Lee Krasner @ Kasmin Gallery, NYC - Collage Paintings 1938–1981

Lee Krasner: Collage Paintings 1938–1981

Kasmin Gallery, New York

March 11 - April 24, 2021

Kasmin presents Lee Krasner: Collage Paintings 1938–1981. The exhibition is presented in collaboration with the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and is accompanied by a fully-illustrated, hardcover catalogue. Featuring several masterpieces from the 1955 debut of Lee Krasner’s collage paintings at the Stable Gallery, as well as significant works from the artist’s 2019–2021 traveling European retrospective, this exhibition provides American audiences with the opportunity to further examine one of Lee Krasner’s most innovative practices.

Throughout her indelible career, Lee Krasner’s tireless and fierce self-examination compelled the artist to destroy previous works and reconstitute their elements into new compositions. This practice of reclaiming past works of her own, as well as of those of her husband, Jackson Pollock, resulted in many of Krasner’s most novel bodies of work in which elements of painting, drawing, and collage coexist in dramatic compositions. Increasingly regarded as one of the most philosophical and unwavering pioneers of the Abstract Expressionist movement in America, Lee Krasner’s collage paintings represent some of the artist’s most conceptual and emotionally charged works.

Included in the exhibition are pivotal works from Lee Krasner Collages at the Stable Gallery, New York, in 1955, which Clement Greenberg would later proclaim as a “major addition to the American art scene of the era.”[1] Reviewing the exhibition, painter Fairfield Porter remarked, “When nature is photographed in detail, its orderliness appears: Krasner’s art, which seems to be about nature, instead of making the spectator aware of a grand design, makes [them] aware of a subtle disorder greater than [they] might otherwise have thought possible.”[2] Stretched Yellow (1955) and Blue Level (1955), which were shown in the Stable Gallery exhibition, are two of a concise group of five works created in the same year in the same imposing vertical scale; the latter of which was also featured in the artist’s recent traveling retrospective.

Following the recent close of Lee Krasner: Living Colour, the tour de force European retrospective curated by Eleanor Nairne of the Barbican Centre, London, which traveled to the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, Germany; the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Switzerland; and the Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain, a number of works from the exhibition are also included in Lee Krasner: Collage Paintings 1938–1981 at Kasmin. With Bald Eagle (1955) Lee Krasner masters the all-over composition and conjures the cut-outs of Henri Matisse, while remaining acutely self-referential in her bold amalgamation of unprimed canvas with parts of Jackson Pollock’s drawings from the 50s. Imperfect Indicative (1976) belongs to “Eleven Ways to Use the Words to See,” a striking series in which Lee Krasner integrated early charcoal drawings that were realized under the tutelage of Hans Hofmann between 1937 and 1940.

Executed during the same period of the charcoal drawings, Seated Figure (1938-39) is the earliest known collage painting by Lee Krasner. A formal feat inspired by Pablo Picasso’s cubist style, this work reveals Lee Krasner’s burgeoning interest in integrating collage techniques with oil painting on canvas and linen. Another noteworthy example is To The North (1980), made just four years before the artist’s death, which reveals a degree of assuredness in the starkness of its large pictorial components, making this piece one of the most mature and resolved of Lee Krasner’s collage paintings.

LEE KRASNER (1908–1984) is considered one of the most critical figures in the evolution of American art in the second half of the 20th century. Emerging from the first generation of Abstract Expressionist painters, Lee Krasner committed to a six-decade persistent exploration of novel approaches to painting and collage. This is Kasmin’s third solo exhibition of the work of Lee Krasner, which the gallery has represented through the Pollock-Krasner Foundation since 2016. The Foundation, established in 1985, provides vital support to emerging and established artists nationally and internationally. For more information, visit www.pkf.org.

Lee Krasner’s work is held in the permanent collections of major institutions worldwide, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Jewish Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Tate, London; Cleveland Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum, Long Beach; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Philadelphia Museum of Art; National Gallery of Australia, Sydney; Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland; and the Artizon Museum, Tokyo, Japan, among many others.

