Considerations...: Lee Krasner

On this Linda Eve, it will be an afternoon of cleaning. Julia and I stopped for donuts after dropping Gabriel off at school, checked out some books at the library, and then went our separate ways. I will take Gabriel to the pool after I pick him up from school.

Prediction for tonight: the Heat again, by five points.

So did we kick off the 500 Greatest Performances of All Time yesterday or what? All right, let's keep on.

Paul Scofield
as Judge Thomas Danforth in The Crucible (1996)

This was an emotional, high-pitched, punch-to-the-gut adaptation of Arthur Miller's classic (with a screenplay by Miller himself) with a dream cast (Daniel Day-Lewis, Joan Allen, Winona Ryder, Bruce Davison); lord among them was Scofield as the stern, unforgiving judge who has come to investigate what all the hysterical Salem girls are up to. Scofield, with his long face of death and rich, sonorous voice, is unforgettable, looking like he steeped out of a Bosch or Hogarth painting. "Now we shall touch the bottom of this swammmmmmppppp!" he cries out, in one of the best line readings I've ever heard.

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Twenty-eight years ago today, Lee Krasner died. We know her best as the beleaguered wife of Jackson Pollock, but she was an extraordinary Abstract Expressionist in her own right - and, some might say, a more palatable, visually interesting artist.

Krasner (1908-1984) studied at various art schools in New York and during the Depression worked menial jobs while she attended classes at night. Her work started out in realist mode but after attending the Hans Hoffman School of Fine Arts, she began to play with Fauvism, Cubism, and abstraction.

During the mid-1930s, she was employed in the mural division at the Works Progress Administration. When she met Jackson Pollock in the early 1940s, she was so drawn to him, so immersed in his own talent and work, that her own work suffered and was placed on the back burner for a period. The two moved to rural New York in the mid-1940s and their work blossomed. In the early 1950s, their marriage crumbling, Krasner began excelling in Matisse-like collages.

After Pollock died, Krasner began working in his barn - large autobiographical works generated by whole body movement dominate this period. Fauvism, collage, abstraction - she returned to these styles again and again throughout the last decades of her life.

Krasner grew up in a traditional Jewish family and was the most educated of the New York artists she associated with and befriended. She will probably always be best known as Pollock's wife, business manager and sparring partner, but her own work demonstrated quite a range. Her work is often autobiographical; she saw no difference between art and life - her work was her life.

The above work, 1965's Night Creatures (in the collection at the MET in NYC), is one of the post-Pollock works she did in a long period of grief and mourning, raw outpourings of loss and and insomniac grief. A work of acryllic on paper, it's a piece in which rhythmic whirls of black and white seem to wrap around disembodied eyes. Suggestive and disturbing, it's a menacing work that is hard to ignore, to shrug off. Are there figures within the dense foliage of dizzying swirls? Who knows?

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We've reached the halfway on out 100 Most Influential Photographers of All Time (according to Professional Photographer magazine)!

Corrine Day (#50)

Day was a British photographer whose life was cut short when she was diagnosed with a brain tumor at the age of thirty-one in 1996. She was expected to live no longer than eight years, but lived for another fourteen, dying in 2010. Day, who formed close attachments with many of the people she shot, brought a hard-edged, sometimes messy documentary feel to fashion photography - what we can look back on now and call "grunge." She became well-known for a shoot she did of Kate Moss in 1993 for British Vogue in Moss' own flat; the images have a strewn, lived-in, almost uncomfortable feel to them. For seven years, Day, while working for many fashion magazines, constructed her book Diary; the book, which was published in 2000, was a bleak but hopeful, accurate, dark-hued, extremely personal account (through photographs) of her life and friends.

Kate Moss, 1993

from Diary

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A Soul Track for Tuesday?

"Dark End of the Street," by James Carr. Carr (1942-2001) was the greatest soul singer the average music fan has never heard of. Born in Mississippi (in a town near the birthplace of John Lee Hooker and Sam Cooke), Carr was the son of a preacher who moved the family to Memphis, where Carr started singing in gospel groups. He joined the Goldwax label (formed in the success of Stax Records) and really only was of musical relevance in the late 1960s, when he released thirteen singles and two albums. By most accounts, he wasn't mentally stable and was prone to deep depression. He faded out and tried to mount a minor comeback in the 1990s, which unfortunately wasn't to be. He died of lung cancer in Memphis in 2001.

His version of "The Dark End of the Street"is, by any account, one of the highlights of soul or pop music. For Carr, the Dan Penn-Chips Moman composition would be his biggest hit, reaching all the way to #10 in the Black Singles Chart (#77 pop), but its longevity isn't just the result of his stirring version of it, but the various other covers of the song: the Flying Burrito Brothers, Percy Sledge, Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Dolly and Porter, Linda Ronstadt, Cat Power, to name but a few. It was off Carr's great 1966 album You Got My Mind Messed Up.

A masterpiece.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzcdNwIkmYA

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5 Things for this week...

5 Regional Places to Take Linda when she's in town