'Lee Krasner: Geometries of Expression' Review: A Painter's Patterns in Ogunquit
Maine's Ogunquit Museum focuses on the artist's exploratory early career as well as works by her contemporaries, offering an intriguing prehistory of Abstract Expressionism.

Ogunquit, Maine

Before Lee Krasner (1908-1984) became known for her large-scale, rhythmic all-over paintings, like "Gaea" (1966) at the Museum of Modern Art and "The Seasons" (1957) at the Whitney Museum; before she created her breakout "Little Images" series (1946-49) of intimate, textured works that have been likened to mosaics and hieroglyphics; and before, in 1942, she met her husband, Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), whose career became entwined with hers (mostly to her detriment, many say), Krasner was an artist in formation, setting a pattern of experimentation that she would follow for the rest of her career. In retrospect, it may be said to have defined her.

"Lee Krasner: Geometries of Expression," at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art through Nov. 17, explores these early, less-known phases of Krasner's career, and adds context with samples by her peers during that time—38 artworks in all, consisting of three Krasner paintings, 11 of her works on paper, and 24 pieces by other artists (many worth knowing better). Ranging from a charcoal drawing she made in 1937 to works she created in 1942, the exhibit attempts to recover lost chapters in Krasner's story, which tends to begin in the mid-1940s. The retrospective that brought her widespread recognition, which opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in October 1983, and then moved to MoMA, featured nothing made before the late 1940s, when the Abstract Expressionist movement, to which she belonged, was establishing New York as the center of the Western art world.

But as a teenager Krasner decided her future was as an artist. As she recalled for an oral history in the Archives of American Art, she was not deterred by a high-school art teacher who reluctantly gave her the lowest possible passing grade, and told her, "The only reason I am passing you in art is . . . [to allow] you to graduate." Krasner simply carried on, gaining admittance to the Women's Art School of Cooper Union and then the National Academy of Design.

By then, abstract art was on its way to domination, but which style of abstract art would rule was still to be determined. Was it to be inspired by nature? Or by a yearning for freedom to be modern? Or Cubism? Or whatever else European artists were doing? Krasner explored many avenues, in different venues and circumstances, but Devon Zimmerman, who curated this show, contends that geometry was the throughline of her career.

Mr. Zimmerman has installed the exhibition using four hubs of her activity, each fixed on distinct bodies of work. Like so many other artists, Krasner studied with Hans Hofmann (1880-1966), a pivotal painter and instructor who exposed his students to Picasso and Matisse, among others, and advanced the notion of "push/pull"—or using varying colors, textures and planes to create spatial dynamism in a painting. Two Krasner drawings from 1937, a still life that conveys its elements with mere suggestions and a geometric abstraction, would lay the groundwork for paintings like "Blue Square" (1940-42). On a white background, Krasner uses impasto brushstrokes, two shades of white, and planes of black and blue to activate a canvas that is, at its base, a still life.

In 1939, Krasner joined American Abstract Artists, an artists-run cooperative that pushed for the acceptance of abstraction as a genre that was just as American as regionalism and representational art. In this strong section of the show, Krasner's "Lavender" (1942) depends on color and impasto brushstrokes to make the case for abstraction as a modernist mode to express experience. "Lavender" is matched, perhaps overshadowed, by other AAA paintings here. Specifically, Balcomb Greene's "Memory Forms" (1939-1971), a stark arrangement of shapes on a horizontally split canvas of black and green backgrounds; Rupert D. Turnbull's "Untitled (Abstraction B54)" (c. 1941), also thick with greens, but on all right-angled geometric forms; and Alice Trumbull Mason's curvilinear "Untitled (Red, Blue, & Black on Grey Ground)," from 1938, sparkle.

Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), a proponent of simple geometric forms rendered in primary colors, strongly influenced Krasner, among others. Here, Krasner's "Untitled" (c. 1939-40) arranges rectangles of white, blue and yellow in a compositionally balanced grid; later, she would rely on this sense of balance and geometry in her all-over paintings.

Finally, the exhibition presents works by Krasner and others for the Works Progress Administration, which employed her for about nine years. Unlike most of the WPA murals created around the country for public buildings, the murals designed for New York were largely abstract. Krasner created many designs, and judging by the examples here, most were filled with colorful, interlocking angular shapes or colorful, overlapped biomorphic shapes. Sadly, none were realized physically, a casualty of the program's end.

Installation view of work by Krasner's peers

Ever experimental, Krasner would go on to make the art that cemented her reputation as a leading Abstract Expressionist. "Geometries of Expression" is appealing largely because it shows her as a searching artist, not one to evolve in a continuum. As Mr. Zimmerman said in an interview, "she poses a question, and follows through to an answer, and then she poses another question. She doesn't come to a specific style." The rest of her career would underscore that independence of spirit.

But this is a small, focused exhibition, and it lacks a catalog. It isn't enough to write the lost chapters of Krasner's career. It is, however, a promising outline for further study.

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