The Met's 'Past Continuous' presents Lee Krasner as Pollock's equal, not his footnote

On 4 October 2026 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York opened Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous, which runs until 31 January 2027. Organised by the museum's Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, it brings together more than 120 paintings, drawings, works on paper and documents from the Met's collection and over 80 lenders in the United States and abroad. It is the first major New York exhibition devoted to either artist in more than two decades and the first at the Met, and it takes its title from a 1976 painting by Krasner.

Rather than treating Lee Krasner as the wife of Jackson Pollock, the show follows both careers in parallel across twelve chapters, alternating rooms devoted to each artist with rooms that hang their work side by side. According to NPR, 74 of the works are by Krasner and 48 by Pollock. Highlights include her small, dense Little Images of the 1940s, the collage Bald Eagle of 1955, which she built partly from Pollock canvases she deliberately cut up, and The Seasons, nearly 17 feet wide, painted in his barn studio after his death in 1956. Curator Brinda Kumar described Krasner as acutely aware of the gender dynamics of the art market; after Pollock's death she managed his estate shrewdly while reinventing her own style every few years. Asked in 1978 what she had been doing while Pollock became famous, she answered that she had been working all the time.

Krasner was born Lena Krassner in Brooklyn in 1908, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from what is now Ukraine, and changed her name as she forged a career in a male-dominated art world. She was one of the few women at the centre of Abstract Expressionism, and in 1984, shortly before her death, she became one of the first women to receive a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Her estate created the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, which has given grants to thousands of artists worldwide.