Go soon. You’ll want to go often.

If the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s grand exhibition last year on Raphael was sublime, its stunning big show this year, “Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous,” is a revelation. Or perhaps revelatory magic would be a better term.

With more than 120 paintings from 80 lenders, including 74 artworks by Lee Krasner (1908-84) and 48 by Jackson Pollock (1912-56), the show takes us back to the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, reminds us in Pollock’s case of his moment of extraordinary achievement and in Krasner’s reveals that she was a far better painter than has been generally recognized.

Krasner had heard of Pollock but not met him. She went to his studio to introduce herself in 1941; they began to date and then married. The Met’s show opens with a wonderfully warm video of their life together after their marriage in 1945 in the cottage they moved to in Springs, a small hamlet in East Hampton, Long Island. 

“Bald Eagle,” Lee Krasner, 1955 (2026 Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society, New York)

In the show’s first gallery curators David Breslin and Brinda Kumar startle you with a series of large abstract collage paintings by Krasner from the mid-1950s. Through a break in the wall you can see one of Pollock’s magnificent drip paintings, “Convergence: Number 10, 1952.” This is not going to be a one-thing-after-another show.

A gallery labelled “Before Krasner, Before Pollock” tellingly surveys the artists’ early work and influences. Born in the West, Pollock came to New York and at the Art Students League studied under the American regionalist Thomas Hart Benton, learning from Native artists and the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Krasner, born in Brooklyn, studied at Hans Hoffman’s school and absorbed Europeans such as Picasso, Matisse and Modigliani. Both the young Americans were included in John Graham’s ground-breaking show “American and French Painters” of 1942, which is given a wonderful micro recall at the Met.

Pollock underwent analysis, his work became more and more Surrealist, and Peggy Guggenheim began to show him at her gallery Art of This Century. “Guardians of the Secret” from 1943 stunned people at his first show and is one of the most famous surrealist-influenced paintings of the period. Of “Stenographic Figure” (1942), Mondrian said it “was the most interesting work I’ve seen in America.” And the influence of Picasso endured. “God dammit,” Pollock commented once, “that guy missed nothing.”

Ensconced in Springs, Pollock took the upstairs bedroom as a studio and Krasner the kitchen. Depressed by World War II and the Holocaust (she was Jewish), Krasner felt blocked until she happened on her “Little Images,” all-over paintings of a semi-pointillist beauty. Pollock was meanwhile fumbling toward his nonpareil drip paintings.

”Autumn Rhythm: Number 30, 1950,” Jackson Pollock (© 2026 Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights
Society, New York)

With them the show explodes in its largest gallery, which presents four of his remarkable and unique drip paintings, produced by his laying a large canvas on the floor and then (literally) dancing around it to pour and drip paint in swirling streams of interlacing color. Pollock gave them numbered titles. (Krasner said: “Numbers are neutral. They make people look at what pictures are: pure painting.”) But critics invented atmospheric labels. “Lavender Mist,” from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, was Clement Greenberg’s deft identity for a marvelously lyrical symphonic swirl of pink, blue, whitish and silvery aluminum that interlace in all directions.

“Convergence,” which we see on entering the show, is a pride of the AKG Art Museum in Buffalo in blue, white and yellow. “One: Number 31, 1950” from 1950 is the largest of all and a pride of the Museum of Modern Art (that year was easily his most productive), while “Autumn Rhythm,” from 1950, in darker tones is the pride of the Met. Writing about it in Art News in 1952, Harold Rosenberg said: “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another an area in which to act in which what was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” (Famously, Hans Namuth photographed the artist at work, and Life magazine ran a story provocatively asking whether Pollock was “the greatest living painter in the United States.”)

“Past Continuous,“ Lee Krasner, 1976 (© The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society, New York)

There was nowhere to go after the majestic achievement of the drip paintings, and Pollock died in an alcohol-induced car crash in 1956. Krasner had had her second gallery show the year before, and despite her grief produced one of her greatest canvases, the 17-foot-long “The Seasons,” a riotous unfolding of pink and green forms. She continued to paint, had a triumphant retrospective at the White Chapel Gallery in London in 1965, and that year created another large masterpiece, “Combat,” which enfolds you in a world of wrestling magenta and tangerine.

A painter to the end, and by no means simply the caring partner of Jackson Pollock, in 1974 Krasner rediscovered some of her earliest work, cut it up, pasted it together—she never forgot Matisse—and called it “Past Continuous.” 

Don’t wait to see these two artists whose gifts to us are revelatory indeed.