Skip to main content

Storms of colour from a wild destructive genius – Lee Krasner review

Barbican, London
Dynamic paintings that fizz and fascinate rescue the endlessly surprising artist from her husband Jackson Pollock’s shadow in this thrilling major retrospective

The bodies bulking their way out of the confines of the painting are either too big for the work, or we are too close. Buttocks, breasts, big feet. Something pendulous, like a testicle, a black smear of pubic hair, maybe an eye. It is hard to tell. Lee Krasner’s 1956 Prophesy was painted the year her relationship to Jackson Pollock was breaking down, and she said that it disturbed her. Pollock encouraged her to keep going. She left the painting on her easel when she took a trip to France, alone. While she was away Pollock wrapped the car he was driving around a tree, killing both himself and one of his two female passengers.

Does it always have to be about Pollock? That he overshadowed Krasner, both in life and death, is inescapable. When Krasner met Pollock in 1941, she was already developing a significant career as a painter. Piet Mondrian praised her rhythm – and they went dancing together. As a drawing student of Hans Hofmann, he had said her work was “so good you would not know it was done by a woman”. The times were against Krasner and other female artists.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2VZBsIu
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Thirty Years of Adonis film review: sexually explicit gay drama mixes porn and pomposity

1/5 stars The line between soft-core porn and pompous art-house cinema grows ever finer in the seventh feature by writer, director and producer Danny Cheng Wan-cheung, also known as Scud. Intended as a philosophical statement about the meaninglessness of life, Thirty Years of Adonis instead comes across as a badly misjudged piece of sensationalist filmmaking. God’s Own Country review: gay love story set in the Yorkshire countryside The film revolves around aspiring gay actor Adonis Yang... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2qgQkop
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more