The Irrepressible Emotion of Lee Krasner
In 1959, Lee Krasner was in crisis. She was still mourning her husband—who’d died in a car crash three years earlier—when her mother died, compounding her grief. An exhibition of her work planned by the critic Clement Greenberg had been canceled when Greenberg decided he didn’t appreciate her newer paintings. Plagued by insomnia, Krasner began painting at night in her husband’s old studio, and since she disliked working with color under artificial light, she used only shades of umber and white.
The paintings Krasner made during this period, described by her friend Richard Howard as her “Night Journeys,” are extraordinary. The confinement, completed in 1960 and named after , is a tempest that engulfs the viewer in chaotic, feathery strokes, a 16-foot-wide sweep of circular emotion. Krasner’s grief, her rage, her power, are all contained within the canvas, layered in jagged streaks of dark brown and daubs of white. Her state of mind is locked in paint, but seeps outward.
