Lee Krasner 'Living Colour'

Lee Krasner on a fag break while she cogitates her next painterly move.

This weekend my family and I went to the Lee Krasner show at The Barbican. This is a huge retrospective for the American artist who was once known as ‘the wife of Jackson Pollock’. Her way with colour and paint and scale, as well as collage and shape are without peer, especially in the post-war abstract-expressionist setting in which she was working. She is sooo not just ‘Jackson pollock’s widow’.

Krasner was a total badass — the freak death of her husband in a car accident propelled her to even greater, bolder, starker work. She continued to use his Long Island studio as her own and made work fizzing with energy and shape and stillness and staccato, furious colour. This is the first retrospective since the mid 1960s and my family and I were honoured to have been able to see it. Even my four year old was into a few of the paintings. Krasner’s paintings are wild, destructively bold, physical acts. The colour is out of this world.

Lee Krasner’s “Another Storm” (1963). WHen asked, my daughter said it looked like ‘mushrooms’.