Lee Krasner

In the mid and late 1940s, Lee Krasner, one of the few women associated with Abstract Expressionism’s first generation, developed compositions comprised of small, interconnected boxes with symbols that she described as hieroglyphic. Using a limited palette and paint applied in thick, controlled drips, Krasner achieved the nonhierarchical, allover format that she and her Abstract Expressionists peers favored. 

Yet the diminutive scale of Krasner’s early work was in part a consequence of her studio space. Krasner completed many of these canvases in an upstairs bedroom of the Long Island home she shared with her husband, Jackson Pollock. After she recovered from the shock of Pollock’s death in a car accident in 1956, Krasner began to paint in the barn on their property that had previously been his studio. She made the most of the increased space: nearly seventeen feet wide and more than seven feet in height, The Seasons was the largest work she had attempted up to that point. 

The composition, a signal example of a group of late 1950s paintings often referred to as the Earth Green series, interweaves sweeping black brushstrokes with swaths of pink, bulbous shapes in off-white, and sections of lush green. Her energetic markings evoke the female body and botanical forms, organic elements tied to growth and the inevitable cycles of nature. Krasner explained that in the wake of the sudden loss of her husband, “the question came up whether one would continue painting at all, and I guess this was my answer.”

Dana Miller and Adam D. Weinberg, Handbook of the Collection (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2015), 211.