EAST HAMPTON.- The Pollock- Krasner House and Study Center is showing the painting Thaw. The 1957 canvas by Lee Krasner, is on loan to the museum from the family of the late Roberta Balfe, an early and generous supporter of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center. We are most grateful to Ms. Balfe’s daughter, Clara Hardin, for allowing us to return it to the studio in which it was created.

The painting is part of Krasner’s so-called Earth Green series, which heralded her return to work after Pollock’s death in August 1956. These were the first works she made in the barn studio, formerly Pollock’s workplace, which she began to use the following spring. Compared to her previous paintings, as Ellen G. Landau points out in the Krasner catalogue raisonné, this series is notable for its sensuous, high-key colors and optimistic titles, several of which “relate to spring, a time of renewal and regeneration.” Krasner counteracted the grief and loss with which she was coping by painting joyous imagery. Her title for this painting, Thaw, indicates the emergence from winter’s icy grip and expresses her affirmation of life in the face of personal tragedy.