Exhibition Specs
Flash Slide Show

This exhibition of works by American painter Lee Krasner (1908-1984)-the first full-scale retrospective since her death-presents sixty paintings, collages, and drawings, many of them not exhibited in decades, on loan from public and private collections around the world. Krasner, the only woman artist who was part of the first generation of the New York School, was known for many years primarily as the wife and artistic follower of Jackson Pollock. Through curator Robert Hobbs's new research and analysis, this exhibition makes her critical contributions to Abstract Expressionism vividly clear, while demonstrating her ongoing artistic dialogue with a diverse range of artists, critics, and writers-including Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Harold Rosenberg, and Meyer Schapiro.

The works selected for the show trace Krasner's development, beginning with a self-portrait (1930) through her early geometric abstractions of the late 1930s and early 1940s (when she became an important member of New York's vanguard) to her mature works. These include her Little Image paintings of the late 1940s, major collages of the early 1950s, the Earth Green series of the late 1950s, the Umber Paintings or Night Journeys of the early 1960s, and her great abstractions of the late 1960s and early 1970s, culminating with such late works as the magisterial series Eleven Ways to Use the Words to See.

The exhibition is accompanied by a 224-page book published by ICI in association with Harry N. Abrams, Inc. It includes an extensive essay by curator Robert Hobbs, the Rhoda Thalhimer Endowed Chair of Art History at Virginia Commonwealth University, and an Introduction by writer B. H. Friedman, one of the earliest champions of Krasner's work, that features previously unpublished excerpts from his diaries.