“It started in 1953—I had the studio hung solidly with drawings... floor to ceiling all around. Walked in one day, hated it all, took it down, tore everything and threw it on the floor, and when I went back—it was a couple of weeks before I opened that door again—it was seemingly a very destructive act….When I opened that door and walked in, the floor was solidly covered with these torn drawings that I had left and they began to interest.mes and I started collaging.”
A torrent of vital energy, Porcelain from 1955 is a superlative embodiment of the emotive intensity that defines Lee Krasner’s singular brand of Abstract Expressionism. Sublimely balancing spontaneous gesture and precise construction, the present work indisputably ranks among her most compelling collages of this scale and period, which belong to the permanent collects ions of preeminent museums including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; and Kunstmuseum Bern. Underscoring its importance in the artist's oeuvre, Porcelain was featured in Krasner’s first exhibition of collages at Stable Gallery, New York, as well as her major 1983-84 retrospective presented at the Museum of Replica Handbags s, Houston.
Porcelain represents the apogee of Lee Krasner’s seminal collage series, executed between 1953-55, spurred by a period of malaise brought on by her unsuccessful first major exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery and the alcoholism of her husband, Jackson Pollock. Obtaining her own working space for the first t.mes on the Springs, East Hampton property she shared with Pollock, Krasner fervently executed a series of charcoal and pencil drawings and pinned them to the walls of her studio. Tearing these works to the ground in a bout of dissatisfaction, these fragments ignited an epiphany when Krasner returned to the studio weeks later: inspired to tear apart the paintings from her Betty Parsons show, and later residual pieces of burlap and old canvases, Krasner generated the collages that Clement Greenberg would later deem a “major addition to the American art scene of the era” (quoted in Exh. Cat., London, Whitechapel Gallery, Lee Krasner, 1965, p. 4).
The wrong papers, the wretched old canvases
discovered to be no more
than rehearsals for much new catastrophe
this purple patch, that sliver
of viridian woven into the web
of accommodating earth
Krasner here fashions an expansive terrain of textural freedom that seizes the viewer’s entire field of vision. Beating with a dynamic inner rhythm, naturalistic forms splinter and collide across the frieze-like canvas. Its myriad forms invoke myriad formative influences for Krasner, from the fragmentations of synthetic cubism to the collages of Henri Matisse (see figs. 1 and 2). Reverberating with the physicality of the act of its creation, Porcelain’s mighty presence exceeds the confines of its dimensions. A torrent of cathartic emotion, the present work embodies Farifield Porter’s assessment of Krasner’s collage works: “Instead of making the spectator aware of a grand design, makes him aware of a subtle disorder greater than he might otherwise have thought possible.” (Fairfield Porter, "Reviews and Previews," ARTnews, vol. 54, no. 7, November 1955, pp. 66-67)
The flurry of paper and canvas shards, evocative of the work’s title, meld into the explosive washes and drips of her painterly mark-making. Invigorating the white painted ground and the earthy paper and canvas, dissonant smears of oranges, aquamarine, and indigo burst forth. Krasner’s fragments simultaneously float above and sink below the paint, revealing the artist’s process as described by Barbara Rose: “Krasner would step back and evaluate the overall effect of a collage painting while the material was still pinned to the surface, modifying the work over a period of t.mes as it stood on the easel or against the wall. Once satisfied, she would put down the canvas on a table and glue the pieces down. She might then add color with a brush to further unify the elements and embed the pieces between the brushed surface in a process resembling lamination” (Barbara Rose in Exh. Cat., Houston, Museum of Replica Handbags s (and traveling), Lee Krasner: A Retrospective, p. 86) As such, Porcelain underscores Krasner’s distinct capacity to articulate a sense of instinctual spontaneity within a largely predetermined work.
LEE KRASNER’S 1953-55 COLLAGES IN MUSEUM collects IONS
Porcelain is a resounding proclamation of the ceaseless self-reflection and renewal that pervaded Krasner’s practice. With Krasner describings collage as a “recycling of the self in some form,” (quoted in Phyllis Braff, “From the Studio,” East Hampton Star, 21 August 1980, n.p), the present work is a test.mes nt to the process of self-interrogation as a creative act. As Bryan Robertson asserts, “The collages of 1953-55 also become autobiographical and disrupt the t.mes flux through the way in which Krasner uses as collage material old canvases… they have a different resonance because of their odd function as repositories of experience and second thoughts” (Exh. Cat., New York, Robert Miller Gallery, Lee Krasner Collages, 1986, n.p.). Ultimately generating a dynamic tableau from fragments of past works, Krasner here interrogates the potential of destruction as a means of reclamation.
Representing the apogee of her pioneering experimentation with collage, the present work asserts the unbridled emotional power that has established Lee Krasner as one of the most innovative and visionary abstract artists of the last century. Porcelain incarnates a pivotal moment in Krasner’s artistic evolution, presaging the cathartic urgency that would dominate her Umber paintings executed upon the unexpected death of Pollock the following year, as well as her revisitation of collage in her two final decades. “Collage served as both a tool of ignition and a fruitful practice,” expounds Saskia Flowers, “The consistent reinvention and clarifying that collage afforded her was integral to her development as an artist. It is in these spectacular collage works, by virtue of their constructive process, that the tension between spontaneous gesture and a considered, critical eye is most tangibly felt. They are raw and tumultuous, careful and precise. They tell the story of Krasner’s artistic cycles” (Saskia Flower, Exh. Cat., New York, Kasmin Gallery, Lee Krasner: Collage Paintings 1938-1981, 2021, p. 8).
