Dear Fellow Art Lovers,
It was a pleasure sharing with some of you the highlights of the “Lee Krasner: Living Colour” exhibition. If you found Tuesday’s taster of the exhibition interesting, I encourage you to return and have a more leisurely “look” with a sighted friend – the tickets from Tuesday night’s tour will allow you and a companion to return to the gallery for free for the remainder of the exhibition, which ends on September 1st.
Lee/Lenore/Lena Krasner was a strong, highly intelligent, determined artist whom the art critic Robert Hughes, dubbed, “the Mother Courage of Abstract Expressionism.”The Barbican art gallery is awash in the tightly-controlled, emotionally energised canvases of this inspiring artist. There is only one painting of Lee Krasner’s in a public gallery in the UK,, “Gothic Landscape,” at Tate Modern. So, by bringing together over 100 works by Krasner, this exhibition gives us the rare opportunity to appreciate how an artist’s work is generated and regenerated over a fifty-year career, from the cubist influences of Picasso, Matisse, and Hoffman, to Krasner’s struggle to break through her “grey slabs” to pure abstraction, all the way through to her post-abstractionist works exploring space and colour through geometric forms – a powerful and innovative nod to her admiration of Matese’s “cut-outs.”
If you have a chance to return, here are three canvases I think are worth taking some time over, which did not feature in Tuesday evening’s tour:
1. “The Eye is the First Circle” 1960 (approx 8 x 16 feet): Here are Lee Krasner’s own thoughts about this painting from Gail Leven’s biography of Krasner:“I remember how excited I was when I finished The Eye Is the First Circle. I was hardly depressed.” She described the painting as being “as though you were descending once more, bringing forth from the unconscious, subconscious, or whatever area you bring forth from, as one does in a dream.” In this case, to name her picture, she recalled that she drew upon Emerson’s words, which had “preoccupied [her] many years before.” The opening lines of Emerson’s “Circles” appealed to Krasner’s deep appreciation of nature and patterns: “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.” Of course Krasner had focused on disembodied eyes as early as the 1930s, when she was briefly under the influence of Surrealism. Krasner said that she titled the painting after she finished it and saw those eyes. (Gail Levin, Lee Krasner: A Biography, New York: Harper Collins, 2011.)
So, what are these white voids amongst the whiplash, and churning of “Ahab coloured,” burnt umber lines – the eye of God, the evil eye, the inner eye, or simply the calm eye of the storm raging in Krasner’s mind?
2. “Happy Lady” 1963, oil on cotton duck, (approx. 5 x 6 feet): This is one of the works Krasner produced in 1963-4 after breaking her right arm, her painting arm. She taught herself to use her right fingertips, which were all that was exposed from the cast, to move her left hand around the canvas. In “Happy Lady,” the stippling technique she used for many of these paintings is clear; the spots of paint squeezed directly from the tube are visible in this painting. The smaller, calmer movements in this canvas give it a more peaceful feel than many of the other works in the exhibition.
3. “Combat” 1965, oil on canvas (approx. 6 x 13 feet): This canvas, which usually resides in Australia, is literally quite unmissable due to its size and attention-grabbing fuchsia and vivid orange colour palette. When Krasner did not name her own canvases, she liked them to be named by children or poets, who would be more intuitive and instinctive with their choice of titles. “Combat” was named by Krasner’s great-nephew, Christopher Stewart, who was ten at the time. The painting does seem to be a battle for dominance between the two vibrant colours, but it seems a friendly, high-spirited battle between two life-affirming, garden flower colours, and Krasner’s approach to the canvas has become less thrusting, and more sweeping. Some of the colours are reminiscent of those seen in “Desert Moon” from 1955, but in “Combat” the palette is simplified, and the colours are almost allowed to make their own spacial boundaries across the canvas.
One final tip: I strongly suggest a stop in the small side room that joins the large space devoted to the “Primary Series.” Here you will find some small, beautiful, almost soothing, paintings created by Krasner in 1968 when she had come across a stash of hand-made-paper made by an artist named Douglas More who lived on Long Island. With this body of work, Krasner explored how the gouache soaked into or lay on top of the different textures of the paper. Each piece only has one or two colours on it. These smaller works in softer colours give us a little pause from the hot orange, fuchsia, magenta, Kelly-green, alizarin crimson, and rich blue of the rest of the “Primary Series.”
I hope you find these highlights helpful, and even if you can’t return to the Barbican art gallery, if you have a free minute, I recommend a quick look on YouTube for interviews with Krasner like the one below, because there is no quicker way to get an understanding of the artist behind this emotive, inventive, and inspiring body of work, then from Krasner’s own words.
In other news, my sadly neglected website is undergoing a much needed rebranding make-over, which I hope will be fully complete by early autumn – i will keep you posted. However, until then I will continue to send a monthly newsletter. Each month I intend to select a different art work from any time, any continent, any medium, to give a clear description of for those with limited, or no sight, and a brief look at the works, and the artist’s historical background. If there are any particular paintings, sculptures, etc. you are particularly fond of, or would just like to know more about, please let me know, and i will try to include them in one of my newsletters.
Also, Star wants me to let you know that she is gathering her thoughts in preparation to dictate to me her own blog, which will feature on the updated website, and which will be devoted to her thoughts on museums and galleries from a four-legged, furry perspective. However, she would like me to share her first bit of advice for the working dog visiting the Barbican:
The brutalist, concrete architecture of the Barbican leaves little room for grassy expanses, and although there are few postage-stamp-sized grassy areas hiding around corners, there are no outdoor bins in which your people can put post walk deposits. So, even though it is nice to laze in the sunshine next to the fountains or lake at the Barbican if you need to “powder your nose,” it is best to take a short jaunt to this park closest to the Barbican’s Silk Street entrance: https://www.fortunestreetpark.com/
Until next month, Star and I wish you all the best and hope you enjoy the start of sunflower season.