Krasner’s Work Lives on Life’s Jagged Edges

A sense of passionate engagement with life’s twists and turns dominates the dynamic exhibition of collages and paintings by Lee Krasner (1908-1984) at Tasende Gallery. Observing the volcanic intensity that spills from these large-scale works, it’s hard to believe that Krasner spent so many years downplaying her own ambitions to nurture the career of her husband, even if he was the legendary Jackson Pollock.

Now recognized as one the most important abstract artists of her generation, Krasner never really got her due while she was alive. These canvases, made during the years 1953 to 1963, the period before and after Pollock’s 1956 death in a car crash, brim with Krasner’s characteristic evocations of fecundity, here delivered in a context of profound grief and emotional renewal.

Krasner was fearless when it came to experimenting with new approaches. Her willingness to trash the old to make room for new growth is revealed by her tendency to rip up old paintings (some of them Pollock’s) and reassemble the multicolored scraps of canvas into arresting collages, which flaunt their bold juxtapositions of disharmonious colors.

In “City Verticals” (1953), Krasner renders the modern city as a claustrophobic thicket of interwoven, weed-like stalks of smoke-gray and black that convey the dense upward thrust of skyscrapers. Vertical shards of deep blue and yellow slice in and out of these passages, like sky and sunlight filtering through the prison bars of a concrete horizon.

Krasner frequently used her canvases as forums in which to stage lively aesthetic confrontations between herself and other Abstract Expressionists. The twin black silhouettes and jagged edges of “Lame Shadow” (1955) bring Robert Motherwell and Clyfford Still to the table, while the biomorphic petals of “Desert Moon” (1955) allow Willem de Kooning (a Pollock rival whom Krasner loathed but respected) to get in a word or two of his own.

Krasner saves her most intense confrontations for the Burnt Umber Series, of which four examples are included here. The somber, earth-toned palette and centrifugally propulsive brushwork of “The Eye Is the First Circle” (1960) convey Krasner’s plunge into the vortex after Pollock’s violent death and the passing of her own mother a few years later. In the midst of this all-encompassing windstorm of brush strokes that swirl, weave and dip in dizzying currents, a field of eyes gradually reveals itself, while the outlines of a bird, wings not yet fully outstretched, can be seen struggling to take flight. Here Krasner comes face to face not just with Pollock’s demons, but with her own.

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* Tasende Gallery, 8808 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, (310) 276-8686, through Feb. 28. Closed Sundays and Mondays.