America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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New York, N.Y., 1955

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In the aftermath of World War II, a number of artists experienced an existential crisis: How could art be meaningful in the wake of such tragedy? What visual language could describe inner and outer worlds so irrevocably transformed? Artists in the United States felt compelled to make art that was unmistakably new. In 1948, Barnett Newman wrote of himself and his peers: “We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of Western European painting.” By largely abandoning European influences, they invented what came to be known as Abstract Expressionism, the first American art movement to gain international acclaim.

European Surrealism, nevertheless, offered crucial inspiration, especially its exploration of the psyche through automatic drawing, anthropomorphism, and personal symbolic languages—elements that can be seen in the work of Arshile Gorky, Lee Krasner, and Richard Pousette-Dart. Others, including Alfonso Ossorio and Jackson Pollock, focused on how the spontaneous interaction between materials and radical processes, such as spraying and pouring, might convey authenticity and immediacy. This art evinced an unprecedented sense of scale, tied not only to the size of the canvas but to the muscular strokes and broad fields of color that dominated it. Critic Edwin Denby recalled that for him and Willem de Kooning this expansiveness came from their culture and surroundings: “At the time we all talked a great deal about scale in New York, and about the difference of instinctive scale in signs, painted color, clothes, gestures, everyday expressions between Europe and America. We were happy to be in a city the beauty of which was unknown, uncozy, and not small scale.”

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

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LEE KRASNER (1908-1984), THE SEASONS, 1957

Fruits and abstract leaves in red and green.
Fruits and abstract leaves in red and green.

Lee Krasner, The Seasons, 1957. Oil on canvas, 92 3/4 × 203 3/4 in. (235.59 x 517.53 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from Frances and Sydney Lewis (by exchange), the Mrs. Percy Uris Purchase Fund and the Painting and Sculpture Committee 87.7. © 2011 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

In The Seasons, Lee Krasner combined a traditional subject with a modern pictorial form, the all-over composition. Historically, the subject of the four seasons has offered artists the opportunity for allegorical meditations on the life cycle. Krasner’s version exemplifies the regenerative portion of that cycle, with boldly, almost garishly colored plant forms that seem to morph into sexual organs.

This monumental painting offered Krasner an outlet during a time of deep personal sorrow. The year before, her husband, fellow artist Jackson Pollock, had died in a car accident. In the wake of this sudden loss, Krasner remarked about The Seasons, “the question came up whether one would continue painting at all, and I guess this was my answer.”

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