Lee Krasner: Works from the 1960s
Opening Reception: Monday, October 19, 6–8pm
Gagosian, 4 rue de Ponthieu, Paris
Olney Gleason, Gagosian, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation are pleased to present Lee Krasner: Works from the 1960s, an exhibition of paintings and works on paper at Gagosian’s rue de Ponthieu gallery in Paris. Opening on October 19, on the eve of Art Basel Paris, the exhibition marks the first solo presentation of Krasner’s work in France. It brings to Paris a focused examination of a transformative decade in the career of one of the most important American painters of the twentieth century. The exhibition follows the landmark European retrospective Lee Krasner: Living Colour (2019–21) and coincides with Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (October 4, 2026–January 31, 2027), the first major exhibition to examine Krasner and Jackson Pollock together in depth. The simultaneous presentations in Paris and New York underscore the renewed international consideration of Krasner’s work and her singular contribution to the history of postwar art.
A central figure of the New York School, Krasner developed an independent and continually evolving practice over more than six decades. Born in Brooklyn in 1908, she studied with Hans Hofmann and absorbed influences ranging from European modernism, including Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, and Pablo Picasso, to the emerging language of American abstraction. Alongside artists including Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko, Krasner and Pollock, who married in 1945, maintained an ardent artistic dialogue, serving as each other’s most exacting critics and strongest supporters.
Krasner’s relationship with France was both artistically and personally significant. She traveled to Europe for the first time in the summer of 1956, visiting museums including the Musée du Louvre, and was in Paris when she learned of Pollock’s death that August. The encounter with European painting would remain an important point of reference throughout her career.
Throughout the 1960s, living between the hamlet of Springs in East Hampton and her apartment and studio in Manhattan, Krasner entered a period of intense experimentation and reinvention. Tackling canvases of unprecedented scale and increasingly lyrical compositions, she worked with newly restricted palettes and began to apply oil paint directly from the tube. These developments gave rise to the Umber Paintings (1959–62) and Primary Series (1960s), now among her most renowned painterly achievements. Her growing international recognition was affirmed by the 1965 retrospective Lee Krasner: Paintings, Drawings and Collages at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, curated by Bryan Robertson.
Extending almost 2.8 meters (109 1/8 inches) in length, Seeded (1960) encompasses the viewer’s field of vision with a dynamic composition in a palette limited to earth tones. One of her Umber works, a group of paintings created during a period of insomnia when Krasner frequently worked at night under artificial light, Seeded combines multidirectional brushstrokes that shift between broad, diffuse passages and taut, energetic marks. Krasner would later describe the Umber series as going “down deep into something which wasn’t easy or pleasant.”
By the mid-1960s, Krasner had turned toward more saturated hues, exploring calligraphic color experiments and works in gouache on paper. An untitled gouache from 1964 juxtaposes purple and yellow, while the oil painting Icarus (1964) suggests the heat and intensity of its mythological namesake approaching the sun. Portrait in Green (1969), Krasner’s only painting on canvas made that year, is composed of sweeping rhythmic gestures in viridian oil paint, accentuated by passages of off-white and linear forest green brushstrokes. The exhibition culminates in the majestic oil on canvas Comet (1966–70), in which vigorous forms of magenta and emerald green are overlaid with cream and white, creating an expansive interplay between figure and ground with an energy in keeping with the celestial associations of its title.
Krasner’s work has never before been the subject of a solo exhibition in France, despite her long-standing engagement with French modernism and nomination as Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1982. Nearly forty-five years after receiving that distinction, the exhibition brings a distilled selection of her work to Paris, situating this decisive period of her practice within the broader history of twentieth-century abstraction.
Works from the 1960s is also Krasner’s debut at Gagosian, in collaboration with Olney Gleason, which represents the artist’s work globally in partnership with the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.
