Lee Krasner got a barely passing 65 in high school art, was later accused of cheating because a self-portrait was too good, and received the backhanded compliment that her work was so strong no one would suspect a woman made it. This episode follows her from a Brooklyn childhood as the daughter of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants through rigorous classical training at Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design, the 1929 opening of MoMA that scrambled her worldview, and studying under Hans Hofmann, who taught her to flatten the picture plane.

We examine her WPA mural work during the Depression, the 1942 visit to Jackson Pollock's studio, and the symbiotic exchange in which she gave him modernist theory and connections while he gave her permission to loosen control. The conversation covers the gray slabs she destroyed, the Little Images paint ...