Lee Krasner
b. Brooklyn, New York, 1908–1984
Siren
1966
Oil on canvas
The Joseph H. Hirshhorn Bequest, 1981 (86.2768)
About Museums Without Men
Celebrated art historian Katy Hessel has launched an audio guide series highlighting the women and gender-nonconforming artists in the public collections of international museums. Museums Without Men is an ever-growing series that introduces museum visitors to underrepresented and often lesser-known artists, opening up collections to new and existing audiences who will be able to follow the audio stops while in the galleries or online. The series links public institutions globally, including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Hepworth Wakefield, UK; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; and Tate Britain, London, to foreground the important work that museums and galleries do by collecting and displaying women and gender-nonconforming artists, whether historical or contemporary.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Lee Krasner, Siren (1966). “Painting is not separate from life, it is one. It is like asking, do I want to live? My answer is yes, and I paint,” said Lee Krasner. Krasner’s canvases, to me, are explosions of paint. It’s almost like you can feel her emotion and expression formulate on the surface, dancing, pulsating, and crystallizing into shapes and forms.
She never makes preparatory studies, instead choosing to paint onto raw canvas. Lee Krasner was an art fanatic since childhood, and declared even in elementary school that she was going to be an artist. Born into a working class Orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn in 1908. Krasner had to escape tradition and build a life for herself.
Her break came in [00:01:00] 1929, when she was about 21, with the opening of The Modern, now MoMA, where she was able to see the splendors of the French modernists up close and in person in a museum dedicated to modern art for the very first time. Earlier in her career, she produced angular studies of the body, which progressed to paintings of splinter like shapes swirling in kaleidoscopic color.
But it was in the late 1950s that her work began to change, following the death of her artist husband, because she now had access to his expansive studio, where she could work on a colossal scale and let her marks fly. We can see this in her painting Siren, from 1966. Working with a single color, green, here she concentrates on form, melding dynamic shapes that hang on the threshold between [00:02:00] abstraction and figuration.
Hints of bodily fragments are interspersed with angular shapes, as if we are watching a battle play out between humans and animals, expression and form. It should be fitting then, that the title, Siren, refers to the hybridized creatures found in Greek mythology. Half human, half bird, they are famed for luring men to their death with enchanting sweet songs.
Sirens are mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey, written in the 7th to 8th century BC, when the sorceress Circe warns Odysseus that if he hears the singing of the sirens, he will never return home.
Now, you must remember that myths are myths, and they are steeped in misogyny, but the derogatory word siren is still used to refer to women today. While we don’t know why Krasner titled this particular [00:03:00] canvas Siren, we do know that she was fascinated by Greek myths, having in the 1960s titled her works such as Gaia, after the Goddess of Earth, or Icarus, who died by flying too near to the sun. Myths are constantly being reinvented and rewritten, in visual and written form. Perhaps this is what Krasner is showing us here. A state of flux, a battle for women to be taken seriously, and for the siren to be set free.
