Starting Sunday, The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock as artistic equals, with some galleries bringing their work together and others showing it independently. Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous opens October 4 and runs through January 31, 2027, bringing together more than 120 works that trace both artists' careers side by side, from their first meeting in a group show to the decades Krasner spent painting alone after Pollock's death.
The exhibition, co-curated by David Breslin, the Leonard A. Lauder Curator in Charge, and Associate Curator Brinda Kumar, pulls loans from more than 80 institutions and private collections and organizes the work into twelve thematic chapters, according to The Metropolitan Museum of Art. As reported by amNewYork, the show is billed as the first to consider both artists' careers in a full chronological sweep. The Met itself describes it as the first major New York museum presentation devoted to either artist in more than 20 years and the first dual retrospective to examine both full career arcs in parallel.
Two Painters, One Shared History
Krasner was born in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrant parents and trained formally at Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design before studying under Hans Hofmann, work experience that predates her relationship with Pollock entirely, amNewYork notes. She also worked for the WPA during the Depression era. The artist John Graham paired Krasner and Pollock in a group exhibition during the winter of 1941-42, according to amNewYork's account, and the two married in 1945.
That same year, the couple bought a wood-frame house and property in Springs, Long Island, for $5,000, using a $2,000 down-payment loan from art collector Peggy Guggenheim, who took one of Pollock's artworks in exchange, per Wikipedia. It was in the barn studio there that Pollock developed his drip technique between 1946 and 1956, and where Krasner later painted her own major monumental works. The property was designated a U.S. National Historic Landmark in April 1994 and now operates as the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, according to the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Tragedy, Then an Explosion of Scale
Pollock died in a fatal automobile crash in 1956; Edith Metzger also died in the same crash, per amNewYork. Krasner, who had already been a serious painter before her relationship with Pollock and had helped protect the conditions sustaining his practice, took over management of his estate after his death. She also moved her own work out of the house and into his former barn studio, a shift that let her dramatically expand her canvas sizes, according to the Whitney Museum of American Art.
That expanded space produced her Umber series and The Seasons, a canvas nearly 17 feet wide that she completed in 1957, amNewYork reports. Decades later, in 1976, she painted Past Continuous, the work that lends the Met exhibition its title. The museum selected that title specifically because the painting shows how Krasner's mature work engaged with memory, history, and loss while still pushing Abstract Expressionism forward, per the Met's description of the show.
A Market and Museum Reckoning
Abstract Expressionism itself emerged from postwar New York's artistic and intellectual atmosphere, the broader scene both artists helped define, amNewYork notes. Krasner's own output from that era and after includes Little Images and Combat, while Pollock's The Moon Woman stands among the works the exhibition will also showcase. Krasner died at age 75 on June 19, 1984, just months before her first comprehensive retrospective opened at The Museum of Modern Art, a show that had originated at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in October 1983, according to TheArtGorgeous.
Her estate has since taken on a life of its own. Established in 1985 through a bequest in Krasner's will, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation has awarded more than $93 million across over 5,200 grants to visual artists in 80 countries over its 40-year history, per the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. The art market has caught up too: in May 2019, her monumental 1960 canvas The Eye Is the First Circle sold at Sotheby's New York for $10 million, according to HENI.
The Met's dual presentation lands amid a broader international re-examination of Krasner's legacy, following the 2019 Barbican exhibition Lee Krasner: Living Color, which ended in September 2019 and was the first major European presentation of Krasner's work in more than 50 years, and a solo show opening at Gagosian Paris this month, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation notes. For New York audiences who have waited two decades for a major museum reckoning with either artist, Past Continuous arrives as both a reunion and, finally, a correction.
