Gothic Landscape
- Artist: Lee Krasner
- Date: 1961
- Medium: Oil paint on canvas
- Dimensions: support: 1768 x 2378 mm
- Museum: Tate Modern
- Collection record: Tate Modern website
Listen to the free audio guide
About this artwork
This is the “Gothic Landscape” by Lee Krasner. Painted in 1961, it’s an abstract canvas that still feels like a scene. You’ll notice thick, vertical lines that dominate the center – they’re meant to look like trees, complete with knotted roots at the base. That visual cue is why Krasner eventually titled it “Gothic Landscape” years after it finished.
The work was created in the years following her husband, Jackson Pollock’s, fatal car crash in 1956. It’s part of a series of large canvases that pour out her grief through violent, expressive brushwork. The gestural strokes feel almost like a release, a way of pushing the outer limits of her own emotional space. The painting was made in a studio she’d used since 1957, under intense personal strain—her mother had died, she’d fought a bitter argument with critic Clement Greenberg, and insomnia pushed her to work late into the night with a pared‑down palette. All that turmoil channels into the raw, almost cathedral‑like verticality of the piece.
See it in person
Gothic Landscape is in the collection of Tate Modern on Bankside, London — free to enter. Point your phone at any artwork there and audioguide.london plays a free audio guide in six languages — no app download needed.
