The Seasons

Seventeen feet of swelling pink-and-rose forms, lush green and ochre, drawn together by sweeping black lines: bodies, buds, and fruit in one rolling field. Painted by a woman at full mural scale, in the barn studio that had been Pollock’s, an image of growth and ripeness made out of loss.

1. 1
   The swelling pink and rose forms

   Across the whole field, the dominant note: full, bulbous, ripened pink-and-rose shapes

   The painting’s engine is a field of full, swelling pink-and-rose forms, read at once as bodies, breasts, buds about to open, and fruit about to fall. They are the emotional center of the picture, and what they carry is ripeness, not mourning. The literal fact on the canvas is the rounded rose-pink shapes; the reading of them as a fertility image, growth answering loss, is a reading, and a fair one.
2. 2
   The green and the ochre

   Threaded through and around the pinks, in passages of foliage-green and earthy ochre

   Lush green and earthy ochre run through and around the pink forms, grounding the bright bodies in something like leaf and soil. This is the "earth green" that names the whole series Krasner painted in these barn-studio years: bodies rooted in vegetation, the warm and the growing together rather than the cool and abstract.
3. 3
   The rhythmic, allover repetition

   The composition as a whole, scanned left to right for a place to rest

   There is no single focal point. The forms recur across the entire seventeen-foot width in a steady, rolling beat, so the eye travels the full canvas the way it would scan a field or a frieze rather than landing on one center. This is allover composition (a term out of Pollock’s drip pictures) bent toward organic, bodily rhythm: the weight spread evenly to all the edges.
4. 4
   Body, bud, and fruit at once

   In the individual forms, anywhere the shapes hover between abstraction and a recognizable thing

   The shapes are kept deliberately unresolved: the same form can be read as a torso, a seed-pod, a piece of fruit, or a sexual organ, and Krasner does not settle which. That hovering between abstraction and the figurative is on purpose. It is how the picture stays a picture of life-force in general rather than an illustration of any one body.
5. 5
   The heavy black contour lines

   Wrapping and dividing the colored forms throughout, the sweeping dark brush-lines

   Sweeping black brush-lines wrap and separate the colored forms, drawing the bodies and giving the whole surface its swing. This is the drawing inside the painting: the line that organizes the rolling field, sets the rhythm, and keeps the swelling colors from dissolving into one another. Krasner’s training as a draftsman is right here, structuring an otherwise overflowing surface.
6. 6
   The mural width

   The full span of the work, about 7 ft 9 in tall and a true 17 ft 0 in wide

   Step back: the canvas is a true seventeen feet across and more than seven and a half feet tall. It is built to be walked, not glanced at, a wall-sized statement that asks for the same physical scale as the big AbEx canvases of its moment. The size is doing argumentative work, claiming a mural ambition that, in that circle and that year, was almost entirely a man’s preserve.