Lee KRASNER and Jackson POLLOCK.

Oct 14th, 2026

I walked through the exhibition in reverse order.  I have read about their work many times.  In art history courses, auctions, museums, galleries, and also on occasions at fairs, which this year made a record-high fair sale for the Armory 2026 through Hollis Taggart Gallery.  I don't know which one it was, because at an art fair of predominantly living artists that is what I am looking at-- (which is honestly a little unfair because their grant has perpetuated the careers of so many great artists annd also longshot artists that sometimes did or did not have a moment like Jackson's. So, can you guess who's work it was?  Timing, strategy, packaging, and the adjacent contexts are all part of the translation of the values and contexts that artists form from the waves of the muse. If that is a sine wave (x,y) then the market is the cosine (x,z) and are translated into the tangential outputs of the same signifiers: value and context. 

I generally would not pay attention to such things at an art fair. Admittedly, more often Pollock's, which, let's be honest, are a few works from a single series and its expanded developments.  And one could speak as drones about Lee's work as well, as she is clearly an aesthetic master of all of the directions experimented in the abstract and modernist styles of her time, and she seems to cross-reference where she ventured within this selection of her body of work presented alongside her husband's.  A sequence of static images that have as much motion, contrast, and shift-focus as any action film. Dropping us on parallel denouements, amplified by the scales and proximities swallowed by the exhibition.

Or maybe that is just a reaction to the line about Jackson taking over the upstairs studio in their home while Lee works in the Kitchen.  Or, more bluntly, how he later co-opted the barn while Lee continued to work in the kitchen.   Such a game of cowboys and homemakers was one that would really excite the media and the general population in the 50s (his explosive period), but today are interpreted and therefore presented inversely.  In our moment, it is easy to consume that sentiment, and while it digests, compare artistic technical skills above market merits.  And take up sides in an argument in a competition they did not have with each other because they had different goals and narratives but shared the art-life more than most are able to.  A few things to really help you grind it away would be that the abstraction he sought was a destruction of established rulesets for a pure act of art-making.  He was tortured, probably because he could not escape how beautiful he wanted to make the controlled disaster of the drip paintings while trying to travel as far away from representation as possible, clinging only to abstraction- no more allies, no more adversaries.  Only the process.  A trip into the void.  How does one decide how to utilize art theory to navigate such a war, and not retain some sort of shell shock or PTSD?  Pollock did not return, but he did remain. and while Jackson's work is not really my favorite thing among the many discourses that spin out of control yet remain in art's orbital homeostasis between accepted methods and rejections, there are three such discoveries as large-scale paintings in this exhibition that shed light not only on his journey but on the history of painting, as pure aesthetic moments.  We've read lines similar to this that he stated, and the curatorial team at the Met certainly conveyed this message through a spatial journey intermingled with Lee's work.  Returning to Lee's work is really what makes the exhibition worth seeing, and is obviously the challenge that the museum wanted. Lee Krasner so expertly exaggerates, crosses borders, and expresses abstractions that pull on connections to many artists of the movements and fields of abstraction with intentional foci that, to me, illustrate a flight above the dialog of abstraction and a counterbalance to the choreography of the drips occurring on the same estate, akin to a weaving of paths with her love and supporters like birds collaboratively weaving a sweater midflight.