The Formidable And Innovative Lee Krasner

Lee Krasner: Living Colour, at the Barbican Centre, London (through 1 September)
Reviewed by Christopher P Jones

Sometimes a retrospective exhibition can abbreviate an artistic life into a series of airless high-peaks without taking notice of the lower-lying ground. This exceptional show at the Barbican Centre, London, achieves the exact opposite. The 100 or so works on display flesh out a life with all the territory — high and low — accounted for, so that every piece lends itself towards a greater whole. In doing so, the exhibition reveals why Krasner is rightly regarded as an artist of pioneering significance, whose development from cubist collage to expressionistic vigour accounts for an important story in 20th century American art.

Born in Brooklyn in 1908, by age 14 Krasner had already decided to become an artist. She applied to the only art course for girls available in New York, at Washington Irving High, where she enjoyed an exemplary artistic education. Three self-portraits, made in her late-teens, proclaim Krasner’s identity as a burgeoning painter. These are competent if unremarkable oil paintings, most notable for the way she represents herself gazing avidly out into the world with serious and quizzical eyes. A series of monochrome life drawings made a few years later reveal her fine abilities in draughtsmanship, where the handling of light, shade and the modelling of the human muscle structure is deft.