• the artist;
• with Marlborough Gallery, New York;
• with Robert Miller Gallery, New York;
• from whom purchased by the Australian National Gallery, Canberra, December 1983

• 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
• Lee Krasner: Collages and works on paper 1933-1974
  • Corcoran Gallery of Art 11 Jan 1975 – 16 Feb 1975
  • Pennyslvania State University Museum of Art 26 Mar 1975 – 27 Apr 1975
  • Rose Art Museum 17 Sep 1975 – 26 Oct 1975
• 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
• Abstract Expressionism: the National Gallery of Australia celebrates the centenaries of Jackson Pollock and Morris Louis
  • 14 Jul 2012 – 24 Feb 2013

• Barbara Rose, Lee Krasner: A retrospective, New York: Museum of Modern Art 1983, p. 80, illus. b&w. fig. 72, p. 77;
• Bryan Robertson, Lee Krasner: Collages, New York: Robert Miller Gallery 1986, no cat. no., illus. b&w, no p. no.;
• Ellen G. Landau, Lee Krasner: A catalogue raisonné, New York: Harry N. Abrams 1995, cat. 77, pp. 45–46, illus. b&w, p. 51

Discussion of the work

During the 1950s Krasner created a series of black-and-white works composed of segments of cut paper pasted on top of pre-existing drawings. The artist remembered: ‘In 1953, I started tearing up drawings, which led to collaging, and then I went into some of these canvases that had been sitting there a long time and nothing happening with them and I collaged some of these as well.’[1] Collage became a particularly dynamic medium for the artist and she would often return to it in order to reinvigorate her processes after periods of creative pause. Through the destruction and ‘cannibalisation’ of her earlier works, Krasner was not only symbolically breaking with the past, but abruptly forcing herself to take a new direction.

Between the late 1940 and the mid 1950s, Krasner’s work was to go through several experimental and transitional phases. In her painted canvases of the late 1940s, known as the ‘Little pictures’, her surfaces were comprised of small, geometric and hieroglyphic elements applied in thick multicoloured paint. By 1950 Krasner had returned to a semi-figurative mode—a brief yet incongruous manoeuvre that resulted in an unsuccessful exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1951. Harnessing this disappointment as impetus for change, Krasner turned to collage and, in stark contrast to her coloured canvases, produced several works on paper in black and white, including the Gallery’s Untitled.

Untitled reveals a dramatically stripped-back palette and a sophisticated loosening of form. Krasner has allowed space and air to settle within the compositional activity, perhaps as a metaphorical exhale from the intensity of the works of the previous decade. The surface of Untitled is a complex combination of a base drawing executed in black oil paint applied directly onto the paper, over which several recycled pieces have been adhered. The composite surface that results is a tangle of both solid black and dry scraped brushstrokes of frenetic drags, pulls and abrupt arcs, periodically sliced into sections by the sharp edges of cut paper. Indicative of a successful stylistic modification, the collage works from this period can be seen to inform the canvases that Krasner was to produce over the next few years.

The collage works of 1953 preceded a sustained period of work in this medium and numerous examples were exhibited, to critical admiration, in 1955 at the Stable Gallery, New York. Looking back on Krasner’s collage work, the art critic Clement Greenberg commented that, in employing this technique,  Krasner had made a major contribution to the progression of Abstract Expressionism at the time.[2]

Jaklyn Babington

[1] Letter from the artist, NGA file 78:0059, f.127.

[2] Ellen G. Landau, Lee Krasner: A catalogue raisonné, New York: Harry N. Abrams 1995, p. 146.

Other works in the collection

The National Gallery of Australia holds a painting and six other works on paper by Krasner: two charcoal drawings and an oil on paper from the late 1930s, and three lithographs.

The National Gallery of Australia holds a painting and six other works on paper by Krasner: two charcoal drawings and an oil on paper from the late 1930s, and three lithographs.