The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York will host a major exhibition for two major artists who have never been subject to such treatment by the institution before: Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock.
The famously married artists each established a legacy that stands on its own. This show, to open in October and run through January 2027, will survey those legacies both on their own and side-by-side.
In a press release, Met director Max Hollein said, “With its distinctive premise and scope, Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous exemplifies The Met’s commitment to reexamining modern art through rigorous scholarship and fresh perspectives. By considering each artist on their own terms while also foregrounding their consequential relationship, the exhibition situates Krasner’s and Pollock’s work within a broader cultural and artistic context.” Hollein went on to call the approach integral to the vision he foresees for the Met Department of Modern and Contemporary Art’s forthcoming new wing, scheduled to open in 2030.
Krasner and Pollock met as young artists when they were included in a show in 1942 and married three years later. They lived together in Springs, New York, in a house that can still be visited today—a potent experience, especially as it includes a barn-turned-studio that retains traces of the hallowed work conducted inside.
During their years together, and after Pollock’s death in a car crash under the influence of alcohol in 1956, Krasner tended to be overshadowed as secondary to her epoch-defining husband. But of the forthcoming exhibition, which borrows its subtitle “Past Continuous” from a painting by Krasner, Met curator David Breslin told the New York Times, “This is a story of equals. They were like two planets circling each other.” The coupled undertaking will “show how the two worked together, lived together, but how they also were two different individuals who told two very different stories about what art making is,” Breslin added.
In the press release, Met associate curator Brinda Kumar said the show “approaches these artists not as a single story, but as two practices unfolding in proximity over time. The exhibition examines how Krasner and Pollock shared a commitment to testing the possibilities of abstraction—through shifts in scale, material, and form—and how those investigations continued to evolve along distinct trajectories.”
The exhibition will include 120 paintings, works on paper, and ephemera drawn from the collection of the Met as well as loans from more than 80 lenders around the world. In addition to important works from fellow museums, the show “will also include several rarely seen works from important private collections.”
