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[[image]] Sundial, oil on canvas, 1972.  Photo: Courtesy Marlborough Gallery Inc.

canvases slashed and torn and then reglued into totally new configurations.  These works, sober in tonality, were filled with vibrant innuendoes of plant and animal life and were shown in 1955 at the Stable Gallery.  Krasner, remembering the night of the opening, recalls that Pollock was pleased with the show and "stood around receiving congratulations for me nicely——just as I had received them for him."

Then in August, 1956, tragedy struck.  Pollock was killed in an automobile crash in the company of a young artist Ruth Kliegman, with whom he was having an affair, and another woman who also died.  Krasner was in Europe at this time.  She had left Pollock with the understanding that life between them could not continue as it was and it was again up to him to decide what to do about it.  Just before she left, another change or break, as she calls it, had occurred in her painting.  On her canvas appeared a large menacing anthropomorphic form with an eye scratched into the upper right hand corner.  The painter was nervous about the image as she, who worked so psychically, could not fathom the source from which it had emerged.  Pollock had used eyes earlier in his work——what was it doing in hers?  He reassured her about the painting but advised her to remove the eye; she refused.  When Krasner returned from Europe to face Pollock's death, this painting, entitled Prophesy, was waiting for her.  Gingerly, she recalls, "I had to confront myself with this painting before I was able to start work again.  I went through a rough period in that confrontation."

Once again Krasner went down deep into herself and fearlessly if painfully dredged up whatever was lurking for her.  Outsized, frightful images appeared, anthropomorphic forms, submerged in murky greys, engaged in primal contests; she gave them titles such as Three is Two, Embrace and Birth.  Around 1958 these stark images took on those acidic greens and reds so characteristic of Krasner's color sense, and then, from 1959 to 1961, a storm began to rage again in the artist's huge umber and white canvases filled with ferocious, explosive splinter stokes of paint.  During this period, Krasner's mother died, a traumatic break with the critic Clement Greenberg occurred and the Pollock estate was withdrawn form the Sidney Janis Gallery and remained in limbo for several years.  A painting done in 1961 was entitled Assault on the Solar Plexus and the artist recalls that, "for me it was an embarrassingly realistic title.  I experienced it."

In the following years rage and anxiety began to subside.  The work became more serene, even playful on occasion.  In 1965, a retrospective took place at the Whitechapel Gallery in England and the response was favorable.  Krasner started to show with the prestigious Marlborough Galleries in New York (where she placed the Pollock estate) and the wild splattery strokes congealed at first into small flower-like clusters and then began to expand once more into voluptuous, fecund configurations growing in stature and stability.  Recent paintings with titles such as Masjuscule, Palingenesis and Sun Dial evoke the classic harmony of the ancient Greeks. Indeed the measured rhythms of their stately forms are analogous to the rich but austere dance dramas of Martha Graham, retaining in their astringent color contrasts the necessary jarring edge which speaks of dour death hovering about in the midst of jubilant life.
    These late works, perhaps more than any that have come before, completely reflect the infinite complexities of the woman who made them: the grating, yet arresting, read and green hues, colors Van Gogh catagorized as symbolic of the life and death struggle, the sharp cutting caligraphic curves and splintery lines, indicating an almost brutal force always lurking close to the surface and then the grand assemblage of these unsettling elements into a series of monumental emblems signalling the moment of resolution and arrival.
    And it is hardly coincidental that these majestic images made their appearance in time for the artist's major exhibition in November, 1973 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Lee Krasner puts it very aptly, "My painting is so autobiographical if anyone can take the trouble to read it."

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THE FEMINIST ART JOURNAL