Lee Krasner Expressionist Masterpiece Ignited By Jackson Pollock’s Demise Expected To Shatter Record

The Eye is the First Circle is an emotional tour de force. After more than 20 years in a private collection, the last large-scale Lee Krasner in private hands spans nearly 20 feet, a tightly contained, yet expansive, explosion of anguish, rage, and instinct that elucidates her life and career.

On August 11, 1956, Krasner’s life plunged to a tragic low, when her husband, famed Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock, crashed his Oldsmobile convertible less than a mile from home while speeding after drinking all day. His mistress, fellow Abstract Expressionist Ruth Kligman, survived, but another passenger, Edith Metzger, the receptionist at Kligman’s beauty salon, died.

Krasner and Pollock already had been falling apart as a couple, due to his debauchery and philandering.

Four months after his death, Pollock was memorialized with a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Four years after the crash, Krasner created a leading masterpiece of Abstract Expressionism, The Eye is the First Circle, part of her series of prodigious, clamorous, and celebrated Umber paintings, fervently depicting the turmoil over her ruinous marriage and Pollock’s sudden demise at age 44.

More torment flooded her life in 1959, when Krasner’s mother died and a planned exhibition at French & Co. was cancelled. Rather than retreat, Krasner fired up her creative spirit to crate her crucially acclaimed Umber paintings.

The Eye is the First Circle is estimated to fetch between $10 million and $15 million during Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Auction in New York on May 16, crushing, and possibly doubling or tripling, Krasner’s current world record when her Shattered Light, which sold for $5.5 million in 2017.

“We are thrilled to present The Eye is the First Circle this spring – a work that declares Lee Krasner’s painterly confidence and

technical sophistication at the peak of her artistic powers,” said Saara Pritchard, senior vice president and senior specialist in Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Department in New York. “The work further serves as Krasner’s examination of and confrontation with her husband Jackson Pollock’s legacy as figurehead of the ‘action painters’ and the New York School. Krasner’s angst is translated on the monumental canvas in arcs of pigment that writhe, splatter, and dip across the canvas with a sense of un-tampered motion and force. We look forward to welcoming collectors and admirers of Krasner’s work to our new galleries this May.”

One of her first Umber paintings, Krasner painted The Eye is the First Circle in Springs, a bay front town in East Hampton, where she had moved her practice into Pollock’s former barn-turned-studio. It provided the space to experiment on immense canvases.

Reeling from the traumatic events, Krasner was often unable to sleep and painted in the middle of the night. Working darkness, literally and figuratively, she started to banish color from her palette, turning to subtle shades of amber, cream, and umber, calling them the “Night Journeys”.

The title The Eye is the First Circle was born from the half-lidded eyes that peeked out from the dense slathering of pigment.

The Eye is the First Circle has been featured in nearly every major survey of Krasner’s work, including the 1983–1984 exhibition Lee Krasner: A Retrospective, organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the 1999–2001 survey Lee Krasner, organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. David Anfam chose it to represent Krasner in his highly regarded exhibition Abstract Expressionism, organized by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in 2016–2017.

Thieves involved in three separate burglaries leading up to Christmas 1991 set their sights on The Eye is the First Circle. Paintings were pilfered from various galleries throughout New York City, and on Dec. 19, The Eye is the First Circle was nabbed from the seventh-floor loft that served as home and exhibition space for John Cheim, director of the Robert Miller Gallery. An anonymous tip enabled police to recover the canvas, which was carefully restored.

The stupendous canvas will go on public display May 3 at Sotheby’s newly expanded and reimagined galleries in New York, as the nucleus of the Contemporary and Impressionist and Modern Art exhibitions. It will be featured in one of the three double height galleries, a spectacular room with newly rounded corners designed so that the walls curve inwards to meet the ceiling. Created as both an exhibition space and an auction room, it’s the only one without an exposed column repurposed from the building was a Kodak warehouse.

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