Abstract pioneer who was more than just Mrs Jackson Pollock
Lee Krasner: Living Colour Barbican Art Gallery
Could an exhibition feel more tailor-made for our times than the Barbican’s new Lee Krasner retrospective? Here is a “pioneer” of abstract expressionism who produced strong paintings for more than five decades. Yet many people still know her primarily as the wife of Jackson Pollock.
If you are struggling to visualise her pictures, don’t worry: British collections are hardly blessed with a glut of them. There’s a canvas in the Tate: a large, monochrome “landscape”, irradiated with flashes of pink. (It hasn’t travelled to the Barbican.) And that’s about it.
So, mounting a full-scale retrospective for Krasner (1908-84) in Britain is impressive. There are loans from big-hitting American institutions, in Philadelphia, Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. One painting, Combat (1965), has flown all the way from Melbourne.
The exhibition starts not at the beginning of Krasner’s life – little of her student work remains – but in the
Forties, following her marriage to Pollock in 1945. A month afterwards, the couple moved into a 19th-century clapboard farmhouse in Springs, Long Island. Pollock colonised the barn as his studio, where, eventually, he produced his revolutionary drip paintings. Krasner, meanwhile, worked upstairs in a bedroom. Its confines defined the scale of her output: she called her jewel-like paintings, such as untitled (1946) – dense, complex surfaces, with glimmers of bright pigment – “Little Images”, noting the possibility of “a tiny painting which is monumental in scale”. Upon seeing one of them, the influential critic Clement Greenberg remarked, “That’s hot. It’s cooking!”
In 1957, a year after Pollock was killed in a car crash, Krasner started to paint in his old studio in the barn. Her work became bigger overnight, begging awkward, unanswerable questions. Why didn’t she get first dibs on this covetable space? And what would she have created had she been there from the off?
Downstairs at the Barbican, we see several massive, memorable works from her nerveracked Night Journeys series, created while Krasner was suffering from insomnia. With their restricted palette of off-white and umber, these dark, difficult paintings resist Krasner’s reputation as a “colourist”.
Still, I love them, because of the deft variety of her mark-making, as well as the heartfelt, almost overwhelming emotion she pours forth. Amid the grand gestural sweeps and arcs, the splatters and runs of liquid paint, a number of shadowy, spectral forms – skulls and death’s heads – float and leer, like apparitions from a nightmare. These, then, are exorcism paintings, as Krasner – who considered her art to be biographical – came to terms with grief. Earlier this month, one example, The Eye is the First Circle (1960) sold at auction for $11.7million (£9.3million).
From here, we move into the Sixties and Krasner’s “Matissean” phase, as her compositions became flushed with colour. A label quotes the critic Robert Hughes describing the artist’s favourite fuchsia pink “rap[ping] hotly on the eyeball at 50 paces”. It’s a nice line, but I find the comparison with Matisse unhelpful: Krasner’s colour combinations are less surprising than the French master’s. Her paintings have a bluntness – a raw grubbiness that constitutes their down-dirty strength – but little of Matisse’s serenity, luxuriousness, or grace. Picasso is the more obvious touchstone.
The big narrative here – that Krasner should be considered as an artist on her own terms, and not as “Mrs Pollock” – feels admirable, and compelling. “I painted before Pollock, during Pollock, after Pollock,” she once said. But it is not a new story. Feminist art historians were already championing Krasner in the Seventies. The following decade, she was the subject of a travelling retrospective that arrived in New York six months after her death.
Perhaps, then, the Barbican should have contextualised her beyond the abstract expressionists. For instance, her paintings of the late Forties, in which rows of runic letters appear like hieroglyphs, throw forward to Jasper Johns’s symbols, Cy Twombly’s interest in graffiti, and the fascination with street art that emerged in the Eighties. And in her best paintings of the Sixties, her energetic brushstrokes semi-resolve into cartoonish figures, prompting questions about the depth of her commitment to abstraction.
I don’t wish, though, to nitpick. Krasner remains criminally underrecognised in Europe, and the Barbican does a brilliant job of introducing her to new audiences. “I like a canvas to breathe and be alive,” she once said. Most of her work still feels wonderfully, irresistibly vital.