The Secret History of Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock

The blockbuster that just opened at the Met, “Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous,” is probably, canvas for canvas, the best painting show in America this year. It does something I thought impossible, which is make Abstract Expressionism—the most fossilized of American art movements—seem new again. The curators, David Breslin and Brinda Kumar, don’t accomplish this with appeals to timeliness or relevance but with a mighty selection of pieces—more than a hundred and twenty, from eighty-two different institutions—and smart exhibition design. The show is circular, starting and ending with Krasner, and roughly chronological, with a few exceptions. It begins in the nineteen-fifties, with some Krasner paintings that incorporate strips of Pollock’s own—a collaging of their life and work, the show’s main theme—then goes back to their apprentice days, in the thirties, when Krasner received her first dose of European modernism through Hans Hofmann, and Pollock, after wriggling from the grip of Thomas Hart Benton, the American regionalist painter, worked through Mexican muralism, American Indigenous art, and Picasso to find a style better suited to his psychosexual torments. In 1942, Krasner and Pollock shack up on Eighth Street, and the show takes off.

Pollock’s first batch of distinctive work appeared shortly after, with “Stenographic Figure” (1942), “The Moon Woman” (1942), and “Male and Female” (1942-43). Standing in a room with them, you’ll see the tension building between figuration and abstraction, between a descriptive line and a self-governed one. In “Stenographic Figure,” a painting that Peggy Guggenheim described as “dreadful” and that Mondrian called “the most interesting work I’ve seen so far in America,” Pollock paints a lively dinner-table exchange between two creatures with swirly arms. Inspired by a Miró retrospective from earlier that year, and having learned about Matisse via Krasner, Pollock trials a variety of marks, from broad, clean planes of blue, orange, and black to jazzy calligraphy. “Male and Female” pushes the blended approach further, with little ketchup and mustard tantrums set off by a crisp chalkboard column of numbers—the style, like the equation, not adding up. The one piece in the room that suggests what’s to come is “Gothic” (1944), in which scythe-shaped lines swing through the composition. There’s a two-stage process at work here: a black line that flows through the painting expressively, followed by a regulation of that flow with blue, orange, and pink highlights. There are no math problems or mangled body parts or other intimations of reality. The whole piece is about the free and rigorous interplay of line.

In 1945, Krasner and Pollock married and moved to Springs, a town in East Hampton, where they purchased a run-down farmhouse on a small plot of land. With only a few hundred locals and one saloon in town, there wasn’t much distraction. Their new life came with a couple of eccentricities, like a blowtorch they used to melt frozen toilet water in the winter and a pet crow named Caw-Caw, but the setting led to the most fruitful period of their relationship. In 1946, Krasner began working on a series of small, densely loaded canvases called “Little Images.” After years of angular still-lifes and nudes, she broke into all-over abstraction, caking her surfaces in color. Some of these canvases are built up with choppy brushwork, as in “Shattered Color” (1947); others are covered in what looks like a macerated and pastel pulp that has been attacked with the tines of a fork. The most surprising development, though, are the drizzles of paint. Right as Pollock was making his famous pivot, so, too, was Krasner.

From 1946 to 1947, Krasner and Pollock tilted their paintings from a vertical axis to a horizontal one: Pollock from easel to floor, performing his “drip” technique on unstretched canvas in a converted barn; Krasner, with pre-stretched canvas, working on a table in an upstairs bedroom of the house. All of the grandeur and energy of Pollock’s looping brambles and cords are clenched in Krasner’s versions. In two pieces from 1947 and 1948, she primes the canvas with smudges of blue, green, and orange, then rains down a comprehensive drizzle of black and white, choking all the color. The one that caught me off guard was “Abstract No. 2” (1946-48). Its white drips have the fluency and thickness of Pollock’s line, but they’re delivered with a strange twist: a web of black paint that obscures the rest of the canvas. It’s almost like you’re squinting at a Pollock with your eyelashes gating your vision. Was there something about the drips that Krasner didn’t want to see, or wanted to push away?

What happened next is now ancient chronicle: Pollock showed his new work at the Betty Parsons gallery in 1948; Life asked if he was the greatest painter in America; and the center of cultural gravity swung from Europe to the United States, from the Old World to the New. The provocation of Pollock’s work was so accessible, so instantly recognizable, that it’s easy to forget why the drip paintings weren’t just controversial but a referendum on the state of art, the nation, and the modern soul. Interpretations ran the gamut.

Were the paintings acts of negation—attempts to destroy figuration, to bring the history of painting to its knees—or triumphs of creation and renewal? Were they anti-capitalist traces of raw selfhood, or C.I.A.-boosted symbols of American freedom? Were they life-affirming “actions”—performances for which the paintings were just an interesting residue—or intricate exercises in self-conscious form? If your frame of reference was the Second World War, they might be images of the body blasted apart by shell fire. If your frame was psychoanalysis, they were glimpses of that dark, wordless corner of the mind called “the unconscious.” Some people experienced them as a purely optical means of aesthetic transport; others found in them tactile accumulations of crust, carnage, and debris. What made them so exciting, either way, was the immediacy they implied. The frozen velocity of paint whipped across a canvas suggested a new visual metaphor for intensity, aggression, violence, virility, force, energy, music, and ecstasy, a more efficient representation than any previous word or picture had managed.

