Peter Krasnow at the Skirball

Peter Krasnow, K.-4-1976, 1976. Skirball Cultural Center. The Hebrew text is the second line of Psalm 19

Peter Krasnow (1886–1979), a pivotal L.A. modernist, has been getting renewed museum attention. The Laguna Art Museum did a single-artist show in 2016, and LACMA recently hung a Krasnow painting in its modern art installation. Now the Skirball Cultural Center is presenting a one-room show of its Krasnow paintings. The Skirball has a substantial holding of both paintings and sculptures, acquired by gift and purchases.

Peter Krasnow, Snow Shovelers—Delancey Street, 1920. Skirball Cultural Center

Born in Ukraine, Krasnow fled the pogroms for refuge in Chicago, Boston, and New York. He received a 1922 show at the Whitney Studio Club, forerunner of the museum. Krasnow was then working in a figurative, late Ashcan School mode. But he and wife, Rose, tired of the starving artist life in Manhattan. They moved to L.A.—well, Glendale—in late 1922. Within months Krasnow participated in a group show at the pre-LACMA Los Angeles Country Museum. This was followed by a single-artist show at the same institution in 1927, and another at San Francisco's Palace of the Legion of Honor in 1931.

These exhibitions secured Krasnow's place in L.A.'s small progressive art scene. He socialized with Edward Weston, Galka Scheyer, Jake Zeitlin, Irving Stone, Rudolph Schindler, and Richard Neutra. It was Weston who sold Krasnow a plot of land in Atwater Village. There Krasnow built a three-room home-studio. He would live and work there for the next 55 years.

Peter Krasnow, K.-7-1949, 1949

World War II was a watershed. Krasnow turned to abstract painting as the valid means of expression in a post-Holocaust and post-Hiroshima world. Unlike his East Coast counterparts, Krasnow favored tropical, fluorescent—deeply "unserious"—colors.

Some of Krasnow's mid-century abstractions are strictly rectilinear, as if Mondrian had gone full Margaritaville. The 1945 painting at LACMA falls in this category. The group of paintings at the Skirball exemplify a later phase, featuring ditsy patterns and semi-figuration. It's easy to read them as a premonition of Pattern and Decoration. They probably show awareness of late Kandinsky (Krasnow knew Schreyer, the "Blue Four"'s West Coast dealer) and perhaps Stuart Davis' kinetic abstractions of the 1940s.

Krasnow can be seen as a skeleton key to much of what came after in Los Angeles. The LACMA installation emphasizes his connection to the L.A. Hard Edge painters of the 1950s. Most of the Skirball paintings display a very unclassical abstraction. Krasnow ventured back to figuration and text and identity politics. A number of the works show Hebrew lettering, something that would have been anathema to strict formalists. (It prefigures Wallace Berman.) More broadly, Krasnow's openness to the California landscape and a pop palate connect him to Diebenkorn, Hockney, Bengston, Ruscha, and Chicago.

What's missing is the irony of the Cool School. Krasnow saw his art as an antidepressant for grim times, a Matissean easy chair, albeit with a palette poised between Peter Shire and Peter Halley. A wall text at the Skirball quotes Krasnow: "When tragedy was at the deepest point, my paintings breathed joy and light—color structures instead of battle scenes, symmetry to repair broken worlds. A means of protest to ease the pain."

"Peter Krasnow: Breathing Joy and Light" runs through Sep. 3, 2023.

Peter Krasnow, K.-19-1974, 1974

Peter Krasnow, K.-14-1975 / K.-15-1975 (Pinchas and Shoshana), 1975. The two paintings, framed together, record the Hebrew names of the artist and his wife, social worker and Hebrew teacher Rose Bloom

Peter Krasnow, Self-portrait, 1925