Lee Krasner: A Through Line

An artist’s evolution through reinvention

Ever since he came on as the director of the Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum, Paul Baker Prindle has been looking forward to showing the Lee Krasner: A Through Line exhibition, which is set to run through May 19. These Lee Krasner paintings were the biggest discovered gems in the museum’s Hampton collection and Baker Prindle wanted to develop an exhibition to showcase them and look at them through a new art historical lens, while also recognizing that Krasner was very influential in art history and is an unsung legend of her time.

Highlighting Krasner and her art is a fitting way to kick off Women’s History Month, an artist who emerged from the first generation of Abstract Expressionist painters and went on to be recognized as one of the most critical figures in American art in the second half of the 20th century.

Through personal trials, the death of her husband, abstract artist Jackson Pollock and as a woman artist amid the prevailing patriarchy (which still clings) of mid-century America, A Through Line is a study of reinvention in the way Krasner and her works evolved through constant experimentation, expansion and reuse.

The exhibition provides a context to Krasner’s important abstract paintings and collages from the 1940s to the early 1960s, including four of her works held in the museum’s Gordon F. Hampton Collection and rarely exhibited works on loan. A Through Line highlights breakthrough moments in her career. Her body of work over 50 years points to encompassing portraits, Cubist drawings, collage, assemblage, and large-scale abstract painting. Krasner, a force of nature, always pushed abstraction forward.

Krasner became a passionate arts activist and a mural painter for the Works Progress Administration, the Depression-era public art project, and a member of the WPA Artists Union. As a member of American Abstract Artists, she championed artists’ rights, promoted abstract art in the 1930s and ’40s, (then a burgeoning art form) demanded more exhibition opportunities for its artists and pushed for museums to show American artists instead of prioritizing their European peers.

A Through Line begins with an exploration of Krasner’s early interest in cubism. She was influenced by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Hans Hofmann. Her work in the 1930s and 1940s set the stage for her transformation in the 1950s and 1960s, as she started embracing a gestural abstraction — applying an intuitive, physical method focused more on how, rather than what is painted.

The first of Krasner’s pieces is her untitled work from 1942. It hangs alongside Pablo Picasso’s 1926 print, Scène d’intérieur and Hans Hofmann’s painting Pure Space (1952). These three works illustrate shared interests in exploring depth of field, linework and different modes of geometric and gestural abstraction. Pure Space offers visitors an opportunity to better understand how Hans Hofmann’s theory of “push and pull” was translated into paint (the illusion of space, depth, even movement on canvas using color and shape, rather than representational forms). This untitled piece from 1942 is the earliest Krasner work in the exhibition. It presents the influence of cubism and also Hoffman’s “push pull” color theory and form theory. Krasner said Hoffman was her primary teacher. In this work she incorporates similar techniques. But she’s also making it her own, creating a combination of curvature and straight line, that make movement and shapes that continue to make appearances in her work, like shard-looking shapes. Krasner was also a huge jazz fan and this work encompasses its progressive, unexpected nature; bold blacks and reds contrast with green, blue and white forms and lines create movement and depth on the canvas before you.

Untitled(1942)

In the center of A Through Line a turning point for Krasner looms large — the largest piece in the exhibition. Her “poorly received” 1951 exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery is a main event in her career, after which she hit a sustained stride that would cement her reputation. Just one of two paintings survived from this Parsons exhibition. On loan from Kasmin Gallery New York, Number 2 (1951) is on view for the first time on the West Coast and only the second time in the United States. Some of the reviews only talked about it from a decorative standpoint — something important to consider — about the work of a female artist within the context of its time and critics’ dismissive nature of women artists. A critical moment for Krasner, she did not exhibit work for the next two years. Number 2 survived destruction by Krasner, suggesting she saw something worth keeping in it. Its color palette is muted, warm and neutral with pops of yellow, blue and orange. It conveys vertical movement, as museum director Paul Baker Prindle noted, as if you’re landing at LAX and you see the cars on the highway. Krasner used most of the paintings from Parsons for collage scrap or underpaintings for later works.

