Lee Krasner at the Barbican

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Lee Krasner (1908-1984) was a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism, she movement that made New York a thriving centre for modern art in the postwar period. Born ,n. Brooklyn., she decided to become an artist at 14, applying to Washington Irving High, then the only school in .New York.to offer an art course for girls. It was an unconventional choice for !he daughter of an .Orthodox Jewish, Russian émigré family, but it enabled her to gain a remarkable education; later she would study at the Cooper Union, the National Academy of Design and the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts.

Krasner was one of the first artists in New York to adopt an entirely abstract approach, and her work was admired by such eminent artists as Pitt Mondrian, who commented on her 'strong inner rhythm'. In 1942, she was included in John Graham's French.and American Painting at the McMillen Gallery, alongside her friends Willem de Kooning and Stuart Davis. The one fellow exhibitor that she had not met was Jackson Pollock, so she decided to visit his studio, since it was only a block away from her own in Greenwich Village. They soon fell in love, and in 1945 were married and moved to Springs, Long Island.

Unlike many of her contemporaries, Krasner refused to develop a 'signature image', which she considered to be 'rigid rather than being alive'. Working in cycles, she continually sought out new means for authentic expression, even during the most tumultuous of times, which included Pollock's emotional volatility and his sudden death in a car crash in 1956. Krasner's formidable spirit is felt throughout the body of work that she created over more than fifty years in the studio-celebrated in this exhibition, the first of her work in Europe since 1965.

When Krasner moved to Springs, in the autumn of 1945, she was emerging from an artistic impasse: her father's death the year before had left her unable to paint anything but what she affectionately called her 'grey slabs'. Now, suddenly surrounded by nature and with a view across the salt marshes to Accabonac Creek, a new kind of imagery was coming through. She turned the upstairs bedroom into a makeshift studio and began work on her 'Little Images vibrant, jewel-like abstractions pulsing with an even rhythm. In some she layered the paint thickly with a palette knife and worked into it with a stiff paintbrush; others she laced with paint thinned down with turpentine in a can.

When the bitter winter of 1947 forced Krasner to work in the living room (they could only afford to heat one floor of the house at a time), she decided to turn two old wagon wheels from the farm into mosaic tables, using leftover tesserae as well as bits of costume jewellery, keys, coins and broken glass. One was exhibited at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in September 1948, together with some of her new, 'hieroglyphic' Little Images (displayed in the next room), which a critic in the New York Herald Tribune described as 'to come right out with it... magnificent'. Krasner proudly hung several of her Little Images in the guest room at Springs, where they Were admired by such visitors as the critic Clement Greenberg. They are presented here with photographs taken by her friend Ray Eames, a fellow student of Hans Hofmann, who documented the wildlife in Springs that inspired this work.

Back in the summer of 1928, Krasner had nailed a mirror to a tree in the garden of her parents', home in Greenlawn, Long Island, and had set about capturing herself against a woodland backdrop.

Wearing an artist’s apron and clutching a rag and brushes in her hand, she is the perfect image of a young painter at work, whose forceful gaze suggests the strength of her ambition.-Now 19, she had graduated from the Women's Art School at Cooper Union, and following a brief spell at the Ad Students-League-was due to begin studying at the prestigious National Academy of Design, where she hoped her self-portrait in.oil would gain her promotion to the life-drawing class.

During interviews, Krasner loved to recount how the Academy had refused to believe her capable of such an accomplished plein-air portrait: 'They took one look at my painting and said, "that's a dirty trick you played-don't ever pretend that you painted outdoors'.' She protested and was promoted, although she continued to struggle with the traditional approach of the Academy, which she condemned •as a 'sterile atmosphere of... congealed mediocrity. Around this time, Krasner changed her birth name Lena, first to Lenore and then to the more androgynous Lee, suggesting the ways in which she was shaping her artistic identity. A fire at her parents' home destroyed much of her student work, making the few self-portraits that survive especially precious.

Krasner faced considerable challenges as a young artist-notably the Wall Street Crash in October 1929, which threw the American economy into crisis. The Great Depression that ensued forced her to leave the National Academy and enrol on a teacher's course at the City College of New York, where tuition was free. While studying for ' her Certificate, she began taking life-drawing classes at Greenwich House with JobGoodman. A former student of the regionalist painter Thomas Had Benton, Goodman advocated.a classical method of drawing, taking inspiration from such Renaissance ,masters' as Michelangelo. The works presented here show how uninhibited Krasner was towards nudity, using Cant6 Crayon to emphasise the muscularity of the model's body.

In 1937 Krasner was awarded a scholarship attend classes at the Hans Hofmann School on West Ninth Street. Hofmann was a German modernist who had lived and worked in Paris alongside Picasso and Matisse, two of Krasner's self-proclaimed 'gods" Hofmann taught a version of analytical Cubism and was primarily concerned with the tension between flatness and three-dimensionality,.which he called the'push-pull of a work. He was a dynamic teacher, famed for his very involved methods, which included making his corrections directly onto a student's work. The drawings displayed here show Krasner making her first break into abstraction; Hofmann responded with the barbed compliment that her work was so good 'you would not know it was done by a woman'.

