The New York Times International - 30.08.2019

2 | FRIDAY, AUGUST 30, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

page two

in 1984. Prices have soared recently; in
May, a panoramic Krasner from 1960
was sold at auction for $11.7 million, a
record for the artist.
But it’s still rare that we get an
effusion of her art on the scale of “Lee
Krasner: Living Color,” which is on
view through Sunday at the Barbican
Art Gallery in London. The first proper
retrospective in Europe for Krasner
since 1965, it is to travel in October to
the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and
continue next year to the Zentrum
Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland, and the
Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.
At the Barbican, the show curated
by Eleanor Nairne appears clean,
mannerly and verysafe. Its pat chrono-
logical presentation has the feel of an
introductory course, and the show
displays little engagement with either
the theoretical challenges of painting
or with feminist critiques of American
high abstraction.
Still, even if all that this retro-
spective of just under 100 works does

is introduce Krasner’s oscillating ca-

reer to new audiences, I’ll take it. Her

most important paintings, especially

the violent loops and sloshes from the

months after Pollock’s death and the

stormlike monochromes of the 1960s,

have an authority that can survive

even the sleepiest hang.

Lena Krassner, as she was named in

1908, was the daughter of Orthodox

Jewish refugees from Odessa, Ukraine,

and the first of their children to be

born in the United States. At 14 she

enrolled at Washington Irving High in

New York and took the name Lenore.

She began advanced study at the

National Academy of Design, but when

the Great Depression hit, she dropped

out, worked as a cocktail waitress and

life study model and made proficient

charcoal studies.

In 1937, she won a scholarship to

study with Hans Hofmann, the Ger-

man émigré who was the most pro-

gressive art educator in New York. The

life drawings she did in his classes are

an early revelation of this show: dense,

foggy charcoal circuits, swallowing up

Picasso’s split perspectives and the

erotic machinery of the Surrealists.

Her first abstract paintings display a

deep technical proficiency even when

they feel overcalculated — the work of

an “A” student still finding her way.

Dense, rhythmic nets of black paint

over multicolor backgrounds have a

decorous quality, while other paintings

incorporate glyphs and symbols simi-

lar to those of her New York school

colleagues Bradley Walker Tomlin and

Mark Tobey, as well as early paintings

by Pollock, whom she met in 1941.

Weeks after V-J Day, the couple

moved from New York to Springs, a

rural town at the eastern edge of Long

Island. Pollock, working in the barn,

found his way to the drip. Krasner,

stuck in a little upstairs bedroom they

sometimes couldn’t afford to heat,

made smaller paintings and mosaics

that also relied on allover, non-hierar-

chical composition. She showed many

in 1951 at Betty Parsons Gallery, but

the exhibition bombed — and Krasner,

ever merciless toward her own work,

tore the canvases to shreds.

When she went back to the studio,

she started to layer her torn abstrac-

tions with blank burlap, new drawings,

and even some of Pollock’s discarded

drip paintings. The results were stri-

dent, seismic collages, brimming with

confidence. For all their debts to her

hero, Matisse, including backgrounds

of rich vermilion and Mediterranean

blue, there’s a freer, jazzier, more ath-

letic relationship between parts that is

pure 1950s-American.

These fantastic collages, completed

in 1954-55, go a long way to correcting

the misunderstanding that Krasner

found her way as a painter only after

Pollock’s death in the summer of 1956.

She was in France when he crashed his

car on a Hamptons country lane, and

after she got back to America she felt

she had to keep working.

Later that year, she completed the

hinge painting of her career: “Proph-

ecy,” a spastic, savage composition that

feels set to burst its narrow, vertical

frame. The figure returns, in the form

of a broken, collapsed nude woman,

her pink flesh dripping past gashed

black outlines. Three more paintings

that year continue the theme, all more

disorderly than Picasso’s “Les Demoi-

selles d’Avignon,” their obvious source,

and even messier than De Kooning’s

series of slashed and gashed “Women.”

