Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Lee Krasner
American; 20th-century
Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum
83%
Night Watch. 1960. Oil on canvas
It's pretty shocking that this painting's barely obscured figurative components (eyes, birdlike heads, the occasional suggestion of a hybrid body) manage not only not to interrupt the all-over intensity of the artwork, but actually to enhance it. (By comparison, Pollock usually suffers once you recognize some human form or other buried beneath his paint, and even de Kooning's women, for all their wildness, can cloy the compositions they're a part of.) Krasner has managed her slight representationalism by forcing each form, abstract and otherwise, to signify in multiple directions at once, and also by forcing many of the painting's discrete planes to serve simultaneously as figure and as ground, depending on which other planes you happen to group them with as you go about processing the image. While the piece's title suggests an affinity with Rembrandt, these techniques are probably derived from the formline designs of Northwest Coast painting and carving, wherein the eye of one creature is always also the foot or the tail of another. As soon as any given form in this painting really starts in on depicting something, it's immediately pulled away towards some other semantic end by a conflicting force elsewhere in the arrangement. It's the incomplete and almost staccato nature of every one of Krasner's forms that accomplishes this: things in this painting are constantly overlapping and intersecting, but never combining. All of the picture's structures, even the thick black lines that bound each of the eyeballs, know just when to break themselves off and to cede their expressive duties to some other mark or shape or hot breath of paint. (TFS, 2026)