Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous at the Met Puts Two Abstract Pioneers in Conversation

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has opened "Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous," an exhibition that brings Lee Krasner (1908–1984) and Jackson Pollock into the same rooms. The Met describes it as a conversation between the two painters, tracing how their practices evolved, what influences they shared, and where they diverged. It is on view through January 2027.

The show runs from Pollock's celebrated drip paintings to Krasner's continual reinvention of abstraction. Rather than treating one artist as the main story and the other as a footnote, it presents both as figures who helped redefine modern painting.

One work the museum has singled out on Instagram is Krasner's "Mosaic Table" from 1947. After the couple settled in Springs, on Long Island, Krasner started what the Met calls an unlikely home improvement project. She found a pair of wagon wheels in the barn. She also had discarded tesserae left from a mural Pollock had designed for a commission that was never realized. Inside each iron rim she set the tiles along with broken glass, shells, pebbles, keys, coins and flattened pieces of costume jewelry, so that colored shards of different sizes swirl across the surface with no set pattern. Pollock poured the cement that fixed the arrangement, and a local ironworker added legs. The table is mixed media in cement on an iron wagon-wheel armature with steel, and it belongs to a private collection.

The Met says the all-over imagery and the looseness of the design anticipate how Krasner handled form in the paintings she called her "Little Images." In the exhibition, the table is shown among those paintings.

The show is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, on the Upper East Side. For anyone curious about how the Brooklyn-born Krasner developed her own voice within Abstract Expressionism, it offers a chance to see her work next to Pollock's.