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dinarily [[?]], is also vigorously sophisticated, hence the complicity of his art. We are very aware of a male gaze on a female body. In a Bonnard painting we are almost more conscious of the light and color in the water floating above an attenuated nude body than the body itself. There is always the spirit of that attenuated, white and wraithlike, melancholic circus horse pervading Bonnard's world.

There are no intimations of this kind in Lee Krasner's work, either, and this because Matisse has been a lodestar for her since her student years. It may be that temperamental reserves of pride and stoicism have also kept her work free of those undertones; but Matisse fundamentally affected her incisive attitude toward composition. A favorite device of Matisse divides his paintings into two or more tightly separated horizontal planes (The Bathers, in the Art Institute of Chicago, is a fine example of this practice) and within these planes constructs complementary images that are additionally separated by abrupt dislocations in scale. Lee Krasner's early painting of a still life in the left foreground with a far-distant view of a figure in a bathtub on the right, so that the foliage of the still life seems larger than the human figure, is typical of this practice, at once unifying and disruptive, like the calm progression of near and distant images on a Japanese screen. Like Matisse, also, her work embraces sexuality, but as an equation and not a proposition.

With the advent of Pollock, there was no longer the separation of myself from nature.

I have referred to "open" structures and to "eccentricities" of imbalance "rectified by firm structural containment," as well as to an unspecified "humanity," and these modifications in an otherwise sharply defined flow of pictorial imagery require comment, also.

They are achieved through an instinctive command of tonality; and tonality, as opposed to hues and tints of color, is a crucial part of an artist's vocabulary, from Phidias to Brancusi, and from

Bathroom Door o/c 20 x 22". 1935 (Lee Krasner)
[[image]]

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of mythology and religion. And as we now reject "received" standards of morality that seem irrelevant to life (loftily settling for ethics), we also wince, today, at the very word "tonal" when