Lee Krasner Living Colour; Barbican: July 2019: 9/10

Krasner says that her relative lack of success kept her away from the “horrendous” nexus of dealers and gallerists and allowed her to work as she wished. That freedom is visible in the enormous variety of work in this show. The constant change in her work keeps up the momentum, however there is a becalmed patch just before the final corridor. In the dull patch I started to become a little bored and realised that many of her paintings were made with the same sweeping gestures and staccato intervals, then at the last minute, to my delight, she changed again to make geometric work.  A lack of a signature style would certainly have held her back, only a very few artists can constantly change their work and remain successful.

In the end I feel that her work is most innovative only with the little paintings, with their tight and structured rhythms.

She talks repeatedly about the years when she made grey masses as a monstrous past but none are on show. It turns out that she scraped the paint off these works and reused the canvases.  I found one image online.

Whilst the show is a valuable part of a rewriting of art history to include the valuable contribution of overlooked women artists I feel that it has resulted in a curation that isolates her and makes her seem to exist outside the nexus of the other art that was going on around her.  She and Pollock were working on painting cheek by jowl and it's inconceivable that they didn't influence each other - I would have liked to see that discussed in the show.  Its omission, whilst tending to add prestige to Krasner weakens the show.  Some biographical notes about how their marriage affected her work would have been equally helpful.

Here are a couple of works that seem to relate to that being done by Pollock at the time, I'd like to know how their art was interacting at the time.

Night Light 1949

Black and White Squares No1 1948