Lot Essay
Lenore Krasner was born in Brooklyn in 1908 to Russian immigrant parents. She expressed an interest in art as early as her high school years and was painting seriously as a teenager. After high school, she won a scholarship to Cooper Union and continued her studies at the National Academy of Design in 1929. In the mid-1930s, Krasner began to study with Hans Hofmann, whose teachings were of profounf significance. Her work from this period reflects Hofmann's influence which emphasized a respect for flatness of the picture plane and the use of bright color. Lee Krasner had met Pollock in the late thirties, and they met again in 1942 and then married in 1945. They bought a house in the Springs on Long Island where Pollock immediately set up a studio, and Krasner followed a year later.
Between 1951 and 1953, Lee Krasner made a series of collages mainly in black and white, from the remains of her own drawings which she then pasted together. Krasner was pleased with the results and began to tear apart canvases which she believed to be unsuccessful. This resulted in a series of works from 1953 to 1955 known as collage paintings, a form of composition she would pursue throughout her career. What began as small, torn paper works evolved into large paper collages mounted on masonite or panel. They are marked by their verticality and shimmering dense surfaces.
The art of Lee Krasner is fundamentally, from first to last, a celebration of nature. By nature I don't mean a view of the garden through an open window or the depiction, however generalized, of a forest, a mountain range, the edge of the sea, or a cluster of flowers. Krasner's love of nature was for what used to be called in Nietzschean or Shavian terms the life force, and embraced the idea of growth, birth and pollination in their widest and deepest meanings. For her, nature meant organic cycles and processes more than specific objects. Equally, she was absorbed by the physical states and conditions of existence like the polarities of heat and cold, the crystalline properties of ice or the dense saturation of humidity, the verdant sappiness of green leaves or the parched dryness and powderiness of dead ones (B. Robertson, Lee Krasner Collages, Robert Miller Gallery, New York 1986, p.1.
In Collage 1954, Krasner has literally embeded the cut canvas and torn paper collage onto the masonite surface. She applied a crust of oil over the surface, while creating a mosaic with bits of colored paper as counterpoint to the dense verticality of the collage elements. Collage 1954 also contains torn remnants from Pollock's discarded drawings.
One can study these collages carefully and get some idea of what the Betty Parsons show was like; the thin stained large horizontal and vertical images remain there in the background, playing against each other; but these large-scale large-image collages are dominated by shapes, typically quite linear, torn from heavy black paper and previous drawings of her husband. These scraps, placed with such authority, are Lee Krasner in 1955. they command their backgrounds, even hot as some of these backgrounds are. They sing like Matisse's papiers coupes, but more roughly. They're noisy, joyous, even raucous--torn from the throat of a blues singer. They represent Lee's second major phase (B. Robertson, exh. cat. Lee Krasner: Paintings, Drawings and Collages, White Chapel Gallery, London 1965).
Between 1951 and 1953, Lee Krasner made a series of collages mainly in black and white, from the remains of her own drawings which she then pasted together. Krasner was pleased with the results and began to tear apart canvases which she believed to be unsuccessful. This resulted in a series of works from 1953 to 1955 known as collage paintings, a form of composition she would pursue throughout her career. What began as small, torn paper works evolved into large paper collages mounted on masonite or panel. They are marked by their verticality and shimmering dense surfaces.
The art of Lee Krasner is fundamentally, from first to last, a celebration of nature. By nature I don't mean a view of the garden through an open window or the depiction, however generalized, of a forest, a mountain range, the edge of the sea, or a cluster of flowers. Krasner's love of nature was for what used to be called in Nietzschean or Shavian terms the life force, and embraced the idea of growth, birth and pollination in their widest and deepest meanings. For her, nature meant organic cycles and processes more than specific objects. Equally, she was absorbed by the physical states and conditions of existence like the polarities of heat and cold, the crystalline properties of ice or the dense saturation of humidity, the verdant sappiness of green leaves or the parched dryness and powderiness of dead ones (B. Robertson, Lee Krasner Collages, Robert Miller Gallery, New York 1986, p.1.
In Collage 1954, Krasner has literally embeded the cut canvas and torn paper collage onto the masonite surface. She applied a crust of oil over the surface, while creating a mosaic with bits of colored paper as counterpoint to the dense verticality of the collage elements. Collage 1954 also contains torn remnants from Pollock's discarded drawings.
One can study these collages carefully and get some idea of what the Betty Parsons show was like; the thin stained large horizontal and vertical images remain there in the background, playing against each other; but these large-scale large-image collages are dominated by shapes, typically quite linear, torn from heavy black paper and previous drawings of her husband. These scraps, placed with such authority, are Lee Krasner in 1955. they command their backgrounds, even hot as some of these backgrounds are. They sing like Matisse's papiers coupes, but more roughly. They're noisy, joyous, even raucous--torn from the throat of a blues singer. They represent Lee's second major phase (B. Robertson, exh. cat. Lee Krasner: Paintings, Drawings and Collages, White Chapel Gallery, London 1965).