LEE KRASNER
T H E U M B E R PA I N T I N G S 1 9 5 9 — 1 9 6 2
Lee Krasner, ca. 1960 - 1961. Photo: Paul De Vries. Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner papers, ca. 1914 - 1984, bulk 1942 - 1984. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Artwork Š 2018 Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
MOOD UMBER DAVID ANFAM
With the twenty-four works collectively described as The Umber Paintings (1959 - 62) Lee Krasner’s art decisively came into its own. Krasner already had a notable output under her belt: from the distinctive Little Image series of the late 1940s, through the multifarious collages during the next decade, to monumental works such as The Seasons (1957) and two murals realized in Venetian glass for the Uris Brothers Foundation, Inc. building in New York (1959). Yet in the Umbers various forces coalesced. They exemplified Krasner’s most outstanding achievement to date, a crucial nexus and overall high point in her career.
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5. Double Helix, 1961, oil on canvas, 70 ½ x 62 ½ inches, 179 x 157.5 cm. 6. The Eye is the First Circle, 1960, oil on canvas, 92 ¾ x 191⅞ inches, 235.6 x 487.4 cm. Private Collection, New York. Courtesy Robert Miller Gallery, New York. 7. Uncaged, 1960, oil on canvas, 96 ⅞ x 93 ½ inches, 246 x 237.5 cm. 8. Fecundity, 1960, oil on canvas, 87 x 70 inches, 220.9 x 177.8 cm. 9. Gothic Landscape, 1961, oil on canvas, 69 ⅝ x 93 ⅝ inches, 176.8 x 236 cm. 10. Night Watch, 1960, oil on canvas, 70 x 90 inches, 177.8 x 228.6 cm.
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Like families, the Umbers are diverse. Formats vary from
Mural (1943). Like Mural ’s semi-figurative convolutions,
vertical to extended horizontals and moderately large
the Umbers tend to coil and careen back upon themselves
dimensions (Double Helix [1961], 70½ x 62½ ins.) to epic
while also giving the impression that they are too restless
spans (The Eye is the First Circle [1960], 92¾ x 191 ins.). The
to stay within the dimensions that hold them—in Krasner’s
facture is also changeful. Some are dense as thickets with
phrasing, ‘one wants to extend the outer limits rather than
pictorial struggle (Uncaged), while others evince the lightest
close off; to expand rather than work in a constricted area.’
touch—witness the thin, effortless filigrees comprising
Thus the general dynamic proves neither centrifugal nor
The Eye is the First Circle. Fecundity (1960) stands some-
centripetal but a kaleidoscopic mix of each—just as a vortex
where between the two. Different again, Night Watch
can appear to swirl both in and out. Yet unlike a vortex few
(1960) and Gothic Landscape have a firm clarity more akin
Umbers have a focal center. Rather, energy and motion
to Upstream #1 (1957).
unleashed is everything. Here, The Eye is the First Circle
As for the brushstrokes, they encompass fine
makes two references. The first swoops back in time to
spray effects evoking pigmented spume alongside the
Krasner’s early Self-Portrait (c. 1931 - 33) in which her left
almost fuliginous swathes in Seeded (1960), where Wassily
eye sits within a circular shadow. The second is the titular
Kandinsky’s apocalyptic Compositions exert an influence.
allusion to the first line in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s
Multi-directional vectors throughout, the brush marks
celebrated essay, ‘Circles’. Less often remarked is that
tend to diverge from the steadier right to left progression
subsequently Emerson declares: ‘There are no fixtures in
that in the Little Images Krasner had identified with the
nature. The universe is fluid and volatile.’ 14 With both
Hebrew writing from her childhood.13 Instead they veer
Emerson and the ‘Umbers’ we are in the realms of
every which way, sometimes even suggesting defiant
becoming rather than being—a condition confirmed by
backhand slashes amid the tumult: impelled leftwards,
Cosmic Fragments (1962), which alludes outright to the
Moontide (1961) manages to chop back and forth with a
Greek philosopher Heraclitus for whom nobody could
bold staccato beat. Was Krasner now breaking free from
step twice into the same river.15
old ties, whether cultural or imagistic?