Because we’ve cycled through all the responses to Abstract Expressionism, it would be easy to glide through the Met show in a reverential but dispassionate mood, feeling that every emotion is an ersatz emotion, every thought a rehashed one. But there’s a welcome lightness to the work in 2026, something you can find instantly in the show’s most spectacular room. Loosely modelled off “The Ideal Museum,” an unrealized gallery plan that Pollock developed with an architect and a friend, it features his colossal drip pieces—including “Lavender Mist,” “Autumn Rhythm,” and “One: Number 31, 1950”—and eight large canvases by Krasner. Each painting hangs on a freestanding wall, so you can pinball your way around them, discovering and rediscovering things. Standing just two feet away from “One,” I felt the wonderful disorientation that comes from looking at a Pollock: the disruption of a horizontal image by the memory of its vertical process. The frenzy of black, white, and turquoise fills your gaze with a completely weightless and floating image, just as you notice how every rope and droplet of paint has been pulled down by gravity into the fabric. Your mind’s eye is standing on the wall, but you’re still here, on the ground.

The other side of the room has eight of Krasner’s collage paintings, all produced in a sprint in 1955. Each is almost seven by five feet, and most establish a broad field of color—blue, crimson, orange—across which migrate sharp and irregular shapes, some like long teeth or spears, others like shards of obsidian. Together, they amount to a daring raid on the standard-bearers of Abstract Expressionism. By the late forties, many of the Ab Ex artists had regulated the expressive element of their style into signature trademarks—think of Rothko’s soft bars of color, Robert Motherwell’s enlarged ink stains, Adolph Gottlieb’s celestial orbs, Clyfford Still’s crags. In a savvy deflationary move, Krasner sliced and diced the machismo of Ab Ex into her own configurations. The vertical stripes in her paintings recall Barnett Newman’s “zips,” the black occupying shapes have a touch of Motherwell, and some edges are jagged enough to be by Still. The most provocative move is in “Bald Eagle” (1955), with fragments cut right out of a Pollock drip painting and packed into a mosaic—Krasner reclaiming her husband’s free-form mark with a blade. The critic Arthur Danto once wrote that, in Krasner’s work, “there are only shadows of other selves, the echo of other voices,” implying that she was doomed to be derivative. That not only ignores the cross-pollinating exchange with Pollock but also fails to see how her absorption of other modes, and her studied replication of expressive signatures, anticipates what was shortly to be celebrated as “postmodern” in the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.

“Oh—I stopped listening after you said ‘needless to say.’ ”

Cartoon by Suzy Becker

Even as fame and alcoholism sunk Pollock in the fifties—his production tapered, and his affairs all but destroyed the marriage—he and Krasner started painting more like each other, not less. Compare Krasner’s “Untitled” (1951) to Pollock’s “Easter and the Totem” (1953), in which Krasner’s distinctive palette of Pepto-Bismol pink, pale orange, chalk white, and black gets reprised by Pollock, who also borrows some of his partner’s curvy Matisse-like forms. After Pollock spent years trying to keep the figure out of his pieces, recognizable lumps and body parts reëmerged, such as the whirlpool of drowning eyes in “Ocean Greyness” (1953), and the same ocular shapes rolled into Krasner’s work a few years later, in “Embrace” (1956). They both had a symbolic fetish for eyeballs, and it’s hard to tell if it was pantheistic or paranoid—every particle of nature seeing itself or watching them.

Greenberg said Pollock began to wobble at the end, and you can see why. There’s a tackiness to some of his final gestures, like “The Deep” (1953) and “Portrait and a Dream” (1953). “The Deep” I instinctively like: it has an almost baptismal quality, as though you’re lifting your head out of a bath of milk to see the night sky. But there’s also a melodrama to the way Pollock uses white paint to surround a black chasm that runs through the picture’s center, as if it were a wound or an existential abyss. Three years after making it, while driving drunk in East Hampton, Pollock crashed his car, killing himself and one of the passengers, Edith Metzger. (The other, Ruth Kligman, with whom he was having an affair, survived.) Krasner was in Paris, and Greenberg called her to deliver the news.

But Krasner’s life kept going, and so does the exhibition. After Pollock died, she moved her studio into the barn at Springs and started painting on a grand scale, with pieces like “The Seasons” (1957), which is almost seventeen feet wide and eight feet tall. Filled with magnified pink and green foliate shapes, it’s like pressing your face into a basket of flowers or ripe fruit; the painting doesn’t turn inward to mourn but rather outward to nature. “I remember sitting with Jackson on our country porch,” Krasner said, “sitting there for hours, looking into the landscape, and always at dusk, when the woods ahead turned into strange, mystifying shapes.”

Unlike Pollock, who tended to settle into a style, Krasner stayed restless. In the sixties, she painted brown and stormy abstractions, where paint seems spit out of a fountain pen, as well as works of unbounded color and fluorescence, such as “Combat” (1965); in the seventies, she started cutting up a cache of her own charcoal drawings, and gluing them into fractured Cubo-Futurist collages. Until her death, in 1984, she was always casting back and lunging forward, tracing and retracing her steps. At the Met, one gets the impression that Pollock was a fascinating passenger whom Krasner picked up, travelled with for fifteen years, and kept talking to even once he was gone. After all, they were painters in love. They poured themselves into each other, and the show makes it impossible to think of them apart. ♦