The wild artist who brought colour to dazzling life

But out of this came an act of destruction that was to transform Krasner’s way of working. A phoenix-like moment, that should be the stuff of art legend, really. One day in 1953, she walked into her studio, hung with drawings. She “hated it all, took it down, tore everything and threw it on the floor”, Krasner later recounted. A couple of weeks later, when she walked back in, “the floor was solidly covered with these torn drawings that I had left and they began to interest me and I started collaging”.

She layered her torn-up drawings over the works she felt were failures from her Betty Parsons show, transfiguring her own artistic output. Making the new out of the old.

Collage became hugely important to Krasner. And she even started layering in fragments of Pollock’s work, as in 1955’s Bald Eagle. Yau suggests that “by using discards from her own, unknown paintings in combination with drawings branded in Pollock’s world-famous style, she is both attacking the failed works and transforming them into something fresh and new – simultaneously mocking and superseding the male power structure”.

The Pollock-Krasner Foundation

Many years later, in 1977, Krasner pulled off a similar trick with her own personal legacy and that of her teacher Hofmann. After finding a stack of drawings she made as a student, she cut them up for collages. Jagged and disorientating, like a reflection in a smashed mirror, they feel like Cubism squared: her Cubist studies given an extra dimension through not only the act of cutting and layering them, but also from the passing of time.