Stable Gallery

After her Little Images, in 1950 Krasner began work on her first solo exhibition, which would open at the Betty Parsons Gallery in October 1951. She created fourteen geometric abstractions washed in soft, luminous color, which were well received but did not sell. Krasner felt despondent and started to work on a series of black-and-white drawings, which she pinned in the studio in the hope that they would ease her into a new direction. She walked into her studio one day, decided that she “despised it all” and tore the drawings up. Unable to return for a number of weeks, Krasner was surprised to find that, when she did, there were “a lot of things there that began to interest me.”

The strewn shreds became the beginnings of a series of collages, many of which were layered over canvases from the Betty Parsons show. She incorporated pieces of burlap, torn newspaper, and heavy photographic paper, as well as some of Pollock's discarded drawings, to which she added touches of paint. These large-scale works were exhibited together in September 1955 at Eleanor Ward's Stable Gallery.