Lee Krasner


Surprisingly good exhibition at the Barbican looking at the life and work of Lee Krasner.

I say surprisingly good as anyone who follows me knows I’m not a fan of abstract art and I thought the art of the wife of Jackson Pollock would try by patience but I loved her! Maybe I understand female abstract expressionist work when the pictures by the blocks I just find annoying. I found this a much more joyous show than I expected.

This show was really well arranged. For once it started upstairs in this space as it suited her earlier smaller works. I also liked the way it started with her smaller works made in the late 1940s after she’d married Pollock and then went back to show where the ideas had come from and he position in art circles of the time. I was fascinated by the section on when she supervised a War Services Project to design window store displays advertising war training courses.

The upstairs section ended with Pollock’s death. You did realise what a shock it must have been and that room reunited four pictures she had done at this time. They began with Prophecy which she painted before he died when their relationship was coming under strain. She described said it “disturbed me enormously” and left it on her easel when she left for France  a few weeks before he died.

You then moved downstairs to her large later works after she took over Pollock’s studio in 1957. The first set were called “Night Journeys” and do fell like a response to the death as they are just painted in umber and use large expressive swirls. In the early 60s she moved onto a similar style but using primary colours and these burst into life. A wonderful quote from her said “I emerged again into the light and colour. I think that’s like life.”

The pictures I liked best, both upstairs and downstairs, were the ones where she takes older work and reuses it in collages. The early works followed a period when she didn’t like the work she was doing, tore it all up but then revisited the studio a few weeks later was struck by the patterns which has been made by the torn work on old canvass. In the later works she cuts up life drawings she’d done in the 1920s which you had seen upstairs creating wonderful fractured images.

Closed 1 September 2019

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