Around 1973, when I began to wonder about the absence of female artists in art history who taught me at university and presented me in museums, Abstract Expressionism was not yet considered worthy of historical treatment. I had a colleague who had dared to plan several lectures on the “new American painting” of the 1950s, and I was already a young and impertinent feminist, so I told her that I couldn't teach the course without including any women. Shrugged. She said she didn't know anything about them. If that mattered to me, let me give the women's talks myself! I accepted, but what did I know? She was a graduate student majoring in 19th century art history. She knew nothing of a still exotic subject like modern art, which she had never studied.
As a consequence of the new feminist consciousness that emerged in the sixties, which also reached art, the American critic Cindy Nemser published in 1975 a series of interviews with contemporary women artists, from Barbara Hepworth to Eva Hesse. One of the interviewees was Lee Krasner. Still vibrant, active and creative, her career stretched back to the radical beginnings of abstract art in New York in the 1930s. She studied with Hans Hoffmann, who, along with Katherine Dreier and Esphyr Slobodkina, led Cubism and the abstract art from Europe to America. Considered one of the best of New York painters, Krasner was selected by John Graham for her exhibition of American abstract artists in 1942; There, in full artistic maturity, she met her future husband, the novice Jackson Pollock. During the fifties, while his painting stagnated, hers did not stop being avant-garde, daring, cutting and pasting canvases and developing the creation of her own dynamic and gestural painting.
In the 1950s, while Pollock's work stagnated, Krasner's never stopped being avant-garde and daring
Krasner survived Jackson and continued to evolve as an artist until his death in 1984 at age 75. It is possible that, for many, Color vivo , the exhibition dedicated to him by the Guggenheim in Bilbao from September 18, is the first time they come across his work. How and why did art historians and museum curators of the century choose to ignore and exclude so many modern and contemporary artists simply because they were women? Why is what we, the public, receive as “art” from museums and art history books is so limited, Eurocentric, racially exclusive, heteronormative, and devoid of women? My research reveals that gender exclusivity - an art history account that only talks about white men - only occurred in the 20th century, in the era of modern art. Before 1900 we find numerous books on artists who are women; her documents are kept in archives and her paintings are in collections.
To meet Krasner for the first time in 2020 is to be too late to a party that feminist art historians have been celebrating for more than half a century. No one is going to rediscover Lee Krasner: he was an undoubted part of 20th century art history and played a prominent role in abstract painting. His first retrospective was organized in London in 1964, at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. In contrast, MoMA did not dedicate a retrospective to him until after his death in 1985. Personally, I did not learn to appreciate the dimension of his talent until an exhibition held in New York in 2000, in which I studied his painting decade by decade. stake by stake, innovation by innovation.
When Pollock died, crashing into a tree while driving drunk on August 11, 1956, the responsibility of caring for his legacy suddenly fell on Krasner, while also taking care of a painting she had just painted just before she died. her husband. Prophecy (1956), featured in the exhibition, is a monstrous fleshy figure, with one eye and animal legs, in which a battle is glimpsed between the terrifying Picasso's The Young Ladies of Avignon and Willem's Woman I de Kooning, to stay with her painter's soul. The two artists had modernized the phallic fantasy of the woman as a monster, the other, the animal, the deity. Between 1956 and 1957, Krasner fought with men and symbolically "killed" them with her creation of an image of joyful life. Unfortunately, the loan of Sun Woman I and II for the exhibition could not be obtained, although Prophecy and her menacing companions are present with their bad omens. The exhibition moves from there to the late fifties, to Insomnia's vast abstract and monochromatic series . This prevents us from understanding the process by which Krasner discovered her new freedom by dedicating herself to body painting, as a woman in command of an infinite space through gestures and rhythms, dancing to the depths of her grief and to the heights of his incomparable pleasure with color.
In the eighties, the painter returned to her initial career as an extraordinary artist of the figure. Her early drawings show her classical aptitudes and her bold cubist decomposition of the human form. Those first works are the ones that he cut out in 1980 to recompose them into collages on large canvases that he titled with all the tenses of the verb to see, in a series called Eleven forms of using words to see. They are evocative works, inhabited by ghostly figures, traversing her history, from Cubist beginnings to the postmodern reconfigurations and deconstructions of her past, reformulated for a promising feminist present. This series is a replica of those who saw but did not recognize his work, such as the critic Clement Greenberg, who in an interview in 1964 said that the painted collages that Krasner made in 1955 were the most stimulating novelty of painting of the time. But Greenberg did not write it down at the time and her silence erased it in life.
That is why it is important that we do not rediscover women artists as if they had been absent when things happened and now we have to cite special reasons for presenting them. Krasner created his art in conversation with Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Elaine de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, and many other men and women. My thesis is that men and women were co-creators of modern art. The modernism is what artists, men and women, black and white, gay and straight, cocrearon in various ways, time contributing their particular political experience of race, class, gender, sexual preference, and vision of the world to multiple threads that form the fabric of 20th century art. The history of art and museums offer us a threadbare canvas without color or complexity. Instead of that narrow vision, we must demand rich, feminist, postcolonial and queer histories of art , to learn to see art and see ourselves with that complexity and diversity.
Lee Krasner is one of the great figures of modern art. Through abstract painting she, like her colleagues, grappled with modernity, the Holocaust, nuclear war, loss and joy in an intense commitment to pushing painting and being a woman beyond the limits. That all this was not known before is a collective tragedy. My personal tragedy is that if the history of art had taught me to look at these women before, perhaps I would have met her in person.
Griselda Pollock is an art historian, a reference in the feminist study of artistic creation, and a professor at the University of Leeds. Translation by María Luisa Rodríguez Tapia.
Lee Krasner. Vivid color . Guggenheim museum. Bilbao. From September 18 to January 10.