Let’s Talk About Lee Krasner (and Jackson Pollock)

One of the major museum events of the fall is called "Krasner and Pollock, Past Continuous," at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It brings together 120 artworks by two of the titans of 20th-century American painting: Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock. The two famously were a couple, and this show claims to be the first to look at their artworks specifically together as a dialogue.

Jackson Pollock was, and is, known as the indispensable abstract expressionist. His expansive style of drip painting, made by throwing paint across a canvas on the ground, caught the media and the public's imagination in the early 1950s. The sensation around these paintings remade U.S. art. For many years, Krasner's reputation was in his shadow. Pollock died tragically in a car crash in 1956. Krasner lived on until 1984, and the Met show illustrates how she continued to experiment.

These days, museums are featuring Krasner's inventive and varied paintings as much as Pollock's. A rebalancing, this show seems bound to continue. The title of the show even comes from a collage painting by Krasner from the 1970s. Having just returned from the exhibition, Ben Davis was inspired to talk specifically about Lee Krasner, who she was, where she came from, and what makes her art unique and lasting. And so we reached out to the art historian Mary Gabriel, author of the very engaging 2018 bestseller, Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler, Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art.