Lee Krasner’s Paris debut will arrive with unusual momentum this fall
Two major exhibitions are set to place Lee Krasner (1908–1984) back at the center of the conversation. In early October, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York will open “Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous,” a survey that considers the Abstract Expressionist painter alongside Jackson Pollock. Two weeks later, Gagosian’s gallery on rue de Ponthieu in Paris will present a show of Krasner’s 1960s work, organized with Olney Gleason and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.
The Paris exhibition is notable not only for its timing, just ahead of Art Basel Paris, but also for its firsts. According to the gallery, Krasner had never had a show in France before. That absence is striking given the scale of her reputation and the renewed attention around her work in both museums and the market.
The 1960s were a pivotal decade for Krasner. After an aneurysm in 1962 and a broken arm in 1963, she entered a period of renewed force, producing paintings that were described by the gallery as brash and radiant, sometimes at a grand scale. Eric Gleason, who began working with the Krasner estate in 2016, said the decade marked a moment when she emerged as “as confident a painter as ever.”
Krasner’s market has reflected that reassessment. Her 1960 canvas “The Eye Is the First Circle” sold for a record $11.7 million at Sotheby’s in 2019, and all 10 of her highest auction prices have been recorded in the past decade. That same year, a retrospective at the Barbican Art Gallery in London traveled to Frankfurt, Bern, and Bilbao, extending the institutional case for her work beyond the United States.
The Met’s survey will reportedly include major 1960s paintings, while the Paris exhibition is expected to draw on the Pollock-Krasner Foundation’s holdings and private loans. For viewers in New York before October, the Museum of Modern Art has an untitled 1949 abstraction on view — a dense, unsparing work that shows how early Krasner’s language of pressure and structure was already taking shape.
Taken together, the fall exhibitions suggest a broader shift: Krasner is no longer being framed only in relation to Pollock, but as a singular artist whose late work has become newly central to the story of Abstract Expressionism.
