by Peter Blume

David T. Owsley, grandson of Frank C. Ball, continued several generations of his family's generosity to the Ball State University Museum of Art when he gave from his collection the important Right Bird Left by abstract expressionist painter Lee Krasner.

Krasner, recognized for her importance in post-war American painting only toward the end of her life, was a victim of prejudice against women in the art establishment that, in the words of Picasso, saw women "as only goddesses or doormats."  Krasner was neither, even though she was the nurturing partner, wife, and then widow of Jackson Pollack, whose genius she was the first to recognize and promote and from whom she absorbed the liberating energy of abstract expressionism. She was by far the better educated of the two, and some critics say, the more talented. She trained academically in the atelier system at the Art Students League in New York, and later with Hans Hoffman, the direct link to the giants of European modernism: Matisse, Kandinsky, and Miro. In the 1930s she worked for the WPA Mural project both as an artist and as an administrator.

Right Bird Left, painted in 1965, is an original synthesis of Picasso's cubism, Matisse's Fauvism, and Jackson Pollack's art as an existential act. When Krasner painted Right Bird Left, she had emerged from a profound depression after Pollack's death in an automobile accident while she was in Europe, their first separation in fourteen years. Beginning in the early 1960s, she was making large scale, confidently composed and intensely colored paintings. Her paintings from the mid-1960s are a feminist victory by an artist who never identified with feminism, a triumph of will against the establishment of male artists, dealers, critics and scholars that could not tolerate the presence of a female in what was then regarded as a man's game. H. W. Janson's magisterial History of Art in its first edition, 1963, illustrated not a single female artist; the third edition of 1985 corrected the omission and Lee Krasner is included next to Jackson Pollock as the artist who had moved abstract painting to a new level.

When asked by an interviewer if birds carried an important significance for her, since the word appears in a number of her paintings' titles, Krasner responded, "I get a bird image, I get a floral image, but I don't go around consciously thinking these images up.  But they come through."

Painted on raw canvas with a medium that is sometimes thin and absorbed into the canvas, and sometimes thick, building a heavy impasto, Right Bird Left is six feet high and twelve feet long. Krasner organized her painting from right to left with a series of orange, fuchsia, and green organic motifs suggesting leaf forms contrasted with deep red violet and blue violet energetically brushed. Leaf forms are further defined by white over-paint that isolates ovoid leaf shapes. The painting has the impact of a tropical rain forest contained in a glass house: it is bursting with joyful psychic energy that seems too much to be contained within the confines of the canvas.