.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
As much as any Abstract Expressionist artist, Lee Krasner embraced change. She worked figuratively in the 1930s, was influenced by cubism and hard-edged abstraction in the 1940s and created her classic Abstract Expressionist works in the 1950s and 1960s. In the early 1970s, Krasner created pared down "minimalist" works such as the important Peacock from 1973. Never content to rest on her laurels, Krasner continually explored new forms of expressionion--"I've never understood the fixed image. I've never experienced this state of being where you fix an image and this becomes your identification" (Lee Krasner quoted in R. Hobbs, Lee Krasner, New York, p. 109).
Peacock is among the largest of the artist's paintings and like many of her late works, it is dominated by a form that looks like an abstracted letter or character. In general, Krasner titled her works after their completion--the beautiful pattern of the brown/green and white form fanning out at the upper right of the painting may have suggested its title, as well as the bulbous and whimisical quality of the central shape.
Like other Abstract Expressionists, Krasner's later work was perhaps influenced by, and part of, the discourse on hard-edged painting and Minimalism. Just as her friend Robert Motherwell moved away from his explosive Spanish Elegy paintings to his elegantly spare Open series in 1967, in the early 1970s Krasner tamed her painterliness into a hard-edged style. The works dating from this period owe more to Frank Stella's hard-edged and contemporaneous Proctactor and Concentric Squares works than to her gestural Abstract Expressionist peers Willem de Kooning and her husband Jackson Pollock. Writing about works painted at this time, Krasner stated "The only difference I can see is they are more scharply (sic) in focus, more concentrated and emblematic...look at the titles--Peacock, 1973...Maybe as we get older we get more economical with time & thinking, with work, touch, everything" (Lee Krasner, as quoted in E. Landau, Lee Krasner: A Catalogue Raisonné, New York, 1995, p. 270).
Her later work is a breathtaking culmination of her career, a synthesis that combines the rigidity of her American Abstract Artist work of the 1940s, with the scale, composition and rolling forms of her mature work. Peacock turns away from facile painterliness, instead focusing on the dynamic interplay of forms and pure and glorious color.
Peacock is among the largest of the artist's paintings and like many of her late works, it is dominated by a form that looks like an abstracted letter or character. In general, Krasner titled her works after their completion--the beautiful pattern of the brown/green and white form fanning out at the upper right of the painting may have suggested its title, as well as the bulbous and whimisical quality of the central shape.
Like other Abstract Expressionists, Krasner's later work was perhaps influenced by, and part of, the discourse on hard-edged painting and Minimalism. Just as her friend Robert Motherwell moved away from his explosive Spanish Elegy paintings to his elegantly spare Open series in 1967, in the early 1970s Krasner tamed her painterliness into a hard-edged style. The works dating from this period owe more to Frank Stella's hard-edged and contemporaneous Proctactor and Concentric Squares works than to her gestural Abstract Expressionist peers Willem de Kooning and her husband Jackson Pollock. Writing about works painted at this time, Krasner stated "The only difference I can see is they are more scharply (sic) in focus, more concentrated and emblematic...look at the titles--Peacock, 1973...Maybe as we get older we get more economical with time & thinking, with work, touch, everything" (Lee Krasner, as quoted in E. Landau, Lee Krasner: A Catalogue Raisonné, New York, 1995, p. 270).
Her later work is a breathtaking culmination of her career, a synthesis that combines the rigidity of her American Abstract Artist work of the 1940s, with the scale, composition and rolling forms of her mature work. Peacock turns away from facile painterliness, instead focusing on the dynamic interplay of forms and pure and glorious color.