Bodies, buds, and fruit in one rolling field

Stand in front of it. The painting is wide before it is anything else, about seven feet nine inches tall and a full seventeen feet across (235.6 by 517.8 cm), a mural-scale landscape canvas too big to take in with a single glance; it has to be walked. And the first thing that fills the eye, before any label, is a rolling field of swelling pink and rose forms: full, bulbous, ripened shapes, with off-white bulbs among them, the color of bodies and of fruit at its peak.

Held in the eye directly, any one of those forms refuses to settle into a single thing. The same rounded pink shape reads as a torso, then as a breast, then as a bud about to open, then as a piece of fruit about to fall; some read frankly as sexual or plant organs. Krasner keeps them unresolved on purpose, hovering between abstraction and the figurative, so the picture stays about life-force in general rather than any one body. What the canvas is overwhelmingly about is not grief. It is ripeness: growth, fertility, the turn of the seasons toward renewal.

Threaded through and around the pinks are passages of lush green and earthy ochre. This is the “earth green” the whole series is named for, and it does real work: it grounds the bright, fleshy bodies in something like leaf and soil, so the picture reads as bodies in a landscape of growth rather than bodies floating in a void. The warm pinks are the figures; the greens and ochres are the ground they grow out of. Krasner sets them so close in pitch that the field stays warm and overflowing all the way across.

The structure is there once you hunt for it, because a field this full needs holding. It is held by heavy black contour lines: sweeping dark brush-strokes that wrap each form and separate it from its neighbor, drawing the bodies and giving the whole surface its swing. This is the drawing inside the painting, and it is where Krasner’s long training as a draftsman shows. Without those black lines the swelling colors would dissolve into one warm blur; with them, the picture has a beat. They are the bones under all that ripe flesh.

Soften the focus and the picture refuses one thing: a center. There is no single focal point, no climax, nowhere the eye is meant to land and rest. Instead the forms recur across the whole width in a steady, rolling beat, so the eye travels the full seventeen feet left to right the way it would scan a field or read a frieze. This is allover composition, a term out of Pollock’s drip pictures (where the poured line covers the whole surface evenly, edge to edge, with no middle), but Krasner has bent it toward something living. Pollock’s allover field was woven line; hers is bodily rhythm, the same swelling forms repeating like the verses of a season. The huge surface is organized not as a scene but as a pulse, read the way you’d watch something grow.