At the Met, Krasner and Pollock in a shared, sharper light

Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous, curated by David Breslin and Brinda Kumar, is not just a relationship show. It uses the pair’s marriage, begun in 1945, as a way to track how two painters shaped each other’s ambitions, methods and sense of scale.

The opening rooms set Krasner’s vertical abstractions from the 1950s against Pollock’s Convergence: No. 10 (1952). For viewers, that pairing makes the visual conversation immediately clear: Pollock’s paint surges outward in skeins and bursts, while Krasner builds her surfaces through collage, cuts and reworked fragments of earlier paintings.

For painters and drawing enthusiasts, the exhibition is especially revealing in the way it handles material and proportion. The dark, studio-sized galleries allow Krasner’s smaller works to hold their own, and her Little Images, made with a palette knife, show how abstraction can be compact, precise and rhythmic rather than simply expansive.

Later juxtapositions, including The Deep (1953) and Birth (1956), underline the exhibition’s larger point: one artist’s work becomes clearer when seen beside the other’s. The show does not erase the imbalance in their reputations, but it does offer a more exact way to look at both artists’ careers, and at the exchange between them.