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27

After Pollock's death I came back to New York, rented an apartment and then abandoned it after two years. I couldn't stand it. So I went back out to Springs. The second attempt was very beautiful. I wasn't depressed atall. Then two years after he had died, I took over the barn. There was no point in letting it stand empty. Meanwhile I had the difficulty of also trying to reestablish myself in New York. I couldn't live in the country all the time alone. So I had to try also to get back into New York.

An avid, not to say avaricious, New York art world was hanging on the widow's progress, [[strikethrough]] to see how she would go. The critics and her [[/strikethrough]] Her one-time [[strikethrough]] fr[[?]] [[/strikethrough]] co-student at Hofmann's classes, [[strikethrough]] Clement [[/strikethrough]] Greenberg, then moving into a position of power at French & Co. Galleries offered her a show on the basis of [[strikethrough]] her [[/strikethrough]] the lyrical [[strikethrough]] colorful [[/strikethrough]] works. Neither he, [[strikethrough]] for [[/strikethrough]] nor she for that matter, calculated what the move back into the barn might produce.

The next works were those great dark-umber and white works: CHARRED LANDSCAPE, WHITE RAGE, COBALT NIGHT, NIGHT BIRDS and FRAGMENTS FROM A CRUCIFIXION. Greenberg was "disappointed" by the turn the work had taken and said so. An angered Krasner cancelled the show and went on working the vein. She worked on until she was felled by a serious operation in 1963 and then the assertion of dominion over the charred landscape seemed done. There has been no return to that palette or that content.
  
The works of the decade '64 to '74 established Lee Krasner's reputation as a painter of major power and feeling. The swinging arcs of color in these works clearly based on nature all but overflow the confines of her large canvases. She returns to yellow-green, dark-green, raspberry and alizarin orange as touch-colors for a sense of impassioned connection with growing things (bridal veil, lilac and fleurs-de-lis?). In