Time & Perspective Quote by Lee Krasner

Krasner’s sentence performs a familiar double move: it sounds generous, almost neutral, while quietly exposing the hierarchy she had to work inside. “Well, let’s say” is the verbal equivalent of a half-smile. It signals she’s about to state something everyone in her world treated as fact, but she won’t grant it the dignity of certainty. The Paris School wasn’t simply admired; it was the air American artists breathed, the standard by which they were judged, and the gravitational center that made New York feel provincial until it didn’t.

Her phrasing is tellingly collective. “We acknowledged” isn’t just historical description; it’s a reminder of how consensus gets manufactured in art: through teachers, critics, museums, and the soft pressure of what gets called “understood.” By stacking “understood and felt and experienced,” she argues that Paris’s dominance wasn’t an abstract idea, it was embodied. It lived in studio habits, in what counted as sophistication, in the anxious sense that innovation had a mailing address.

Context matters: Krasner came up in a moment when American modernism was still negotiating its relationship to European authority, just before Abstract Expressionism recast New York as the new center. As a woman artist navigating both the macho mythos of the New York School and the older prestige economy of Paris, she’s also registering how legitimacy works: it’s less a breakthrough than a permission structure. The line reads like a memory, but it’s also a subtle critique of how “leading force and vitality” often means “where the gatekeepers are.”