The Metropolitan Museum of Art opens 'Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous' on October 4, 2026, an exhibition that sets out to do something no museum has attempted before: follow the complete artistic trajectories of Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock alongside one another. With more than 120 works on view through January 31, 2027, it is the first major New York presentation devoted to either artist in over two decades, organized by curators David Breslin and Brinda Kumar. The show is arranged chronologically so visitors can track each painter's development both together and apart, including fallow stretches — Krasner's years of limited output while she re-examined European modernism, Pollock's creative struggles before his death. Collage anchors the concept: the exhibition is bookended by collages, and its subtitle borrows the title of Krasner's 1976 mixed-media painting 'Past Continuous,' built from fragments of her own earlier drawings. For the curators, collage works as a metaphor for the partnership itself — two materials placed side by side, becoming something new while remaining distinct. Krasner's own history structures the narrative. She moved into Pollock's East 8th Street apartment in the fall of 1942 and married him in October 1945. Her 1965 Whitechapel retrospective, 'Lee Krasner: Paintings, Drawings, and Collages,' was her first solo show outside the United States. In 1974, curator Bryan Robertson unearthed a box of her 1930s drawings from Hans Hofmann's classes; Krasner cut them into strips and rebuilt them as canvases named for verb tenses, insisting, 'I am never free of the past.' The exhibition also revisits landmarks such as 'Composition' (1949), the small-scale 'Little Images,' and the gray slabs of her black-out period. Late in life, Krasner endowed the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (1985), which has granted over $90 million to artists — the first foundation set up by an artist, for artists. The curators' ambition is to retire the "emerging from Pollock's shadow" framing for good, presenting the pair instead as each other's sharpest critics.