It’s too easy to read these brutal

paintings as outpourings of grief. For

Krasner, painting had a much higher

vocation than personal expressivity,

and she was no sentimentalist; by

1957, she had moved into Pollock’s barn

studio, where she had enough space to

work at mural scale. There she execut-

ed grand, nearly monochromatic ab-

stractions that are more physical than

anything before them. The umber

paint, thinner and drippier than the

slabs of pigment in “Prophecy,” stains

the untreated canvas like dirt or blood.

I find these first large-scale abstrac-

tions pretty theatrical. More rewards

seem to lie in the colorful panoramas of

the 1960s — such as the 13-foot-wide

“Combat,” completed in 1965 and lent

from the National Gallery of Victoria in

Melbourne, Australia, which channels

her love of Matisse’s bright hues into a

parade of pink bubbles and squiggles.

But Ab-Ex was always a garish

mode of painting, and a little theater

has always been part of the American

package. What Krasner proved was

that theatrics and braininess were not

at odds, and that a life in painting had

room for both.

She put up with a lot. Put up with

her husband’s temper, put up with the

critical and institutional disregard; put

up, too, with Job’s comforters who

could not accept that she wanted to be

both Mrs. Pollock and a great artist.

I recently went to the barn in the

Hamptons where Krasner and Pollock

both painted their breakthrough

works, and watched visitor after vis-

itor take pictures of the floor: drips

from the master, tailor-made for an

Instagram story. Under a trellis, in

shadow, were Krasner’s painting boots,

splattered and weathered. They still

await their idolaters.

On her own in the limelight

Top left, the American painter Lee Kras-

ner in her barn studio in 1962. Her hus-

band, Jackson Pollock, had used the

studio before his death in 1956. Her works

include, clockwise from top right, “Desert

Moon” (1955), “Blue Level” (1955) and

“Polar Stampede” (1960).

THE POLLOCK-KRASNER FOUNDATION/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK; ARCHIVES OF AMERICAN ART, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

THE POLLOCK-KRASNER FOUNDATION/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK; THE SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

THE POLLOCK-KRASNER FOUNDATION/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS),

NEW YORK; MUSEUM ASSOCIATE/LACMA/LICENSED BY SCALA/ART

RESOURCE, NY

THE POLLOCK-KRASNER FOUNDATION/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS),

NEW YORK

K RASNER, FROM PAGE 1

BEIJING His portraits were among the
most recognizable in the world, rivaling
the Mona Lisa.
But few have heard of Wang
Guodong, the Chinese artist who for
years was responsible for painting the
enormous portrait of Mao Zedong — re-
placed annually — that gazes down on
Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
Mr. Wang, who was 88 when he died
on Friday at a hospital in Beijing, was
chosen in 1964, when he was in his early
30s, to be the official painter of the 15-
by-20-foot oil portrait of Mao that hangs
at the entryway to the Forbidden City,
the Gate of Heavenly Peace. It is steps
across the square from the Communist
Party’s central seat of power, the Great
Hall of the People.
Portraits of Mao have been installed
there since 1949, when the Communists
took power in China; they are fre-
quently replaced because they are ex-
posed to the elements. (A portrait of
Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist leader
who lost the civil war to Mao’s Commu-
nists, hung there previously.)
The job was one of the highest — and
most intimidating — honors available to
a painter in China. In a sign of Mr.
Wang’s stature in Communist Party cir-
cles, a funeral was held for him on Sun-
day at Babaoshan, the cemetery in Bei-
jing reserved for party elite, Beijing
Youth Daily reported. Mao Xinyu, Mao’s
grandson, was said to have sent a
wreath.
Over the years, Mao’s appearance

evolved as portraits were swapped out.

At one point he was depicted wearing an

octagonal cap and a coarse woolen

jacket. But even after Mr. Wang stepped

down as official portrait maker in 1976,

his successors continued to paint identi-

cal portraits based on Mr. Wang’s de-

sign, showing a rosy-cheeked, grim-

looking Mao with his trademark chin

mole.

