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Indepth Arts News:
"Lee Krasner"
2000-06-10 until 2000-08-27
Akron Art Museum
Akron, OH,
USA
Lee Krasner is the first full-scale retrospective of the major American painter Lee
Krasner (1908 - 1984) since her death. Krasner was the only female associated with
the first generation of the New York School. This exhibition articulates her critical
contributions to the movement and brings an important feminist perspective to the
discussion of Abstract Expressionism. Krasner's work demonstrates an ongoing
artistic dialogue with a diverse range of artists, including Hans Hoffman, Willem de
Kooning, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, and her husband, Jackson Pollock. Krasner
was influenced by Pollock's work but she was a powerful influence on his work as
well.
The traveling exhibition comprises sixty paintings, collages, and drawings on loan
from major collections around the world. Together, these works-many of them not
publicly exhibited in decades-present the complete trajectory of Krasner's work.
Organized chronologically, the exhibition begins with the artist's early figurative work
of the 1930s and includes important examples from all phases of her career, including
the magisterial series Eleven Ways to Use the Words to See.
Organized by Independent Curators International and curated by noted art
historian Robert Hobbs, this revealing exhibition demonstrates Krasner's
lifelong refusal to settle on a single style with which to express her artistic and
personal concerns. It also examines her position as one of the most important
American painters of this century. Dr. Hobbs states, Lee Krasner's art
diverges from mainstream Abstract Expressionism. It represents an unrelenting
search for a dynamic self that continually outdistances her work. Predicated on
this open-ended sense of herself, Krasner's art is particularly relevant at the end
of the millennium, when old definitions of a cohesive and unchanging self are
being seriously questioned.
With fierce determination and an ever-questioing eye, Lee KRasner helped define-and redefine-the art of this century.
Over the course of five decades, Krasner defied convention and created an identity distinct from her role as Kackson
Pollock's wife. From figurative painting to Abstract Expressionism and beyond, that journey is now captured in Lee
Krasner, a full-scale retrospective of her work.
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