Black and White

Lee Krasners Black and White from 1953 is a collage of oil paint, gouache, and cut and torn painted paper on cream laid paper that represents a crucial moment in the artists career, when she was developing the collage technique that would become central to her practice and that allowed her to recycle earlier paintings into new compositions. The year 1953 was one of crisis and transformation for Krasner: her marriage to Jackson Pollock was under increasing strain, and she had recently destroyed a body of earlier work that she found unsatisfactory, cutting up the canvases and using the fragments as material for new collages. Black and White exemplifies this strategy of destruction and reconstruction, in which earlier paintings are cut and torn into fragments that are then reassembled into new compositions that respond to the shapes, colors, and gestures of the original material while creating something entirely new. The title Black and White signals the chromatic restriction that Krasner imposed on herself in this period, limiting her palette to the two extremes of the tonal range in order to focus on the structural and gestural qualities of her work without the distraction of color. The adhesive residue visible on the paper surface is a physical record of the collage process, in which fragments were attached and reattached as the composition evolved, creating a surface that bears the traces of its own making in a way that reveals the working process behind the finished work.

Krasners Black and White collages are foundational works in the history of collage as a medium for abstract painting, and their strategy of recycling earlier work into new compositions influenced the development of process art and the broader tradition of destruction and reconstruction in postwar American art. The collages demonstrated that Krasner was making independent innovations while her husband was receiving all the attention.

A 1953 collage by Krasner of oil paint, gouache, and cut and torn painted paper, representing her crucial innovation of recycling earlier paintings into new compositions in a restricted black and white palette that focuses on structure and gesture.