Lee Krasner, Hiding in Plain Sight

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/arts/lee-krasner-barbican-schirn-kunsthalle.html

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LONDON — A tangle of drips in all directions; 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.”

Tough, diligent, and deadly serious about the history of art, Krasner might have been the most intelligent of the painters who convinced the world in the late 1940s that New York had displaced Paris as the epicenter of modern art. That intelligence expressed itself through an art that ricocheted across styles and media, from tightly massed collages to huge abstractions of Matissean richness.

Intelligence, though, was not enough to reach the celebrity tier of American painting, and it even could be a hindrance if you were a woman in American art’s most macho era. 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 women painters to receive a full retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art: That show opened a few months after her death in 1984. Prices have soared recently; 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,” which is on view for a few more weeks at the Barbican Art Gallery in London. The first proper retrospective in Europe for Krasner since 1965, it is to travel this October to the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, and continue next year to the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland, and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

At the Barbican, where the show has been curated by Eleanor Nairne, it appears clean, mannerly, and very safe. Its pat chronological presentation has the feel of an introductory course, and the show displays little engagement with either the theoretical challenges of painting or with feminist critiques of American high abstraction.

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 an authority that can survive even the sleepiest hang.

Lena Krassner, as she was named in 1908, was the daughter of Orthodox Jewish refugees from Odessa, Ukraine, and the first of their children to be born in the United States. At 14 she enrolled at Washington Irving High, the only school in New York that admitted girls to its art curriculum, and took the name Lenore. She began advanced study at the National Academy of Design (a place of “congealed mediocrity,” she would later say), but when the Great Depression bit, she dropped out, worked as a cocktail waitress and life study model, and made proficient charcoal studies.

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 life drawings she did in his classes are an early revelation of this show: dense, foggy charcoal circuits, swallowing up Picasso’s split perspectives and the erotic machinery of the Surrealists. The lines appear nearly graven into the paper. Smudges and clouds of dark gray reveal the mercilessness of her corrections and revisions.

Her first abstract paintings display a deep technical proficiency even when they feel overcalculated — the work of an “A” student still finding her way. Dense, 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 school colleagues Bradley Walker Tomlin and Mark Tobey, as well as early paintings by Pollock, whom she met in 1941.

Weeks after V-J Day, the couple moved from New York to Springs, a rural town at the eastern edge of Long Island. Pollock, working in the barn, found his way to the drip. Krasner, stuck in a little upstairs bedroom they sometimes couldn’t afford to heat, made smaller paintings and mosaics that also relied on allover, non-hierarchical composition. She showed many in 1951 at Betty Parsons Gallery, but the exhibition bombed — and Krasner, ever merciless toward her own work, tore the canvases to shreds.

When she went back to the studio, 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. For all their debts to her hero Matisse, including backgrounds of rich vermilion and Mediterranean blue, there’s a freer, jazzier, more athletic relationship between parts that is pure 1950s-American.

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. She was in France when he crashed his car on a Hamptons country lane, and after she got back to America she felt she had to keep working.

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, all more disorderly than Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” their obvious source, and even messier than De Kooning’s series of slashed and gashed “Women.”

It’s too easy to read these brutal paintings as outpourings of grief. For Krasner, painting had a much higher vocation that 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, thinner and drippier than the slabs of pigment in “Prophecy,” stains the untreated canvas like dirt or blood.

I find these first large-scale abstractions, christened the “Night Journeys” by the poet Richard Howard, pretty theatrical. More rewards seem to lie in the colorful panoramas of the 1960s — such as the 13-foot-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 Ab-Ex 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.

She put up with a lot. Put up with her husband’s temper, put up with the critical and institutional disregard; put up, too, with Job’s comforters who could not accept that she wanted to be both Mrs. Pollock and a great artist.

I recently went to the barn in the Hamptons where Krasner and Pollock both painted their breakthrough works, and watched visitor after visitor take pictures of the floor: drips from the master, tailor-made for an Instagram story. Under a trellis, in shadow, were Krasner’s painting boots, splattered and weathered. They still await their idolaters.

Lee Krasner: Living Color Through Sept. 1 at the Barbican Art Gallery; barbican.org.uk. Opens Oct. 11 at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt; schirn.de.