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of the picture plane. Spatially, the negative as as positive as the positive space of an object - there was the old Chinese phrase about the space in between the spokes of a wheel being as important as the spokes themselves. This, at its simplest, was what I took to be Cubism:; but it still separated me from nature as the Renaissance concept of space separated me from nature. At Hofmann's, in this sense, there was still the Renaissance concept of space - which means that I, the artist, was here observing nature there, and making my comments.

Lee Krasner has been aware for many years of the emblematic potency of the microcosm within the cosmos: what is remarkable is to have protected herself, as a third but integral presence, into this complementary duality with such fastidious, esthetic poise that the paintings are free of all negative qualities. They are never morbid or too privately hermetic: sustained within their own space and light with evident ease, they have also a powerful force, but it is affirmatory, passionate, formally esoteric on occasion but always clear in definition purged of equivocation.

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Porcelain oil & paper collage. 30 x 48 1/2. 1955 (Dr. Leonard Siegal). photo courtesy Marlborough Gallery

I have used the words "deepest" (with regard to the scrutiny of her own identity) and "high" (to describe the "altitude" at which reconciliation is achieved between the artist's vision of nature and an awareness of herself, and the way in which its embodiment within their natural dialogue, pastoral and biological, is disclosed as an imaginative synthesis), and here these words need special definition.

In broad terms, artists who work abstractedly either send up signals of distress, joy, exaltation or pain, like warning rockets or fireworks displays, or send down into the depths soundings, anchors or divining rods. It is a matter of being above the surface or below it: and because neither vantage point implies the finality of defeat and being ravaged by life, or conclusive triumph and a conquering spirit, both are equally valid and positive in their formal objectivity if the expressive structure is left sufficiently "open," and Lee Krasner always designs her structures in this open way.

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She this combines the signs and symbols of these oppositions composition; but usually there is a penultimate, delicately calculated imbalance, like people with the wrong shadows, the discord between a sound and an imperfect echo, or an expansive form related to or divided from a contracted mirror image. The resultant imbalance, with its accentricities [[eccentricities]] rectified by firm structural containment, is what gives her work its humanity.

Even Mondrian, with his search for a "pure" equilibrium, deployed squares or rectangles of color in a dramatically "situational" and temporal way to the end of his life, although the balance he created between the soaring vertical and constraining horizontal often provided its own structural equilibrium.

It is a measure of Lee Krasner's personal contribution to modern art that, like Matisse, through remaining very consciously the artist and never allowing herself to become a mere vehicle for the exposition of the subconscious, which is only relative to humanity, she has created so many images that finally possess, in sheer clarity, an objective balance -- hovering in the estuaries of equilibrium without floating into the immaculate solace of that reassuringly peaceful river - but which also imply a large measure of complicity. "Involvement" is too clumsy a word for these implications.

The gaze of Matisse on a nude body is caressing and conspiratorial: every stroke of the pencil, each calligraphic distillation through the tip of a brush of any contour of that body, is charged with feeling, however relaxed or seemingly indolent those pencil strokes or brush marks may seem in their distribution. There is never distortion: only emphasis and concentration. In Bonnard's paintings of a nude woman lying in a bath, or drying herself, the gaze has no complicity: the sensuality is in the light, color, texture and profusion of detail of the image as a whole, but the underlying mood is asexual; it describes what a housekeeper with unusually sensitive eyes would see if she opened the bathroom door accidentally and found her mistress bathing. Bonnard's paintings contain their own warm and happy acceptance of life, but this acceptance excludes eroticism: the quality of Bonnard's sensuality touches also on neurasthenia, and makes it beautiful. Matisse has no concern for debilitation, the tensions of family