The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s fall exhibition brings 120 paintings by Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock together when the show opens Oct. 4. More than 80 national and international lenders contributed works. The exhibition presents the artists in conversation and offers a chance to reconsider both bodies of work together.
Recognition and the Museum
The exhibition’s pairing comes against a record of delayed institutional recognition for Krasner. At 65, she was about to have her first solo exhibition in a major American museum. The Whitney Museum of American Art mounted “Lee Krasner: Large Paintings,” an exhibition of 18 works spanning two decades beginning in 1953.
Krasner described the possibility of the Whitney exhibition in terms of when recognition arrived. “The alternative is that it could all have happened after I die,” she said. She also said, “But to feel Big Boom Joy — oh, cut it out.” Her remarks put the timing of public recognition alongside her response to it.
The Whitney exhibition gave viewers a chance to see the paintings and judge them, Krasner said: “When those paintings are up there, everybody can look and judge for themselves.” The Metropolitan Museum’s current exhibition expands the setting for that work by placing Krasner’s paintings beside Pollock’s among 120 works from more than 80 lenders.
Krasner in Her Own Words
Art critic, author and documentary filmmaker Amei Wallach recalled meeting Krasner in 1973. Wallach described her as direct and forceful. At the time, Krasner sat barefoot, her shirt untucked, in the house she’d shared with Pollock in the Springs section of East Hampton.
Krasner spoke directly about the name attached to her. “I happen to be Mrs. Jackson Pollock, and that’s a mouthful,” she told Wallach. In another remark, she named several parts of how she understood her position: “I was a woman, Jewish, a widow, a damn good painter, thank you, and a little too independent.”
Those words connect her public identity to her work and her relationship with Pollock without reducing her to either. The Met exhibition places their paintings together. Krasner’s account of herself names the pressures and labels she faced in her own terms.
Wallach, who met Krasner in 1973, wrote that the exhibition offers a chance to reconsider the artists’ work together. The show’s 120 paintings come from a network of more than 80 national and international lenders. Its central arrangement is explicit: Krasner’s works appear alongside Pollock’s, and viewers can encounter both artists in conversation.