Portrait in Green by Lee Krasner

In the early 1960s Lee Krasner began working on what she called her ‘Primary Series’.

This body of work included more than sixty paintings whose exuberant colour marked a dramatic break with her earlier series of works which were made predominantly with raw and burnt umber pigment.

These paintings included boisterous colours such as alizarin crimson, fuschia pink and hot orange further cementing Krasner’s reputation as a ‘good noisy colourist’, as one critic had referred to her.

These highly keyed colours of Krasner’s ‘Primary Series’ are unmistakable in her work Portrait in Green, with its swirling green hues dancing across the canvas and accentuated with white.

'Portrait in Green' was immortalised in a famous series of photographs taken by Mark Patiky, showing Krasner making this work in her studio. The first person Krasner had allowed to photograph her whilst working, Patiky’s images show 'Portrait in Green' tacked to her studio wall before it’s completion.

Fond of painting ‘within the limits of her body’, these photographs show Krasner running at the wall paintbrush in hand, in a whirlwind of gestures, underlining the loose looping shapes featured in this painting