Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous - The Metropolitan Museum of Art - New York
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Lee Krasner (1908–1984) and Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) met as emerging artists in New York in the winter of 1941. They married in 1945 and moved to Springs, Long Island, where their lives and work remained closely intertwined, personally, artistically and professionally, until Pollock's early death. For decades Pollock's reputation overshadowed Krasner's; today both artists are recognised as central to the innovations of art from the mid-20th century onwards.
Taking its subtitle from a 1976 painting by Krasner, Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous follows two parallel lives and practices, shaped first by lived experience and later shadowed by memory. Krasner, born in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrant parents from what is now Ukraine, and Pollock, raised in Los Angeles and the American West, each brought their own geographies and inheritances into a shared artistic world.
Their early paths followed distinct strands of American modernism that converged in Abstract Expressionism, a movement that sought to translate inner feeling into dramatic visual action. In the years after the Second World War, as artists asked why art mattered and what it could be, Pollock found his breakthrough in the "drip" technique, while Krasner pursued a restless exploration of abstraction, often prompted by her lasting interest in nature and colour.
The first major New York presentation devoted to either artist in more than 20 years, the exhibition brings together over 120 works and is the first to look at the full arc of their careers side by side. Go to Website
