4 minute read
Inner Rhythm
Lee Krasner was an unsung pioneer of abstract expressionism, oft-overshadowed by her husband Jackson Pollock. With the exhibition Living Colour, the Barbican properly reframes her legacy.
Through Blue, 1963, Private Collection, New York City © The Pollock- Krasner Foundation.
By Christopher Stach.
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“I’m always going to be Mrs Jackson Pollock – that’s a matter of fact”, once said Lee Krasner in self-admission. “But I painted before Pollock, during Pollock, [and] after Pollock.”
Krasner’s work has not always been given the quality of attention it deserves, admits London’s Barbican, in a written precursor to its dedicated exhibition.
‘During her lifetime, she was often marginalised as the suffering spouse of the artist Jackson Pollock; after his death in 1956, she had to cope with the added burden of being the sole executor of his estate. In the 1970s, second-wave feminism revived interest in her career. Yet many of the hyperbolic claims made at the time for Krasner’s role in relation to Abstract Expressionism – albeit well-intentioned– have contributed to the difficulty in appreciating her work in a clear light.’
The Barbican, then, offers ‘clear light’ with Living Colour, a platform for the late artist’s work to be celebrated (and analysed) in its own right.
Krasner was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1908 – and was also born amid the first generation of abstract expressionists. (Willem de Kooning entered the world in 1904, Barnett Newman in 1905, Pollock in 1912, and Ad Reinhardt in 1913).
“Living and working in New York and its environs between the mid-1930s and the late 1960s, this generation of artists can be roughly divided into three stylistic groups,” says American poet and critic John Yau. “The gestural Abstract Expressionists, those who favoured strict geometries, and a third, seldom talked-about group which was relentless in its pursuit of pure, rounded forms, with a focus on shapes, lines and edges.”
However Krasner “explored all of these styles, and does not fit comfortably into any of the groups that practised them or the narratives in which they have been embedded,” Yau explains – and falling outside the lines of easy classification was not Krasner’s only obstacle on the road to recognition.
Says the Barbican exhibition curator Eleanor Nairne, “Becoming and then sustaining herself as an artist had required formidable determination. There was her Orthodox religious upbringing, which ran contrary to a bohemian lifestyle in Greenwich Village; the financial precariousness of New York during the Great Depression and the Second World War; and the struggle to be taken seriously as a ‘woman painter’, which was still largely seen as a contradiction in terms.”
Adds Nairne, “Through all of this – and three onerous decades as Pollock’s widow and executor – Krasner refused to allow her own work to suffer.”
The curator summons a remark about the formidable Krasner, uttered by playwright Edward Albee. He surmised that – having emerged through life’s many tribulations– it was little wonder that, “Lee was not ‘easy’, and what a blessing is there; protect us from ‘easy; women; she demanded the quality she gave, and if she put us on our mettle, she gave us gold in return.”
Palingenesis, 1971 © Pollock-Krasner Foundation Collection.
Courtesy Kasmin Gallery
In terms of her artistic return, Living Colour is a delightful assembly encompassing her mixed output, from self-portraits and life drawings to her ‘Night Journeys’, ‘Prophecy’ and her ‘Eleven Ways.’ There are also the ‘little image’ paintings, which powerfully tackle Krasner’s remark of how, “You can have giant physical size with no statement on it, so that it is an absurd blow-up of nothingness, and vice versa, you can have a tiny painting which is monumental in scale”.
The imagery of her work “was made in relationship to nature,” enlightens Katy Siegel, the Eugene V. & Clare E. Thaw Endowed Chair at Stony Brook University, New York. “Above all, her relation to nature took complicated form in her relationship to her own work, to how it was made and to her place in the world... Krasner very much takes a place in the universe of modern artists enmeshed in ideas about nature and the natural world.”
The word ‘natural’ defines her approach, too, given that she never made sketches or preparatory studies in advance of painting; as Krasner explained, “There’s a… blank, and something begins to happen, and the hope is… that it comes through.”
One of Living Colour’s (many) interesting insights is an observation by Nairne: that the circumstances thought to have hampered Krasner may have actually liberated her artistic arc. “Free from much critical pressure, Krasner had made the work she felt impelled to make,” says the curator. “Without a coterie of controlling dealers and collectors, she was never forced to repeat herself, but could flow with each new direction as it came to her. She acknowledged that, in some respects, being overlooked had been a ‘blessing’.”
Indeed, one of Krasner’s most profound confessions relates to how, “I never violate an inner rhythm. I loathe to force anything… I know it is essential for me. I listen to it and I stay with it. I have always been this way. I have regards for the inner voice.”
The Barbican, 35 years after her passing, has ensured that Krasner’s inner voice – plus the bends, curves, and undulations of her creative energy flow – are able to be heard loud and clear. As nature intended.
‘Living Colour’ shows at the Barbican in London until 1 September. For further info, visit barbican.org.uk
Untitled, 1946 Collection of Bobbi and Walter Zifkin © The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, by Jonathan Urban
Abstract No. 2 , 1947 IVAM Centre, Spain. ©The Pollock-Krasner Foundation.
Courtesy IVAM
