1949

Composition

American, 1908 - 1984

Composition comes from Lee Krasner’s breakthrough series of “Little Image” paintings of the late 1940s. Meticulously crafted and intimately scaled, it reflects her deft control of innovative, unorthodox painting methods. Krasner—the wife of Jackson Pollock, one of the most celebrated artists in the postwar period—worked the canvas flat on a table, applying pigments with sticks and palette knives or straight from the tube. The picture’s overlapping skeins of dripped white paint form small, geometric compartments and convoluted designs atop a densely textured surface. Although seemingly impenetrable and unreadable, Composition celebrates painting as a primal means of communication through an analogy to picture-based writing systems.