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In previous exercises, we’ve asked you to look at art that’s more representational — a bridge scene, colorful buckets, a landscape. With art like that, there’s no question about what you’re looking at, in a literal sense.
This piece is different. Whatever you might see, or think you see, it’s not a clear or obvious depiction of anything real. It’s called “The Seasons,” painted in 1957 by the Brooklyn-born artist Lee Krasner. It’s made of oil and house paint (yes, the paint used to paint houses) applied to a 17-foot-long canvas.
The piece hangs on the seventh floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, on its own wall.
What’s in this painting?
There are only a few colors here: brown outlines, a few shades of green, some large pink areas, and a few small spots of yellow:
The paint is applied thinly in some places. In others, you can see gravity pulling the paint down, dripping across the canvas.
The large forms are big and swirly — the actual canvas is more than seven feet tall — and feel as if they were painted fast with a big brush. Smaller circles surround them. There are some sharper shapes on the edges …
… that look like leaves and foliage.
Your brain may start to see faces in some of the swoops and swirls.
(That’s a phenomenon called “face pareidolia.” It turns out our brains love faces.)
If you saw none of these things, or had a hard time connecting with the art in your time, it may be worth acknowledging something obvious: Abstract art often makes people mad. Spend five minutes in front of an abstract piece in your local museum, and you’ll hear everything from “I could do that” to “This makes no sense” to “Why is this art?” It can feel inaccessible, as if it requires a special education or art history degree to understand, or at least appreciate properly.
“Certain ways of reading abstraction can be complicated for people who aren’t used to looking at it,” said Kim Conaty, the chief curator at the Whitney, when I spoke with her. (This painting is right outside her office.)
When you do connect with an abstract piece, it can be powerful, she said. Conaty was a pre-med student in college — before a required Art History 101 class.
“And what was the thing that caught my attention and maybe changed my entire path? It was abstraction,” she said. “I just couldn’t get over these new forms, new ideas, new worlds and the idea that through abstraction an artist could make a world that you’ve never seen before.”
She recommends looking closely, trying to pick up clues on how the painting was made. What color did Krasner start with? What colors are on top of that? Where did the brush run out of paint? How did she reach the top of the canvas?
“It causes you to slow down, prompts you to look harder, to follow the lines, to try to imagine, like what it was to make this work,” she said.
You could ask what feelings these colors evoke. And that might lead to questions like, as Conaty said, “What does it mean to paint a feeling?”
When Krasner painted this, she was grappling with very complicated feelings.
Krasner painting in the studio in 1969.
Mark Patiky, via the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center
She was a woman in a male-dominated art world. She was a relatively famous abstract artist married to the most famous abstract artist, Jackson Pollock. She painted small works in an upstairs bedroom of their house on Long Island. Pollock painted his monumental “drip” paintings on the floor of the much larger barn.
This is the floor of the barn at the Pollock-Krasner house. It’s open for visitors starting in May.
Gordon M. Grant for The New York Times
In 1956, with the marriage strained from Pollock’s drinking and an affair, she left for Paris to get some space. While in Paris, she got a call in the middle of the night. Pollock had died. He was drunk and crashed his car.
A few months after his death, she moved from her small upstairs studio into the barn. Depressed and sleepless, she tacked a 17-foot-long canvas to the wall and began painting again. “The Seasons” was the first piece to emerge. It was her largest work to date.
“This period was a period of mourning, a kind of resetting for Krasner,” Conaty said. “And yet, when you look at this painting, it does not feel like a mourning period. It is luscious and lyrical and vibrant, and it just feels like new beginnings.”
Krasner spoke about this tension in a 1979 interview, allowing for the possibility that her feelings and her paintings were just out of sync — one had not yet caught up to the other.
“How could this so-called ‘serene’ or ‘alive,’ very ‘alive’ painting come through at a moment when I was as depressed as I was or as low as one could be?” she said. “Well, I registered that this was happening but I certainly had not been able to explain it in any way.”
Part of the draw of abstract art is that it can bring up strong feelings, in the painter and the viewer. There is no “right” answer despite our brain’s desperate craving for one. Some find that maddening. Others, freeing.
“I don’t want everything explained,” she said later in the interview. “It makes me uncomfortable.”