The Museum of Modern Art opened on November 8, 1929, in several rented rooms on the 12th floor of the Heckscher Building—today the Crown Building—at 730 Fifth Avenue in New York City. Lee Krasner (1908–1984) visited the exhibition on November 9 with several of her classmates from the National Academy of Design. “We disbanded after leaving the show, and there was no time to compare notes…but the after-affects were automatic,” Krasner recollected later to the art critic Lawrence Campbell. “A freeing…an opening of a door. Seeing those French paintings (the inaugural exhibition featured Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Seurat) stirred my anger against any form of provincialism.” Apples painted from still life for her student work at the Academy began to sit differently in the picture space. Similarly, as the story goes, after seeing their first Matisse and Picasso works, she and fellow students responded with shapes, colors, and compositional choices that caused their portrait instructor to hurl paintbrushes across the classroom and exclaim, “I can’t teach you people anything.” While Krasner valued her foundational art training, these experiences exemplified the attitudes of the time. In the late-1920s and early-1930s art circles of New York City, there was enormous debate and upheaval around the notion of what makes a picture interesting. Abstraction was taking hold in the broadest sense, and European avant-garde movements like De Stijl were beginning to influence American art forms.

In the Ogunquit Museum of American Art’s exhibition Lee Krasner: Geometries of Expression, Krasner’s early drawings and paintings hang with works from the same period by some of her dearest and lifelong artist friends—Burgoyne Diller, Mercedes Matter, Ilya Bolotowsky, and Balcomb and Gertrude Greene—as well as her renowned teacher, the brilliant conveyor of the abstract concept “push/pull,” Hans Hofmann. The exhibition centers on four circles of influence for the young Krasner: her study with Hofmann, her employment with the Works Progress Administration (WPA), her involvement with artists’ organizations like the American Abstract Artists, and her reverence for De Stijl founder and artist Piet Mondrian, who was also a friend. Geometries is lovingly co-curated by guest curator Michèle Wije, who previously curated the exhibition Sparkling Amazons: Abstract Expressionist Women of the 9th Street at the Katonah Museum of Art in New York, and Devon Zimmerman, curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, whose own research on De Stijl and the networks that fueled modernism is reflected in the intimate experience of connection that happens from one picture to the next. “This is a period of time when American identity was up for grabs,” says Zimmerman. “We are interested in how Krasner, and many of her friends and peers, turned to abstract art to engage an international community of artists responding to the tumult of modern life, and in turn, to make an argument for American culture as global.”

Krasner’s gorgeous abstract Mural Studies for Studio A, WNYC Radio Station in gouache on paper represent a personally significant (but ultimately unrealized) project for the Federal Art Project for New York and New Jersey, a woman-led regional division of the WPA established by the federal government in the mid-1930s in response to the Great Depression—a lifeline for artists who were literally starving. The Federal Art Project provided creative employment at survivable wages as well as equal pay for male and female artists. Krasner jumped in at the outset, qualifying for numerous projects and always hoping for the opportunity to work on her own abstract mural. That opportunity eventually came through WNYC Radio Station in 1941; however, only the studies were made, as the project was scrapped when the United States entered World War II.

Geometries is infused with the mark of Piet Mondrian. Mondrian’s limited-palette grid compositions were so important to Krasner and her contemporaries, and it’s exciting to see their reverent but free-thinking responses to his work in their own—especially Charmion von Wiegand’s lovely Untitled (Geometric Abstraction) oil on canvas. Hans Hofmann is also ever-present, and while his influence is much louder and bigger than the boundaries of this exhibition, those boundaries allow a focus on just this slice of time, when Hofmann was famously tearing up his students’ work in front of them (including Krasner’s) to reassemble the pieces in a new more dynamic relationship with the picture plane. It’s refreshing to visit Krasner at this time of her life, when so much was new and coming into being. The artist died months before the Museum of Modern Art launched Lee Krasner: A Retrospective, the “first-ever comprehensive survey elucidating Krasner’s importance as a vanguard Abstract Expressionist.”

Lee Krasner: Geometries of Expression will be on view at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Ogunquit, until November 17, 2024.