difference. She also knows who gets credited when talk hardens into history. By anchoring the “beginning” in Guggenheim’s gallery, she’s reminding listeners that artists don’t rise on genius alone; they rise through networks, patrons, gatekeepers, and the lucky architecture of a room willing to hang the wrong work at the right time. In her plainspoken tone, you can hear both gratitude and a quiet correction to the legend.