Lee Krasner Will Make Paris Debut via Gagosian, Olney Gleason

It is a very good time to be a fan of Lee Krasner—or to become one.

In early October, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York will survey the Abstract Expressionist giant alongside her husband in “Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous.” Two weeks later, a show of her meaty work from the 1960s will go on view in Paris at Gagosian’s gallery on rue de Ponthieu, ahead of Art Basel Paris.

The show in the French capital is a collaboration between Gagosian, the New York gallery Olney Gleason, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.

“Larry and I were talking about upcoming shows, and noted that many of our collectors have an interest in Krasner,” Kara Vander Weg, a Gagosian senior director, said in a video call (referring of course to the gallery’s founder, Larry Gagosian).

Vander Weg got in touch with Eric Gleason, who began working with the Krasner estate in 2016 when he was at the now-closed Kasmin gallery, and they started planning. Krasner “never had a show in France before, which is remarkable,” Vander Weg said.

The 1960s were a pivotal time for Krasner, who was creating brash, radiant works, sometimes at a thrillingly grand scale. “She had an aneurysm in 1962, broke her arm in ’63, and then on the heels of all that, she really emerged as confident a painter as ever,” Gleason said. In 1965, the Whitechapel Gallery in London staged the first retrospective for the artist, who died in 1984 at 75.

“The Met will cover a lot of ground, and they’ll certainly have some blockbuster paintings from the 1960s,” Gleason said on the call, “but this is an opportunity to be additive, based on the holdings of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation—what we know we could utilize from there, and also source privately.”

Is there a lot of work in the estate? “I will never tell you that,” Gleason said.

OK, fair enough. But it is a matter of public record that Krasner and her market are hot. A massive 1960 canvas, , sold for a record $11.7 million at Sotheby’s in 2019, according to the Artnet Price Database, and all 10 of her top auction prices have come in the past decade.

Also in 2019, a Krasner retrospective opened at the Barbican Art Gallery in London before traveling to venues in Frankfurt, Germany; Bern, Switzerland; and Bilbao, Spain.

“Over the last 24 months, we’ve set and reset the Krasner private sale record many times,” Gleason said. He expects to do so again.

October, of course, is still a long way off. Those seeking some Krasner before then should head to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which has on view a tough, dense, and potent untitled abstraction from 1949.