Kufic by Lee Krasner

From the cacophonous hues of her ‘Primary Series’ a much quieter painting emerged.

Upon viewing this work in 1968, art critic Lawrence Campbell said:

‘Kufic, 1966, [is] one of her best works, [with] only minimal colour – just a large tan bareness with yellow writing heroically twisting into thicks and thins to make movements and forms faintly complemented by some crayon marks, a kind of preliminary drawing, on the canvas’.

Quite unlike the other boisterous paintings of the ‘Primary Series’, Kufic offers a moment of contemplation with a much sparer composition and muted colour palette.

Rather than the weighty organic forms that dominate some of her ‘Primary Series’ paintings, 'Kufic' features a series of more calligraphic forms, not dissimilar to a form of writing, which was of continuous interest to Krasner’s throughout her life.

In a 1973 interview, Krasner was referring to her earlier ‘Little Image’ paintings (1946-9) which feature dense compositions of hieroglyphic shapes and symbols, when she said:

'[hieroglyphics are] a preoccupation of mine from way back and every once in a while it comes into my work again…

'In my last show at Marlborough which was in 1968, I have a painting called 'Kufic', which is the name of an early form of Arabic writing.'

'Every once in a while, I fall back to what I call my mysterious writings...'

'I have no idea what this is about but it runs through periods of my work’.