1938 (SOLD)

Oil on paper

19 x 25 inches (48.3 x 63.3 cm)

Signed and dated lower left

Ex-collection:
The Artist
Pollock Krasner Foundation
Robert Miller Gallery, New York
Private collection until the present

Literature:
Ellen G. Landau, Lee Krasner: A Catalogue Raisonné, New York, 1995, cat. no. 42, p. 41, illustrated

About the Painting:
In Untitled (Still Life), “Krasner demonstrated how Hofmann’s theory of “push-pull” could be expressed with color. She left a lot of white paper showing around and between wedge-shaped areas of pure hue in an attempt to duplicate the “aerated” surfaces she admired in Matisse’s pre-Fauve paintings. Referencing Matisse’s Collioure pictures, she worked her colors so that they appear to expand and contract, metaphorizing three-dimensional space. In some of these oil still lifes, Krasner counterpointed identifiable objects with an armature of swinging horizontal and vertical lines. In most, however, she allowed color areas to work on their own. Rough suggestions of a receding tabletop can occasionally be read, but three-dimensionality is more often suggested through the push and pull of warm/cool tensions. Bottles, melons, and other still-life accoutrements are reduced to triangles and circles, or nonspecific mosaic-like dabs and patches of differentiated hues.”
Ellen G. Landau, Lee Krasner: A Catalogue Raisonné, New York, 1995, p.39