Metropolitan Museum of Art reevaluates Lee Krasner alongside Jackson Pollock

Curators David Breslin and Brinda Kumar organized the exhibition Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The show aims to give Lee Krasner's work a prominence that parallels the fame of her late husband, Jackson Pollock. While previous museum surveys have looked at the two artists separately or together, the curators designed this show to prioritize Krasner as a primary figure in the Abstract Expressionist movement.

The exhibition uses a specialized layout to manage the different scales of the artists' works. Because Pollock's paintings are often massive and volatile, the curators placed Krasner's smaller paintings in separate galleries to ensure they remain visible. The show includes a black box gallery that recreates the atmosphere of the artists' studios. It features Krasner's 1950s collages, which she created using pieces of her own unsold paintings and bits of Pollock's drawings.

The display also highlights the fact that Krasner was a successful artist in her own right before and during her marriage to Pollock. She had a significant solo show at the Stable Gallery in 1955. The exhibition concludes by showing how the two artists influenced each other, ending with a side-by-side pairing of a 1953 Pollock painting and a 1956 Krasner painting. The show remains open to the public until 31 January 2027.