The Met Puts Lee Krasner First — and the Market Still Yawns

By Tom Whitfield

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has hung Lee Krasner's name before Jackson Pollock's — and priced the correction at $30 a ticket. Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous, curated by David Breslin and Brinda Kumar, runs until 31 January 2027 and earns four and a half stars, with the works themselves rated five.

The show's premise is simple and, mostly, convincing: give Krasner (1908–84), a first-generation Abstract Expressionist, a primacy parallel to Pollock's (1912–56). The subtitle comes from a Krasner painting shown in the finale. A black-box opening gallery presents six vertical collages she made in the 1950s from cuttings of her unsold paintings, canvas pieces and bits of Pollock's drawings, punctuated by pink and orange slashes.

Yet the eye drifts. A window-like opening frames Pollock's Convergence: No. 10 (1952), black skeins shot with colour, mounted on an angled freestanding wall. Signature Pollocks ricochet off shape-shifting Krasners, and vice-versa — but he remains the bigger draw.

What does the exhibition change?

Not the market, on the evidence the show itself supplies. Krasner's auction record stands at $11.7m, set at Sotheby's in 2019 for The Eye is the First Circle (1960), a canvas included here. This year Christie's sold Pollock's Number 7A (1948) for $181.2m — still short of the reported $200m financier Ken Griffin paid David Geffen in 2016 for Number 17A. A reputational correction, the review concludes, seems both necessary and likely; a financial one does not.

The history the Met retells cuts both ways. Krasner and Pollock met in 1942, when she was better known to New York's Abstract Expressionist crowd and he was the only unfamiliar name in a John Graham-organised show of American and European Modernists, partially recreated at the Met. That exhibition linked their small abstractions to Picasso, Miró, Matisse, Modigliani, de Chirico and de Kooning — jumpstarting both careers and making them a couple.

Krasner visited Pollock's studio unannounced and was so dazzled she hit a creative block. She insisted they marry and move to Springs, East Hampton, to protect him from himself, and persuaded Peggy Guggenheim to cover the downpayment. Three unusually sober years followed — long enough for the drip paintings and lasting fame — before alcoholism, depression and creative paralysis returned. Krasner's own career took off with a confident 1955 solo show at the Stable Gallery.

Curators Breslin and Kumar keep the works apart, so her modestly scaled paintings hook the eye without being overwhelmed. Two black galleries approximate the couple's studios — she worked in the kitchen, he in an upstairs bedroom — moving from his lyrical early pours to her mosaic-like Little Images, painted with a palette knife. A daylight-flooded gallery then hangs Convergence beside the Met's prize Autumn Rhythm: Number 30 (1950), the shift in tone and scale registering the fame Pollock won after a 1949 Life feature asked: "Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?"

The single side-by-side juxtaposition caps the thesis: Pollock's The Deep (1953) against Krasner's Birth (1956), painted the year he died. "That pairing said it all," the review notes.

The caveat

The curators' boldest claim is Breslin's, offered at the press preview: "I don't think we would have a Jackson Pollock if it weren't for what Krasner did to support his work." There is no way to test that theory. The relationship was so codependent, the review argues, that the reverse may be just as true.

Fellow critics back the reset. The New York Times's Holland Cotter calls the show an "exercise of art-historical reset" and finds "a distinctive impression of personal joy" in Krasner's late work. The Wall Street Journal's Karen Wilkin praises the curators for encouraging "concentration on their work, rather than the mythology attached to both painters." Whether audiences leave talking about her, rather than him, is the test the Met has yet to pass.