Lee Krasner’s Elegant Destructions

Lee Krasner, one of the most phenomenally gifted painters of the twentieth century, often would create through destruction. She had a habit of stripping previous works for materials—fractions of forgotten sketches, swaths of unused paper, scraps of canvas from her own paintings as well as those of her husband, Jackson Pollock—that she would then reconstitute as elements of her masterful, distinctive collages. A new show devoted to her endeavors in this mode, “Lee Krasner: Collage Paintings 1938–1981,” will be on view at Kasmin Gallery through April 24. A selection of images from the exhibition appears below.

Lee Krasner, Stretched Yellow, 1955, oil with paper on canvas, 82 1/2 x 57 3/4″. © 2021 Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Collection of Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum of California State University, Long Beach. Gift of the Gordon F. Hampton Foundation, through Wesley G. Hampton, Roger K. Hampton, and Katharine H. Shenk. Courtesy of Kasmin Gallery.

Lee Krasner, Untitled, 1954, oil, glue, canvas, and paper collage on Masonite, 48 x 40″. © 2021 Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Private collection, New York City. Courtesy of Kasmin Gallery.

View of “Lee Krasner: Collage Paintings 1938–1981,” 2021, Kasmin Gallery, New York. Photo: Diego Flores.

“Lee Krasner: Collage Paintings 1938–1981” will be on view at Kasmin Gallery through April 24.

from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/31j0Eil

Comments

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...

The Historical Future of Trans Literature

Whatever happens against custom we say is against Nature, yet there is nothing whatsoever which is not in harmony with her. May Nature’s universal reason chase away that deluded ecstatic amazement which novelty brings to us. —Michel de Montaigne If you were trying to get anywhere in the late thirteenth century, the Hereford Mappa Mundi would not have been particularly helpful; the map is rife with topographical omissions, compressions, and errors—the most egregious of which is perhaps the mislabeling of Africa as Europe and vice-versa. Of course, as any medievalist will tell you, mappa mundi were not intended for cartographic accuracy anyway. Rather, they were pictorial histories, encyclopedias of the world’s mythological and theological narratives, records of medical fact and fable. Notable places—Carthage, Rome, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Jericho—appeared, but their placement on the map emphasized their symbolic import, rather than their geographical specificity. Thus, ...

A Year in Reading: Daniel Torday

I’ve been on leave from teaching this year, so it’s been a uniquely good 12 months of reading for me, a year when I’ve read for only one reason: fun. Now when I say fun … I’m a book nerd. So I tend to take on “reading projects.” The first was to work toward becoming a Joseph Conrad completist. I’m almost there. I warmed up with critic Maya Jasanoff ’s The Dawn Watch: Conrad in a Global World , which granted me permission to remember the capacious scope of his perspective, his humanistic genius. His masterwork was hard work, but Nostromo belongs on the shelf of both the most important and most difficult of the 20th century. The Secret Agent blew the top of my head off—it’s funny and deeply relevant to our moment, about a terrorist bombing gone horribly wrong. Under Western Eyes is all I got left. 2018 isn’t over yet. But then much fun came in reading whatever, whenever. That started with a heavy dose of Denis Johnson . The new posthumous collection of his short stories, The Lar...

TOBI'S DESK

Search This Blog