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immense dining table (English 18th century; to seat 14 in a circle) are works not by Pollock but by Lee Krasner: two self-portraits from her youth; collages from the 1950s; FRAGMENTS FROM A CRUCIFIXION from 1962, an enormous burnt umber and white violence painted in sweeping strokes so wide and rapidly applied their edges are furred with spray. The whole surface is drawn into the turmoil, yet in the four corners the strokes bend inward, rushing back upon themselves into a vast oval, enclosing the storm and the deed.

Another way of stating her belief might be, in rebirth. Much has actually been lost of her past work. Most of her early drawings and paintings were destroyed in a fire in 194x. Twice she has gone back into what survived, and torn or cut the work up for collage. In '51, not liking the reception given her first exhibition, or perhaps the work itself, she cut up the canvases, combined them with black shards of cloth and torn paper, and turned out a number of fiercely vertical compositions with titles expressive of a will not to lie down: MILKWEED....BURNING CANDLES. Pollock died in '56 and, much as Krasner would like to avoid it, it is not possible not to see her subsequent work except as catalyzed by the will to [[strikethrough]] survive [[/strikethrough]]go on. There was a sudden burst of life-proclaiming works: GREEN EARTH....UPSTREAM. Then an antiphonal swing back to incorporate the past (FRAGMENTS FROM A CRUCIFIXION falls here) before another surge forward: BLOOM....PRIMEVAL RESURGANCE....PALINGENESIS. Was it from that latter title, with its linguistic trace of "palimpsest" that, when in 1973 she found a cache of drawings done thirty years before she took a theme for her next paroxysm of re-creation? That exhibition may have been the most poignant and also [[strikethrough]] savage [[/strikethrough]]ruthless declaration of the right to life of this artistic era. The early Cubists used collage to play a metaphysical game upon the card-table of a picture-surface, dealing out bits of the "real"--cigarette papers, bits of type, photos; textiles--to combine