Artistic ABCs
"If the alphabet is A to Z, I want to move with it all the way, not only from A to C. For me, all the doors are open.… l have never been able to understand the artist whose image never changes."
—Lee KrasnerIn the early 1940s Lee Krasner worked in New York's most avant-garde circle. She had studied with the German expatriate Hans Hofmann, was a friend of the Dutch expatriate Willem de Kooning, and painted for a time with the enigmatic John Graham, a Russian émigré with a rich heritage of philosophy and literature as well as advanced ideas about art.
In this heated intellectual climate in 1943 she painted Composition, a floral still life simplified almost to the point of abstraction. Blocks of vivid color are contained by thick black lines of surprising boldness, creating shapes that are equally organic and structural. The dense, rugged texture of the pigments and the layering of one sharp color on another give this painting a highly activated surface, a physicality that points toward the soon-to-emerge Abstract Expressionist style.
Source: National Museum of American Art (CD-ROM) (New York and Washington D.C.: MacMillan Digital in cooperation with the National Museum of American Art, 1996).
Pictured: Lee Krasner, 1908–84, Composition, 1943, oil, 30 1/8 x 24 1/4 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase made possible by Mrs. Otto L. Spaeth, David S. Purvis, and anonymous donors and through the Director's Discretionary Fund.
"If the alphabet is A to Z, I want to move with it all the way, not only from A to C. For me, all the doors are open.… l have never been able to understand the artist whose image never changes."