The 51 works on show here celebrate 12 women who were central to the movement, including
Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning.
In 1978, while planning the show "Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years" with Robert Hobbs, I insisted on giving prominence to
Lee Krasner along with her male contemporaries.
Entitled "Jazz and Visual Improvisations," the exhibit features 36 mixed-media works by 18 artists, including Romare Bearden, Jackson Pollock, Stuart Davis,
Lee Krasner, Radcliffe Bailey, Larry Rivers, Ouattara and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
But as those decades recede ever further back (and the mighty male figures only grow more firmly ensconced in the canon), the AbEx pantheon has expanded to include major female painters such as Joan Mitchell and
Lee Krasner. And, at this shifting frontier, newer figures (not new, of course, to the history of Abstract Expressionism but to canonic admiration) now command attention--painters of enormous merit who, perforce, were ground down by the era's insistent denigration of women or whose admirable achievements were compromised by the demands of their husbands' careers (even as those careers may still be up for grabs in the larger play of historical recontextualization).
ART
LEE KRASNER - LIVING COLOUR BARBICAN ART GALLERY BY DOUGIE GERRARD
Lee Krasner, a fiery, somewhat forgotten artist, is rightly honoured by this wonderful new exhibition.
Why would a famous artist give an interview to a 22-year-old?' a colleague once challenged me when I spoke about my first meeting with
Lee Krasner (Fig.
Painter Stella Bowen ceded to the needs of her husband, Ford Madox Ford, lamenting, "Pursuing art is not just a matter of finding the time--it is a matter of having a free spirit to bring to it." Others, such as painter
Lee Krasner and actress Lynn Fontanne, cherished the symbiosis they shared with their equally accomplished husbands.
Krutick also was inspired by earlier female artists such as Helen Frankenthaler and
Lee Krasner, and has been exploring the creative aspects of incorporating handsome color and textural components into her paintings, such as swirling and rhythmic ambulatory forms that offer the viewer a brand of visual poetry that is distinctive, but also idiosyncratically recognizable as Krutick's signature.
NINTH STREET WOMEN:
LEE KRASNER, ELAINE DE KOONING, GRACE HARTIGAN, JOAN MITCHELL AND HELEN FRANKENTHALER: FIVE PAINTERS AND THE MOVEMENT THAT CHANGED MODERN ART by Mary Gabriel (Little, Brown and Co.)-At nearly 1,000 pages, Gabriel's book teems with details that are almost always fascinating even when not essential.
Ninth Street Women:
Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art By Mary Gabriel New York, NY; Little Brown and Company, 2018, 944 pages, $35.00, hardcover
Pollock and
Lee Krasner, the painter's now equally famous artist-spouse, stayed there in 1950 when Ossorio returned to the Philippines briefly to supervise work on the Victorias church.
Lee Krasner remembered him as "the first to mention Jackson Pollock as one of the greatest painters America had produced ...