The shifting styles of Lee Krasner.
LONDON — A tangle of drips; a hazy rectangle in a field of dark pigment; a rigid zip down an empty canvas … To be an Abstract Expressionist in New York’s buoyant first postwar years, it helped to have a signature look. Yet Lee Krasner was suspicious of paintings where telltale marks were like alternative autographs — even when the autograph was her own husband’s.
She was proud not to have a single style. You had to figure out each painting on its own, she said, or you end up with something “rigid rather than being alive.”
Still, Krasner received little attention from museums until her 60s, and she has rarely stepped out of the shadow of Jackson Pollock, her husband from 1945 until his early death in 1956.
It’s not wholly right to say she has remained underappreciated. She is one of the few female painters to receive a full retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art: That show opened a few months after her death in 1984. In May, a panoramic Krasner from 1960 was sold at auction for $11.7 million, a record for the artist.
But it’s still rare that we get an effusion of her art on the scale of “Lee Krasner: Living Color,” a show just concluding at the Barbican Art Gallery in London before reopening in October at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. The exhibition will travel next year to the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland, and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.
The show appears clean, mannerly, and very safe. Its chronological presentation has the feel of an introductory course.
Still, even if all this retrospective of just under 100 works does is introduce Krasner’s oscillating career to new audiences, I’ll take it. Her most important paintings, especially the violent loops and sloshes from the months after Pollock’s death and the stormlike monochromes of the 1960s, have a persistent authority.
Krasner was the daughter of refugees from Ukraine, and the first of their children to be born in the United States. 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 charcoal life drawings she did in his classes are an early revelation of this show: dense, foggy charcoal circuits.
Her first abstract paintings display a deep technical proficiency even when they feel overcalculated. 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 colleagues Bradley Walker Tomlin and Mark Tobey, as well as early paintings by Pollock, whom she met in 1941.
In 1945, the couple moved from New York to Springs, a town at the edge of Long Island. Pollock, working in the barn, found his way to the drip. Krasner made smaller paintings and mosaics that also relied on non-hierarchical composition. She showed many in 1951, but the exhibition bombed — and Krasner tore the canvases to shreds.
She started to layer her torn abstractions with blank burlap, new drawings, and even some of Pollock’s discarded drip paintings. The results were strident, seismic collages, brimming with confidence.
These fantastic collages, completed in 1954-55, go a long way to correcting the misunderstanding that Krasner found her way as a painter only after Pollock’s death in the summer of 1956.
Later that year, she completed the hinge painting of her career: “Prophecy,” a spastic, savage composition that feels set to burst its narrow, vertical frame. The figure returns, in the form of a broken, collapsed nude woman, her pink flesh dripping past gashed black outlines. Three more paintings that year continue the theme.
It’s too easy to read these brutal paintings as outpourings of grief. For Krasner, painting had a much higher vocation than personal expressivity, and she was no sentimentalist; by 1957, she had moved into Pollock’s barn studio, where she had enough space to work at mural scale. There she executed grand, nearly monochromatic abstractions that are more physical than anything before them. The umber paint stains the untreated canvas like dirt or blood.
I find these first large-scale abstractions theatrical. More rewards seem to lie in the colorful panoramas of the 1960s — such as the fourmeter-wide “Combat,” completed in 1965 and lent from the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, which channels her love of Matisse’s bright hues into a parade of pink bubbles and squiggles.
But abstract expressionism was always a garish mode of painting, and a little theater has always been part of the American package. What Krasner wanted — and proved at her best — was that theatrics and braininess were not at odds, and that a life in painting had room for both.