style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black’>Lee Krasner is a
bulls-eye for all sorts of critical impieties. Her legacy suffers as much from
a benighted revisionism as from a close association with the Abstract
Expressionist virility cult. The critical ejectment she has been routinely
subjected to is matched by gallant efforts to resuscitate her, seemingly ex
nihilio.
If a woman among the throngs of painterly heroism is a cause readily taken on,
one hopes Krasner would come out for the better. Unfortunately, those who
dismiss or defend her—often doing nothing more than turning faults into
virtues—do so na�vely. Such ineffectual efforts mean she is still continuous
grist for the spurious judgment mill.
Drawing together the vicissitudes of such a career does
often demand more than critical or analytical acumen. Sometimes a bit of
indulgence is indispensable, especially if previous assessments are already
muddled; Krasner entrains as much viciousness as the inverse response of
irrational reverence. Add the volatility of an oppressive clich� and you have a
conjuration hard to wade through. Then again, critical probity often teeters on
what seem like fickle principles.
So
a persistent question lingers, even after a long series of retrospectives: is
there in fact a correlation between the presence of Pollock and the critical
divestment of Krasner (Translation: Exactly just how good was Lee Krasner
anyway)? “After Palingenesis”, the latest Krasner exhibition at Robert Miller
Gallery, is in a long line of attempts to find out. The show is aptly named, as
it is seemingly obsessed with resuscitation, from the stress on continuity and
sweeping range, to the comments of one exasperated female viewer that “ this
proves she is finally out of the shadow of that man!”
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black’>The chronology of the
show is loosely arranged around Krasner’s 1971 painting Palingenesis
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black’> [Greek for rebirth],
and offers a range that seems deliberately unfocused. Overall, it strives to
emphasize the continuity afforded by Krasner’s self-admitted pension for
repetition: “…all of my work seems to swing back to something I was involved
with earlier”. As if through the ‘vales of karma’, Krasner had foreseen our
obsessive need for critical ‘rebirth’ by her own constant motif of resurrection
and rediscovery.
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black’> In many ways, Krasner
tried to make up for a deficiency of a signature style by inventing a series of
different ones. Thus the concerns surrounding her can seem obsessive and
somewhat inappropriate, driven as they are by the nagging need to sum her up.
No, she was not superlatively gifted, but neither were many others. Yes, there
are weaknesses, but these are the same lauded in much less visible names. If
Krasner does suffer critically, it is not exactly for being wholly repressed by
a male cultural bias. Rather, if she is repressed at all, it is by the impetus,
instilled by our own neurosis, to continuously hold her up to scrutiny—that or
embrace her as a lost cause. Still, it has not been easy to forget Hans
Namuth’s iconic images of Pollock painting with Krasner sitting watchfully
behind.
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black’>Krasner will probably
never be seen as a primary force within the movements of post-war American
painting, even if she was an important member of its volatile community. This
hardly seems unjust since it can be claimed for very few artists, yet easily
argued for another woman painter, Helen Frankenthaler. However, tt is ironic
that Krasner probably could have benefited from something as derogatory as the
‘bad-girl’ tag so readily given to contemporary female painters. At least we’d
forget she was in a volatile relationship we cannot let go of, and which only
accounts for fifteen years of a nearly half century career. It sometimes seems
we love her because of, not in spite of, her trappings. These have proved easy
fodder for Hollywood melodramas.
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black’>If her work lacks the
power and awe-inspiring stylistic consistency marking her male contemporaries,
then it’s not because she did not strive for that legacy. Perhaps this was not
her forte. There is perhaps not enough virtuosity to skirt the pitfalls of
aiming high, although she maintains a distinct energy throughout. Her failures
are the same of many other painters of her genre, based on the impossibility of
being systemic and spontaneous to court a conspicuous perfection with the desire for
unbridled energy. Krasner’s not-so-near miss of the high modernist glass
ceiling is not reason for wholesale dismissal: she is ultimately richer for her
inconsistencies. An insistence on her work standing on its own is more
appropriate, which it certainly has since the late 50’s. Every other critical
maneuver seems based on a conjectural cynicism, since many of her faults
actually stem from within.
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black’>Krasner’s deceptively
attractive qualities can leave one pleased but unsatiated. Even appraisals made
in bad faith still accurately account for an imagination sacrificed for
efficacy, or a self-conscious obsession with tiding-up. Her most unfortunate
quality is that she comes to lack vitality because of this, giving up her ludic
qualities for a sustained but unimpressive perfection. Krasner is often too
serious, in the way determined seriousness can be a stock response to failed
innovation, or at worst a symptom of consuming ineptitude. She comes off as
having something to proveââ¬â—we certainly want her to do so. When she tries
to convey the muscular gestures of abstraction [Green Rhythm
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black’>, 1966, To The North
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black’>, 1980], the efforts
often come off too flat and static.
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black’>Much of Krasner’s work
suffers from an over balance of color contradicting the freedom of gesture her
lines can delineate such as Between Two Appearances
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black’>[1981],
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black’> Olympic
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black’>[1974], Pennons
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black’>[1972] and Sundial
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black’>[1972]. In such cases,
the paintings often come closer to interior design than effective abstraction
where the tones of
sorrel under blue of To the North [1980] are overburdened with a familiar plagal cadence.
style=’color:black’> As if all too readily aware of this, her greatest
stylistic variance, the ‘verb tense’ collages, reduce the role of color and mix
charcoal drawing technique with the meandering lines of abstraction.
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black’>There is a formal
brilliance in collages like Imperfect Indicative
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black’> [1976], betrayed by
the all-too-neat arrangements of much of her work. Themselves a form of
‘rebirth’— through a reuse of materials— the collages are the strongest elements
of this entire collection of paintings. In work like Present Subjunctive
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>[1976]
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>and Past Conditional
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> [1976] Krasner seems content to
leave painterly substance behind for a kind of angular drawing. By mixing
incongruous arrangements without trying to rein in their formal openness, the
collages may prove to be Krasner’s plauditory cue.
Lee Krasner: After Palingenesis
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>, Robert Miller Gallery, September
6 through October 11, 2003.
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