Lee Krasner’s retrospective at the Barbican
Lee Krasner never enjoyed the acclaim she deserved while she was alive. However, as a major new retrospective shows, she could be just as innovative as her more celebrated husband. By Claudia Pritchard
In summer 1963, the artist Lee Krasner felt dizzy on Main Street in East Hampton, near her Long Island home, and fell, breaking her right arm. Unable to use a brush with her “good” arm in plaster, she took to working with her left hand, applying paint to canvas straight from the tube.
Her new Primary Series paintings, the result of one of many improvisations in a career that spanned 50 years, are among the 100 or so works in the first exhibition of Krasner’s work in Europe for more than half a century. Lee Krasner: Living Colour at London’s Barbican Art Gallery revisits an artist scarcely known or collected in Britain, where she is represented in public collections by just one work at Tate Modern, Gothic Landscape (1961). That piece, created after the death of her husband in 1956, is, like others
of that period in this exhibition, distinguished by its sepia tones, so the vibrant hues of this show will come as a surprise to many.
The husband in question was Jackson Pollock, and the art of Krasner would become overshadowed in the minds of many by both his radical drip paintings and his early and shocking demise. Krasner was in Paris, looking at art and visiting artists, when news came of his fatal car accident. He had ploughed straight into a stand of trees, killing himself and a friend of his lover, who survived.
Dogged by insomnia, Krasner took to painting at night in his studio, a barn on the farm in Springs, New York that they acquired in the year of their marriage, 1945, with the help of money from collector and gallerist Peggy Guggenheim. Because she liked normally to work by natural light, at this time Krasner abandoned colour in favour of natural shades of umber. But her early and late works radiate from the walls, even the left-handed Primary Series striding brightly through the spectrum.
With a refined love of the natural world, its colours and complex forms, throughout her life Krasner described her work as “organic.” Early, intricate works such as Abstract No 2 (1946-48), with their floating, skeletal structure, call to mind primitive life forms, fossils and invertebrates.
Krasner was born Lena Krassner in Brooklyn, New York, in 1908, conceived as soon as her mother was reunited with her father who had fled Odessa during the Jewish pogroms. The family spoke a mixture of Russian, Yiddish and English, and in her Orthodox Jewish upbringing Lee learnt some written Hebrew. Later, this knowledge of ancient text would surface in Composition (1949), with its murmuring hieroglyphics. In her teens she Americanised her name, like many émigrés.
As Lenore Krasner, she was accepted into the only school that taught art to girls, undertaking a two-hour round tip to Manhattan and so discovering the metropolis. During the year of a first, brief marriage, 1929, the stock market crashed, heralding the great depression that would, paradoxically, ultimately bring work her way.
In 1933, the Public Works of Art Project was founded as part of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, employing 3,700 artists to create public art. Krasner was put in charge of creating window displays to promote new educational courses.
Attending life classes, she produced muscular figures that would be repurposed towards the end of her career. One of the many fascinations of this outstanding show is to see both some of her original life drawings from the early 1930s, and then other fragmented and re-assembled versions of the Eleven Ways of Seeing series (1976). Each with a different verb form as title – Imperative, Imperfect Indicative – these collages incorporate precisely cut shards of the early nudes, some interspersed
This exciting exhibition shows Krasner to be a forthright and inventive artist in her own right
with shafts of colour.
The practice of dismantling and re-forming work began in 1953, when, unhappy with earlier pieces, she ripped them up and left them abandoned on the studio floor. She returned some time later to view the detritus through new eyes, and made of the scraps deeply textured and layered new works, including the dancing Blue Level (1955).
The explosions of colour and form that resulted from these collages were interrupted by an unexpectedly turbulent painting in the summer of 1956 that frightened the artist so much that she left it on the easel as she set out for France. Called Prophesy, its tangle of limbs, stumps and colliding torsos proved to come uncomfortably close to foreshadowing Pollock’s violent death. Returned to the US as the widow of the by now sought-after painter, with all that entailed, she nonetheless resumed painting within weeks, adding to Prophesy three disturbing companion pieces: Birth,
Embrace and Three in Two, the last with echoes of Picasso’s tortuous
Three Dancers.
These four paintings are reunited in this exhibition, almost certainly for the first time since 1956; three are now in private collections. Their arching loops and Gothic curves are repeated in the nocturnal umber series that followed.
Being Mrs Pollock would hang over the rest of Krasner’s career, which shed another skin in the 1970s with a return to the vibrant palette of her early years. In the 1940s, newly wed, happy but broke, she had scooped up pottery fragments, shards of glass, and hammered hardware and trinkets to create two densely patterned mosaic tables on old wagon wheels. One is in the show. Pollock poured the concrete that set around the little treasures. In
Palingenisis (1971) and Olympic (1974), she once again arranges clear-edged geometrical shapes with eye-popping bursts of colour.
This exciting exhibition shows Krasner to be a forthright and inventive artist in her own right, respected by her more famous peers, but only rarely accorded exhibitions. To join her 50-year journey is to dance the boogie-woogie with Mondrian, who shared her love of jazz, fall in and then out with the critic Clement Greenberg, and to be feet away when Pollock poured paint straight from the can in 1947. Krasner was dribbling lacy trails of paint from an oil can on to her paintings at that same time, but few noticed. Funny, that. n
Until 1 September