A major Metropolitan Museum exhibition places Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock in sustained dialogue, tracing two intertwined careers while expanding the story of Abstract Expressionism beyond a single artistic legend.
What happens when two artists who shared a life are finally given equal space to tell their own stories?
At The Metropolitan Museum of Art this fall, Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock return to New York in a major exhibition that looks beyond the familiar mythology of Abstract Expressionism. Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous, opening October 4, 2026, brings together more than 120 paintings, works on paper, and related material to trace the artists’ careers in parallel—from their early years through the postwar period and into the final decades of Krasner’s life.
It is the first major New York presentation devoted to either artist in more than 20 years and the first major exhibition at The Met to examine the full arc of both careers together.
Two Artists, One New York
Krasner and Pollock met in New York in 1941, when both were emerging artists navigating the city’s rapidly changing modern art scene. They married in 1945 and eventually moved to Springs, on Long Island.
Their relationship became one of the most discussed partnerships in American art.
But Past Continuous is not simply an exhibition about an artistic couple.
The Met’s premise is more expansive: Krasner and Pollock developed distinct practices that sometimes intersected, sometimes diverged, and remained connected to the broader transformations of American modernism.
The exhibition therefore places their work beside one another without reducing either artist to the other’s biography.
The Meaning of “Past Continuous”
The exhibition’s title comes from a 1976 painting by Krasner.
The phrase is particularly fitting for an exhibition concerned with artistic lives that continued to evolve even after major historical moments had seemingly been settled.
Pollock’s career ended with his death in 1956. Krasner lived for nearly three more decades, continuing to reinvent her work and engage with artists including Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, and Henri Matisse.
That difference in chronology matters.
It allows the exhibition to look beyond the compressed story in which Pollock’s most famous years become the endpoint of their shared narrative.
Instead, Past Continuous follows two artistic trajectories that continued to develop in different directions.
Before the Drip
Pollock is often introduced through the paintings that made his drip technique famous.
But the exhibition begins earlier.
Works such as Stenographic Figure (1942) and Guardians of the Secret (1943) reveal an artist still working through figurative, symbolic, and Surrealist influences before his radical late-1940s paintings transformed his reputation.
Krasner’s trajectory was similarly exploratory.
Her practice moved through different forms of abstraction, with an ongoing interest in color, nature, rhythm, and visual structure.
By placing their earlier works into the same chronological framework, the exhibition makes visible the experimentation that preceded the canonical images associated with each artist.
Pollock and the Revolution of Gesture
Pollock’s drip paintings remain among the defining images of postwar American art.
Rather than applying paint exclusively through conventional brushwork, Pollock poured, dripped, splattered, and moved paint across canvases positioned on the floor.
The resulting paintings turned gesture and movement into visible records of process.
The Met exhibition includes Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist) (1950), one of Pollock’s landmark works, alongside other paintings that demonstrate the scale and complexity of his mature practice.
The Deep (1953), another major work in the exhibition, belongs to a later moment when Pollock’s painting became darker, more concentrated, and markedly different from the exuberance of the drip period.
Together, these works complicate the idea that Pollock’s practice can be reduced to a single technique.
Krasner’s Expanding Vocabulary
Krasner’s career offers a different model of artistic persistence.
Her work continually changed.
The Met’s presentation includes Composition (1949), The Seasons (1957), The Eye is the First Circle (1960), and Combat (1965), among other works that demonstrate her movement through abstraction, collage, gesture, color, and fragmentation.
Her collage practice is particularly important to the exhibition’s larger argument.
Krasner frequently reworked earlier material, cutting, rearranging, and transforming existing images and surfaces.
Destruction could therefore become a form of creation.
A previous painting could become raw material for another.
The past was not discarded. It was continually reassembled.
That approach gives Past Continuous an additional meaning: artistic history itself can be revised, reconstructed, and seen differently over time.
The Long Shadow of a Famous Name
For decades, Pollock’s reputation occupied a disproportionately prominent place in the public story of the pair.
The Met explicitly frames the exhibition as part of a continuing reassessment of Krasner’s artistic significance while also offering a sustained examination of Pollock’s complex practice.
This is not simply a matter of replacing one artist with another.
Instead, the exhibition changes the structure of the conversation.
Krasner is not presented merely as Pollock’s partner, and Pollock is not presented solely as the mythic pioneer of drip painting.
Both become subjects of sustained art-historical attention.
Their differences become as important as their connections.
Twelve Chapters, Two Careers
The exhibition is organized into 12 chapters spanning the artists’ careers from the 1930s through the postwar period and the final years of their lives.
The structure moves between moments of convergence and divergence.
Among the key works are Krasner’s Little Images and Umber and Earth Green series and Pollock’s late-1940s drip paintings and monumental canvases of the 1950s.
The exhibition design also draws attention to moments of exchange while allowing individual works to retain their own visual identities.
The result is less a conventional retrospective than a sustained conversation across time.
The Met and the Artists
The exhibition also has a particular significance for The Met.
Pollock first exhibited a painting at the Museum in 1943 in a wartime exhibition. Later in the decade, he was among the artists known as the “Irascibles,” who publicly challenged the Museum’s position toward contemporary art.
After Pollock’s death, The Met acquired Autumn Rhythm: Number 30, 1950, one of his major paintings.
Krasner’s relationship with the Museum developed differently. She donated important works on paper by Pollock to The Met during her lifetime, and the Museum later hosted her memorial service in 1984.
Past Continuous therefore also becomes part of the Museum’s own history with the two artists.
From American Modernism to Contemporary Art
The exhibition arrives at a moment when museums are increasingly reconsidering the narratives through which modern art has traditionally been presented.
Abstract Expressionism has often been described through a group of highly visible male artists and a dramatic postwar narrative centered on New York.
Past Continuous does not erase that history.
Instead, it adds complexity.
Krasner and Pollock emerged from different geographic and cultural backgrounds and brought distinct artistic inheritances into the same New York environment. Their practices developed alongside broader questions about what painting could accomplish after World War II.
That historical framework also helps explain why their work continues to matter.
The question is not simply who invented a particular style.
It is how artists repeatedly reinvented painting at a moment when painting itself seemed to be confronting a radically changed world.
A Dialogue That Continues
More than half a century after Pollock’s death and decades after Krasner’s passing, the dialogue between their practices remains open.
Their paintings continue to ask questions about gesture, material, color, destruction, repetition, memory, and artistic identity.
But Past Continuous adds another question:
What happens when a familiar art-historical story is looked at again?
At The Met, Krasner and Pollock are not frozen in the roles history assigned them.
They appear as artists still in motion—sometimes moving together, sometimes apart, and constantly negotiating their relationship with painting, modernism, and each other.
Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue
October 4, 2026–January 31, 2027
Gallery 899
Free with Museum admission
The past, in this exhibition, is anything but finished.
It remains continuous—revisited through paint, memory, scholarship, and the changing ways audiences understand the artists who shaped modern American art.