[1] C. Greenberg, quoted by B. Robertson, Lee Krasner, Paintings, Drawings, and Collages, exh. cat., London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1965, p. 4.

[2] F. Porter, "Reviews and previews," ARTnews, Vol. 54, No. 7, November 1955, pp. 66-67.

KASMIN

509 West 27th Street, New York

www.kasmingallery.com

______________________

Painters of the East End @ Kasmin Gallery, NYC - Mary Abbott, Nell Blaine, Perle Fine, Helen Frankenthaler, Jane Freilicher, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Charlotte Park, Betty Parsons, Jane Wilson

Painters of the East End
Mary Abbott, Nell Blaine, Perle Fine, Helen Frankenthaler, Jane Freilicher, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Charlotte Park, Betty Parsons, and Jane Wilson
Kasmin Gallery, New York
July 11 - August 16, 2019

JANE FREILICHER

Landscape in Water Mill, 1962

Oil on linen, 18 x 20 inches, 45.7 x 50.8 cm. 

Courtesy of the Estate of Jane Freilicher. 

Kasmin announces Painters of the East End, on view at 297 Tenth Avenue. The exhibition explores the commonalities and distinctions of the work produced amongst the coterie culture of Long Island’s South Fork during the mid-twentieth century, including Mary Abbott, Nell Blaine, Perle Fine, Helen Frankenthaler, Jane Freilicher, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Charlotte Park, Betty Parsons, and Jane Wilson.

Artists have historically converged on Long Island seeking inspiration from the landscape and an escape from their confined urban studios, while still retaining access to the energy of New York City. With the mass influx of the European avant-garde following the onset of World War II and the subsequent establishment of the New York School, a thriving and collaborative artist-based community was born in the East End.

The Hamptons of the New York School was untamed, inexpensive, and a bastion of bohemian living. The opportunities provided by the area’s open spaces were developmental for the painters who set up there not only because of their practical advantages—larger studios, relative quiet—but for novel subject-matter that allowed for contemplations of the horizon, rural landscapes, and bodies of water, nodding to the lineage of the Romantic sublime.

Perhaps most crucial for these artists was their shared inspirations which led to a new model of community, differing in both structure and character from the frenetic energy of lower Manhattan. Such a social scene was integral to both the personal and artistic lives of the artists represented in the exhibition. Helen A. Harrison, Director at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton, says of the period: “The painters who gravitated to Long Island's South Fork in the mid-twentieth century were a far more varied group than the earlier art colonists, who came primarily for the picturesque scenery. They ran the gamut from landscape painters to Surrealists, Abstract Expressionists, and Pop artists, so it's clear that many were motivated by factors other than subject matter. Perhaps even more important than the beautiful surroundings and the ease of access from New York City was the magnetism of association, as artists attracted one another to form a vibrant creative community that continues to thrive today.”

The exhibition includes: Mary Abbott (b. 1921), Nell Blaine (1922 – 1996), Perle Fine (1905 – 1988), Helen Frankenthaler (1928 – 2011), Jane Freilicher (1924 – 2014), Elaine de Kooning (1918 – 1989), Lee Krasner (1908 – 1984), Joan Mitchell (1925 – 1992), Charlotte Park (1918 – 2010), Betty Parsons (1900 –1982), and Jane Wilson (1924 – 2015).

KASMIN GALLERY
297 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY 10001
www.kasmingallery.com

Lee Krasner, LACMA, Los Angeles - Retrospective Exhibition

Lee Krasner

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

October 10, 1999 - January 2, 2000

Lee Krasner, the first full-scale retrospective of the major American painter LEE KRASNER (1908–1984) since her death, is on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The traveling exhibition comprises sixty paintings, collages, and drawings on loan from major collections around the world. Together, these works—many of them not publicly exhibited in decades—present the complete trajectory of Lee Krasner’s work. Organized chronologically, the exhibition begins with the artist’s early figurative work of the 1930s and includes important examples from all phases of her career, including the magisterial series "Eleven Ways to Use the Words to See."

