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拍品專文
Painted in 1972 at the height of Lee Krasner’s mature career, Lotus is a lucid display of the artist’s remarkable ability to harmonize the kinetic energy of nature within her rigorous aesthetic process. Here, her style of bold, graphic biomorphic forms is rendered in tender, slow-drying oils, a combination which produces a beautifully balanced and highly evocative image. Sweeping gestures of ultramarine blue, mossy green, and muted lilac are held together by passages of eggshell. This soft shadow that surrounds each shape gives the impression of collage, harking back to her pivotal exhibition at the Stable Gallery, Lee Krasner Collages, in New York in 1955. Reviewing the exhibition, Stuart Preston of The New York Times described each work as a “dense jungle of exotic shape and color” (quoted in E. Nairne, Lee Krasner: Living Color, exh. cat., Barbican Art Gallery, London, 2019, p. 97). Here, seventeen years later, with a more pared down palette and composition, Krasner achieves greater clarity: “I never violate an inner rhythm,” Krasner once said. “I loathe to force anything. I do not force myself, ever…I have regard for the inner voice” (quoted in ibid., p. 97).
With its planar forms, saturated color, and meditative economy of means, Lotus bears a clear aesthetic affinity to the late paper cut-outs of Henri Matisse. In 1961, she attended The Last Works of Matisse: Large Cut Gouaches at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), where his vivid paper cut-outs proved formative for her exposure to the expressive possibilities of bold, simplified colored. Among the works she would have encountered was La Rosace, a gouache paper-cut out maquette he made for a stained-glass window in memory of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, a co-founder of MoMA, at a church in Terrytown, New York, and Matisse’s final work. In it, Matisse transforms the intricate grammar of a Gothic rose window into a simplified yet charged composition. Like Lotus, the work maintains a quality of quiet reverence through reduction rather than elaboration, a potency that each artist distilled most effectively in their later careers. As Robert Henkes observed of Krasner’s mature style, “the thought processes necessary in order to reach the stage of execution demand a greater discipline”—and it is precisely that discipline, earned over many years, that Lotus most coherently displays (Eight American Women Painters, New York, 1977, p. 46).
That restraint was, in a literal, material sense, accumulated—emerging from her lifelong habit of reworking paintings she deemed unresolved rather than leaving them behind. Lotus, among other large-scale works of the early 1970s, is a product of this working style. As Krasner explains: “What I’ve done is pick up canvases that I did somewhere in the sixties that were never resolved. I’ve started to re-work these, trying to hold on to whatever image exists there. I obviously don't seem to be through with whatever is taking place when I throw back to the past in some way in my work… I’m sharply aware of it and simply accept it as a takeoff point. I don’t think your takeoff point is that important. It is the result that you’re interested in” (quoted in B. Cavaliere, “An Interview with Lee Krasner,” Flash Art, January/February 1980, p. 15). This recursive process displaces Krasner’s oeuvre from standard chronology, instead placing it in a cyclical timeline in which paintings are added to, re-formed, destroyed, and put back together. As a result, Krasner never adhered to one hallmark style unlike many of her Abstract Expressionist peers and likewise, never understood herself or her artistic output as a static, fixed entity. As art historian Robert Hobbs maintains, Krasner “remained committed to the existential imperative to confront the monstrous freedom of the modern world by facing her own contingency,” and instead, embraced “a more open-ended perception of the self as a dynamic constellation of forces” (Lee Krasner, exh. cat. Independent Curators International, New York, 1999, p. 28).
This dynamic perception of the self finds its most vivid expression in Krasner’s relationship with nature. In Lotus, the elegant flower is cradled by curling leaflike forms, embracing the delicate flower in an enclosed embryo. Cocooned around the lotus in a circular formation, the eye is drawn around the image with a centrifugal force. As in many of her other works from this period, such as Mysteries and Rising Green, this centrifugal rhythm aligns with the natural imagery Krasner depicts, evoking not just the shared life cycles of mankind and nature, but their inextricable interdependencies. As one critic reflected, Krasner’s sustained and probing search for pictorial imagery that would reflect her relationship with nature achieved “the grandeur of an epic quest. The nature of this quest, its ethos and motivation, certainly its energy, has involved the deepest scrutiny of her own identity so that the images in her painting also reconcile, through imaginative synthesis at a high altitude recurrent aspects of her own persona in terms of emphatic composition and obsessive structure” (B. Robertson, “The Nature of Lee Krasner,” Art in America, November/December 1973, p. 87). Lotus, therefore, is not solely a meditation on the flower as a part of nature, but a being to which Krasner felt profoundly connected, both spiritually, elementally, and even, in a sense, politically.
