The Laguna Art Museum is proud to be hosting a major comprehensive exhibition for an accomplished Art Deco artist — the first in nearly 40 years. Connoisseurs of both painting and sculpture will enjoy.
Although he was born in the Ukraine, artist Peter Krasnow (1886-1979) spent most of his life in the United States, where for nearly 70 years he explored social, political, and cultural realities, earning considerable renown.
The Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach, California, is overjoyed to revisit the life and career of Krasnow during a major comprehensive exhibition — the first since the artist’s death in 1979.
Having immigrated to the United States in 1907, Krasnow would eventually settle in Los Angeles in 1922 after studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and living in New York for several years. The museum reports that Krasnow’s early works were “largely realist portraits and symbolic carved sculptures; accomplished examples of social realism and Art Deco. His abstract paintings, whose bright, synthetic colors he chose to contrast with the dark political realities of the 1940s, are schematic tableaux that employ calligraphic symbols referencing spiritual ideas and organic processes. In both sculpture and painting, Krasnow developed styles that have surprising contemporary currency.”
The show — titled “Peter Krasnow: Maverick Modernist” — will feature approximately 50 paintings and 20 sculptures that survey the artist’s entire career. Among the highlights of the show are Krasnow’s “Demountables,” which were constructed during the 1930s and 1940s. These sculptures were hand-carved from wood and assembled using interlocking parts. The museum adds that these works are “organic abstractions drawing on traditions of folk and tribal art.”
The exhibition will be accompanied by a full-length catalogue — the first of its kind. “Peter Krasnow: Maverick Modernist” opened on June 26 and will remain on view through September 25. To learn more, visit the Laguna Art Museum.
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How One Artist Became a Maverick Modernist
