Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock Will Soon Share the Spotlight at the Met

• The Met will give a joint spotlight to Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock in a blockbuster exhibition this fall.
• The show stresses that the artists were equals, despite Pollock’s unmatched fame.
• More than 120 objects will be on view, with key loans supplementing the museum’s holdings. 

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art just announced a joint show of husband-and-wife Abstract Expressionist greats Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. As the city’s first major presentation dedicated to either artist in over 20 years—and the first joint show anywhere to cover the entirety of their careers, not just the time they were together—it’s almost certain to be quite the blockbuster.

“These artists are equals, partners in life, giants in the history of art, and revolutionaries who defined what abstraction could be,” David Breslin, the Met’s curator-in-charge of Modern and contemporary art, said in a statement. “Each found a partner who would insist on the primacy of art over life; and they both aspired to an art that was forged out of historical connections but that also promised freedom and radical possibility in a world forever changed by war. The exhibition concerns entwined lives but is also about how different artistic directions come from shared terrain.”

The show, “Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous,” takes its name from the title of a 1976 Krasner painting. It is curated by Breslin and associate curator Brinda Kumar, with the assistance of research associate CJ Salapare.

Born in 1908, Krasner studied under Hans Hofmann, and was influenced by the European avant-garde, such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Piet Mondrian. Pollock, born in 1912, drew more from American Regionalism, Mexican mural traditions, and Surrealism. During the Great Depression, both artists relied on jobs with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Art Project to help make ends meet.

Krasner met Pollock in 1941, through a group show featuring both of their work. The two, who married in 1945, were still emerging artists. Dealer Peggy Guggenheim loaned them the money for a down payment on a home in Springs, a small community in East Hampton, New York, in 1945. Now a U.S. National Historic Landmark, it is known today as the Pollock-Krasner House and Studio.

It was there that Pollock broke through to widespread fame. A photoshoot in his barn studio illustrated perhaps the most consequential magazine profile in all of art history: the 1949 story introducing his radical  “drip” technique that asked if he was “the greatest living painter in the United States.”

The couple’s love story was marred by Pollock’s alcoholism and infidelity, culminating in his untimely death in a car crash in 1956. Pollock was just 44. Krasner would live until 1984, continuing to grow and evolve as an artist throughout her 75 years, while also working to secure Pollock’s legacy.

The Met show traces the full arc of both careers, both together and apart, including Krasner’s “Little Images,” “Umber,” and “Earth Green” series, as well as Pollock’s drip paintings of the late 1940s and his monumental canvases from the 1950s.

It will feature over 120 objects, with paintings, works on paper, and ephemera. The museum has secured major loans from near and far—the Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Tate in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and private collections.