{"id":1884616,"date":"2026-04-15T16:51:29","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T13:51:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1884616"},"modified":"2026-04-15T16:51:29","modified_gmt":"2026-04-15T13:51:29","slug":"the-met-is-treating-lee-krasner-as-pollocks-equal-will-market-follow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1884616","title":{"rendered":"The Met is Treating Lee Krasner as Pollock’s Equal\u2014Will Market Follow?"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Krasner_Lotus.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Editor\u2019s Note:<\/strong>\u00a0This story originally appeared in\u00a0On Balance,\u00a0<\/em>the ARTnews\u00a0newsletter about the art market and beyond.\u00a0Sign up here<\/em>\u00a0to receive it every Wednesday.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n\tThe Metropolitan Museum of Art says its upcoming exhibition, \u201cKrasner and Pollock: Past Continuous,\u201d is a \u201cstory of equals.\u201d Set to open in October, the survey brings together 120 works\u00a0 by more than 80 lenders, with an explicit focus on considering Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner \u201con their own terms\u201d while also placing them in relation to one another.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThat is the museum\u2019s version of the story. But the art market\u2019s version is harsher, simpler, and much more familiar: Pollock remains one of the great trophies of 20th-century art. Krasner, his wife, widow, and interlocutor, and one of the most formidable painters of the New York School, still has to fight for every inch of price recognition.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe price gap between these two long dead artists is sizeable: Pollock\u2019s auction record sits at $61.2 million, while Krasner\u2019s is just under 20 percent of that figure, at $11.7 million, set at Sotheby\u2019s in 2019 by The Eye is the First Circle<\/em> (1960). But the more interesting question is why that gap persists even now, after years of scholarship, a heralded Krasner retrospective that traveled to the Barbican in London and Guggenheim Bilbao, and a shift in the art-world narrative that has canonized her as more than\u00a0 \u201cPollock\u2019s wife.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tPart of the answer is obvious. Krasner came to artistic maturity during the time of\u00a0 Abstract Expressionism, which mythologized masculinity and self-destruction as artistic proof of life. Pollock fit that role perfectly. Krasner, who was tougher, smarter, and in some ways more restlessly inventive, did not. For decades, the culture preferred the drunk \u201cgenius\u201d in the barn to the woman who worked tirelessly.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBut Krasner\u2019s market is also thin, selective, and narrow. While collectors say they want a Krasner work, what they often mean is they want a work in a particular style\u2014large, colorful, and legible\u2014and they want it at a price that doesn\u2019t exist.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAs Saara Pritchard\u2014now a partner at Fair Warning, with prior roles at Sotheby\u2019s and Christie\u2019s\u2014put it to me, buyers routinely ask for \u201ca colorful Krasner under $3 million.\u201d Her answer is blunt: \u201cGood luck.\u201d Even at $10 million, she said, \u201cthat does not exist.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThat diagnosis gets at the core of the problem. Krasner\u2019s issue is not only that she has been undervalued but also that the market continues to reward the most digestible version of her work. Krasner\u2019s burnt umber paintings, collages, and \u201cLittle Images\u201d have not been championed by collectors. Buyers still want the hit single.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe current phase of Krasner\u2019s market can be traced to a deliberate intervention. In 2016, Kasmin gallery secured the rights to sell Krasner\u2019s work through the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and brought a major Krasner painting to Art Basel Miami Beach with an asking price of around $6 million. It sold, and according to multiple sources, that same work has since traded privately for roughly four times that amount. The sale was a clear signal that a market for the artist exists. In 2024 Kasmin secured the rights to sell Pollock\u2019s work as well. And last year, Olney Gleason, the gallery run by former Kasmin president Nick Olney and its head of sales, Eric Gleason, re-secured those exclusive representation rights. (Olney Gleason declined to comment for this story, as did the foundation.)<\/p>\n

\n\tSince then, much of the sales activity has taken place outside the auction room. Both Pritchard and Sara Friedlander, deputy chairman of postwar and contemporary art at Christie\u2019s, told ARTnews<\/em> that works by Krasner have traded in the growing private market, with some major works selling at levels that match or exceed public benchmarks. Friedlander emphasized that Krasner\u2019s best works have traded privately, even as public activity on those works has been minimal or nonexistent. Auction records, in that sense, tell only part of the story.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe market hasn\u2019t seen the best stuff, in my opinion,\u201d she said, pointing to major paintings from the 1970s and \u201980s that have largely traded privately. She added that Krasner occupies a distinct position even among her peers: \u201cShe had a significant voice of her own,\u201d and her influence on Pollock and postwar abstraction is only now being fully understood.<\/p>\n