Franklin Roosevelt launched the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) in 1933, a scheme that would employ more than 3,700 artists to decorate public buildings as part of his New Deal programme to counter widespread poverty and unemployment. Krasner worked on a number of projects throughout the 1930s, and in 1942-as a respected member of the artistic community in New York and an active exhibitor in the American Abstract Artists-she was approached to supervise a major commission for the War Services Project. The job was to oversee the design and execution of twenty department-store window displays in Manhattan and Brooklyn, advertising war training courses that were being made available to the public in municipal colleges.

Leading the commission, Krasner was asked to oversee a team of male artists ('misfits', as she called them), which included William Baziotes and Jackson Pollock. She attended a number of classes as part of her research for the project, including one on the chemistry of explosives, which she described as 'an alchemist's dream'. She decided to photograph the courses and then integrate the resulting images into her designs, alongside dynamic Photography and abstract markings that suggest her own artistic interests. In 1942, documentary photographs were taken of Krasner's original collage designs, which no longer exist; these photographs are projected here on the scale •of window displays in order to give an impression of this important body of lost work.

When Krasner finished her Little Images in 1950, she began work on her first solo exhibition, which would open at the Betty Parsons Gallery in October 1951. She created 14 geometric abstractions washed in soft, luminous colour, which were generally well received but-like most exhibitions of contemporary work at the time- did not sell. Krasner felt despondent and started to work on a series of black-and-white drawings, which she pinned floor-to-ceiling in the studio in the hope that they would ease her into a new direction. She walked into her studio one day, decided that she 'despised it all', and tore the drawings up. Unable to return for a number of weeks, Krasner was surprised to find that, when she did, there were 'a lot of things there that began to interest me'.

The strewn shreds became the beginnings of a series Of collages, many of which were layered over canvases from the Betty Parsons show.

Krasner incorporated pieces of burlap, torn newspaper and heavy photographic paper, as well as some of Pollock's discarded drawings, to which she added touches of paint. The resulting 'collage paintings' began with smaller fragments and a more organic palette, as seen here, and climaxed in the more graphic, brightly co!outed works on display in the next room. These large-scale works were exhibited : together in September 1955 at Eleanor Ward's Stable Gallery. The I artist and critic Fairfield Porter wrote in his ARTnews review that they make the viewer 'aware of a subtle disorder greater than he might otherwise have thought possible'.

In the summer of 1956, Krasner painted a work unlike any other she had made. The canvas is dominated by looping, fleshy forms, lined with black and with accents of pink that emphasise the body imagery. Prophecy was painted at a time when Pollock's alcoholism was becoming acute and their relationship was coming under considerable strain. Krasner described how the painting 'disturbed me enormously', and it remained on her easel when she left for France alone. In a letter to Pollock dated 21 July, she wrote: 'the Louvre... is overwhelming- beyond belief. I miss you and wish you were sharing this with me... the painting here is unbelievably bad. (How are you Jackson?)' Her answer came on 12 August, when she received a telephone call with the news that Pollock had crashed his car, killing himself and Edith Metzger, a friend of his lover, Ruth Kligman, who had survived.

At the age of 47, Krasner found herself a widow. Just weeks after .the funeral, she returned to her painting, making three works that continued the series she had begun with Prophecy: Birth, Embrace and Three in Two. Reunited here, these four works seem to present seething landscapes animated by dark psychological forces. When asked about her determination to work, even in the face of such profound grief, Krasner was matter-of-fact: 'Painting is not separate from life. It is one. It is like asking- do I want to live? My answer is yes-and I paint.'

Sometime in 1957 Krasner decided to take over Pollock's studio in the barn at Springs. Although it must have been a space loaded with painting memories, it was also the largest working area with the best natural light. Ever practical, she explained in an interview that 'there was no point in letting it stand empty'. Krasner was now able to work on an unprecedented scale, tacking lengths of unstretched canvas directly to the wall. She was suffering from chronic insomnia at the time and so worked at night; she decided to restrict her palette to white and umber, since she hated working with colour under artificial light.

In the early 1960s, Krasner allowed colour to burst back into her painting. Like the Night Journeys, Another Storm has a limited palette, but the subdued umber has given way to a blazing alizarin crimson.

When Krasner fell in East Hampton and broke her right arm, she taught herself to work with her left, squirting paint directly from the tube and using the fingertips of her right hand to guide the movements. This resulted in more tactile works, such as Through Blue and icarus. In the years that followed, Krasner's gestures would become looser, more calligraphic, with bold forms somersaulting across the canvas in dissonant hues.

Krasner's colours in the 'Primary Series' feel exuberant, almost decadent, alluding to her artistic hero Matisse, who declared that 'with colour one obtains an energy that seems to stem from witchcraft'.

Her confidence in this period may well have come from the survey of her work that was organised by the curator Bryan Robertson at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1965; this was her first exhibition in a public institution, and was met with very positive reviews. For Krasner, each painting had to emerge authentically from within, so she never made preparatory sketches in advance of a painting.

However, in 1968 she came across a stash of handmade paper, which she decided to use for a new body of work, on display in the adjoining room. She experimented with the simplicity of using only one or two pure pigments: 'I was just mad for doing them and they went at quite a clip.'