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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