• with Marlborough Gallery, New York;
• with Pace Gallery, New York;
• with Robert Miller Gallery, New York
• bought, through the Krasner-Pollock Foundation, by the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1992

• Lee Krasner: Paintings, drawings and collages
  • Whitechapel Art Gallery 1965-09- – 1965-10-
  • York City Art Gallery 30 Apr 1966 – 21 May 1966
  • Ferens Art Gallery 28 May 1966 – 18 Jun 1966
  • Victoria Street Gallery 28 Jun 1966 – 16 Jul 1966
  • City Art Gallery 20 Aug 1966 – 10 Sep 1966
  • Arts Council Gallery 17 Sep 1966 – 09 Oct 1966
• Large Scale American Paintings
  • The Jewish Museum 11 Jul 1967 – 17 Sep 1967
• Lee Krasner: Recent Paintings
  • Marlborough - Gerson Gallery Inc., 1968-03- – 1968-03-
• Lee Krasner: Large Paintings
  • Whitney Museum of American Art 13 Nov 1973 – 06 Jan 1974
• SurrealitõtùBirdrealitõt 1924-1974
  • Stõdtische Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf 08 Dec 1974 – 02 Feb 1975
  • Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden 14 Feb 1975 – 20 Apr 1975
• Lee Kranser: Paintings
  • Susanne Hilberry Gallery, Birmingham, MI 1977 – 1977
• Extraordinary Women
  • Museum of Modern Art, New York 22 Jul 1977 – 12 Sep 1977
• Tracking the marvellous
  • Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, New York University 27 Apr 1981 – 30 May 1981
• Lee Krasner: A Retrospective
  • The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston 28 Nov 1983 – 08 Jan 1984
  • San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 09 Feb 1984 – 01 Apr 1984
  • Chrysler Museum of Art 26 Apr 1984 – 17 Jun 1984
  • Phoenix Art Museum 23 Aug 1984 – 07 Oct 1984
  • Museum of Modern Art, New York 19 Dec 1984 – 02 Feb 1985
• Some Sixties Works
  • Robert Miller Gallery 04 Jun 1987 – 31 Jul 1987
• Lee Krasner: Paintings from 1965-1984
  • Staller Center Art Gallery, State University of New York at Stony Brook 24 Jun 1988 – 10 Sep 1988
• Lee Krasner: Paintings from 1965-1970
  • Robert Miller Gallery 04 Jan 1991 – 26 Jan 1991
• Abstract Expressionism: the National Gallery of Australia celebrates the centenaries of Jackson Pollock and Morris Louis
  • 14 Jul 2012 – 24 Feb 2013

• Harold Rosenberg, ‘The art world,’ The New Yorker, 26 August 1967, p. 96;
• Lee Krasner,New York: Marlborough-Gerson Gallery 1968,cat. no. NY2, illus. fig. 6, no page number;
• Marcia Tucker, Lee Krasner: Large paintings, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art 1973, no. 12, p. 16, p. 36, illus. col. p. 29;
• Barbara Rose, Lee Krasner: A retrospective, New York: Museum of Modern Art 1983, p. 134, illus. col. fig. 132, p. 135;
• Grace Glueck, ‘Art: Lee Krasner finds her place in retrospective at Modern’, New York Times, 21 December 1984, p.C31, see also http://www.nytimes.com/1984/12/21/arts/art-lee-krasner-finds-her-place-in-retrospective-ar-modern.html?pagewanted=all (accessed May 2012);
• Robert Miller, Lee Krasner: Paintings from 1965–1970, New York: Production Ink Inc., 1991, cat. 5, pp. [27–28, 29], illus. col. p. [40], on cover;
• Robert Hobbs, Krasner, New York: Abbeville Press 1993, p. 79, pp. 86–87, illus. col. fig. 9, p. 80;
• Ellen G. Landau, Lee Krasner: A catalogue raisonné, New York: Harry N. Abrams 1995, CR 432, p. 228, illus. col. p. 229;
• Bronwyn Watson, ‘Public works: Combat’, The Australian, 1 May 2010, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/public-works-combat/story-e6frg8n6-1225858758267 (accessed May 2012)

Literature

• Harold Rosenberg, ‘The art world,’ The New Yorker, 26 August 1967, p. 96;
• Lee Krasner,New York: Marlborough-Gerson Gallery 1968,cat. no. NY2, illus. fig. 6, no page number;
• Marcia Tucker, Lee Krasner: Large paintings, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art 1973, no. 12, p. 16, p. 36, illus. col. p. 29;
• Barbara Rose, Lee Krasner: A retrospective, New York: Museum of Modern Art 1983, p. 134, illus. col. fig. 132, p. 135;
• Grace Glueck, ‘Art: Lee Krasner finds her place in retrospective at Modern’, New York Times, 21 December 1984, p.C31, see also http://www.nytimes.com/1984/12/21/arts/art-lee-krasner-finds-her-place-in-retrospective-ar-modern.html?pagewanted=all (accessed May 2012);
• Robert Miller, Lee Krasner: Paintings from 1965–1970, New York: Production Ink Inc., 1991, cat. 5, pp. [27–28, 29], illus. col. p. [40], on cover;
• Robert Hobbs, Krasner, New York: Abbeville Press 1993, p. 79, pp. 86–87, illus. col. fig. 9, p. 80;
• Ellen G. Landau, Lee Krasner: A catalogue raisonné, New York: Harry N. Abrams 1995, CR 432, p. 228, illus. col. p. 229;
• Bronwyn Watson, ‘Public works: Combat’, The Australian, 1 May 2010, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/public-works-combat/story-e6frg8n6-1225858758267 (accessed May 2012)

