There's a new blockbuster show at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Past Continuous features two artists: Jackson Pollock, with many of his instantly recognizable "drip" paintings, and Lee Krasner, an artist often overshadowed by Pollock, who was her husband. But in this major exhibition, Krasner is finally getting her due — and on her own terms.
This gargantuan show is replete with Pollock's greatest hits, the giant, frozen dances of paint splashed on canvas that have become iconic. But this exhibition of more than 120 works (74 from Krasner, and 48 from Pollock) reveals Krasner as an Abstract Expressionist titan, too.
One of the first works that catches your eye is a 1955 Krasner collage.
"Collage was very catalytic for her at these crucial moments in her life," said Brinda Kumar, one of the two Met curators who put together this exhibition. "She was literally sometimes tearing up older bodies of work to create a new chapter."
This work is 1955's Bald Eagle, a riotous mix of browns, blacks, fuchsia, and orange, with a claw-like slash of yellow. And right in the middle is a cutout whose shape evokes the head of a bald eagle — and that's the name that Krasner gave to this collage.
Pollock's rejects were the source material for Bald Eagle, according to Kumar. "Krasner has very intentionally and deliberately cut up discarded Pollock works from this era in the 1950s, where you can see his distinctive drip still evident," she said.
When you put Krasner's collages next to Pollock's drip paintings, we see something new in the juxtaposition, said another Met curator, David Breslin.
"But that doesn't mean that the individual parts forgo their histories or their pasts," Breslin said. "We see that almost as a metaphor for couples in relationships as well. You form a unit, yet you also have all the things in your head, in your mind, in your heart that are your own, that don't change."
And sure enough, just past these collages, a visitor will see one of Pollock's classic drip paintings — 1952's Convergence, with neon orange and electric yellow so bright and bold that they foreshadow 1980s subway graffiti. The curators have put Convergence on a freestanding wall near windows, with daylight shining through — evoking the energy of a contemporary gallery.
The unspoken challenge of this show is to invite comparisons between wife-and-husband artists. In popular imagination, Pollock is often the troubled genius and hero, and Krasner is sidelined as a helpmate. She knew what people thought — but she didn't care.
In a 1978 interview on a television program called Inside New York's Art World, the interviewer asked Krasner what she was doing while Pollock was becoming so famous.
"I was working all the time," Krasner replied. "I doubt our relationship could have existed at all if I weren't working. In terms of what other people think, I can't do anything about that. You know, that's not my preoccupation anyway. As long as I was able to work, I went about my business."
That's true, but Krasner was also very savvy about her market value as a female artist, said curator Brinda Kumar.
"She was very cognizant of the gender dynamics and the gender politics. His career was the one that was more successful at the time."
To that end, she made certain calculations. They made their home in Springs, N.Y., a small fishing community on the far side of Long Island — a location Krasner chose specifically to get Pollock away from the business and booze of Manhattan. Pollock used a barn on the property to work on his enormous canvases, while Krasner painted first in the kitchen and then in a small, upstairs bedroom.
Charting her own course
Lee Krasner was all about reinvention — both artistic and personal. Born Lena Krassner in Brooklyn, she was the child of Orthodox Jewish parents who came from a shtetl in what is now Ukraine. Nobody in her family knew anything about art.
She gave herself a series of new names: first Lenore, then Lee Krasner. She sculpted a new life as a young, bold artist. And she became a quintessential networker who knew everybody in New York's art scene.
Journalist Mary Gabriel has written extensively about Krasner, including in her 2018 book Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement that Changed Modern Art. Gabriel says that unlike her husband, Krasner kept reinventing her style.
"Krasner was so fascinating because she changed, not even by the decade. Every few years, she tries something new," Gabriel said. "She was always searching, which in a way is the most, I think, honest way to be an artist, because art is about discovery."
These include what Krasner called her "Little Images" — densely populated paintings from the late 1940s of nearly hieroglyphic looking symbols, all jostling for space on small canvases — as well as immense works she created, especially after Pollock died in a car crash in 1956. Pollock was plagued by alcoholism and depression, and he cheated on her; his girlfriend of the time was one of the passengers in the crash.
Krasner continued to be financially savvy as well. After Pollock's death, she more than tripled the price of one of his most famous works, Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), to sell it to the Met — a sum that not just set the pace for Pollock's market value, but for a tide of modern artists.
For this show, Autumn Rhythm was moved off its traditional museum wall to a freestanding display, Kumar noted.
"It is almost architectural in a way, because it's set against this slate grey color," she said. "The swirling blacks get animated in a whole new way, and the familiar teals and the familiar whites surge with a new energy."
Krasner seized upon her own new energy in the years after Pollock's death. She took over the barn studio that had been her husband's — and made giant, joyful work, brimming with life and lushness, as curator David Breslin noted.
"You see this incredible painting that's almost 17 feet wide called The Seasons, that has these forms and bodies, eyes and body parts and these things that look like vegetation sprawling out of it," Breslin said. "So she makes, almost in a contradictory way, some of the brightest, most vibrant paintings the year after his death."
And in some way, this whole show is all about Lee Krasner finally being able to claim her own space. Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous runs at the Met until Jan. 31.
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