Evolution, growth and change go on. Change is life.Lee KrasnerThe same year she painted Lotus, Krasner, as a member of the political organization Women in the Arts, protested gender-based discrimination at MoMA. An article from The New York Times reports, “Wearing signs such as ‘MOMA Prefers Papa’ and ‘Sigmund, This Is What We Want, an End to Discrimination,’ a group of some 300 women artists paraded gaily before the Museum of Modern Art yesterday morning in a swirl of balloons and streamers.” (G. Glueck, “Women Artists Charge Bias at Modern Museum, The New York Times, April 13 1972, p. 36). At the time, Women in the Arts considered itself as “the largest group in New York City concerned with ending discrimination against women artists.” Using MoMA as their platform, these women advocated that every museum have major exhibitions of women artists, put on with the same “dignity, […] status, [and] publicity” afforded to male artists. Together, they challenged not just individual institutions, but “the corrupt and decadent structure of the art world” itself (ibid.). That Krasner was among them is unsurprising—she had been engaged in politics all her life, stretching back to her organizing work for the Artists Union during her WPA years in the 1930s.
While one cannot say for certain that she painted Lotus as a direct result of these protests, the convergence of the symbolism of the lotus flower and this political moment invites closer attention. In both Buddhism and Hinduism, the lotus is a sacred symbol associated with purity, awakening, compassion, and transformation — a flower that roots in murky water and rises to bloom above the surface, its beauty contingent on, rather than despite, the difficulty of its conditions. For an artist who had spent her life fighting for equality on multiple fronts—for artists as laborers, for women artists, and for her own recognition as a painter disentangled from the title of Mrs. Jackson Pollock—perhaps the lotus was less a subject than a reflection of Krasner herself. She had spent a career fighting to rise above the murky waters of being designated a great woman artist rather than simply a great one—an artist whose work was evaluated on its inherent aesthetic and conceptual merits instead of in relation to her male peers. In Lotus, with its crisply defined forms and piercing palette, the flower is held above the fray: serene, poised, and resolute.
Lotus was met with great acclaim when it was presented at Marlborough Gallery in the spring of 1973. Along with eleven other of her recent works, this exhibition of large paintings was the precursor to Krasner’s first major retrospective at the Whitney which took place later that same year, and in which Lotus also featured. Hilton Kramer, the New York Times art critic, hailed the gallery show as “by far the finest exhibition of Miss Krasner’s work I have ever seen” (H. Kramer quoted in E. Nairne, Lee Krasner: Living Color, exh. cat. Barbican Art Gallery, London, 2019, p. 215). And just a few months later, he would expand on this sentiment in his review of the Whitney show: “Color is afforded a freer role in the picture‐making process. No longer imprisoned in a design that it may embellish but never dominate, color acquires a new freshness and vitality, forcing a greater openness and simplicity as it determines the disposition of every form” (H. Kramer, “Lee Krasner’s Art—Harvest of Rhythms, New York Times, November 22, 1973, p. 50).
That Krasner chose to hang Lotus above her own dining room table suggests the painting occupied a singular place in her life. More perhaps than any other work in this period, Lotus holds in equilibrium the forces that animated her entire practice: the recursive process of an artist who seldom considered any canvas fully resolved; the conviction that human life and the natural world are governed by the same cycles of transformation; and the quiet insistence that beauty can emerge from the most resistant of conditions. Krasner once said that “painting is a revelation, an act of love”—and in Lotus, that love is felt in every gesture, both inward toward the self and outward to the world to which it responds. “As a painter,” Krasner finishes, “I can’t experience it any other way” (quoted in E. Nairne, op. cit., p. 34).
With its planar forms, saturated color, and meditative economy of means, Lotus bears a clear aesthetic affinity to the late paper cut-outs of Henri Matisse. In 1961, she attended The Last Works of Matisse: Large Cut Gouaches at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), where his vivid paper cut-outs proved formative for her exposure to the expressive possibilities of bold, simplified colored. Among the works she would have encountered was La Rosace, a gouache paper-cut out maquette he made for a stained-glass window in memory of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, a co-founder of MoMA, at a church in Terrytown, New York, and Matisse’s final work. In it, Matisse transforms the intricate grammar of a Gothic rose window into a simplified yet charged composition. Like Lotus, the work maintains a quality of quiet reverence through reduction rather than elaboration, a potency that each artist distilled most effectively in their later careers. As Robert Henkes observed of Krasner’s mature style, “the thought processes necessary in order to reach the stage of execution demand a greater discipline”—and it is precisely that discipline, earned over many years, that Lotus most coherently displays (Eight American Women Painters, New York, 1977, p. 46).
That restraint was, in a literal, material sense, accumulated—emerging from her lifelong habit of reworking paintings she deemed unresolved rather than leaving them behind. Lotus, among other large-scale works of the early 1970s, is a product of this working style. As Krasner explains: “What I’ve done is pick up canvases that I did somewhere in the sixties that were never resolved. I’ve started to re-work these, trying to hold on to whatever image exists there. I obviously don't seem to be through with whatever is taking place when I throw back to the past in some way in my work… I’m sharply aware of it and simply accept it as a takeoff point. I don’t think your takeoff point is that important. It is the result that you’re interested in” (quoted in B. Cavaliere, “An Interview with Lee Krasner,” Flash Art, January/February 1980, p. 15). This recursive process displaces Krasner’s oeuvre from standard chronology, instead placing it in a cyclical timeline in which paintings are added to, re-formed, destroyed, and put back together. As a result, Krasner never adhered to one hallmark style unlike many of her Abstract Expressionist peers and likewise, never understood herself or her artistic output as a static, fixed entity. As art historian Robert Hobbs maintains, Krasner “remained committed to the existential imperative to confront the monstrous freedom of the modern world by facing her own contingency,” and instead, embraced “a more open-ended perception of the self as a dynamic constellation of forces” (Lee Krasner, exh. cat. Independent Curators International, New York, 1999, p. 28).
