Peter Krasnow (birth name Feivish Reisberg), printmaker, painter, and sculptor, was born in a small Ukrainian village on August 20, 1886. He immigrated to the United States in 1907, initially living in Boston before settling in Chicago in 1908. He attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, eventually earning his degree in 1915.

Krasnow moved to New York in 1919 and his first break came in 1922 when the Whitney Studio Club mounted an exhibition of his work. Krasnow met Edward Weston at the Whitney Studio Club and they became lifelong friends. Deploring the close living conditions of New York, Krasnow with his wife, Rose, moved to Southern California. Success was to follow and in December of 1922, he was included in a small group exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  In 1923 he built his studio on a lot in Glendale purchased from Edward Weston. That same year Krasnow was invited by Stanton Macdonald Wright to participate in exhibition of the Group of Independent Artists of Los Angeles and in following years solo exhibitions of Krasnow’s work were held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Oakland Art Museum, and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Scripps College, the Pasadena Art Institute, and the Judah Magnus Museum in Berkeley. In 2016, the Laguna Art Museum mounted the exhibition Peter Krasnow: Maverick Modernist.

Krasnow was a leading California modernist known primarily as a painter and sculptor but he was also a printmaker and a pioneer in lithography. He executed about twenty-five lithographs in 1928 but his sojourn in printmaking lasted only two years.

Krasnow is represented in the collections of the Carnegie Institute, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Judah L. Magnes Museum, Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum, Norton Simon Museum, Oakland Museum of California, Phoenix Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Herzliya Museum of Art in Israel.

Peter Krasnow died in Los Angeles, California on October 30, 1979.