Lee Krasner: The Edge of Color, Geometric Abstractions 1948–53

Krasner had experimented with geometric abstraction as early as the late 1930s, creating work in a distinctly Cubist idiom while studying with the celebrated German painter Hans Hofmann in 1937–40. In the early 1940s she exhibited with the avant-garde American Abstract Artists group, largely formed by geometric abstractionists like Josef Albers and Irene Rice Pereira; through this group Krasner met Piet Mondrian, who famously told her, “You have a very strong inner rhythm. Never lose it.” However sporadically, Krasner would later return to a geometric visual language, seen in the crisp forms of major paintings of the 1970s.

Highlights of the exhibition include loosely-brushed compositions of side-by-side rectangles, not previously exhibited and likely realized just before Krasner began cutting and pasting her works from the Betty Parsons exhibition into her collage paintings. Painted on reused canvases, the underlying compositions, semi-visible from the reverse, are consistent with the paintings Krasner showed at Betty Parsons. 

Additionally, the only two surviving paintings from a suite of fourteen canvases exhibited in Krasner’s first-ever solo exhibition are on view together for the first time since their debut in 1951. On loan from the Museum of Modern Art, Number 3 (Untitled) (1951) is reunited with Number 2 (1951), which is on view in New York for the first time in over 70 years and is the largest painting Krasner had ever made to date. Reviewers at the time of their debut likened Krasner’s schematic vistas of glowing color to the Dutch abstractionist Piet Mondrian, though not without their sardonic gendered language. Despite their generally positive critical reception, the works remained unsold, and Krasner later notoriously destroyed or painted over all but these two canvases to create a landmark series of collage paintings in the mid 1950s, several of which were exhibited at Kasmin in 2021.