Emerson’s essay, harking back to the Biblical
Whatever, the recurrent arcs that twist into
Ecclesiastes, also alerts the reader to cycles in nature and
loops and almond-shaped eyes, as with Messenger and
human life: ‘every end is a beginning; that there is always
Fledgling (both 1959), or elsewhere spread into fan-like
another dawn risen on mid-noon’.16 Krasner’s titles—
slashing diagonals, evident in the teeming Polar Stampede
most coined by, or in collaboration with, the poet Howard
(1960), still retain a particular provenance: the Pollock of
and his partner Sandy Friedman 17—follow suit. Glacial
the tellingly titled Eyes in the Heat (1946) and his epochal
or desolate states epitomized in Cool White (1959) and
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Charred Landscape (1960), the second betraying a curious
is, something broader and older than Carl Jung’s
give alternate vehemence and grace, immediacy and
and perhaps coincidental titular overlap with Arshile
archetypal codifications, apposite as they may be. Put
deliberation, to the psychological layers that must have
Gorky’s two versions of Charred Beloved (1946) [and
another way, Krasner’s process throughout the ‘Umbers’
attended Krasner’s very real-life coming to grips with
Morris Louis’s funereal ‘Charred Journals’ (1951),18 contend
seems tantamount to a nekyia—the ancient Greek term for
Pollock’s shadow.25
with rejuvenation, expressed by botanical or organic
necromancy (the supposed practice of communicating
How appropriate, therefore, is the very word
allusions, such as Siblings (1959), Fecundity (1960), Seeded
with the dead). In a nutshell, the I/eye witnesses a katabis,
‘umber’. Let the Oxford English Dictionary’s first and
(1960), Primeval Resurgence (1961) and Feathering (1959).
a descent into a dark place to summon and confront
second definitions suffice: ‘shade, shadow.’ Umber, which
These universal, myth-related themes are not special in
ghosts that is at least as venerable as Homer’s account
can be raw and burnt, ranks among humankind’s oldest
themselves
of Odysseus’s journey into Hades.22
known pigments (it occurs in the Stone Age Altamira and
since
they
reprise
those
in
Abstract
Expressionism’s heyday. More occult is What Beast Shall
Nothing else explains those titles that construct
Lascaux caves 26 ). Umber or bistre shades as Krasner
I Adore? (1961) , which derives from the French visionary
a necromancer’s domain: Vigil (the wakefulness before
employed them—from the palest penumbral traces to rich
poet Arthur Rimbaud’s ‘A Season in Hell’ (1873).
spirits arise); Night Watch (albeit with a nod to Rembrandt’s
creamy impasto and emphatic near-black lines and masses
Rimbaud’s extended prose-poem—Krasner had scrawled
storied scene 23 ); Messenger (a specter is but an emissary
that act as fierce armatures—also hint at ageing, the darkness,
the line on her studio wall in the 1930s19—introduces a
from the beyond); Triple Goddess (which must invoke
fading and dimming that overcomes many material things
narrative angle since at core it portrays a rite de passage,
Hecate); traditionally represented as three-formed and long
in the course of time, ourselves included,27 as well as the
gravitating at the close to a change of seasons from
linked to necromancy and the moon); Entrance and Gate
ink in, say, ancient manuscripts such as Leonardo’s notes
Autumn to Spring. From a wider vantage point, this turn
(to and from the underworld); and What Beast Must I Adore?
and drawings. As such, browns connote matters spatially
to universalism meant that Krasner was moving against
(the toll exacted for an oracular summoning of the dead).
