Lee Krasner believed ‘art comes from art’, a conviction that drove six decades of restless experimentation, even while she stepped back from the spotlight to let her husband, Jackson Pollock, shine. Pollock’s seminal ‘drip’ paintings cast him as a towering figure of abstract art, but a new exhibition argues that both artists may yet be too narrowly understood.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art seeks to capture the full stretch of their protean careers. Including more than 120 paintings, works on paper and ephemera, Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous traces their ascent within the New York School and Pollock’s early fame, through their turbulent marriage, and Krasner’s life beyond her husband’s death at 44.
‘There never has been the opportunity to see both artists toe to toe, in the fullness of their respective practices,’ Met curators David Breslin and Brinda Kumar explain over email. While art-world sexism may have influenced a delay in Krasner’s recognition, the colleagues contend that she was still respected in her lifetime as a major artist, and is now understood as essential to mid-20th-century innovation. ‘We think this is the right moment to position her as an equal interlocutor,’ the pair jointly told me.
The show captures how both artists emerged within different strands of American Modernism. The influence of the European avant-garde can be felt in Krasner’s early work, whereas Pollock’s inspirations came from the homegrown Regionalist movement, Native American art and the Mexican muralists.
They met when they were both included in an influential 1942 exhibition at New York’s McMillen Gallery. Krasner later described Pollock’s work as having created ‘a violent transition and upheaval’ in her own practice.
After the pair married and decamped to a homestead in Long Island in 1945, she hit what she described as a ‘dead’ period, producing ‘grey slabs’ from a bedroom studio, while giving her husband the run of the property’s barn, encouraging him to develop his famous style – exemplified at the Met with the gutsy Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist). By 1949, Life magazine was asking whether Pollock was America’s ‘greatest living painter’.
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Krasner, who had been better known than Pollock when they met, helped cultivate this image. Her own reputation may have been limited by having to ‘make do, while Pollock was alive, with the secondary role: a smaller studio, having to act the role of wife when press came around’, the curators observed.
Still, Krasner eventually had her own breakthrough, painting what she called ‘Little Images’, replete with fine molecular figurations such as the dripping white glyphs of Composition (1949). The show also captures Pollock’s abandonment of the drip style at the height of his career in 1951, when he put out a series of mysterious black pourings shortly before he was killed in a drunk-driving incident in 1956.
Afterwards, Krasner took over the barn as her studio. A monumental swirling abstraction of pink, green and white botanical forms, The Seasons (1957) is presented as her ‘answer’ to the question of whether she could continue painting after her husband’s death. For new viewers, the curators hope the show evinces both artists’ unwavering belief in abstraction, which invites people ‘to feel and think for themselves’. They add: ‘That openness feels especially important now’.
‘Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous’ runs 4 October–31 January at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028. For more information visit metmuseum.org
A version of this article appears in the October 2026 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers
