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edge. The juxtaposition of these two types of edge--contour that is drawn played against literal contour that is cut--is another of the conceptual subtleties of these multivalent works. Frozen gesture, in the form of the cut-out shapes, subsumes the gestures of hand and wrist recorded in the recycled drawings: The past is both recaptured and embraced within the context of the present.

The use of drawings made during the artist's youth is an act of self-retrieval of heroic dimension. Retrieved as well in a contemporary context is Krasner's experience as a mural painter on the W.P.A., which impelled her initially to work on large-scale horizontal formats in 1951. In Triptych (Fig. 9), a horizontal work composed essentially of three interrelated easel paintings, the flatness and decorative effects of mural painting are evoked through the rhythmic curves of the big cut-out shapes, only to be contradicted by the painterly modulations and shadings covering the sheets of paper out of which these shapes are made. Texture, always a concern of Krasner's since her early heavily impastoed Picassoid works, is evoked both by the literal contrast of smooth paper with rough canvas as well as by the chalky and oily tactility of the collaged passages.

The new paintings, in short, are a brilliant tour de force of balancing out antithetical elements to arrive at a believable and consistent whole which is not only more than its parts, but also, because of its internal coherence, understood both initially as well as finally as a single, complex image. The impact of the sixties is preserved, but now it is countered by the detail of traditional art; the architectonic qualities of mural painting are never permitted to degenerate into merely decorative flatness--the flaw of much hard-edge or geometric abstraction. Instead, the ambiguous space of easel painting is simultaneously evoked and cancelled in a precarious balance between the conventions of mural painting and easel painting that is one of the crucial and most original features of Abstract Expressionism. The paintings also deal with pictorial irony as well in a contemporary manner. Value contrast functions to suggest illusionistic depth; however, because the drawings are constantly interrupted--at times with a kind of violent thrusting intrusion--by intercalations from other drawings, contradictory passages of shading nullify the suggestion of illusion. The result is that the conscious mind rather than simply the eye is awakened to the cognizance of flatness as a conception not irrevocably antagonistic to illusion.

Hofmann's Cubist lessons demanded that the eye be convinced of the integrity of the picture plane. But nearly forty years have elapsed since the moment these drawings were made. Their current resurrection as elements within a fresh pictorial synthesis, which departs as much from Action painting as Action painting departed from Cubism, is a moment of summing up the history of art of the last forty years. For the paintings contain illusions to Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, and Constructivism as well as to Abstract Expressionism. Their subject is not only the biography of the artist, but also the history of modern art, not as clever commentary, but as content. It is as if Krasner had turned Cubist collage inside out, mocking its depiction of flatness with collaged chiaroscuro. To the initial Cubist fragmentation of reality, she has added the fragmentation of representations of those very fragments! Normally one would expect that the act of fragmenting the fragmented would result in total chaos; but as many ancient philosophies tell us, the highest state of mind is that which can simultaneously entertain two mutually antithetical concepts.

In her new paintings, Krasner concedes nothing to the pretty but empty picture syndrome that is so typical of current abstract art, for it is today as impossible to paint a good painting about nothing as it was for the Abstract Expressionists. These works are not illustrations of philosophical propositions; they are mentation made concrete. A brilliant balance is achieved; richly elaborated passages full of detail and nuance, vitalized by the energy of youth, collaged, into bold forms, are locked into negative shapes of bare reserved areas, securely structured as only the stability and maturity of age could conceive. The dual use of sizing to affix the paper to the surface as well as to accentuate the cloth texture of canvas as nothing other than a accentuate the cloth texture of canvas as nothing other than a piece of woven material is Krasner's way of bringing her work into line with the latest developments in painting, which draw attention to, not only the flatness of the support, but also to its actual identify as a piece of cloth--mere surface. By turning back to reconsider where she began on her own, Krasner has come out ahead again. This time, however, she is capable of realizing what she intuitively knows. Her ability to embody conceptual ideas within a concrete work of art exposes the cowardice of disembodied ideas art as much as it criticizes the vacuity of current abstraction devoid of mental content. Ignored by the canonizers of the pantheon of Abstract Expressionism, Krasner emerges as a survivor with history now on her side.


1. One must attribute the discrepancy betwen Krasner's career and the quality of her work to two main factors; her unwillingness to play politics (she refused a show Clement Groenberg offered her at French & Co. in 1959 because she "didn't like his attitude") and, of course, to the undeniable fact that, as the wife of Jackson Pollock, she had a hard time being taken seriously as an artist in her own right, although she painted throughout her marriage and was encouraged by Pollock to continue working as a painter, rather than to support him financially as the wives of many of the other Abstract Expressionists were forced to do.

