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A captivating tour-de-force teeming with explosive gestures, vivid hues and emotional intent, Lee Krasner’s August Petals epitomizes the artistic revelation that overtook Krasner following a period of extraordinary hardship. Painted in 1963—directly preceded by Krasner’s groundbreaking Umber Paintings, a series fraught with emotional turmoil following the sudden loss of her husband, Jackson Pollock, and her mother—the present work marked a pivotal turning point, both personal and artistic, during which she embarked on a series with the same fraught psychic intensity but liberated from the underlying trauma which infused them. August Petals is among a limited suite of eleven paintings that Krasner produced, which reveal the renewed inspiration she found in nature during this emotionally trying period. Vibrant color returns as Krasner captures an ebullient resolve to overcome obstacles: “The new style retains the freedom gained through suffering, using that freedom now to celebrate the vital rhythms of life. The return to bright color announces a new direction in her art, which becomes increasingly abstract once more.” (Exh. Cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art (and traveling), Lee Krasner, 1983, p. 130)

August Petals, like many of the artist’s most beloved paintings, tells a story infused with layers of personal history: “I think my painting is so autobiographical if anyone can take the trouble to read it.” (the artist quoted in: Cindy Nemser, Art Talk: Conversations with 12 Women Artists, New York 1975, p. 100) Depicting the sense of life and joy pervasive in Krasner’s paintings of this unique period, the present work is lyrical and methodical, delicate and ferocious, the grace and intensity of the canvas serving as irrefutable evidence of her artistic genius. On Christmas Night of 1962, Krasner was rushed to the hospital with a brain hemorrhage and, after undergoing surgery in early January, she began her long period of convalescence at the Hotel Adams. This brush with death—so soon after the deaths of both her husband and mother—shook Krasner deeply. August Petals emerges from a moment of extreme crisis and is charged with immense psychic exigency, bearing witness to the therapeutic joy she found in nature and painting, thus marking in emotive and expressive gestures stipples that record this crucial nexus of her practice.

August Petals heralds a new era of painting from Krasner, one in which she returns to a more vibrant, brighter palette unused since 1958 and paints directly from the palette. Previously having painted in her bedroom upstairs, Krasner later began using the barn studio behind the homestead where Pollock made some of his most celebrated paintings; the larger studio space naturally led to larger canvasses with impressively scaled compositions. Unlike Pollock, who would lay the canvas on the ground and pour paint over the surface, Krasner would pin the canvas on the wall and work vertically, standing at an angle that faces the window into the beautiful landscapes of Accabonac Creek and the garden to which the artist herself would tend. August Petals stand out even further from this special series of works, where other works of the early 1960s would embody brighter but more limited palettes of one or two colors, it introduces light and playful clusters of floral pinks and greens. The present work, born in this critical intersection of her life, flutters before our eyes like flower petals tumbling in the August summer breeze after enduring the long and cold winters of Long Island, suspended in a season of growth both in life and in metaphor.

Gentle brushstrokes oscillate and dance across the surface, each rich with impasto, blossoming out of the picture plane into our field of view. A saturated field of color set against the thick weave of the canvas, Krasner applies rich, tactile layers of bright white, emerald, olive green, rosy pink, and burgundy, colors undoubtedly inspired by the landscape surrounding her house in the hamlet of Springs, New York—flowers blooming in early summer, jutting through the grassy knolls. The painting’s stippling technique, almost filigreed in its rhythmic movement, recalls contemporary peers like Jackson Pollock or Robert Ryman but also harkens back to the impressionist paintings of Claude Monet and Pierre-August Renoir.

August Petals stands as a test.mes nt to Krasner’s ability to embody life itself in her paintings, as she describes, “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.” (the artist quoted in: Ellen Landau, Reading Abstract Expressionism: Context and Critique, New Haven 2005, p. 237) Metaphorically and physically, August Petals seeks to give shape to Krasner’s will to live, to produce life-affirming paintings. The allusions to nature and vivacious tones underscore themes of growth and regeneration inherent to cycles of life while also providing a marked sign of the artist’s renewed interest in safety, sanctuary, and resilience, foregrounded by the artist’s steely will. Her energetic markings, in their emotional resonance and aesthetic prowess, epitomize her distinguished career in abstraction: “Krasner experienced the difficulty and exhilaration of creation, the fears of being subsumed in mythic content, and the satisfaction of finally developing and accepting an enlarged sense of self as a result of her deep commitment to fulfilling her own nature.” (Robert Hobbs, “Krasner, Mitchell, and Frankenthaler: Nature as Metonym,” in: Exh. Cat., Denver Art Museum (and traveling), Women of Abstract Expressionism, 2016, p. 66)

Artist

Lee Krasner