Lena Krassner , as she was named in 1908, was the daughter of Orthodox Jewish refugees from Odessa, Ukraine, and the first of their children to be born in the United States. At 14 she enrolled at Washington Irving High, the only school in New York that admitted girls to its art curriculum, and took the name Lenore. She began advanced study at the National Academy of Design (a place of “congealed mediocrity,” she would later say), but when the Great Depression bit, she dropped out, worked as a cocktail waitress and life study model, and made proficient charcoal studies.

In 1937, she won a scholarship to study with Hans Hofmann, the German émigré who was the most progressive art educator in New York. The life drawings she did in his classes are an early revelation of this show: dense, foggy charcoal circuits, swallowing up Picasso’s split perspectives and the erotic machinery of the Surrealists. The lines appear nearly graven into the paper. Smudges and clouds of dark gray reveal the mercilessness of her corrections and revisions.

Her first abstract paintings display a deep technical proficiency even when they feel overcalculated — the work of an “A” student still finding her way. Dense, rhythmic nets of black paint over multicolor backgrounds have a decorous quality, while other paintings incorporate glyphs and symbols similar to those of her New York school colleagues Bradley Walker Tomlin and Mark Tobey, as well as early paintings by Pollock, whom she met in 1941.

Weeks after V-J Day, the couple moved from New York to Springs, a rural town at the eastern edge of Long Island. Pollock, working in the barn, found his way to the drip. Krasner, stuck in a little upstairs bedroom they sometimes couldn’t afford to heat, made smaller paintings and mosaics that also relied on allover, non-hierarchical composition. She showed many in 1951 at Betty Parsons Gallery, but the exhibition bombed — and Krasner, ever merciless toward her own work, tore the canvases to shreds.