Detail, The Seasons, 1957, Lee Krasner. This painting is the one I always used to visit in its hideaway nook behind the convoluted first addition to the Whitney Breuer. I would make my way down the confusing split level stairway to commune with it. Somehow it’s punch was even more affecting in this smaller space than it is on a more expansive wall in Renzo Piano’s Whitney 2.0. Though Krasner was technically an Abstractionist, in this work I saw figures and elements of nature, even a woman confronting the death of her husband Jackson Pollock’s death a year after he died in the auto crash. She seemed to be trying to get on with it with its brilliant shoots of green and pink and renewed life bursting everywhere . I think of it as a happy painting. She said, “The question came up whether one would continue painting at all and I guess this was my answer.”
Joan Mitchell's Tumultuous Life
After a suicide attempt in 1954 brought on by the wild nights at the Cedar Bar where she became a 'brawling, destabilizing demon when drunk", a tumultuous relationship with the painter Mike Goldberg and her father's death, Joan Mitchell painted this City Landscape in 1955. It was the very height of the Abstract Expressionist movement, yet each painter had found his or her own way,
"I don't go off and slop and drip," she said, obviously referring to Jackson Pollock, "I stop, look, and listen."