A Once-in-a-Lifetime Look Into America’s Most-Storied Art Couple

“Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a once-in-a-lifetime gathering of more 120 works by America’s most storied art couple: Lee Krasner (1908–84) and Jackson Pollock (1912–56). Much has been said about them, with almost all the focus being on Pollock. A May auction made him the newest member of the $100 million club, and the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Biography went to Jackson Pollock: An American Saga by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White. At 934 pages long, the book inspired the Hollywood film Pollock (2000), for which Marcia Gay Harden won Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Krasner.

Indeed, Krasner herself has been seen as a supporting character for too long. In 1981, Barbara Rose curated the exhibition “Krasner/Pollock: A Working Relationship” to undermine the dominant narrative that she was a second-tier artist and long-suffering helpmate to her legendary husband, proposing that their marriage was a complex, working partnership of artistic equals. But Rose never got Krasner out of Pollock’s shadow.

A show that pays more attention to Krasner than Pollock (she outlived him by 28 years), “Past Continuous” is more daring, nuanced, and expansive than previous attempts because, finally, it treats them as equals. The exhibition starts with footage, a panoramic view of their unheated, two-story, shingled house and studio on Long Island, overlayed with historic stills of Pollock, Krasner, their dog Gyp, and their tamed crow, Caw Caw. This is where Krasner and Pollock lived for nearly 11 years, until Pollock killed himself and one of his passengers, Edith Metzger, while driving drunk, injuring his girlfriend, Ruth Kligman, too. At the time, Krasner was in Europe, distancing herself from her husband’s drinking and philandering.

It was in this house, far from New York and his favorite watering hole, the Cedar Bar, that Pollock made his first storied drip paintings. He unrolled unprimed canvas onto the studio floor and worked horizontally, applying enamel and house paints with sticks and brushes but never touching the canvas. He was inspired to do this by the paintings of Janet Sobel (1893–1968), a self-taught Ukrainian-born artist. Her Milky Way (1945), which he saw at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery in 1946, directly inspired his first drip painting, Galaxy, in 1947.

Just two years later, a headline in the widely popular LIFE magazine asked “Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” elevating him from little-known abstract painter to overnight celebrity. Its four photographs showed Pollock as a brooding, hyper-masculine figure smoking a cigarette and wearing paint-splattered jeans. Krasner is not mentioned; he is portrayed as a solitary male genius.

Subverting that myth, the Met show ambitiously resets the history of Abstract Expressionism, going a long way to reveal the complexity of their artistic relationship. The first gallery presents Krasner’s collage works from the mid 1950s, when Pollock was at an artistic impasse and spiraling out of control. Until now, we’ve only ever gotten the lamentable tragedy of Pollock’s decline sans the triumph of Krasner’s emergence from his shadow.

This retelling proves that by the mid-’50s, Krasner is Pollock’s equal and deserved to be see on her own. In Bald Eagle (1955), Krasner collaged scraps of dark brown linen and unprimed canvas that she and Pollock discarded, including on the white shape in the middle of the painting that resembles a bird’s profile, where we see Pollock’s dripped black line. Incorporating work rejected by her and her husband, Krasner was reborn, like a phoenix, from the destruction.

It’s an apt metaphor for Krasner’s entire life and career. Beset with doubts and periods of blockage, Krasner had to find constantly ways to move on and pursue a trajectory that was all her own, all while facing Pollock’s larger-than-life. Before she ever met Pollock, Krasner wrote these lines from Arthur Rimbaud’s poem A Season in Hell on her studio wall:

To whom shall I hire myself out? What beast must I adore?
What holy image is attacked? What hearts shall I break?
What lie must I maintain? In what blood tread?

Constantly restless and one tough cookie, Krasner understood how hard it was to maintain one’s integrity as an artist.

After proposing that Krasner more than held her own, the curators take a more biographical approach, placing examples of their early work—from before they met—in the same gallery. It starts with his-and-hers self-portraits—Krasner’s, in graphite and crayon, (ca. 1929-30); Pollock’s, a muddy brown, moody impasto (ca. 1930–33)—and includes a selection of paintings from a group show they both exhibited in, “American and French Painting” (1942). Curated by the Russian émigré artist and theoretician John Graham, it saw Pollock and Krasner hung alongside Stuart Davis, Willem de Kooning, Picasso, and Henri Matisse. After seeing the show and not knowing who Pollock was, Krasner looked him up. The rest is history.

The exhibition is filled with highpoints, from Pollock’s lyrically expansive masterpiece, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), to the recreation of Krasner’s groundbreaking exhibition at the Stable Gallery in 1955, which led the critic Clement Greenberg to proclaim her “a major addition to the American art scene of the era.” He later declared that with drip painting, Pollock had gotten past Cubism (meaning Picasso) and made the first great American paintings. Although Greenberg suggested that Krasner had taken collage (again Picasso) into a new American territory, he stopped short of being as laudatory as he was for her husband. It was this hierarchical thinking (or glass ceiling) that Krasner crashed against throughout her career.

Using pieces she and Pollock destroyed, abandoned, or never finished, she created both a body of work all her own. In Blue Level and Desert Moon (both 1955), with their solid areas of blues and reds, respectively, Krasner constructed a vertical world that stood straight and sturdy, raw elements reaching beyond the painting’s top and bottom edges. The verticality of these works can be seen as an aspirational self-portrait in which destruction and rebirth are literally and metaphorically merged.

The latter rooms of the exhibition are dominated by Krasner, who moves into new territory, while Pollock makes a handful of one-of-a-kind paintings, such as Portrait and a Dream and The Deep (both 1953). In her smartly vulgar The Seasons (1957), which extends nearly 17 feet, Krasner returns to the subject of rebirth one year after Pollock’s death, depicting abundant forms resembling genitalia. That boldness continued right up to Past Continuous (1976), her last monumental collage made of charcoal drawings she made while studying with Hans Hofmann.

In the 20 years between, we see major works from every decade. Restless as ever, she kept doing something unexpected. Take Kufic (1965), a spare, contemplative painting whose title refers to the oldest style of Arabic calligraphy, underscoring Krasner’s long interest in writing and linear marks. Rising Green (1971) is another standout in her masterful career.

The exhibition culminates with the Future Indicative (1977), collaging Krasner’s figure drawings. Krasner, self-critical and never fully satisfied with what she had done, made multiple masterpieces in paint and collage that stand on their own and resemble none of her contemporaries. Finally, Krasner is recognized for her powerful contribution to American art.