Prospero | Paint and the pendulum

Lee Krasner’s colourful, creative destruction

She was among the most inventive of the abstract expressionists, as a new retrospective at the Barbican Centre shows

By S.H.

IN 1951 Lee Krasner hosted a show of her large, brightly coloured geometric paintings at a gallery in New York. Critics liked it, but the paintings didn’t sell. Distraught, Krasner began working on a series of even bigger pieces—black-and-white drawings that spanned from floor to ceiling—but she decided she hated them, and tore them to pieces. When she returned to the studio a few weeks later, she was surprised. All of a sudden, she said, she saw “a lot of things there that began to interest me”.

She collaged the torn-up drawings onto the colourful canvases from her gallery show. She added more paint, burlap, fragments of newspaper and bits of discarded paintings by her husband, Jackson Pollock. The resulting works, unveiled at an exhibit in 1955, were inventive and evoked the chaos of nature. They marked the beginning of a process which Krasner would often use: the dismantling of old work to make something new.

“Lee Krasner: Living Colour”, a retrospective of the artist’s work at the Barbican Centre—and the first major show of her work in Europe in more than 50 years—explores these cycles of destruction and regeneration. It traces her development from art student in New York to prominent abstract expressionist, moving deftly through periods in her painting such as her “Little Drawings” (small canvases packed with colour, texture and hieroglyph-like forms) and what a friend called her “Night Journeys” (massive explosive paintings in umber made in the wake of Pollock’s death).

The exhibition demonstrates Krasner’s great skill as a colourist, and how much of her work is rooted in nature. Two of her early self-portraits, created as a student, featured plants. After her father’s death Krasner struggled to paint until she moved out to Springs, Long Island, in 1945 and started observing the outside world. Among the flowers and leaves and birds, a creative impulse began to come through, realised on vibrant, small canvases thick with textured paint and in two marvellous mosaic tables made out of wagon wheels, studded with bits of glass, coins, keys and plastics. The visitor can glimpse her startling creativity, her adeptness with bits and pieces, and the interplay between order and chaos, all of which would feature in her later paintings.

Her range is impressive, too. Krasner could do the monumental canvases for which abstract expressionists are best known. For example, in deft strokes of red and white “Another Storm” (1963) evokes the movement of butterflies. She could also work with smaller forms. A side-room is devoted largely to Krasner’s watercolours, calligraphic works of bright hues that are also explorations of negative space. These intimate works are as arresting as the large canvases.

It is a cliché to say that Krasner “lived in Jackson’s Pollock’s shadow”—a phrase which appeared in her obituary in the New York Times in 1984 and has been repeated over and over in reviews of the current show, 35 years later. It is also not really true: the bulk of Krasner’s major artworks were created before her 11-year marriage, or after Pollock’s death. She was respected by critics in the 1950s and 1960s, and internationally recognised in her lifetime (though it took longer for her to earn that acclaim than for many of the men she worked alongside; a documentary shown at the end of the exhibit highlights both the force of her personality and the institutional misogyny she faced). “Lee Krasner: Living Colour” is a celebration of her creative life, and one which does not require constant references to her marriage.

Indeed, the visitor emerges from this exhibition wondering whether she was a better painter than her spouse; she was certainly a more inventive one. In 1974 she rediscovered drawings that she had made while a student of Hans Hofmann, an influential painter, and promptly cut them up. Hofmann was known to be strict, sometimes tearing up his students’ drawings, so the deliberate act of slicing with scissors provided a kind of childish delight. But the resulting works were revelatory: 11 canvases arranged with angular slices of her former self.

The past, for Krasner, wasn’t something to preserve or revere—it was something that ran through the present, something to play with in paint. “All my work keeps going like a pendulum; it seems to swing back to something I was involved with earlier, or it moves between horizontality and verticality, circularity or a composite of them,” she said. “For me, I suppose that change is the only constant.”

“Lee Krasner: Living Colour” continues at the Barbican Centre in London until September 1st

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