The Met Puts Lee Krasner on Equal Footing With Pollock at Last

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has gathered more than 120 works by Lee Krasner (1908–84) and Jackson Pollock (1912–56) in "Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous," an exhibition that pays more attention to Krasner than to her husband — a first for a show devoted to America's most storied art couple.

The timing is pointed. A May auction made Pollock the newest member of the $100 million club. The 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Biography went to Jackson Pollock: An American Saga by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith — 934 pages that inspired the Hollywood film Pollock (2000), for which Marcia Gay Harden won Best Supporting Actress as Krasner. In that telling, Krasner is the supporting character. This show argues otherwise.

Krasner was not the first to make the attempt. In 1981, Barbara Rose curated "Krasner/Pollock: A Working Relationship," proposing that the marriage was a partnership of artistic equals rather than the pairing of a genius and a long-suffering helpmate. Rose never got Krasner out of Pollock's shadow. The difference now, according to the exhibition's own framing, is that "Past Continuous" finally treats them as equals — and Krasner outlived Pollock by 28 years, which gives the later galleries entirely to her.

How the show begins

The exhibition opens with footage: a panoramic view of the couple's unheated, two-story shingled house and studio on Long Island, overlaid with historic stills of Pollock, Krasner, their dog Gyp, and their tamed crow, Caw Caw. They lived there for nearly 11 years, until Pollock killed himself and one of his passengers, Edith Metzger, while driving drunk, injuring his girlfriend, Ruth Kligman. Krasner was in Europe at the time, distancing herself from her husband's drinking and philandering.

It was in that house that Pollock made his first drip paintings. He unrolled unprimed canvas on the studio floor and worked horizontally, applying enamel and house paints with sticks and brushes, never touching the canvas. The source of the method is named plainly on the wall: Janet Sobel (1893–1968), a self-taught Ukrainian-born artist whose Milky Way (1945), seen at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery in 1946, directly inspired Pollock's first drip painting, Galaxy, in 1947.

Two years later, LIFE magazine asked in a headline: "Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" The four accompanying photographs showed a brooding, hyper-masculine figure in paint-splattered jeans. Krasner is not mentioned. The Met show sets out to subvert that myth of the solitary male genius.

What does the show actually change?

The first gallery presents Krasner's mid-1950s collages — the years when Pollock was at an artistic impasse and spiraling out of control. Until now, the account goes, audiences have only gotten the tragedy of Pollock's decline without the triumph of Krasner's emergence from his shadow.

Bald Eagle (1955) makes the argument in material form. Krasner collaged scraps of dark brown linen and unprimed canvas that she and Pollock had discarded; on the white bird's-profile shape at the center, Pollock's dripped black line is visible. She built the work from what both artists rejected. Blue Level and Desert Moon (both 1955) follow, their solid fields of blues and reds constructing a vertical world whose raw elements reach beyond the painting's top and bottom edges — destruction and rebirth merged, literally and metaphorically.

The curators then turn biographical, hanging early works from before the couple met in one gallery: his-and-hers self-portraits — Krasner's in graphite and crayon (ca. 1929–30), Pollock's a muddy brown impasto (ca. 1930–33) — and paintings from "American and French Painting" (1942), curated by John Graham, where the two hung alongside Stuart Davis, Willem de Kooning, Picasso, and Henri Matisse. Krasner, not knowing who Pollock was, looked him up after seeing the show.

The Greenberg ceiling

Highpoints include Pollock's Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist) and a recreation of Krasner's 1955 Stable Gallery exhibition, which led Clement Greenberg to proclaim her "a major addition to the American art scene of the era." The caveat matters: Greenberg declared that Pollock's drip painting had gotten past Cubism and made the first great American paintings, while stopping short of equal praise for Krasner's collage. That hierarchical thinking — a glass ceiling — is what the show says she crashed against throughout her career.

The later rooms belong to Krasner. Pollock contributes a handful of late works such as Portrait and a Dream and The Deep (both 1953). Krasner keeps moving: the nearly 17-foot The Seasons (1957), painted a year after Pollock's death, returns to rebirth with abundant forms resembling genitalia; Kufic (1965), titled for the oldest style of Arabic calligraphy, underscores her long interest in writing and linear marks; Rising Green (1971) is another standout. The show culminates with Future Indicative (1977), collaging her figure drawings, and closes with Past Continuous (1976), her last monumental collage, built from charcoal drawings made while studying with Hans Hofmann.

Whether one exhibition can settle a balance that critics, biographers and auction houses have tilted for eight decades is the open question. But the works are on the wall, and more of them are hers.