Word: krasner
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...York City were the victims of a sort of cultural apartheid, and the ruling assumptions about the inherent weakness, derivativeness and silly femininity of women painters were almost unbelievably phallocentric. Thus Peggy Guggenheim, the first major collector of Pollock's work, seems to have been so jealous of Krasner's place in his life that she refused to acknowledge her as an artist. And a poll in the Cedar Bar or any other watering place of the New York avant-garde would simply have echoed Picasso's dictum that women were always "goddesses or door mats," never...
Living with Pollock slowed her development, which had been precocious before they met. Krasner had a very full art education: in fact, no American could have had a better one in the '30s. First, rigorous academic grounding under the atelier system at the Art Students League in New York; then large-scale practical experience on the WPA murals in the '30s; finally, three years (1937-40) under the great emigre teacher Hans Hermann, who knew the fabled phoenixes of Europe (Matisse, Kandinsky, Mondrian) and could transmit their ideas to his students. As a disciplined draftsman, she was nearly...
...when they came, their blossoming was remarkable. In fact "blossoming" is hardly the word, for it suggests a soft, floral, ethereal event, adjectives one would not pick for the tough paintings, often full of barely controlled anger, that she was to produce after 1960. Krasner's cubist background had given her a strong sense of how to manage her pictorial field as a whole, rather than preserve, in abstraction, the choice of "figure" and "background." In the best of her '50s work, like Blue Level, 1955, the play of raggy shapes and roughly sliced strips of burlap...
...Krasner always wanted to paint big pictures, ones that stretched arm and eye, surfaces that rose to the challenge of scale that was embedded in abstract expressionism. But she was able to find a way of rapid gestural drawing that did not depend on the skeining and overlay of thrown paint from edge to edge that Pollock had perfected. It was the brush that counted for her, and when she did fling or dribble liquid pigment on the surface, it only looked like a mannerism. But her sense of drawing was so ingrained that she could cover a huge surface...
...there a less "feminine" woman artist of her generation? Probably not. Even Krasner's favorite pink, a domineering fuchsia that raps hotly on the eyeball at 50 paces, is aggressive, confrontational; and when her line evokes eros, its grace is modified by a rough, improvisatory movement, a distrust of quick visual acceptance. Sometimes, as in Green Fuse, 1968, or Rising Green, 1972, she refers to the palm-court, winter-garden atmosphere of late Matisse; yet the shapes are too cutting to stand as undiluted emblems of luxury. Critical of the world, she is just as hard on herself, harder...