While Krasner was the only female painter associated with the first generation of the New York School, for many years she was known primarily as the wife and artistic follower of Jackson Pollock. This exhibition makes her critical contributions to Abstract Expressionism vividly clear, while demonstrating her ongoing artistic dialogue with a diverse range of artists, critics, and writers—including Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, and Pablo Picasso, among others—and showing that while she was in fact influenced by Pollock’s work, she clearly influenced him in turn. In embracing the work and ideas of others as a source of her own creativity, Krasner rejected the romantic and distinctly male Abstract Expressionist notion of the alienated individual as the wellspring of artistic expression. Her work thus brings an important feminist perspective to the discussion of Abstract Expressionism, affecting our views not only of her own painting, but of that of others as well.

Lee Krasner begins with a self-portrait painted in 1930. Created in order to fulfill a requirement of the conservative National Academy of Design, where Krasner was studying, the painting establishes many of the themes that would remain constant throughout her career. She depicts herself in the center of the picture, standing outdoors as she works on her canvas. The lush woods, fields, and wildflowers by which she is surrounded point to the artist’s lifelong interest in the fecundity of nature, while her central position alludes to her place as an integral part of it. Finally, Krasner’s powerful presence in the self-portrait, especially notable in her intense stare, points to the central role of the self, seen in relation to others, that informs so much of her work.

Works from the 1940s include eight examples of Krasner’s well-known "Little Image" series, initiated c. 1946-47 and continuing until 1950. While this series was influenced by Pollock’s "Sounds in the Grass" series, of 1946, and his drip paintings begun later that year, the small-scale "Little Image" paintings are far from imitations of Pollock’s work. Early works in the series, for example, such as Noon, of 1947, are painterly mosaics. This heavily impastoed work, in which the image seems to bleed off the edge of the canvas, is Krasner’s equivalent to Pollock’s Sounds in the Grass: Shimmering Substance, of ca. 1946. In Krasner’s work, the strokes of paint simultaneously represent themselves and the artist’s creative process.

In the early 1950s, Krasner began ripping or cutting apart her own and Pollock’s works and recombining them into an important group of monumental collages. When these were exhibited in 1955, critic Clement Greenberg referred to the show as one of the most important exhibitions of the decade. The present exhibition includes five of these collages, including Bald Eagle and Bird Talk, both of 1955, which are salient examples of the dialogue with other artists that Krasner carried on in her work. The large-scale Bald Eagle, for example, which includes an eagle-like profile at its center, incorporates torn pieces of Pollock’s 1950s ink drawings. In Bird Talk, aspects of de Kooning’s style are evident, although the work is definitively Krasner’s, with her dissonant colors and personal iconography.

In 1956, just before leaving for Europe, Krasner painted Prophecy. The painting’s centralized male-female hybrid, consisting of three legs, two torsos, and several heads, is a powerful and complex image. An incised eye in the upper-right corner adds a mysterious sense of foreboding. (When Krasner received a call in Europe informing her of Pollock’s death, she returned to New York to find Prophecy still on the easel.)

Lee Krasner includes eight paintings from the major series known as the "Earth Green Series," begun soon after Pollock’s death in August 1956 and worked on until 1959. Birth, of 1956, was one of the first works that Krasner completed after Pollock died. Like Prophecy, this painting contains a menacing eye in the upper right, although here it is joined by several other eyes. Birth consists of large breasts and swelling shapes that evoke pregnancy and childbirth. Yet Lee Krasner clearly thought of these as violent, even dismembering events, for the body parts are fragmented and strewn across the canvas. Sun Woman II, painted the following year, has a significantly more positive view of fecundity than Birth. The painting’s red, rounded forms, while more abstract than in Birth, are in much greater harmony and are juxtaposed to natural-looking, green shapes.

