Life In Abstract

ELEANOR NAIRNE tells the story of a pivotal decade in the life of American abstract painter LEE KRASNER as she emerged from the shadow of her husband, Jackson Pollock

In the autumn of 1945, Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock moved permanently to Springs, Long Island, where – with the help of a loan from Pollock’s patron and dealer Peggy Guggenheim – they bought a 19th-century farmhouse, with a view across the salt marshes to Accabonac Creek.

Krasner had been suffering from a creative block, making nothing but what she called her “grey slabs”; now, suddenly surrounded by nature, she found that a new imagery was beginning to blossom. Turning the upstairs bedroom into a makeshift studio, she began work on her Little Image paintings.

Positioning the canvas flat on a table or the floor, Krasner created vibrant, jewel-like abstractions that pulsed with an even rhythm across the surface. For some, she would layer the paint thickly with a palette knife and then work into it with a stiff paintbrush; for others, she covered her canvas with a lace overlay of paint that she had thinned down with turpentine in a can. She always worked in oil, explaining in an interview that “I tried a few things in acrylic... [but] I find it opaque, dense, dead as a doornail.”

In 1947 the cold winter forced Krasner to work downstairs by the stove, where she made two mosaic tables using old wagon wheels she had found in the barn. One of the tables was exhibited at Bertha Schaefer Gallery in September 1948 (accompanied by a few of Krasner’s new ‘hieroglyphic’ Little Images), where it prompted the New York Herald Tribune’s critic to state that “the total effect [is] to come right out with it, magnificent”.

Krasner hung several of her Little Images in the guest room at Springs, where such visitors as the critic Clement Greenberg and the artist Bradley Walker Tomlin would admire their delicate intensity.