When Lee Krasner was asked in a 1978 interview what she was doing while her husband Jackson Pollock was becoming so famous, she said, "I was working all the time." Krasner is shown above, at work, in 1981.Ernst Haas/Getty Images hide caption There's a new blockbuster show at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Past Continuous features two artists: Jackson Pollock, with many of his instantly recognizable "drip" paintings, and Lee Krasner, an artist often overshadowed by Pollock, who was her husband.But in this major exhibition, Krasner is finally getting her due — and on her own terms.This gargantuan show is replete with Pollock's greatest hits, the giant, frozen dances of paint splashed on canvas that have become iconic.
But this exhibition of more than 120 works (74 from Krasner, and 48 from Pollock) reveals Krasner as an Abstract Expressionist titan, too.One of the first works that catches your eye is a 1955 Krasner collage."Collage was very catalytic for her at these crucial moments in her life," said Brinda Kumar, one of the two Met curators who put together this exhibition."She was literally sometimes tearing up older bodies of work to create a new chapter."This work is 1955's Bald Eagle, a riotous mix of browns, blacks, fuchsia, and orange, with a claw-like slash of yellow.
And right in the middle is a cutout whose shape evokes the head of a bald eagle — and that's the name that Krasner gave to this collage.Pollock's rejects were the source material for Bald Eagle, according to Kumar."Krasner has very intentionally and deliberately cut up discarded Pollock works from this era in the 1950s, where you can see his distinctive drip still evident," she said.When you put Krasner's collages next to Pollock's drip paintings, we see something new in the juxtaposition, said another Met curator, David Breslin."But that doesn't mean that t...