Lee Krasner retrospective: the forgotten genius of Abstract Expressionism

There has never been an art season like this in Europe. In London, Cindy Sherman comes to the National Portrait Gallery, Natalia Goncharova to Tate, Faith Ringgold is at the Serpentine, Paula Rego at Milton Keynes’ new gallery. In Paris, Berthe Morisot has the Musée d’Orsay, Dora Maar the Pompidou, Sally Mann the Jeu de Paume. These solo shows by female artists triumphantly swell, in the museum arena, the inevitable 21st-century theme of reviewing the past through the lens of gender. Every one of these artists has something to say about identity and female perspectives.

Except for the magnificently compelling, scandalously little-known Lee Krasner. The best paintings in her stellar retrospective at the Barbican — the first in Europe since 1965 — are as powerfully alluring and beautiful as any abstractions ever made in America: the battle between swooping fuchsia and orange arcs and half-moon crescents in “Icarus” and “Combat”, airy, breathless; thrusting umber swerves interwoven with creamy sprays and dense earth-toned pigment, from where hooded, half-lidded eyes peer out, across the five-metre “The Eye is the First Circle”. This is named after the opening of Emerson’s essay declaring “the universe is fluid and volatile . . . the heart refuses to be imprisoned . . . it tends outward with a vast force and to immense and innumerable expansions”.

That was what Krasner believed. Nothing at the Barbican announces the work is by a woman artist. Krasner adopted an androgynous name. She refused to show in Peggy Guggenheim’s 1943 Women exhibition. Yet at every twist and turn as her mature paintings evolve, you cannot forget that Lee — née Lena — Krasner was Mrs Jackson Pollock. This makes the show doubly important: unmissable for the history of abstraction, and as unfolding social history, tracing relationships between a woman artist’s life, work, reputation and the impact of feminism, then and now.

Stiff mosaic-like shards of colour congest and constrain the hieroglyphic “Little Images” paintings, done in the small house in Long Island where Krasner and Pollock moved in 1945 soon after their marriage. Pollock, by contrast, worked in the huge barn. After his drinking and depression escalated, Krasner picked up the fragments of their lives in collage, cutting up her own works, and sometimes his discarded ones: “Shattered Light”, “Forest” (1954), then the more painterly, still jagged “Milkweed”, “Desert Moon” (1955).

On her wall in July 1956, when Krasner left without Pollock for Paris, to visit the Louvre, was “Prophecy”, wreathing, pink forms, touched with deep red, emphasising allusions to the body. “I was aware that it was a frightening image, but I had to let it come through,” she recalled. Pollock reassured her: “A good painting . . . just continue.” When she returned in August, Pollock was dead — an alcohol-related car accident.

Immediately after the funeral she pushed on from “Prophecy” to more convulsive, similarly vertically oriented images, violent and erotic, of intertwined broken pink shapes, fleshy, heavily lined with black, and disembodied eyes: “Birth”, “Three in Two”. Formally, they are responses to Picasso’s “Demoiselles”, and as angry and sharp.

What happened next is the crux of this marvellous show. Krasner, 47, took Pollock’s barn as her studio, enlarged her canvases, and during the next few years of insomnia, grief and confusion she worked by night, draining colour to raw and burnt umber, white, patches of amber.

“Polar Stampede”, most lyrical of the so-called “Night Journeys”, is a pattern of icy whites and darkening browns evoking a maelstrom but also rhythmic, rocking like a lullaby; others, such as “The Assault on the Solar Plexus”, are bleaker. The titles, Krasner admitted, were “embarrassingly realistic . . . I was going down deep into something which wasn’t easy or pleasant”.

She emerged in 1963 with “Another Storm”, the Barbican’s star of stars: the monochrome palette retained but the umber replaced by blazing alizarin crimson, punctuated by white strokes suggesting froth on fast-flowing water. Here and in successors including “Happy Lady”, “Through Blue”, “Mister Blue”, lilting, shooting blues, cobalt, ultramarine, and the spring-fresh “Siren” and “Portrait in Green” (1963-69), Krasner is proved a major independent figure of Abstract Expressionism. Her signature language of arcs and curves and loops, voluptuous, fierce, the feathery touch embedded in a tough linearity, is as rich and distinctive as Pollock’s skeins and drips, Mark Rothko’s layered squares or Barnett Newman’s zips.

Brushy yet limpid, unruly though delicate, twice as high and far broader than the body span of Krasner — who just hit 5ft in height and leapt from the floor with long-handled brushes — these paintings are jubilant, gripping, alive because they so vibrantly unpack the struggle of their making.

Matissean colour is the ultimate reference point, but at American scope and scale, and with a sense of both wild landscapes and resolution hard-won from chaos: among Krasner’s favourite lines of poetry was Rimbaud’s “I ended up finding sacred the disorder of my mind”.

The Barbican’s installation, with the ceiling opened to allow a flood of natural light, showcases superbly the glowing high points of the mid-1960s and, in darker sections, the brooding intensity of the night paintings. That contrast is the heart of the show, which has a joyful pulse — jazz, from an excellent film dovetailing archival footage of Krasner’s life and some interviews, sounds throughout. There is a lovely account of Krasner dancing with the elderly Mondrian — both were jazz fanatics — who told her: “You have a very strong inner rhythm. You must never lose it.”

She never did. In the 1970s the forms become harder-edged, concerned with geometry, the compositions more stately and contained, as in the raspberry/green “Palingenesis”, reminiscent of Matisse’s cut-outs. You can see why Robert Hughes described a 1973 gallery exhibition as “rap[ping] hotly on the eyeball at 50 paces”.

Not, though, hotly or close enough. MoMA’s first retrospective opened in 1984, months after Krasner’s death. What kept her so invisible?

“I was a woman, Jewish, a widow, a damn good painter, thank you, and a little too independent” was her summing-up. In the 1930s, her teacher Hans Hofmann said her work was “so good, you’d never know it was done by a woman”. In Pollock’s lifetime, much of her energy went to supporting him; her work soared after his death, but a male-centred art establishment failed to notice. Krasner was publicly grateful, in the 1970s, to the feminist movement for garnering her new attention; any woman denying prejudice, she said, should be “slapped”. Yet finally she insisted “I’m an artist, not a woman artist, not an American artist” — and from that too we can learn today.

‘Lee Krasner: Living Colour’, Barbican, London, to September 1, barbican.org.uk

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Letter in response to this article:

Krasner’s niece Rusty reached judo’s pinnacle / From Peter Jaeger, Tokyo, Japan