or temporally distant or psychologically inward. Think, for
the mood of the times, bringing ideological baggage from
Against this darkness nature performs its reparative,
instance, of the sepia tints in old photographs (no wonder
the 1940s into the American ‘culture of cool’ that had
life-giving task. Bloom, Fledgling, Siblings, Feathering
contemporary photo graphics software and digital cameras
burgeoned from around the mid-1950s onwards and
(note how these three gerunds signify an ongoing pulse)
often give an option to emulate this ‘antique’ look). Or
which would soon reach one of its apogees with the rise
and Double Helix countermand the morbid ‘charred’ and
remember the reddish-brown opening and closing scenes
of Pop. Such deliberate archaism injects a broody
‘gothic’ landscapes, not to mention the maelstrom at
in the film The Wizard of Oz (1939) meant to convey the
feistiness into her enterprise. 20
Ultima Thule, the frigid world’s end (Polar Stampede). 24
timebound old-fashioned Kansas world as opposed to the
In similar vein, Howard and Friedman collec-
Hellish seasons meet vernal renewals (Seeded, Fecundity,
fantastical fancy-free land of Oz, an effect recapitulated in
tively named the ‘Umbers’ ‘The Night Journeys’, which
Primeval Resurgence) so that all eventually circles back on
the otherwise remote sequences depicting the grainy spaces
Krasner approved. Again Pollock’s Jungianism looms: he
itself—as Emerson avowed—along the way, the title given
outside the Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979).
characterized an early ceramic tondo where a fetus-like
to a vibrant 1961 Umber with interlocked rhythms. The
All these overtones chime with the primordial, somber
child is set forth onto a dark sea as ‘the story of my life.’ 21
beauty lies not in the extravagant literary overtones that a
cast to the ‘Umbers’—subjective reflections, as it were, in
Taken together, the various clues establish a topos. That
close reading of the Umbers may prompt but in how they
a nocturnal eye.
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Cobalt Night, 1962 oil on canvas 93 1/2 x 161 3/8 inches 237.5 x 409.9 cm Provenance Robert Miller Gallery, New York Lila Acheson Wallace, Mount Kisco, New York Washington, D.C.,National Gallery of Art, gift of the above, 1984 Exhibitions New York, Howard Wise Gallery, New Work by Lee Krasner, March 6 – 30 1962, no. 12. London, Whitechapel Art Gallery; York, City Art Gallery; Hull, Ferens Art Gallery; Nottingham, Victoria Street Gallery; Manchester, City Art Gallery and Cardiff, Arts Council Gallery, Lee Krasner, Paintings, Drawings, and Collages, September 1965 – October 1966. Tuscaloosa, University Art Gallery, University of Alabama, Paintings by Lee Krasner, February – March 1967, no. 7. New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Lee Krasner: Large Paintings, November 13 1973 – January 6 1974. Houston, Museum of Fine Arts; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Norfolk, Chrysler Museum; Phoenix Art Museum and New York, Museum of Modern Art, Lee Krasner: A Retrospective, November 28 1983 – February 2 1985. Literature B.H. Friedman, Lee Krasner, Paintings, Drawings, and Collages, exh. cat., London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1965, pp. 15 and 24, no. 56 (illustrated and erroneously identified as Another Storm). L. Campbell, “Of Lilith and Lettuce,” ARTnews, March 1968, p. 61. M. Tucker, Lee Krasner: Large Paintings, exh. cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1973, pp. 15, 27 and 36, no. 8 (illustrated and erroneously identified as Another Storm). C. Nemser, “A Conversation with Lee Krasner,” Arts Magazine, April 1973, p. 47. C. Nemser, Art Talk: Conversations with 12 Women Artists, New York, 1975, p. 101. E. Munro, “Krasner in the Sixties: Free for the Big Gesture,” Art/World, 16 February / 16 March 1979, p. 6. E. Munro, Originals: American Women Artists, New York, 1979, pp. 117 and 520. R. Hughes, “Bursting Out of the Shadows,” Time, 14 November 1983, pp. 92 and 93 (illustrated in color). T. Albright, “Krasner: Energy Rather Than Power,” Review, 26 February 1984, p. 13. M. Vetrocq, “An Independent Track: Lee Krasner,” Art in America, May 1984, p. 142 (illustrated in color). M. Brenson, “Lee Krasner Pollock Is Dead; Painter of New York School,” The New York Times, 21 June 1984, p. D23. J. Strick, Twentieth Century Painting and Sculpture: Selections for the Tenth Anniversary of the East Building, exh. cat., Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, 1989, pp. 96 and 97 (illustrated in color). National Gallery of Art, ed., American Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue, Washington, D.C., 1992, p. 222 (illustrated). E.G. Landau, Lee Krasner: A Catalogue Raisonné, New York, 1995, pp. 104, 182, 195 - 196, 198 and 321, cat. no. 366 (illustrated in color). Dialogue: Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, exh. cat., New York, Robert Miller Gallery, 2005, n.p.
