Lee Krasner: Listen

Ever wonder where the art is stored at the WFMA, and what's in there anyway? Join MSU professor Todd Giles as he unlocks the vault!

[Transcript]

Hello and welcome to The Vault Unlocked. My name is Todd Giles and we’re here to take you inside the collection vault at the Wichita Falls Museum of Art at MSU Texas, because getting to know art helps us better know ourselves. In this episode, we will take a close look at Lee Krasner’s 1974 screenprint titled Embrace.

For decades Lee Krasner was better known as the wife of Jackson Pollock than as an important post-war Abstract Expressionist in her own right. Fortunately, that stigma has been changing over time with the publication of her Catalogue Raisonné by Ellen Landau in 1995, Gail Levin’s 2011 Lee Krasner: A Biography, and retrospective exhibitions in major cities like Houston and New York. Like many of the painters of her generation, Krasner did not produce many works on paper during her lifetime—in her case, only 29.

Krasner was one of fifteen “distinguished American artists,” along with Alice Neel, Robert Goodnough, Alex Katz and others, commissioned in 1974 by the Kennedy Galleries in New York to produce a run of 210 signed prints to commemorate the 1976 U.S. Olympics. When asked to write a statement about her contribution, Krasner said, “The opportunity for nations to come together for a single event, such as the Olympics, provides a spirit in which all the nations embrace” (Landau 274).

Embrace, a four-color screenprint, calls to mind the Modernist influence on Krasner’s earlier work from the 1930s, which can be seen in her angular 1939 still-life simply titled Composition, a painting perhaps inspired by the work of Piet Mondrian, who immigrated to New York one year later. More to the point, Embrace is nearly identical to another of Krasner’s 1939 oil paintings, Olympic, in which she reduced her usual amorphous, interconnected and diversely-colored shapes down to piercing green arrowhead-like angles that shatter through a crisp blue circle. The sharp angularity, which was a departure from the paintings Krasner is most well-known for, is also in marked contrast to the more organic and fluid prints of her female contemporaries Helen Frankenthaler and Louise Nevelson, both of whom are also represented in the permanent collection of the WFMA.

Thanks for joining us as we unlock the vault at the Wichita Falls Museum of Art at MSU Texas. To learn more about the WFMA, our current and upcoming exhibitions, the permanent collection, as well as sign up for our e-newsletter, visit wfma.msutexas.edu.

Works Consulted

Hobbs, Robert. Lee Krasner. Exh. Cat. New York: Independent Curators International, 1999.

Landau, Ellen. Lee Krasner: A Catalogue Raisonné. New York: Abrams, 1995.

Levin, Gail. Lee Krasner: A Biography. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2011.

Rose, Barbara. Lee Krasner: A Retrospective. Exh. Cat. Houston, Texas, Museum of Fine Arts / New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1983.

Embrace from the Permanent Collection of the Wichita Falls Museum of Art at MSU Texas

 
View Previous The Vault Unlocked