The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present a landmark exhibition exploring the intertwined careers of Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, bringing together more than 120 works in the first major New York presentation devoted to either artist in over two decades.
Opening on 4th October 2026, Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous traces the artists’ lives and practices in parallel, re-examining one of modern art’s most influential partnerships while placing renewed emphasis on Krasner’s pioneering contribution to Abstract Expressionism.
Drawing on loans from more than 80 museums and collections worldwide, alongside works from The Met’s own holdings, the exhibition follows both artists from the 1930s through to the end of their respective careers. Rather than presenting Pollock and Krasner as a single artistic story, the exhibition explores where their practices converged and where they developed in radically different directions.
Meeting in New York in 1942 before marrying three years later, Krasner and Pollock shared a creative partnership that helped shape the emergence of Abstract Expressionism. While Pollock became internationally celebrated for his revolutionary drip paintings, Krasner continually reinvented her own practice through collage, gestural abstraction and richly coloured paintings inspired by nature and the European avant-garde. The exhibition seeks to rebalance this history by examining both artists as equals while acknowledging the distinctiveness of their individual achievements.
Organised across 12 chronological chapters, the exhibition juxtaposes moments where the artists worked side by side with galleries devoted solely to one or the other. Visitors will encounter Pollock’s celebrated drip paintings, alongside Krasner’s Little Images, monumental Umber and Earth Green series, as well as key paintings including Composition (1949), The Seasons (1957), Lavender Mist: Number 1, 1950, The Deep (1953) and many other defining works.
Among the exhibition’s strengths is its international scope, with major loans arriving from institutions including MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate, the Centre Pompidou, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, the Art Institute of Chicago, SFMoMA and the National Gallery of Victoria, alongside rarely seen works from private collections.
The exhibition also reflects The Met’s ongoing reassessment of twentieth-century art ahead of the opening of its new Tang Wing for Modern and Contemporary Art in 2030. By reconsidering Krasner and Pollock through contemporary scholarship, the Museum aims to demonstrate how both artists continue to shape conversations around abstraction and painting today.
Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous,
4th October 2026 to 31st January 2027,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
