BWW Reviews: The Visual Splendor of FROM THE MARGINS: LEE KRASNER / NORMAN LEWIS

In every respect, From the Margins: Lee Krasner / Norman Lewis is an exquisite exhibition. Some of this show's delicacy and poignancy seems inevitable: different though they were in many respects, both Krasner and Lewis were lyrical, painstaking painters. Both were minority members--Lewis, a man of Afro-Caribbean descent; Krasner, a woman of Russian Jewish heritage--of the very white and very male Abstract Expressionist movement. Both reached artistic maturity by creating fastidious and often flawless canvases while their more famous colleagues--de Kooning, Pollock, Mothwerwell, Kline--opted for grander, messier gestures. Neither has really been greeted with the deserved recognition until now, in a showcase at the Jewish Museum that is itself a lesson in fastidiousness and soulfulness of the highest order.

That we have this exhibition and this pairing (Krasner and Lewis were distant acquaintances, at best) is a stroke of fortune. In 2008, the Jewish Museum launched the much-publicized display Action/ Abstraction: Pollock, De Kooning, and American Art, which dealt mostly with household names in Abstract Expressionism and with the critics (Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg) who helped to make them household names. Lewis and Krasner were represented by one painting each, and were grouped in a section entitled "Blind Spots". Not the most auspicious circumstances, but the pairing stuck with curator Norman L. Kleeblatt. Half a decade later, and with the input of assistant curator Stephen Brown, Kleeblatt has figured out exactly what to do with these two artistic sensibilities--bring together a few dozen of Krasner's paintings and roughly the same number of Lewis's, place everything in chronological order, and allow comparisons, contrasts, correspondences to spring up everywhere. Separate their achievements back out if you want, or let Kleeblatt's setup work its magic and allow Lewis's skittering lines and Krasner's jaunty ciphers--and everything else they created--to become mutually illuminating.

Fortunately too, Kleeblatt doesn't allow Krasner's life to overshadow her art. Raised in Brooklyn and trained at Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design, she is most famous today for marrying and patiently enduring Jackson Pollock. It would be a mistake to absolutely ignore this connection--since some of the canvases that Krasner painted between 1948 and 1949 look like sensitive cousins of Pollock's famed drip paintings--though it would be an even greater mistake to make to much of the Krasner-Pollock link. Time and again in From the Margins, Krasner emerges as a vigorously independent painter. She could fight her influences to a halt, as she did in a muted yet breathtaking 1950 canvas--its subdued purple background and charged boxes of tomato red and lemon yellow as good as anything Hans Hoffmann devised. She could also astonish with those cipher paintings, which are among the few works of American abstraction that use vertical canvases and circular canvases to genuinely pleasing effect. By the time she finally composed paintings on the monumental scale favored by other Abstract Expressionists, Krasner had nothing left to prove; her 1965 painting Kufic, which stretches well over ten feet wide, bespeaks order, serenity, unity with golden hue upon golden hue.

Though Lewis's journey was very different, it brought him to some of the same destinations--both personally and artistically. He grew up primarily in Harlem, traveled with the Merchant Marine, and studied at Columbia University; by the mid 1930s, he had immersed himself in the Harlem arts scene. Like Krasner, Lewis was intimately linked to the textbook members of the New York School--particularly to Ad Reinhardt, who was among Lewis's close friends. But where Reinhardt preferred orderly geometries and dogmatic monochromes, Lewis gravitated to filaments of color, complex fade effects, and persistent hints of representation: Twilight Sounds, Florence, Congregation, and Lava are just a few of the Lewis canvases that Kleeblatt and Brown have picked out. Lewis isn't exactly a showman, but his paintings are often ornate and occasionally awe-inspiring. In Every Atom Grows, a mostly black-and-white entry from 1951, he somehow evokes everything from a dying birch forest to a hydrogen bomb explosion to a chessboard thrown against a funhouse mirror to his own, ultimately unclassifiable, fusion of pictorial chaos and pictorial discipline. When Lewis (again, in fascinating tandem with Krasner) gravitated to large-scale canvases in the 1960s, he preserved this spirit of tension. The largest of the Lewis works on display, Alabama II of 1969, interrupts a field of red with a few calligraphic brushstrokes, executed in deeper crimson. A symbol of bloodshed, or a formal experiment of puzzling, inescapable pathos?

If you're a devotee of Abstract Expressionism, you should leave From the Margins feeling that (at last) a curator has figured out how to handle Krasner and Lewis. And if you're a frequent guest of the Jewish Museum, you should leave this exhibit feeling (also at last) that someone has finally figured out what to do with all those salon-like galleries on the second floor: there have been some likable shows in these spaces, but these offerings have felt either too crowded (Marc Chagall: Love, War, and Exile) or too empty (Other Primary Structures) where installation and arrangement were concerned. But this is not the kind of always commanding, often over-ambitious affair that Action/Abstraction was, and it is for the best that it isn't. Krasner and Lewis don't need a fanfare exhibition: they are best served by a presentation that is light on thesis and argument--and believe me, the race and gender issues behind From the Margins could have resulted in enough politically-correct argumentation to encumber any curator and any artist. What these two painters need is contemplation, a chance for their art to be seen, absorbed, evaluated, and in some cases revered. That is exactly what the Jewish Museum has given them. Modesty, here, is perfection.

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