The third piece, on loan from Des Moines Art Center, Black and White (1953) is a collage incorporating scraps Krasner tore up from both her own works and works from her husband. Her use of paper initiates a unique way to express build up and perspective to make a different framework for her creative process. Her vertical shapes reappear and shard shapes occur more often. In this transitional moment she moves beyond painting on canvas. The collage illustrates a key step toward new works the artist debuted in a 1955 exhibition at the Stable Gallery, now recognized as a historic highlight for Krasner and for American abstract painting

Krasner’s creative reuse was later described as “one of the great events of the decade” by art critic Clement Greenberg. Also on view is the iconic Stretched Yellow (1955), from the museum’s collection. The museum notes, the piece, painted over a 1951 painting exhibited at Parsons, is critical to understanding how Krasner’s early work leads up to 1955 and to what happens after. This is when she starts reutilizing works that were said to be “failures.”

She broke canvases up into pieces to create new backgrounds for new composite collage paintings. In Stretched Yellow, Krasner integrated more vibrant blue and black paper. She’s still working with shards and narrow strips, but in a different way and with different materials.

There is a consistent through line, hence the exhibition’s title, where she works in different modes but she has distinctive stylistic hallmarks and techniques that she returns to just like she revisits her work moving it forward and to the next level.

Later works on view, including Cornucopia (1958) and What Beast Must I Adore? (1961) illustrate how Krasner continued to revisit gesture, illusory depth, and line and shape in new ways while remaining grounded in pure abstraction and familiar themes.

At this time, Krasner’s works deal with themes of cyclical aspects of nature and seasons. But we still see the same familiar shapes: shards, vertical pieces and pillars, broken up but still visible.

Cornucopia, with its autumn colors, full of swirls like the wind, resemble the tones outdoors where Krasner lived in East Hampton, New York.

What Beast Must I Adore? (1961)

The title of the final work in the show, What Beast Must I Adore, comes from an Arthur Rimbaud poem, which was written in black crayon on her studio wall. It was part of 24 works she did between 1959 and 1962 called The Umber Paintings. Made during a period of insomnia, the composition of brown and neutral tones with bold strokes is a departure for the colorist. But during the night she moves to painting in this deep umber and cream color palette embracing swirling gestural arcs. To not use color but to be so expressive Krasner clarifies her independence and greater confidence making these swirling arcs her mark even as important male artists like Mark Rothko were driving a turn away from this gesturalism toward broad expanses of saturated color.

A Through Line demonstrates Krasner’s independent vision and stylistic hallmarks. The works prove Krasner was resilient and dedicated, a visionary. In illustrating a continuity Krasner’s critics sometimes denied she had, the museum notes it disputes critiques of Krasner that are often gender biased. Today, Krasner is a revered artist whose importance to the history of art is finally garnering deserved recognition.

Museum director Paul Baker Prindle, who curated the exhibition, spoke about his inspiration and the events that led him to show Krasner’s works at this particular time.

“It was conversations with three graduate students in [the] School of Art that really got us thinking. At first, in the midst of #metoo conversations throughout our industry, we wanted to tell a Krasner story that didn’t center [on] her husband [Jackson Pollock]. That was a big concern of ours; we wanted to look at Lee Krasner’s work for its merits, not for how her personal life is tied to another artist who is a household name. As our project evolved, Krasner’s ability to rebuild and reinvent felt very timely as we began to imagine what things would look like after the worst of the pandemic. We wanted to put together an exhibition that could be an example of how to pull yourself back together and get back on the horse so to speak. Krasner was incredibly resilient, and everyone involved in this exhibition has found that inspiring.”

Lee Krasner: A Through Line will present additional programming in collaboration with the exhibition.

Time: 12 to 5 p.m., Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, through May 19

Cost: Free

Details: www.csulb.edu/carolyn-campagna-kleefeld-contemporary-art-museum

Venue: Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum, 1250 Bellflower Blvd., Long Beach