After her mother’s death in 1959, Lee Krasner’s art changed radically. She limited her palette to blacks, whites, ochers, and browns to create the "Umber and White Series," which she also called "Night Journeys," because they were painted at night while she suffered from insomnia. The title of one of the paintings in the series, The Eye Is the First Circle, derives from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay "Circles," in which he discusses the need for humans to enlarge their sense of self and understanding of the universe. In fact, it was not until the painting—a large work marked by a seeming whirlwind of brushstrokes—was finished that Krasner noticed that many eyes peer out from the canvas.

Named for the earth goddess, Gaea (1966) is a large work that includes a weeping profile—which may signify Gaea—other female forms, and a large egg. It is painted in a dissonant combination of pinks, purples, and reds, but does not include the green that would be expected in a painting of this title. This powerful work combines the pain inherent in Birth with the chaotic feel of the "Night Journeys" works.

Palingenesis (1971) returns once again to the subject of fecundity. Named for the Greek word for rebirth, the painting, in reds, greens, ocher, and black, is more restrained than much of Krasner’s earlier work. Marked by sweeping rhythms and well-defined forms, it shows clear evidence of Lee Krasner’s familiarity with the cutouts of Matisse.

In 1976 Krasner again made a radical shift in her art. Inspired by a group of her early drawings, made while studying with Hans Hofmann in the 1930s, she embarked on the series that came to be known as "Eleven Ways to Use the Words to See," five examples of which are on view in the exhibition. Some of the charcoal on the old drawings—which had been left for decades in a barn on her Long Island property—had smudged, while other drawings had left reverse impressions on the paper that covered them. After reviewing the drawings, she chose the best ones for framing and used the remainder, including the reverse impressions, for collages. Yet unlike her earlier, monumental collages, the ones in this series are disjointed, with a dissonance between the codified look of the Hofmann-school drawings, or fragments of drawings, and the overall composition.

By using early drawings to create new works of art, and by emphasizing the disjunction between the drawings and the composition of which they are now a part, these superb and complex works, at once dense and fragmented, represent a critique of modernism and a belief that the past must be reviewed and reworked in new work. As such, they straddle both modernism and postmodernism. The titles of the works in "Eleven Ways to Use the Words to See," such as Imperative, Imperfect Subjunctive, and Present Conditional, attest to the importance of time in the series, and to the connection of art to language, which younger artists at the time were exploring as well.

The exhibition closes with three works from the last four years of Lee Krasner’s life. One of these, Between Two Appearances, of 1981, combines collages of dripped paint with representations of heads. By cutting the drips out of earlier works and commingling them with new painting, Krasner gives them the self-conscious quality of a quote, again incorporating an important element of postmodernism. And once again, she mixes the past and present to create a bold new work.

Les Krasner

Exhibition catalogue

Catalogue: Lee Krasner is accompanied by a catalogue that includes an extended text by Robert Hobbs, with ninety-two full-color and thirty-four black-and-white illustrations. Drawing on his ongoing research, as well as in-depth interviews with Krasner’s friends and associates, Hobbs offers a fresh look into the artist’s past, her personality, and her artistic contributions, drawing a rich picture of Lee Krasner and the context in which she worked. The 224-page volume is available in softcover for $29.95 at the LACMA museum shop. The hardcover edition, distributed internationally by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., is available for $49.50.

This exhibition was organized by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York, and was curated by Robert Hobbs. 

LACMA Coordinating Curator: Carol S. Eliel, curator of modern and contemporary art

After Los Angeles, the exhibition travels to the Des Moines Art Center (February 26–May 21, 2000) and the Akron Art Museum (June 10–August 27, 2000), before completing its tour at The Brooklyn Museum of Art (October 6, 2000–January 7, 2001).

LACMA - Los Angeles County Museum of Art

5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90036

www.lacma.org