This dynamic perception of the self finds its most vivid expression in Krasner’s relationship with nature. In Lotus, the elegant flower is cradled by curling leaflike forms, embracing the delicate flower in an enclosed embryo. Cocooned around the lotus in a circular formation, the eye is drawn around the image with a centrifugal force. As in many of her other works from this period, such as Mysteries and Rising Green, this centrifugal rhythm aligns with the natural imagery Krasner depicts, evoking not just the shared life cycles of mankind and nature, but their inextricable interdependencies. As one critic reflected, Krasner’s sustained and probing search for pictorial imagery that would reflect her relationship with nature achieved “the grandeur of an epic quest. The nature of this quest, its ethos and motivation, certainly its energy, has involved the deepest scrutiny of her own identity so that the images in her painting also reconcile, through imaginative synthesis at a high altitude recurrent aspects of her own persona in terms of emphatic composition and obsessive structure” (B. Robertson, “The Nature of Lee Krasner,” Art in America, November/December 1973, p. 87). Lotus, therefore, is not solely a meditation on the flower as a part of nature, but a being to which Krasner felt profoundly connected, both spiritually, elementally, and even, in a sense, politically.
Evolution, growth and change go on. Change is life.Lee KrasnerThe same year she painted Lotus, Krasner, as a member of the political organization Women in the Arts, protested gender-based discrimination at MoMA. An article from The New York Times reports, “Wearing signs such as ‘MOMA Prefers Papa’ and ‘Sigmund, This Is What We Want, an End to Discrimination,’ a group of some 300 women artists paraded gaily before the Museum of Modern Art yesterday morning in a swirl of balloons and streamers.” (G. Glueck, “Women Artists Charge Bias at Modern Museum, The New York Times, April 13 1972, p. 36). At the time, Women in the Arts considered itself as “the largest group in New York City concerned with ending discrimination against women artists.” Using MoMA as their platform, these women advocated that every museum have major exhibitions of women artists, put on with the same “dignity, […] status, [and] publicity” afforded to male artists. Together, they challenged not just individual institutions, but “the corrupt and decadent structure of the art world” itself (ibid.). That Krasner was among them is unsurprising—she had been engaged in politics all her life, stretching back to her organizing work for the Artists Union during her WPA years in the 1930s.
While one cannot say for certain that she painted Lotus as a direct result of these protests, the convergence of the symbolism of the lotus flower and this political moment invites closer attention. In both Buddhism and Hinduism, the lotus is a sacred symbol associated with purity, awakening, compassion, and transformation — a flower that roots in murky water and rises to bloom above the surface, its beauty contingent on, rather than despite, the difficulty of its conditions. For an artist who had spent her life fighting for equality on multiple fronts—for artists as laborers, for women artists, and for her own recognition as a painter disentangled from the title of Mrs. Jackson Pollock—perhaps the lotus was less a subject than a reflection of Krasner herself. She had spent a career fighting to rise above the murky waters of being designated a great woman artist rather than simply a great one—an artist whose work was evaluated on its inherent aesthetic and conceptual merits instead of in relation to her male peers. In Lotus, with its crisply defined forms and piercing palette, the flower is held above the fray: serene, poised, and resolute.
Lotus was met with great acclaim when it was presented at Marlborough Gallery in the spring of 1973. Along with eleven other of her recent works, this exhibition of large paintings was the precursor to Krasner’s first major retrospective at the Whitney which took place later that same year, and in which Lotus also featured. Hilton Kramer, the New York Times art critic, hailed the gallery show as “by far the finest exhibition of Miss Krasner’s work I have ever seen” (H. Kramer quoted in E. Nairne, Lee Krasner: Living Color, exh. cat. Barbican Art Gallery, London, 2019, p. 215). And just a few months later, he would expand on this sentiment in his review of the Whitney show: “Color is afforded a freer role in the picture‐making process. No longer imprisoned in a design that it may embellish but never dominate, color acquires a new freshness and vitality, forcing a greater openness and simplicity as it determines the disposition of every form” (H. Kramer, “Lee Krasner’s Art—Harvest of Rhythms, New York Times, November 22, 1973, p. 50).
That Krasner chose to hang Lotus above her own dining room table suggests the painting occupied a singular place in her life. More perhaps than any other work in this period, Lotus holds in equilibrium the forces that animated her entire practice: the recursive process of an artist who seldom considered any canvas fully resolved; the conviction that human life and the natural world are governed by the same cycles of transformation; and the quiet insistence that beauty can emerge from the most resistant of conditions. Krasner once said that “painting is a revelation, an act of love”—and in Lotus, that love is felt in every gesture, both inward toward the self and outward to the world to which it responds. “As a painter,” Krasner finishes, “I can’t experience it any other way” (quoted in E. Nairne, op. cit., p. 34).