Out of "Mrs. Jackson Pollock"’s shadow

For all that The Seasons claimed, recognition did not come quickly, and the way it was withheld is part of the picture’s story. When the Earth Green canvases were shown, a strand of criticism waved them off as derivative of Pollock’s work and “too decorative.”In the art writing of the period, “decorative” carried a coded charge: it filed a woman’s large, colorful, ambitious painting under pretty-and-minor rather than serious-and-major, a polite way of saying “feminine.” Krasner spent her career under exactly this kind of dismissal, the one that had once printed her name as “Mrs. Jackson Pollock.” She was blunt about what it cost her, and the line most often quoted has the dryness of someone who had heard it all:

“I was a woman, Jewish, a widow, a damn good painter, thank you, and a little too independent.”

The remark, recounted by her biographer Gail Levin from their first meeting, in 1971, circulates widely as Krasner’s own summary of why the art world kept her at arm’s length. Taken as reported, it is the whole fight in one sentence: she knew exactly how good she was, and she knew exactly which of the things on that list were being held against her.

The independent recognition she had earned arrived slowly and then, in the end, fully. A 1965 retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in London put her work in front of a serious European audience, and it was received more warmly there than at home, where the marginalization was sharpest. In 1973 the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York mounted Lee Krasner: Large Paintings, a show built precisely around the mural-scale ambition The Seasons embodies. And in the 1980s came the full reappraisal, including a major touring retrospective that finally set her among the first-generation Abstract Expressionists rather than in the margin beside one of them, and made her a standing precedent for the later women who claimed large-scale gestural and biomorphic abstraction as their own ground. Krasner died in 1984, having lived to see at least the beginning of that turn.

The Seasons itself entered the Whitney Museum of American Art by purchase. The credit line records the museum’s purchase “with funds from Frances and Sydney Lewis by exchange, the Mrs. Percy Uris Purchase Fund and the Painting and Sculpture Committee,” and the work carries the accession number 87.7. The Whitney’s record prints no explicit acquisition year; the “87” at the front of the accession number conventionally points to an acquisition around 1987, but that is an inference from the numbering, not a stated fact, so it sits as “roughly 1987” rather than a hard date. The painting is still in copyright (Krasner died in 1984; the rights sit with the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the Artists Rights Society), which is why it appears here small and credited rather than reproduced freely.

So the picture comes to rest as what it always was: a true seventeen feet of swelling pink and green, made by a woman who had been told, for decades, that the big statement was not hers to make. She made it anyway, in the studio where her husband had made his, the year after he died, and she titled it for the thing it is most about. Not an ending. The seasons turning over, toward growth.