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20. Portrait of Lee Krasner by Halley Erskine,1959. Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner papers, ca.1914 - 1984, bulk 1942 - 1984. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
LEE KRASNER IN CONVERSATION
WITH BARBARA NOVAK The following text is reproduced from the transcript of an unaired interview videotaped in October, 1979, for WGBH New Television Workshop, Boston, Massachusetts. It has been lightly edited for length. The original unedited transcript can be obtained from the Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner papers, ca. 1914 -1984, bulk 1942 -1984. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. The videotaped interview resides in the archives of WGBH, Boston. It is reproduced here with the kind permission of Barbara Novak.
BARBARA NOVAK Lee, what kind of a child were you? LEE KRASNER Oh, what a question to start with. I don’t
think I ever was a child. Now what do you mean; zero in a little bit.
time into a language I didn’t know […] if they didn’t want me to understand it, they just spoke in another language. BN You spoke English only?
BN —tell us how your parents came from Odessa—
LK And a little bit of Yiddish […] I went to Hebrew
LK Or someplace nearby.
school at about five, so I start to write, but I don’t understand what it is; I can’t transpose.
BN And [in Odessa your father had] worked for a rabbi— LK Right. BN And your mother followed your father [to the
United States]—
BN Now that was one of the things I wanted to ask you about, because my understanding is that you paint from right to left. LK So Marcia Tucker during the Whitney Show pointed
LK Correct.
out to me, that I started canvases that way.
BN And you were born thereafter, right? And you were
BN You weren’t conscious?
one of six or seven children— LK Right, and I’m the first born here, and then a sister,
Ruth, follows me, and that’s it for the family. BN And you spoke a lot of languages— LK Well, the household had Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, and English. So anybody could cut off at any given
LK Totally unaware—she brings this out, which is a
fabulous insight for me. I wasn’t aware at all. BN Well, that’s why I was interested because does that very naturally go back to that early Hebrew training? LK Undoubtedly, it must. I can find no other source
or basis for this. Also, I think my preoccupation with
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calligraphy, not necessarily in traditional form [...] So that a painting that I did in the seventies called Kufic, which is ancient Arabic—I titled Kufic because it is a form of calligraphy. BN Then you were interested in writing at a very early age, probably even before you knew you were interested in writing. LK I would have to add it up that way. BN Now your family had worked for a rabbi, right? And it was an Orthodox home that you were growing up in? LK Oh I certainly did, it was like I had to say my
morning prayer on getting up, in Hebrew, so I never understood; and late in life, quite late in life, I read a translation of this prayer that I had been saying all of my life, or from the beginning of my life. It’s fascinating, for it is a beautiful prayer: “Thank you, O Lord, for light and for beauty”, etc. And the closing line, it said, if you are a male you say: “Thank you, O Lord, for creating me in your image.” If you are a female you say: “ Thank you,
PA U L K A S M I N G A L L E R Y