Met's Pollock-Krasner Show Repositions Her as His Equal — SkimNews
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- The Metropolitan Museum of Art opened 'Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous,' a dual-career exhibition curated by David Breslin and Brinda Kumar over three years, featuring over 120 paintings loaned from more than 80 institutions worldwide including work by Modigliani, Matisse, Picasso, and de Kooning.
- Lee Krasner served as the unofficial publicist for Jackson Pollock's career — down to folding gallery programs — because, as curator David Breslin notes, she was a realist who knew Pollock was the one who would sell and pay the bills.
- The exhibition deliberately avoids a 'compare and contrast' framework, instead presenting moments where each artist is 'encountered on their own terms' while showing the 'creative adjacency' that informed their practices.
- Krasner and Pollock first met at a pivotal John Graham-curated show at McMillen Inc. that also launched de Kooning and juxtaposed New York School artists with Parisian greats; the Met recreates part of that gallery.
- Krasner introduced Pollock to Matisse, particularly through MoMA's 1951 retrospective of Matisse's late cutout works, which Breslin says gave Pollock permission to use color in new ways.
- Krasner's market recognition has risen significantly — she was one of vanishingly few women granted a solo retrospective at MoMA, and her work has fetched up to $10 million at auction.
Why it matters: The Met's three-year, 80-institution effort repositions Krasner from 'Pollock's wife' to a first-tier Abstract Expressionist in her own right, and the curators' refusal to do a 'compare and contrast' — instead letting each artist's career stand on its own — sets a template for how institutions might handle legacy female artists long written out of the dominant narrative.
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