\n\tScarcity plays its role. Friedlander added that roughly half as many Krasners have appeared at auction in recent years as works by Helen Frankenthaler. Many of the strongest paintings are already held by institutions or collectors who are less keen to sell their art, limiting supply even as interest has grown. Krasner was also the third woman ever to receive a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, after Georgia O\u2019Keefe in the 1940s and Louise Bourgeois in the 1980s\u2014a reminder that institutional recognition has long outpaced market confidence.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>
Courtesy ARTDAI<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tData from ARTDAI makes the imbalance harder to ignore. From 2005 to 2015, Krasner\u2019s market totaled about $14 million across 22 lots, compared with $32 million for Helen Frankenthaler across 114 lots\u2014a gap of a little more than twofold in value and more than fivefold in volume. Since 2015, Krasner\u2019s prices have risen sharply, with her average climbing roughly 170 percent to just under $2.8 million. But the broader structure of the market hasn\u2019t changed. Over the same period, Frankenthaler\u2019s market has remained much larger overall, totaling about $222 million to Krasner\u2019s $82.9 million, even as Krasner\u2019s average price has surged.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut even as Krasner\u2019s prices have risen, there hasn\u2019t been a matching rise in activity, which likely speaks to how rare the material is to begin with. Just 29 works by Krasner have been traded publicly since 2015. The result is a series of isolated spikes in value, driven by a small number of high-quality works, rather than a deep, liquid market.<\/p>\n

\n\tAdding Pollock to the picture further clarifies the picture. Like Krasner, Pollock\u2019s market has been limited by the quantity of material. From 2005 to 2015, just 20 works were traded, for a total value of $226; in the following decade, only 15 works were traded, for $181 million. That translates to average prices of $11 million and $12 million respectively. But even as Pollock\u2019s prices have stayed stable and Krasner\u2019s have risen dramatically, her work is still valued at magnitudes less. That gap speaks to a structural issue in how the market assigns value at the very top.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Met show could loosen up Krasner\u2019s market. Krasner\u2019s 2019\u201320 Barbican retrospective, \u201dLee Krasner: Living Colour\u201d was the last major institutional effort to reintroduce her work. That show traveled across Europe but never produced a sustained shift in the US market. The Met survey, then, has the potential to do something different by presenting the full arc of Krasner\u2019s practice to a broad American audience.<\/p>\n

\n\tLuckily, we have a test coming up next month. In May, two Krasner works will hit the block at Christie\u2019s. The 1972 painting Lotus<\/em>, a crisp, hard-edged floral abstraction that appeared in the painting-focused 1973 Whitney Biennial, will appear at an evening sale with an estimate of $1.8 million to $2.5 million. In a following day sale, Volcanic<\/em>, a dense gestural early canvas from around 1951, will be offered with an estimate of $1 million to $1.5 million. The latter work is tied more closely to the language of AbEx.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>
Lee Krasner, Volcanic<\/em>, 1951.<\/span>Courtesy Christie\u2019s<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tTogether, they map the problem in miniature\u2014two Krasners, from two different bodies of work, appealing to two different kinds of buyer, with no guarantee the market will value them equally.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere is precedent for that kind of anticipation. Ahead of the Whitney Museum\u2019s 2015 retrospective for Frank Stella\u2014the museum\u2019s first career-spanning survey for any artist at its new downtown building\u2014dealers and advisers were already treating the exhibition as a market catalyst. That brought Stella\u2019s work into focus, concentrating attention on an artist whose market had been steady but sporadic, and gave his market a shot in the arm. In 2015 Stella\u2019s auction record hit a high when Delaware Crossing <\/em>(1961) sold for $13.6 million at Sotheby\u2019s in New York. Four years later, his 1959 work Point of Pines<\/em> sold at Christie\u2019s for $28 million. Before the Whitney show, Stella\u2019s market record had never broken $7 million.<\/p>\n

\n\tLike Stella, Krasner was neither a one-decade painter nor the maker of a handful of desirable canvases from a single decade or two. She moved across styles, scales, and moods, destroying as much as she preserved, holding herself to what one market participant described as \u201can unforgiving standard.\u201d Both Pritchard and Friedlander stressed the extent to which she shaped Pollock\u2019s development, not as a supporting figure but as a force within the same intellectual and visual field.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Met can present Krasner as Pollock\u2019s equal. The question is whether the market is ready to follow that lead\u2014not just by bidding up the familiar works, but by recognizing the full range of what she made.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

[analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/market\/lee-krasner-jackson-pollock-met-art-market-1234781332\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Krasner_Lotus.jpg?w=1024″] Editor\u2019s Note:\u00a0This story originally appeared in\u00a0On Balance,\u00a0the ARTnews\u00a0newsletter about the art market and beyond.\u00a0Sign up here\u00a0to receive it every Wednesday. The Metropolitan Museum of Art says its upcoming exhibition, \u201cKrasner and Pollock: Past Continuous,\u201d is a \u201cstory of equals.\u201d Set to open in October, the survey brings together 120 works\u00a0 by more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1884616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1884616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1884616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1884616\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1884616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1884616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1884616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}