Krasner and Lewis: A Collegial Conversation

Although Lee Krasner spent much of her life in Springs, it would be a mistake to neglect the contribution of Norman Lewis to “From the Margins: Lee Krasner | Norman Lewis, 1945-1952,” now at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan. The exhibition so enmeshes their work that it is difficult to divide one from the other.

Krasner, born in Brooklyn to Russian emigres, moved here in 1945 with her husband, Jackson Pollock, and helped form the colony of artists working here who would define midcentury Modern art.

The paintings on view in this show are from very fertile years in her career and will be a treat to those who appreciate her “Little Images,” created in a small bedroom in the couple’s farmhouse while she was thought to have stopped making art to support her husband’s career, and before she shifted to larger canvases. This is the kind of work that can make one pause to reflect what her art might have been had she not felt compelled to compete with the big male dogs of heroic Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s and beyond.

Krasner has been well in evidence lately in gallery shows, art fairs, and other exhibitions, but rarely by the best representations of her work. It takes a serious museum show to round up the better pieces and remind us how powerful she or any artist can be when their highest realizations are shown.

There are some delightful works here, compact, intricate, dense. They are so clearly powerful on their own, it is difficult to imagine a time when they would have been considered secondary. The same can be said for Lewis, whose work mostly differs from Krasner’s in style but retains a unique structure and composition that stands the test of time.

In the catalog, with essays by Norman Kleeblatt, Stephen Brown, Lisa Saltzman, and Mia Bagneris, much is made of Krasner’s “writings,” her movements of line into tightly executed shapes and structures, often self-contained but progressing across and down the canvas. Many sources are posited for these apparently symbolic structures. The artist herself acknowledged late in life that they could have been influenced by the Hebrew letters she encountered in prayer books as a child.

Ms. Saltzman suggests that it is not merely the Hebrew characters and their right-to-left progression that serve as influences. She cites the pictographs Pollock was creating during this period, Krasner’s projects for the Works Progress Administration, which brought in elements of Russian Constructivism and the Bauhaus, and a fascination among Surrealists of the time with tablet inscriptions found at Knossos and translated four decades later in 1952.

These paintings were created on a tabletop and were kept small by necessity. The artist applied paint straight from the tube, with thick daubs or thinner drippy lines. In some, she took skeins of white or a light color and ran them over wider swathes or patches of deeper color.

Two untitled works look like Pollock drip paintings, but their easel size and her apparent “horror vacui” make these magnificently snarled and tangled compositions perfectly realized more-is-more images. They are jewel-like feminine retorts to the histrionics of Pollock’s action-painting balletics. Controlled and complicated, they mask more than they reveal and offer no way in — talk about mystique!

Yet calling attention to these two paintings does not diminish the power of her more pictorial canvases, and, in one case, panel. Those works, for the most part, are as engaging as they are visually dense. “Black and White Squares No. 1‚” from 1948, is a layered geometric exercise, balancing expressivity and precision. The repeated motif in no way forms a pattern. Rather, it seems more like a random assemblage of imperfectly proportioned windows or box cameras, maybe even picture frames. The repetition of lines around a central core can sometimes overlap to suggest three-dimensional illusion, but Krasner never violates the sacred canon of formalism in these works, whether adding the spirals, triangle, and circle to the collection of shapes or glyphs she composes, or thickening up the paint past the acceptable norms of flatness.

The picture plane begins to open up in a work like the 1950 “Lava‚” some time before her supports do. “Lava” is a mere 40 by 30 inches, the same dimensions as her more claustrophobic paintings. The exhibition then jumps to 1965, with “Kufic,” at a monumental 81 by 128 inches, more than 11 feet wide. This monochromatic, tone-on-tone painting references an Arabic script form of writing, a seeming red herring when compared to the work’s open figural references, which flow into each other. This is Krasner’s colossal style, practiced in Pollock’s larger barn-studio after his death, with an overall vastness and larger forms that might cluster but never achieve the same density as the earlier pieces.

Speaking of Formalism, the neglect of Krasner and Lewis by that era’s critical titans Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg actually gave rise to this exhibition. In a previous show at the museum, “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, De Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976,” the two were relegated to a section called “Blind Spots‚” to indicate the critics’ indifference to certain artists. In that setting, these seemingly unrelated artists from vastly different backgrounds fell into a collegial conversation, or at least their paintings did. And here they do, too. Lewis’s Bermuda background and Harlem upbringing were far removed from Krasner’s youth in a Russian-Jewish enclave in Brooklyn, and yet their artistic growth on the “margins” (from the show’s title), is surprisingly complementary.

At times one even sees the same veiling of subject matter under paint in Krasner’s work as is seen repeatedly in the Lewis paintings. It is enough of a tendency, to want to find more examples in other artists’ work, to see how prevalent that approach was at the time and what its sources were. It demonstrates why the temptation is so powerful to define artists of this era under one rubric and how they so often confound it.

The exhibition will remain on view through Feb. 1. Temple Adas Israel in Sag Harbor and the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center will offer a docent-led tour of the exhibition, with bus transportation, next Thursday. The tour is at 1 p.m. and costs $35, $65 with transportation. Reservations can be made through Toby Spitz at [email protected].