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[[image]]
Another Krasner mosaic on Broadway

Lee Krasner from page 41

involves complete, even unconscious, mastery of paint and which is never preconceived in content. She prints intuitively, but cautions, "The time sequence, the moment you're doing something, is not necessarily what you're feeling at that second."

Only once was Krasner forced to alter her working methods. It was in 1958-59, for a group of mosaic murals commissioned for the Uris Building at 2 Broadway, "Cartoons were drawn up lifesized because I wasn't allowed to touch the materials. Union rules."

Krasner, decided to use collage, with sharply defined forms, and supervised the work throughout, even to choice of tone and color. Did she find it aggravating to work this way? "Of course, but I didn't want to forego doing it altogether and that was my alternative."

Combining Past and Present

Krasner's current work involves old paintings (from the '60s), which she has picked up again. These are works which she felt were unresolved, "that had just been started and abandoned," and which she is reworking with the intention of "holding on to the little image that is there as much as possible." They are a combination of past and present, coming at a time in Krasner's career when her [[??]] is reappearing on the scene, when her own past is, so to speak, simultaneously on view with her present.

How does she feel about 1979, about the current situation in art?

"I think nothing has ever been so wide open as it is today. You name it and you can paint it, and there's a gallery that will show it...I don't think it's the end of painting.... They'll have to find their own symbolism. I suppose the wall of Abstract Expressionism seems impenetrable, when we wre there, it was people like Picasso and Matisse. How were you ever going to climb out of that one? All generations have to deal with that, but I think they will keep going. There's room for everyone, it's a great big world."

What about her own future work? "The minute I get a crystal ball and get an answer, I'll let you know. God knows, I wish I knew that one. I know that it will not suddenly become Superrealist nudes: that I'm definite about, and that it won't become a vertical in a colorfield. It will be what I've always been about, and farther than that I can't say."


[[image]]
Krasner's [[italics]] Wheat Beast Must I Adore [[/italics]] (1961)