At the Met, Krasner and Pollock are seen through the studio
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is presenting Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous, an exhibition focused on Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock. It places their work alongside their shared life, in compact galleries where paintings, archival images, and traces of their Long Island home shape the viewing experience.
Installed on the museum’s second floor in a somewhat hard-to-reach section, the show favors a restrained sequence rather than a dramatic storyline. A narrow corridor, lit by a silent video made from fragments of film and photographs, leads into the galleries and immediately grounds the exhibition in the material world of the artists’ work.
What stands out most is the attention given to the craft of painting. Krasner’s works read as constructions in paint — at once small and large, precise and forceful — where the energy of the gesture is matched by a clear sense of surface and structure.
The exhibition also asks viewers to consider how artworks change when they are placed back into a shared life. The relationship does not replace the paintings; instead, it sharpens them, showing how memory, studio images, and a common place can illuminate an artistic practice.
For artists and for anyone interested in drawing and painting, that is the real draw: the show makes the conditions of making visible, from materials to process, while allowing biography and form to remain distinct but connected.
Source : Hyperallergic