The exhibition begins with an idyll: a house in the countryside, in front a pond, various birds, in the back a man enters the door (washed out) and goes outside; A woman comes from the side. A Super 8 film on a continuous loop, endless light, endless green. The house with the pond is in the tiny town of Springs on Long Island outside New York; The man in the door is called Jackson Pollock, the woman on the side is Lee Krasner, the two are newly married.
“Past Continuous” is the name of the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, a title that cannot be translated because this grammatical tense does not exist in German. It's about a past that extends into the present: a past that doesn't go away.
First, let's take a look at the origins of the two. She couldn't have been more different. Lee Krasner, born in 1908, came from Brooklyn. She was the daughter of Ukrainian Jews and had studied painting with the German Hans Hofmann. Her first pictures show that she got to know European modernism very thoroughly from Hofmann. Pollock was four years her junior, a Midwestern boy growing up in the Los Angeles area; he started out as a skilled Picasso impersonator interested in Native American art.
The two met because an exhibition in 1942 brought their pictures together. The evening after the exhibition, Krasner showed up unannounced at Pollock's house. The two became a couple; and then she couldn't do anything anymore. For three years she stroked paint after paint until her canvases had become gray slabs, then she scraped it all down again. Afterwards it was said that Pollock's genius had robbed Krasner of his strength. She said it was the news from the war: over there in Europe, her relatives were being shot down in pits.
In 1945 the two married and moved from the city to the idyll. This cut them off from the vibrant art scene in Manhattan, but it also made it a little harder for Jackson Pollock to keep himself supplied with alcohol, which was a good thing. Pollock set up his studio in the shed of the Springs house - she worked upstairs above the kitchen. Invitations to the spouse's studio were only possible by invitation.
When the two of them weren't working, they cooked together, went on hikes, and invited friends over. Downstairs in the living room there was a big old anchor hanging on the wall that the two of them had found while walking; Since he had an eyelet at the top, he looked like a person spreading his arms in a blessing gesture - or like a crucified person. In the Metropolitan Museum we can admire this readymade for the first time outside the home of the two celebrities.
Jackson Pollock made his giant formats in the barn of the house in Springs. The canvas lay on the barn floor in front of him; he used an oil can to spread streaks of paint on it in a wild dance. The results look like the test images that you used to see after the program had ended: you can almost hear the angry electrical humming and cracking that often accompanied such test images on television; the higher the energy, the angrier the hum.
Lee Krasner was the artist's muse during this phase. She introduced him to the latest European works of art to keep him up to date, and encouraged him to go a little further with each new painting (“too far” was always just far enough). In 1949, Life magazine seriously asked whether Jackson Pollock was the greatest living American painter. Today there are art critics who claim that Pollock was Lee Krasner's creation, their Frankenstein monster, so to speak.
Half the work of this exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum is to free Lee Krasner from such attributions, to dig her out from under the interpretations that critics have heaped on this woman over the decades. Because while her world-famous husband was working as a berserker in the shed, she was creating small formats in the house that had something special. Colorful collages. Clusters of white squares. A table that is actually a sculpture.
The exhibition shows, as if in passing, that Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner belonged to two different species: she was a vixen, he was a hedgehog. “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one great thing,” wrote the Greek poet Archilochus. Jackson Pollock first had to find himself; Once he found himself, he remained at the core of who he was. But she – the vixen – changed, changed styles, methods, and work tools.
Of course that didn't go well. It couldn't go well. Pollock drank like a fool, he cheated on her, he became more and more crazy. He died in a car accident in 1956 at the age of just 44, killing a passenger. Krasner was in Europe when it happened; she returned home immediately. A little later her mother died. She couldn't sleep at night. Sleeplessly, in the barn that had now become her studio, she created large formats full of yellow and white and black in which grief seemed to literally explode.
In one of these paintings, the black squiggles become eyes that seem to study the viewer. But Lee Krasner was far from finished. She outlived her husband by 28 years and reinvented herself again and again. In the end she found old pictures that she had never sold: cubist stuff from the 1930s. She took the scissors, cut them up and assembled them into never-before-seen works of art - vixen to the end.
This exhibition at the Met is not just grandiose in scope; it brings together more than 120 paintings loaned by more than 80 institutions. It is also a logistical masterpiece: It is difficult to imagine exactly how Pollock's large formats were brought into the museum rooms - in any case, they do not fit through any door. Above all, the Metropolitan Museum demonstrates here what place it has in New York's art life. MoMA and the Guggenheim are actually responsible for modern art; American modernism can be viewed at the Whitney Museum.
The Metropolitan Museum is traditionally more the place for the old masters. But here it trumps all of the local competition in one fell swoop. When the Metropolitan Museum acquired its first Pollock painting in 1957 (“Autumn Rhythm” for the now somewhat ridiculous sum of $20,000), it was a scandal; it almost cost then-director James Rorimer his job. But the current museum director, the Austrian Max Hollein, beamed at the exhibition opening like a general who had just won an important battle.
“Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous,” until January 31, 2027, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