2. Krasner still smarts when she tells the story of Barnett Newman calling to invite Pollock to join the protest of the "irascible eighteen" against the Metropolitan Museum Krasner answered the phone: Newman asked to speak with Pollock and did not invite her to join, although she had been active in all of the various artists protest activities in the thirties. Krasner recounts that women were easily accepted as equals on the W.P.A. and in the exhibitions of the American Abstract Artists. She attributes the decline of women artists in the forties and fifties to the misogyny of the Surrealists, who both idealized and denigrated women. The atmosphere of the New York School ultimately became so "macho" that Grace Hartigan called herself "George Hartigan" for a time, and Krasner changed her name from Lenore Krasner to Lee Krasner, dropping a letter from her patronym and changing her first name to one that might be male or female.

3. Graham and de Kooning both exhibited very conventional figure paintings, and Pollock exhibited an early expressional abstraction. Birth. Krasner is listed in the catalogue as Lenore Krassner and Graham addresses her as "Lenore" in a postcard inviting her to participate in the exhibition, which also included works by Americans Stuart Davis and Walt Kuhn, and Europeans Mcdigliani and Hozault as well as others.

4. Because she did not have her own studio, she gave Holmann's school as the address of her studio when she rejoined the W.P.A. in 1937 after she had been tired earlier that year. (See chronology in Marcia Tucker, Lee Krasner's Large Paintings, Whitney Museum, 1974.)

5. Morris was the president of the American Abstract Artists, 3rd Mondrian exhibited with the group while he lived in New York. Mondrian and Krasner hit it off immediately because of their mutual interest in jazz and dancing.

6. Kasner relates that George McNeil, who worked as a monitor in Holmann's classes, translated what Holmann was saying for her.

7. For a discussion of Pollock's fusion of the linear and the painterly, see Michael Fried's introduction to Three American Painters. Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, 1955.

8. Holmann's lectures were finally organized into a semblance of a theory in Search for the Real, first published in 1948 by the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover as an exhibition catalogue.

9. The painting on the cover of this issue is the single work that incorporates the front side of an oil sketch on paper to accent the basically neutral painting with a slice of brilliant color. Otherwise, color in the works is the original color of canvas of the front or back of charcoal drawings or their impressions, or of the reverse side of the oil sketches where blotched areas of paint has bled through. The angel exception is a rectangle of transparent dark red in Triptych.

10. Most American artists were suffering from such a profound sense of inferiority vis-à-vis  European and especially French culture that they were blind to the originality and importance of the abstractions of the artists of the Stieglitz circle.

11. Graham, influenced by Focillon's new interpretation of a history of world art decnated in the Life of Forms in Art, had a broader view of the sources of modern art than Barr, who considered only the linear succession of Western European art styles.

12. In William Setiz, Abstract-Expression's: Painting in America, a published doctorial dissertation, Princeton University, 1955 p. 481.

13. For the best discussion of Graham's ideas see Marcus Ecstein Allentuck's introduction to the annotated edition System and Dialectics of Art, Johns Hopkins Press, 1971, Graham introduced Krasner to Pollock in 1941, and remained in close contact with the couple for several year until his jelousy of Pollock broke up the friendship. he painted several imitation Pollocks including Bird Watcher (1941) in the Indiana University Art Museum. As Ella Kokkinen points out in "John Graham during the 1940's," Arts Magazine, November 1976, Graham invited the Pollocks separately to tea, not with his other guests. Krasner remembers these Russian less as rituals in which Graham, bare-breasted and wearing a skit, would spread elaborate cloths and serve exotic cakes while the three talked about art. The great recent interest in Graham must be attributed to the realization among younger art historians researching the origins of Abstract Expressionism that Graham, not the Surrealists, introduced the crucial idea of painting as automatic scripture, and that the essential ground rules for Abstract Expressionism are already articulated by Graham in his 1937 treatise. Pollock's ability to put Graham's ideas into practice may well have been what drove Graham over the edge of eccentricity in to madness.

14. An intermediate stage between the 1955 and 1975 collage paintings is represented by the maquettes for the mosaic Krasner designed for 2 Broadway of 1958-59, and in the recent poster for the Olympics in which the shapes of the 1971-73 paintings are cut out in a preliminary maquette which suggested the possibility of another set of collage paintings. Hofmann had originally counseled tearing up drawings and collaging them back together, which de Kooning did in a number of cases in the drawings of women of the fifties. The result is a sharp shift in space, a king of radical disjuncture which, if Krasner were using her drawings as representations of the figure as opposed to abstract design elements would have created an inconsistent space instead of the integrated surface she manages to preserve.