How Lee Krasner Became a Fashion Muse

O ne afternoon last fall, the fashion designer Ulla Johnson drove from her family home in Montauk, on the eastern tip of Long Island, over to the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs, where painters Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner lived and worked in self-styled isolation from the time they were married in 1945. Pollock’s life famously ended nearby, in a car accident, 11 years later. But Krasner stayed on until her own passing in 1984, moving her studio from a spare bedroom in the farmhouse they’d shared to the barn where Pollock had made his final, transcendent drip paintings.

Johnson hadn’t come for Pollock, though; she was there for Krasner, the artist who had gone toe-to-toe with the first, all-male generation of abstract expressionists and more than held her own. In the barn, she studied photographs of Krasner sweeping her brush across a rhythmic 1969 canvas called “Portrait in Green.” Nearby are the marks where she’d skated off the canvas, brushing viridian paint right onto the gessoed walls. The sight was electric, Johnson says: “I believe very much in the emotional weight of objects that have been touched by the hand—by the person who embroidered them, or in this case by the painter who brought these canvases to life.”

This spring, the designer delves deeper into Krasner’s complex body of work with a collection that takes “Portrait in Green” and two other late paintings, “Comet” and “Palingenesis,” as a starting point. Collaborations are a constant in Johnson’s world, a way of expanding on her language of flowing, deeply feminine silhouettes and sumptuous florals by connecting with artisans outside the mainstream. In 2020, she partnered with a glassblowing workshop near Nairobi on earrings made from glass beads and flowers, and a year later she sourced handwoven bags from a collective of Masai women.

“I grew up around a celebration of material culture,” says Johnson, whose parents are both archeologists. “My mother was an avid collector of Victorian lace, but also of textiles and folk costume, starting with her native Yugoslavia. The celebration of craft—this language that unites rather than divides us globally—was a part of my upbringing and has become a very big part of my work.”

Johnson launched her namesake business in 1999, a year after graduating from the University of Michigan with degrees in psychology and women’s studies. Her intention, she says, was to grow the brand organically, which she’s achieved through self-funding and maintaining an intensely loyal team. “There’s a little bit of a cult there—and it’s a good one,” says architect Rafael de Cárdenas, who recently designed a Manhattan showroom for Johnson that melds slick, mirrored finishes with the more crafted elements she adores. He calls it “a petting zoo of texture and objects.”

How Johnson settled on Krasner as a focus is a bit fuzzy at this point, she says, though she’s long admired the painter’s nature-based forms and vibrant color. She and her husband, art consultant Zach Miner, are active collectors, and she keeps an eye out for female talent; last year she partnered on a capsule collection with Shara Hughes, another fierce colorist drawn to nature.

Krasner thought of herself as an artist from an early age. Born in Brooklyn in 1908, the daughter of Jewish refugees from Ukraine, she worked to put herself through a series of art schools around the city, hedging her bets by attending teacher’s college, too. While Pollock’s work developed in more-or-less linear progression towards the drip, Krasner’s was fiercely cyclical, pushing forward and then looping back to collage, assemblage and other modes of working that animated her paintings over nearly six decades. She once told an interviewer: “I like a canvas to breathe and be alive. Being alive is the point.”

On Pollock’s death in 1956, Krasner became his executor, a role that both set her up—she was never broke again—and set her back, because her painting practice often slid behind the more pressing affairs of the estate. The more Johnson learned about Krasner’s efforts—“She built Pollock’s secondary market,” the designer marvels—the more she came to admire the artist’s business chops. It was one of several shared touchpoints: Johnson also happens to be the Brooklyn-born daughter of a hardworking immigrant mother. “I haven’t come up in this business in a traditional way, nor did Lee,” she says. “I think she was very much trying to forge her own place in the landscape and make her voice heard, without a lot of foundational or material support.”

When Johnson approached the Kasmin Gallery, which represents the Krasner and Pollock estates, it gave the venture its blessing unreservedly. Executive Director Mariska Neitzman has vetted an increasing number of such requests lately; in 2020, Kasmin represented the artist Jamie Nares in a collaboration with Valentino. “I was very encouraging in this case, but I left it to the Foundation to decide if they wanted to proceed,” she says.

Johnson’s sensitivity to the work stood out to Caroline Black, Executive Director of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. “Ulla struck me as being very intuitive,” Black says. “It didn’t feel like a corporate relationship. She was so thoughtful about it, really focusing on Lee and her idea that paintings come alive.” The three works jointly chosen for the project date from 1969 to 1971, a period when Krasner had rejected her stygian palette of the early 1960s and was making surging, large-scale compositions in sharp cyclamen pinks and bottle greens. For Johnson, they’re “an expression of joy” that amplifies her personal vision for fashion.

The designer spent the summer of 2024 working on 11 looks, sketching and draping figures with silk twill and georgette that had been printed in Italy with Krasner’s explosive imagery until the process began to feel alchemical, she says, “like this baton had been passed to me.” Krasner’s recursive practice, Johnson adds, “allowed me to feel quite free, mixing the canvases in certain looks, being a bit more irreverent while honoring Lee’s legacy.” The Foundation remained involved throughout, down to signing off on hang tags that display each painting in full.

The collaboration dovetails with Krasner’s ascendance in the public sphere. A recent European retrospective has broadened her audience and stoked her market; the artist’s current auction record stands at $11.6 million, established at Sotheby’s in 2019 for a monumental umber painting from 1960 entitled “The Eye is the First Circle.” Eric Gleason, who oversees the Pollock and Krasner estates for Kasmin, points out that despite significant parallels between Krasner’s market and those of her contemporaries Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell, there is one profound difference: the volume of available material. Krasner left behind just over 200 paintings, and 600 works altogether. “She was an exceptionally harsh editor,” Gleason says. “She did a lot of cannibalization and then reconstitution of paintings. And she never let anything out in the world unless she was totally confident in it.”

For her part, Johnson couldn’t be more excited about sharing her spring collection. In preparation for the runway show, she commissioned an essay from Mary Gabriel, whose 2018 book, “Ninth Street Women,” chronicles the rise of Krasner and other female artists who fought their way into the male-dominated story of postwar painting. “She spoke about how in this moment, a Lee Krasner becomes not just something that we look at, but something that we live in,” Johnson says. “I thought that was so beautiful.”