But despite the portrait’s prominence,

the artist is little known.

“Nobody is allowed to put their names

on that painting,” Mr. Wang explained in

an interview with The Los Angeles

Times in 2006. “It’s that way before, and

it’s that way now.”

Mr. Wang appeared not to mind. For

him, anonymity came with the job of cre-

ating what one prominent art historian

called “the most important painting in

China.”

But like many who lived through the

turbulence of Mao’s totalitarian rule, Mr.

Wang was not always in such good

standing with the party.

During the Cultural Revolution, the

decade-long period of political tumult

that convulsed the country from 1966 to

1976, Mao’s image was prominently dis-

played in millions of homes, schools, fac-

tories and government buildings across

the country. As the leader’s personality

cult grew, Mr. Wang found himself under

attack by the student militants known as

Red Guards, who persecuted anyone

they considered ideologically impure or

insufficiently devoted to Mao.

They called Mr. Wang a capitalist be-

cause of his family background, and

they criticized him for painting Mao

from an angle that showed only one ear.

This, they said, implied that Mao was lis-

tening to only a select few, not the

masses.

“How many ears I painted was not up

to me,” Mr. Wang later explained. “It

was decided by the central govern-

ment.” He said all of the artists who

painted Mao did so based on a govern-

ment-issued photo and were instructed

not to deviate from it.

Nevertheless, Mr. Wang was sub-

jected to a so-called struggle session, in

which he was brought onto a stage and

publicly humiliated.

As punishment, Mr. Wang was sent by

the authorities to work as a carpenter in

a framing factory for two years. But he

was allowed to keep his title, and he con-

tinued to paint the official portrait, this

time with two ears.

In the 1970s, Mr. Wang selected 10 Bei-

jing art students as apprentices. They

were screened first for their political re-

liability and second for their artistic

ability. They were taught the basics of

portrait painting and learned how to

stay within the boundaries of political

acceptability.

“Mao’s face must be painted extra red

to show his robust spirit,” Liu Yang, one

of the students, told The Los Angeles

Times in 2006. “It can never be too yel-

low, which would seem sickly, like he

hadn’t eaten in days. You could be ac-

cused of being a counterrevolutionary.”

Only once, after Mao’s death in 1976,

was a black-and-white portrait of the

chairman hung on the Gate of Heavenly

Peace. Mr. Wang retired that year.

Since then, in keeping with tradition,

the portrait has been replaced with a

new one every year, under cover of

darkness, just before National Day cele-

brations on Oct. 1.

Wang Guodong was born on June 25,

1931, in Beijing. Little could be deter-

mined about his youth or his family life.

His death was reported by Chinese state

media. Survivors include two sons.

The Mao portraits, still based on a

version designed by Mr. Wang, have

varied little in recent decades. Each is

seen by millions of tourists every year

as they visit Tiananmen Square and the

Palace Museum.

The portraits have been vandalized

several times, including during the pro-

democracy protests in Tiananmen

Square in 1989, when three young dem-

onstrators pelted one with ink-filled

eggs. Hours later, the defaced portrait

was taken down and replaced with a

spare. The protesters served lengthy

prison sentences.

“It’s a very complex image,” Wu

Hung, an art historian at the University

of Chicago, said of the painting in a 2006

New York Times article. “It has different

meanings to different people. To the

party, it symbolizes the party and the

nation’s founding. But to a lot of people it

symbolizes China, or it has very person-

al memories.”

Since Mao’s death and China’s subse-

quent economic reforms, the demand

for Mao paintings in China has waned.

But over the years, artists have experi-

mented with the once-sacred image.

In the late 1980s, in a subtle nod to the

portrait’s artificiality, the Chinese artist

Wang Guangyi depicted it overlaid with

a grid structure, a technique that Wang

Guodong and his successors had used to

copy the portrait to scale.