Discussion of the work

For Combat 1965 Lee Krasner returns to colour with a vengeance. A commanding late work, the painting stands in stark contrast against her monochromatic Cool white 1959[1]—and in dialogue with Jackson Pollock’s Blue poles1952. The title refers, perhaps, to the ‘battle’ between the orange and crimson shapes that jostle for the viewer’s attention.[2] On an off-white ground, Krasner has worked up layers of pink, another of white, and then painted sections of orange within the tangle of shapes. Large sections of unprimed canvas are left visible, especially at the centre of the work, resulting in veil-like effects amongst the flicks, splatters, arcs and ‘scribbles’. This is a virtuoso examination of colour and form.

In the mid 1960s Krasner consolidated her style and repertoire. In 1965 she produced a large number of gouaches using high-key colour combinations of pinks and greens or purples and yellows, in which figurative forms and shapes appear ready to burst forth from the canvas. As Stephen Westfall points out, the compositional elements consistent to her oeuvre—the rocking semi-circle or ‘spilt’ moon, the eyelet-shaped ellipse, and the spear-like diagonal slash—become more emphatic at this time.[3] These forms, on a grand scale, are found woven throughout Combat. Barbara Rose observes the way that they change and mutate, appearing to ‘somersault into one another,’ and how the ‘interlocking floral shapes’ serve to connect the whole work, uniting its various details and range of brushwork into a single, consistent pattern.[4] This tangle of overlaid shapes links Combat to Krasner’s work in collage.[5]

In Combat Krasner balances edges and the interior: sometimes her marks appear to expand beyond the canvas, at others they are contained and compressed by the edge of the work. The contrast between the strong diagonal at lower centre, and the triangle formed by its less emphatic right side, serves to emphasis the energy of the wave-like shapes billowing around the shape. The linear arabesques that lace through Combat ‘move at the same rate as the furiously brushed interiors of the shapes they enclose and are comparatively free from the gravity-directed vertical drips that fall like rain in her fifties paintings.’[6] In several other works of the same year—see, for example, Right bird left 1965^[7]—she develops the ‘procession’ of shapes into large horizontal paintings.

Krasner described herself as swinging between the ‘poles’ of Picasso and Matisse.[8] In Combat, and other works of the period, she combines Picasso’s figurative deconstruction with an approach to colour reminiscent of Matisse. Ellen Landau notes that, in painting back into the enclosed spaces, Krasner seems to have been experimenting with a device used by Pollock in the late 1940s: the opaque, orange areas, haloed in magenta, read as positive against the white ground, and the disposition of these ‘non-specific shapes’ charts a direction for the eye to follow across the canvas.[9] Krasner has achieved an elegant fusion of colour and form in Combat, a natural give-and-take between her smaller works in collage, and the mural-like, all-over paintings for which so many of the Abstract Expressionists are best known.

Lucina Ward

[1] Barbara Rose describes Combat as the ‘tropical antithesis’ of the Umber series with their ‘icy polar landscapes’. Lee Krasner: A retrospective, New York: Museum of Modern Art 1983, p. 134.

[2] Confrontation 1966, another richly coloured, expressionistic work with related ovoid shapes, is likewise titled to suggest a direct engagement with the viewer; Krasner later painted over sections of the composition, radically simplifying it, and retitled the painting: Comet 1970, oil on canvas, 177 x 218.4 cm, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, CR537.

[3] Lee Krasner: Paintings from 1965–1970, New York: Production Ink Inc., 1991, p. [25].

[4] Rose, p. 134.

[5] See, for example, Untitled 1953, oil, collage, gouache, 57.0 x 76.2 cm, NGA 1983.3609.

[6] Westfall in Lee Krasner: Paintings from 1965–1970, New York: Production Ink Inc., 1991 pp. [26–27]; see also p. [24].

[7] oil on canvas, 177.8 x 342.9 cm, Ball State University Museum, Muncie, Indiana.

[8] Elsewhere she said ‘All my work keeps going like a pendulum … it seems to swing back to something I was involved with earlier, or it moves between horizontality and verticality, circularity, or a composite of them. For me, I suppose, that change is the only constant.’ http://www.theartstory.org/artist-krasner-lee.htm (accessed May 2012).

[9] Lee Krasner: A catalogue raisonné, New York: Harry N. Abrams 1995, p. 228.