The Metropolitan Museum of Art opens “Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous” today, Oct. 4, with 120 paintings from more than 80 national and international lenders. The fall exhibition places Lee Krasner’s work alongside Jackson Pollock’s. The museum calls it a rare chance to reconsider the two artists in conversation.
For Krasner, that conversation has taken a long time.
A Painter Defined by Her Marriage
Art critic, author and documentary filmmaker Amei Wallach met Krasner in 1973 and later described the encounter vividly. Krasner sat barefoot, shirt untucked, in the house she had shared with Pollock for some 11 years in the Springs section of East Hampton. Wallach found her direct and forceful.
Krasner didn’t dodge the subject of her husband’s shadow. “I happen to be Mrs. Jackson Pollock, and that’s a mouthful,” she told Wallach. Then she went further, listing the labels that had followed her. “I was a woman, Jewish, a widow, a damn good painter, thank you, and a little too independent.”
The sentence reads like an inventory of everything the art world could use to define her beyond her work.
Late Recognition
At 65, Krasner was about to have her first solo exhibition in a major American museum. The Whitney Museum of American Art mounted “Lee Krasner: Large Paintings,” a show of 18 works spanning two decades beginning in 1953. By the key dates of this story, 53 years have passed since Wallach’s visit.
Krasner kept her expectations in check. “The alternative is that it could all have happened after I die,” she said. She waved off sentiment, too: “But to feel Big Boom Joy — oh, cut it out.” What she wanted was simpler. “When those paintings are up there, everybody can look and judge for themselves.”
That’s the standard the Met now applies. Putting the paintings side by side lets visitors do the judging Krasner asked for, without making one artist a footnote to the other. Wallach, who wrote about her meeting with Krasner, says the exhibition offers a chance to reconsider the artists’ work together.
What the Show Brings Together
The scale matters. A show drawing on more than 80 lenders in the U.S. and abroad takes cooperation across museums and collections. It also puts 120 paintings in one place, letting viewers follow the work of two artists who shared a house and studio life in Springs, rather than rely on a single narrative about either one.
Why This Matters: Krasner’s own words show how a working artist can be reduced to marital status, gender, religion and widowhood. She was 65 before a major American museum gave her a solo show, and that fact says something about who gets institutional attention and when. A major museum devoting its fall exhibition to both artists as equals in conversation offers public acknowledgment, even if late, that recognition isn’t distributed evenly. Visitors can now see the paintings together and decide for themselves, as Krasner asked. Whether other institutions follow with similar reappraisals is a question this exhibition raises but can’t answer.