Babst Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by Peter Krasnow (1886-1979). Peter Krasnow (born Feivish Reisberg) was born in 1886 in Novohrad-Volynskyi, Ukraine. He emigrated the United States in 1907 at age 20 to escape the pogroms. He moved to Los Angeles in 1922, integrating into the artistic and intellectual and circles of the time, which included Edward Weston, Rudolf Schindler, Richard Neutra, Lorser Feitelson, and Helen Lundeberg. Although Krasnow achieved critical success with exhibitions at early iterations of what eventually became the Whitney Museum of American Art (1922) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1922 & 1928), he largely avoided the commercial art world during his lifetime. The exhibition spans three rooms of the gallery and includes early portraits, never-before-seen ink drawings made in response of to the horrors of World War II, and a series of colorful abstract paintings he embarked upon immediately after Pearl Harbor. Inspired by Jewish mysticism and the Southern California landscape, Krasnow's paintings, as he wrote, ''breathed joy and light—color structures instead of battles scenes, symmetry to repair broken worlds. A means of protest to ease the pain. When despair reached its highest-zero point—it can hurt no more, and life persists.''