Painter who portrayed Mao, over and over

WANG GUODONG
1931-

BY AMY QIN

Wang Guodong, left, in 1983 with a protégé, Ge Xiaoguang. From 1964 to 1976, Mr. Wang

was the painter of the annually replaced portrait of Mao Zedong in Tiananmen Square.

NEAL ULEVICH/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Zoe Mou contributed research.

With a handful of oocytes and a col-

lection of frozen sperm, an international

team of scientists is racing against the

clock to ensure that the only two north-

ern white rhinoceroses left on the planet

— both females — are not the last of

their kind.

This week scientists in Italy were able

to fertilize seven of the 10 oocytes, or

eggs, that had been extracted from the

two rhinos last week. They used sperm

that had been collected from male rhi-

nos before they died.

That outcome was better than ex-

pected, said Cesare Galli, the managing

director of Avantea, the Italian laborato-

ry where the work was performed. But it

is only one more step in a conservation

effort that has spanned continents and

lasted for years.

Dr. Galli was working with scientists,

veterinarians and conservationists

from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and

Wildlife Research in Germany, the Dvur

Kralove Zoo in the Czech Republic, and

the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya.

“We were really able to do something

no one before has been able to do,” said

Jan Stejskal, the director of interna-

tional projects at the Dvur Kralove Zoo.

“We still don’t know whether we’ll have

embryos, but it was successful anyway.

We proved that there is a real chance for

them to have offspring.”

Not everyone considers this a worth-

while effort; critics question whether

resurrecting an animal that is function-

ally extinct could draw attention away

from other endangered species.

The northern white rhino, a sub-

species of the more populous southern

white rhino, once roamed the grass-

lands of east and central Africa. They

have hairier ears and smaller bodies

than their relatives, and some re-

searchers have argued that the north-

ern white rhino should be considered a

separate species.

Human efforts to save endangered

animals (often made necessary by man-

made threats like environmental degra-

dation and poaching) are usually a race

against time. But in the case of the

northern white rhino, the race is espe-

cially urgent.

An animal can be considered critically

endangered if there are dozens or hun-

dreds of them left. But in this case, the

only survivors are Najin and Fatu, a

mother and daughter — the daughter

and granddaughter of the last surviving

male, which died in 2018. Scientists dis-

covered in 2014 that even artificial in-

semination using frozen sperm was un-

likely to be an option for them, since nei-

ther seemed physically capable of car-

rying an embryo to term.

The eggs collected last week — five

from Najin and five from Fatu — were

sent to Italy to be fertilized by sperm

that had been collected years earlier

from two males named Suni and Saút.

Dr. Frank Gõritz of the Leibniz Insti-

tute said it would be ideal to see a north-

ern white rhino born within a few years,

so that it could coexist with the two fe-

males and learn their behavior. But that

will require a surrogate pregnancy.

The southern white rhino might be a

good candidate for that. Last month, a

southern white rhino calf was born at

the San Diego Zoo Safari Park using hor-

mone-induced ovulation and artificial

insemination with frozen semen, San

Diego Zoo Global announced.

The more those techniques are per-

fected, the more feasible it becomes that

one of these rhinoceroses could eventu-

ally carry a northern white rhino to

term.

But that is still many steps ahead. Dr.

Galli, of Avantea, said it was unclear

how many of the eggs fertilized on Sun-

day would become blastocysts, the next

step in embryonic development.

That should become clear sometime

next week — and even then, perfecting a

technique for transplanting an embryo

into a surrogate could take years, and

gestation can last for 16 months or more.

But even if every egg fails, there will

most likely be opportunities to extract

more, Dr. Galli said, adding that egg fer-

tilization alone was a big step forward in

terms of scientific achievement.

Dr. Göritz agreed. “It’s not only about

saving the northern white rhino,” he

said. “We gained so much knowledge,

and we used technology that we can now

apply way earlier for other endangered

species before they reach this situation.”

Rhino eggs

fertilized in a

race against

extinction

BY JACEY FORTIN

The last two living northern white rhinos.

Their eggs were fertilized using sperm

taken from male rhinos before they died.

TONY KARUMBA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

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