This thumping doodle by Lee Krasner — whatever it is, I like it, not least because it looks like some kind of writing devised by a sensibility going for broke. For that matter it could be the shower tile of a Venusian. The “Jewish girl from Brooklyn’s” early influences are pegged as “Hebrew calligraphy, cubism, Mondrian and especially Matisse.”

Krasner’s artefact conveys well nigh infinite possibility as to what a painting can be or what could be a painting. Nothing adjacent to “pretty” or “ugly,” just intricacy tantamount to a perfervid tramontane hallucination. It makes her partner’s drips look lazy.

The tale of Krasner’s 1950s collages is one of those creation stories that love to tell themselves and be told. They acquire the status of deep lore surrounding deceased practitioners whose leavings accrete value trousered by museums and galleries. 

At a dead end after struggling with some recalcitrant drawings, she ripped them in half and threw them on the floor. “Having finished this bout of destruction, I slammed the door and walked away,” she said. Days later, she saw the possibilities. She tore more, she pasted those scraps to paper — and later Masonite — and interlaced them with tangled, cursive, or thrusting marks.

Who hasn’t struggled with a “recalcitrant” drawing? The upshot in this case has the heat of annunciation: “Lo,” spake the angel, a connoisseur. “My jaw dropped. She was a really great painter.”

(Amei Wallach, “For Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, Equal Footing at the Met,” New York Times, 2-25-26)

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