‘Distinct and intertwined’: Inside The Met’s blockbuster Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock exhibition

The painting that opens The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibition Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous (on view until 31 January 2027) is an emblematic choice. Though Jackson Pollock is often presented as the solitary artist who came to define the machismo of Abstract Expressionism, curators David Breslin and Brinda Kumar have selected his wife Lee Krasner’s Bald Eagle as the starting point of their journey to reassess the careers of both artists.

Painted in 1955, during the final year of their lives together, this imposing canvas incorporates collaged elements of both Krasner and Pollock’s work. It reflects Krasner’s early interest in collage and contains remnants of both her earlier work (which she destroyed) along with Pollock’s black-and-white drawings. Together, they act to balance each other out, one supporting the other, reminding us that without one, the other would not exist.

What unfolds in the exhibition’s galleries is an intensely personal narrative of two artists, their individual struggles, their artistic triumphs and their lives together. ‘It’s not one story,’ Max Hollein, Director and CEO of The Met said at the press preview of the exhibition. ‘It’s two distinct and intertwined stories.’

The exhibition is told linearly over 12 chapters; after beginning with Bald Eagle, it moves back in time to track the artists’ respective careers before they met, then moves through the arc of their relationship and finally ends with Krasner in the decades following Pollock’s death. There are over 120 works and ephemera on display from more than 80 lenders, including private collections and museums across the world as close as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and as far as the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia. The result is a one-of-a-kind museum going experience: ‘It has to be seen,’ Hollein said. ‘It has to be experienced.’

Living together, working separately

The works on display are often hung not on walls, but in the center of the galleries — only emphasizing their scale — and are sometimes visible from the surrounding rooms. (Some of the galleries are inspired by the idea of the ‘Ideal Museum’: a novel way of displaying Pollock’s works created by the artist and the architect Peter Blake.) Despite opening the exhibition by focusing on the work of Krasner, the presence of Pollock looms in the form of Convergence: Number 10, 1952, a large-scale canvas seen in the gallery of Krasner’s paintings, visible through an opening cut into the wall of the gallery next door.

The exhibition then begins to trace the careers of both artists through their vastly different upbringings and their early influences: from Pollock’s Surrealist-infused canvases that bear the hallmarks of his friend and mentor, the American muralist painter Thomas Hart Benton, along with his interest in Mexican muralism, African and Oceanic art and Pablo Picasso, among other inspirations. Krasner, on the other hand, was dedicated to the Modernist breakthroughs that were taking place in Paris, enrolling in Hans Hofmann’s School of Fine Arts and absorbing his teachings on color and form. The pair met at a 1942 show organised by the artist John Graham, which is recreated in part in The Met’s exhibition.

Throughout their decade and a half together, before Pollock’s death in 1956, the couple developed a unique working relationship: they lived together but worked separately, and each was allowed into the other’s studio only by invitation. 

In Springs, Long Island, where the couple moved in 1945, Pollock worked from a large barn on the property, while Krasner was relegated to a spare bedroom. This sense of domesticity is illustrated in the exhibition when Pollock’s heavily worked 1947 canvas Full Fathom Five — an early ‘drip’ painting in which he built up the surface of his painting with nails, buttons, cigarette butts and coins — is displayed close to a mosaic table by Krasner in which she embeds tesserae (small tiles), keys and jewellery into her work. The closeness — yet also the distance — between them is palpable.

Pollock’s monumental canvases

Beginning in the spring of 1950, Pollock embarked on a series of large-scale paintings that would come to define his legacy. These monumental, all-enveloping canvases are each impressive in their own right, but one of the many triumphs of The Met’s exhibition is gathering five of these jaw-dropping canvases in the same room. Displayed in a revamped gallery that opens up onto the museum’s famed Petrie Court, Pollock’s Lavender Mist (1950), Convergence; Number 10, 1952, One: Number 31, 1950, Autumn Rhythm: Number 30, 1950 and Number 28: 1950, 1950 are bathed in natural light. 

Although the scope of each of these paintings is immense (the largest measures over 8 feet by 17 feet), the surface of each canvas is executed on a distinctly human scale. Tracing the intertwined trails of paint that arc across the surface of the canvas affords a true understanding of Pollock’s mastery of his medium. In Lavender Mist, however, he goes one step further, inserting himself, in the form of his handprint in the upper left and upper right corners, directly on the surface of the canvas: a very personal intervention into an otherwise resolutely abstract painting.

Just five years after painting Lavender Mist, Pollock crashed his car into a tree while driving drunk, killing not only himself but also his passenger, Edith Metzger. His tragic death has done much to cement the artist’s legacy in the canon of postwar painting. Yet, despite his hard living, it is the joyous, poetic, magical and mysterious nature of these large-scale canvases that truly reflect Pollock’s lasting legacy as a painter as complex as his compositions.  

Krasner’s cycles of renewal

Following his death, Krasner was left to confront not only the loss of her husband, but also the continuation of her own career. Emerging from Pollock’s omnipresent shadow and now able to use the barn which he had co-opted for so long, her paintings expanded to match both the scale and scope of her husband’s work. At 17 feet wide, The Seasons (1957) rivals the ambition of Pollock’s greatest canvases, its organic shapes and forms developing her practice in new directions.

Pollock’s early death saved him from many of the challenges that Krasner would experience later life. As she faced further bereavements in her family and suffered from insomnia which caused her to work mostly at night under the unforgiving glare of artificial light, her palette gradually retreated in its use of color. As the exhibition draws to a close, we see Krasner emerging from that darkness with what the curators call ‘a rapturous reengagement with color,’ continuing a cycle of renewal that she engaged with throughout her life.

Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous is the first comprehensive exhibition to tackle either artist’s work in New York in over 20 years. That it should take place at The Met is particularly apt as both artists had a strong relationship with the museum during their lifetimes. (Their names are both etched on the ‘benefactors’ wall’ of the museum’s Great Hall.) The ambitions of both Krasner and Pollock’s paintings can be overwhelming, yet what emerges from this exhibition — in addition to the opportunity to see true masterpieces of the postwar twentieth-century canon — is a very personal portrait of two extraordinary artists and the unique relationship that propelled them forward.

‘Neither artist’s career follows a simple narrative of progress or completion,’ co-curator Brinda Kumar said at the press preview. ‘Instead, they both are marked by recurrence, transformation and consistent return to the past.’