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The Metropolitan Museum of Art says its upcoming exhibition, “Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous,” is a “story of equals.” Set to open in October, the survey brings together 120 works by more than 80 lenders, with an explicit focus on considering Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner “on their own terms” while also placing them in relation to one another.
That is the museum’s version of the story. But the art market’s 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.
The price gap between these two long dead artists is sizeable: Pollock’s auction record sits at $61.2 million, while Krasner’s is just under 20 percent of that figure, at $11.7 million, set at Sotheby’s in 2019 by The Eye is the First Circle (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 “Pollock’s wife.”
Part of the answer is obvious. Krasner came to artistic maturity during the time of 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 “genius” in the barn to the woman who worked tirelessly.
But Krasner’s 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—large, colorful, and legible—and they want it at a price that doesn’t exist.
As Saara Pritchard—now a partner at Fair Warning, with prior roles at Sotheby’s and Christie’s—put it to me, buyers routinely ask for “a colorful Krasner under $3 million.” Her answer is blunt: “Good luck.” Even at $10 million, she said, “that does not exist.”
That diagnosis gets at the core of the problem. Krasner’s 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’s burnt umber paintings, collages, and “Little Images” have not been championed by collectors. Buyers still want the hit single.
The current phase of Krasner’s market can be traced to a deliberate intervention. In 2016, Kasmin gallery secured the rights to sell Krasner’s 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’s 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.)
Since then, much of the sales activity has taken place outside the auction room. Both Pritchard and Sarah Friedlander, deputy chairman of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s, told ARTnews 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’s 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.
“The market hasn’t seen the best stuff, in my opinion,” she said, pointing to major paintings from the 1970s and ’80s that have largely traded privately. She added that Krasner occupies a distinct position even among her peers: “She had a significant voice of her own,” and her influence on Pollock and postwar abstraction is only now being fully understood.
Scarcity 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’Keefe in the 1940s and Louise Bourgeois in the 1980s—a reminder that institutional recognition has long outpaced market confidence.
Courtesy ARTDAI
Data from ARTDAI makes the imbalance harder to ignore. From 2005 to 2015, Krasner’s market totaled about $14 million across 22 lots, compared with $32 million for Helen Frankenthaler across 114 lots—a gap of a little more than twofold in value and more than fivefold in volume. Since 2015, Krasner’s 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’t changed. Over the same period, Frankenthaler’s market has remained much larger overall, totaling about $222 million to Krasner’s $82.9 million, even as Krasner’s average price has surged.
But even as Krasner’s prices have risen, there hasn’t 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.
Adding Pollock to the picture further clarifies the picture. Like Krasner, Pollock’s 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’s prices have stayed stable and Krasner’s 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.
The Met show could loosen up Krasner’s market. Krasner’s 2019–20 Barbican retrospective, ”Lee Krasner: Living Colour” 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’s practice to a broad American audience.
Luckily, we have a test coming up next month. In May, two Krasner works will hit the block at Christie’s. The 1972 painting Lotus, 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, 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.
Lee Krasner, Volcanic, 1951.
Courtesy Christie’s
Together, they map the problem in miniature—two Krasners, from two different bodies of work, appealing to two different kinds of buyer, with no guarantee the market will value them equally.
There is precedent for that kind of anticipation. Ahead of the Whitney Museum’s 2015 retrospective for Frank Stella—the museum’s first career-spanning survey for any artist at its new downtown building—dealers and advisers were already treating the exhibition as a market catalyst. That brought Stella’s 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’s auction record hit a high when Delaware Crossing (1961) sold for $13.6 million at Sotheby’s in New York. Four years later, his 1959 work Point of Pines sold at Christie’s for $28 million. Before the Whitney show, Stella’s market record had never broken $7 million.
Like 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 “an unforgiving standard.” Both Pritchard and Friedlander stressed the extent to which she shaped Pollock’s development, not as a supporting figure but as a force within the same intellectual and visual field.
The Met can present Krasner as Pollock’s equal. The question is whether the market is ready to follow that lead—not just by bidding up the familiar works, but by recognizing the full range of what she made.
