Number 3 (Untitled)

Lee Krasner, 1951 · Gallery 401 · Floor 4

Alright so, Lee Krasner finally gets a show of her own. She's been painting for twenty-five years. Fall of 1951. Betty Parsons Gallery in New York. Fourteen paintings. One reviewer says it's like traveling through a vast uninhabited land of quiet color. Sounds promising, right? Nothing sells. This is one of the fourteen. Look at the dark red stripe, just left of the middle. The widest one. Even there, the paint's thin enough for the canvas to show through. Then there's that little hairline of yellow, about halfway down, just right of the middle. Barely anything. And over on the left, a skinny red stripe keeps breaking off and starting again. A couple of years later, Krasner's got her studio covered in black-and-white drawings. Floor to ceiling, all the way around. One day she walks in and hates all of it. Takes them down. Rips them apart. Throws them on the floor. She said later, "I don't know why I did it, except I certainly did it." So... she just leaves them there. Doesn't go back for a couple of weeks. Usually, when you leave a mess for two weeks, what you come back to is a mess. But she starts looking at the pieces. Something about them interests her. She picks them up and starts making collages. Then she goes after some of her oil paintings. Cuts those up too. By 1955, she has another show. Big collages. Torn edges, black patches, pieces of painted canvas put together in new ways. That's her turning point. And underneath some of them? The paintings from that first show. The ones nobody bought. Some became scraps. Others became the surface she built on. Only two survive as they were. You're looking at one.

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