Lee Krasner

Previous owner: Malborough Gallery, New York; Christie’s, New York, 2004; Meredith Long & Company, Houston, Texas, 2004; private collection, Texas, 2005
Acquisition: Reinhard Ernst Collection, Christie’s, New York, 2020

Peacock from 1973 belongs to a late series of works by Lee Krasner that was first shown that year at the Marlborough Gallery in New York by Donald McKinney, and later in the large solo exhibition ‘Large Paintings’ curated by Marcia Tucker at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art.

As so often with Krasner, the new paintings represented a break with the style of previous works and were met with great enthusiasm. Bright colours in sharply defined areas and clear forms characterise all the paintings, including Peacock. The colours fanning out in the upper right half of the painting could be referenced in the name of the piece – Krasner gave her works titles after they were finished. The artist herself said of the paintings that they seem ‘sharper in focus, more concentrated and emblematic’ [1] than earlier works. In the 1950s, she radically reinvented her approach to painting when, in a moment of frustration, she tore up all the drawings on the walls and floor of her studio. When she re-entered the room a few days later, she found the snippets of pictures scattered all over the floor interesting and began to collage on canvases along with other image remnants. There are certainly echoes of these spontaneous, dynamic forms in paintings created twenty years later, such as Peacock, but now as a pictorial composition painted in oils. Immediately after completing this series, she went back to her early drawings, created during her three years of lessons with Hans Hofmann beginning in 1937, and again reworked them into new collages. She explained in 1979, ‘I am never free of the past, I believe in continuity. I have made it crystal clear that the past is part of the present which becomes part of the future’, always anxious to keep questioning her work, to continue exploring and discovering her own self and painting. [2]

“Painting cannot be separated from life. They are one. It’s like asking, ‘Do I want to live?’ My answer is, ‘Yes – and I paint.'” [3]
In the year she painted Peacock, Krasner said in a television interview that her lack of recognition as an artist is due, first, to the fact that she was an emerging female artist in the 1950s and, second, that she is Jewish. She was supported and exhibited mainly by Jewish women in the New York art scene until the late 1970s, such as critic and curator Barbara Rose and Marcia Tucker. Finally recognized and celebrated in retrospect as a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism shortly before her death, her work in its entirety defies clear art historical categorizations. At a time when women were not granted autonomy either in society as a whole or within the art discourse, Lee Krasner’s artistic independence remains radical to this day.

[1] Lee Krasner, quoted in Ellen G. Landau: Lee Krasner: A Catalogue Raisonné, New York 1995, p. 270.
[2] Lee Krasner, 1979, quoted in: Eleanor Munro, Originals: American Women Artists, New York, 1979, p. 119.
[3] Lee Krasner, 1960, quoted in Louise Elliott Rago: ‘We Interview Lee Krasner’, in: School Arts, vol. 60, 1960, p. 32.