THE MANY SIDES OF LEE KRASNER; AFTER TAKING A BACK SEAT TO POLLOCK, ARTIST GETS A NEW VIEWING AT LACMA.

Byline: Reed Johnson Staff Writer

The ``Lee Krasner'' exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is the first major retrospective devoted to the painter since her death in 1984.

But which Lee Krasner is on view? The dutiful student of Hans Hofmann and secondhand disciple of Matisse and Picasso? The dynamic feminist forerunner who became the only female painter associated with the New York school of abstract expressionism?

The late bloomer who didn't discover her true artistic voice until her fourth decade on the planet? Or the cantankerous woman whose abrasive personal style probably cost her points with posterity?

In fact, all these aspects of Krasner's remarkable life and career receive their due in this touring show of 60 paintings, collages and drawings organized by Independent Curators International and running at LACMA through Jan. 2.

One side of Krasner you won't easily find, however, is the ``neglected'' painter who never escaped the shadow of her famous husband, Jackson Pollock. If anything, this exhibition suggests that Krasner's stock may be ready for an upward reappraisal similar to the one Pollock received following last year's major New York retrospective.

While Pollock's stature as a modern art icon was probably sealed the instant he lost his life in a 1956 car accident, Krasner's output and reputation have ripened with age. While Pollock seemed to sprint through his too-brief career in an unpremeditated creative fury, Krasner paced herself, continuing to produce prescient and important work when she was well into her 60s.

Still, old labels die hard - particularly when they contain truthful elements. If it's too simplistic to describe Krasner merely as Pollock's protege and appendage, it's equally clear from this show that Krasner used her husband's work as a yardstick and an entry point for her own development throughout their 11-year marriage. Krasner herself freely acknowledged Pollock's influence, which was virtually inescapable for any artist of that generation anyway.

Although Krasner was better-known when they met, Pollock's drip paintings, made between 1947 and 1951, sent his reputation on a meteoric trajectory - followed by an equally swift personal burnout. At the time of the tragic accident, Pollock hadn't painted for nearly a year and a half, heaping fuel on an already volatile ego.

Not coincidentally, it was only after Pollock's death - preceded by his backsliding into heavy drinking and taking up with a mistress 18 years his junior - that Krasner emerged fully as a major American painter on her own terms.

Turning away from the macho self-absorption of the abstract expressionist fraternity, Krasner created artworks that were more provisional and contemplative but hardly less personal than those of her impulsive mate and colleague.

By breaking her career into discrete but continuous chapters, LACMA's show emphasizes the multifaceted quality of Krasner's output. Her work, rather than being an extension of one mythic, monumental persona such as Pollock's, is more like a patchwork quilt of multiple, intersecting artistic strategies and identities.

Born in 1908 in a still-rural section of Brooklyn to Russian Orthodox Jewish immigrants, Krasner was a hard-working, relatively well-educated teen-ager when she began taking drawing courses in the late 1920s.

While obtaining a teaching certificate, she met the art critic Harold Rosenberg and began a lifelong friendship. It was Rosenberg who introduced her to the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, whose writings impacted the early 20th-century avant-garde. Through Rosenberg, she also gained entry into the Greenwich Village intellectual culture of the 1930s.

In 1934, Krasner began working for the New Deal's Public Works of Art Project, followed by the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration. It was through the Artists Union that she first met Jackson Pollock.

With like-minded fellow artists, she danced at loft parties, took part in union-related protests and joined in vigorous discussions about the merits of Soviet Communism - then still perceived by leftist intellectuals as a bastion of enlightened morality and working-class solidarity.

Krasner's art from this period is represented in the exhibition with geometric works such as ``Gansevoort II,'' named for a Lower Manhattan street where she lived in the 1930s. She came under Hofmann's influence, seen in her cubist still lifes, and began investigating the tension between representational painting and the more spiritual, metaphysical possibilities to be found in abstract shapes and blocks of color. She particularly admired what she described as the ``airborne'' quality of Matisse: ``It allows you to step into space,'' she once said.

By the time she married Pollock in 1945, Krasner already had begun to move past cubism toward a more introspective art. She produced a somber series appropriately known as the Gray Slabs. In his comprehensive catalog essay, Robert Hobbs proposes that these ``dense, turgid works'' may have been registering Krasner's subconscious horror at the first published reports of Holocaust atrocities.

After destroying these grim canvases, Krasner turned to the far more appealing Little Image Series. Likely inspired by the Hebrew writing she'd first seen while growing up, this series utilizes a made-up lexicon of squiggles, symbols and whimsical designs to create paintings of primal encoded power, roughly analogous to Pollock's drips.

Yet there was already evident in Krasner's approach a deliberative quality that separated her from Pollock. Krasner dealt in incremental gestures rather than grand, sweeping pronouncements. Without sacrificing spontaneity or boldness, her works didn't go out of their way to proclaim they'd been splattered onto the canvas in a frenzied outburst of ego-driven genius.

Krasner also favored a very different palette from Pollock and most of her male colleagues. At times her color choices - hot pink with orange, mustard with lime green - were exuberantly, almost perversely atonal, like a 19th-century parlor room.

Rejecting purist credos, Krasner freed herself to mix and match. In collage works such as ``Bald Eagle'' (1955), she incorporated scraps of Pollock's own ink drawings of the 1950s. She also made visual references to colleagues' paintings in works such as ``Milkweed'' (1955), which alludes to Robert Motherwell's ``Elegy to the Spanish Republic'' series - part of her ongoing, interactive ``dialogue'' with such contemporaries as Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and others.

If abstract expressionism's great, ``unresolvable'' project was supposed to be the artist's relentless inward focus on ``the unitary self,'' Krasner determined that this project needn't become an exercise in solipsistic navel-gazing. Rather, the self could incorporate the vast world of ideas, the history of art, poetry and psychotherapy, and the community in which the artist lived and worked.

Making the case for that point of view is beyond the power of any one artist, just as making the case for a given artist is beyond the power of any one exhibition. There's a chance, however, that ``Lee Krasner'' could mark a turning point for both.

The facts

What: ``Lee Krasner.''

Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd.

When: Through Jan. 2. Museum hours are noon to 8 p.m. Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, noon to 9 p.m. Fridays, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays; closed Wednesdays.

Admission: Adults $7; students and seniors $5; children/younger students $1; children 5 and under free. The second Tuesday of every month is free to all, excluding ticketed exhibitions. Call [phone].

CAPTION(S):

6 Photos

PHOTO (1 -- color) ``Self-Portrait,'' c.1930

(2 -- color) ``Prophecy,'' 1956

(3 -- color) ``Gothic Frieze,'' c.1950

(4 -- color) ``Rising Green,'' 1972

(5 -- color) ``Bald Eagle,'' 1955

(6 -- color) ``Milkweed,'' 1955