The biggest canvas she had ever attempted

In the barn, in 1957, Krasner built The Seasons, and it was the biggest thing she had attempted to that point: a canvas a full seventeen feet wide and more than seven and a half feet tall. The date matters, because the dust of 1956 clings to it. Pollock died in August 1956, and the move into the barn and the start of this body of work belong to that year; but the canvas itself is a 1957 painting, dated firmly 1957 by the Whitney Museum, which owns it. The famous death-year is the year before, not the year of the picture.

The medium is worth getting exactly right, because it ties Krasner to the circle she came out of. It is oil and house paint on canvas, not oil alone. Like Pollock, Krasner reached for commercial house paint, the cheap industrial enamel sold for walls and doors, alongside her artist’s oils. That choice is a quiet piece of the AbEx story in itself: these painters were building heroic pictures out of hardware-store material, and the surface of The Seasons carries both the slow body of oil and the flatter, faster flow of house paint.

The Seasons is not a one-off. It is the centerpiece of a body of work now called the “Earth Green” series, the run of large, biomorphic, vegetal, brightly colored canvases Krasner painted in the barn studio in roughly 1956 to 1959 (related canvases include Sun Woman I and the painting that gave the series its name). Biomorphic means built from rounded, organic, living-looking shapes, the curves of bodies and plants rather than the straight lines of geometry; that is the language of these pictures, and The Seasons is the largest and most ambitious of them.

One thing stays easy to blur, so it is worth separating: the Earth Green pictures are the green ones, full of pink and foliage and growth. They are not the dark night paintings. A couple of years after this, Krasner could not sleep, and she began a different series in the same barn, the “Night Journey” or umber paintings of about 1959 to 1962, worked in browns and off-whites by artificial light because she could not face color in the small hours. Those are a separate, darker run. The Seasons belongs to the green ones, the daylight ones, the ones about ripeness and growth.