Lee Krasner: Meet the Missus

When arrested in 1936 during a protest over the dismissal of 500 artists from the WPA Federal Art Project, Lee Krasner told the unsuspecting police officer processing her that her name was “Mary Cassatt.” (One of the similarly impish men arrested gave the name “Picasso.”) For most of her life and ever since her death in 1984, Krasner has been known primarily as Mrs. Jackson Pollock, wife and widow of the abstract expressionist who dominated American art during his brief life. Gail Levin’s Lee Krasner: A Biography corrects this case of mistaken identity in bringing Krasner out from behind the familiar labels and storylines to stand on her own as a powerfully fascinating figure and artist. Krasner’s “growing recognition” from the 2000 film Pollock (in which she was portrayed by Academy Award-winner Marcia Gay Harden) and novels such as John Updike's Seek My Face “owes more to fiction than fact,” Levin writes. Lee Krasner: A Biography proves that the facts are almost always more interesting. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Lee Krasner: Meet the Missus."

[Image: Lee Krasner. Right Bird Left, 1965.]

Flesh for Fantasy: The Nude in Art in America

“[T]he culture of the United States has always been one of massive internal contradictions,” Bram Dijkstra writes in his monumental Naked: The Nude in America, “in which surface harmonies breed countercultures that merely represent the dualistic opposite of the previously dominant cultural pieties.” Dijkstra targets the most “massive internal contradiction” of American society—a puritanically sexually repressed country that produces and consumes behind closed doors more pornography than any other spot on the globe. In Naked, Dijkstra lays bare the counterculture of art celebrating the human body through nude art while simultaneously reflecting the neuroses of the repressive mainstream. To borrow a phrase from Billy Idol, Dijkstra presents “flesh for fantasy” first as the nightmare of Puritanism and, more hopefully, as the perhaps impossible dream of a mature, open society. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Flesh for Fantasy."

[Image: Nan Goldin. Kate Moss on a White Horse. High-Gate Cemetery, London. 2001. Photograph © Copyright Nan Goldin.]

[Many thanks to Rizzoli for providing me with the image above from and a review copy of Naked: The Nude in America by Bram Dijkstra.]

Foreign Report: A New, Italian Take on Edward Hopper

Leave it to an Italian art publisher to do an American artist right. Skira’s Edward Hopper, distributed in the United States by Rizzoli, may be the finest single volume visually and critically on the elusive yet irresistible 20^th century artist. The familiar paintings are all there, but explorations into Hopper’s drawings, his subtle eroticism, his European influences, and even his influence on filmmaking add a whole new dimension, giving us the fullest picture of Hopper possible, all in one of the most beautiful publishing packages imaginable. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Foreign Report."

[Many thanks to Rizzoli USA for providing me with a review copy of Edward Hopper.]