White Squares
Lee Krasner
LEE KRASNER, 1948. ENAMEL AND OIL ON CANVAS.
As a child in an Orthodox Jewish family, Lee Krasner looked upon the Hebrew texts with awe. Unable to read the language, she nonetheless studied the characters religiously, removing them from their context they took on purely abstract, aesthetic forms. It was this experience that Krasner credits with her lifelong fascination with calligraphy, ancient languages, and hieroglyphics. The rigidity of the structure and evenness of placement within the canvas lend this work a textual feeling. It is communicating a message we cannot read, requiring us to dissaciate the forms from meaning and interpret them purely emotionally. She herself described it as ‘hieroglyphic’, and it was her goal to merge the organic and the abstract together in formalism. The abstraction is clear, but the organic forms emerge as much in the sense of process as the subjects. Shards of yellow, green, and blue emerge out of the dense black background as if stones glistening at the bottom of a sea. We fall into the work, down the rectangular spiral into a natural world, familiar and yet altogether alien.