The Met Is Treating Lee Krasner As Pollock's Equal-Will Market Follow?

When The Metropolitan Museum of Art opens“Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous” in October, the exhibition will present Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner as artistic equals. The market, however, still tells a far less balanced story. Pollock's auction record stands at $61.2 million. Krasner's is $11.7 million, set at Sotheby's in 2019 for“The Eye is the First Circle” (1960).

The Met's survey will bring together 120 works from more than 80 lenders, with the museum emphasizing that both artists should be considered on their own terms as well as in relation to one another. That framing arrives at a moment when Krasner's reputation has expanded well beyond the old shorthand of being Pollock's wife. Scholarship, a major traveling retrospective, and years of curatorial reassessment have helped secure her place in the New York School canon.

Yet the market has moved more unevenly. Buyers often say they want a Krasner, but usually mean a very specific one: large, colorful, and immediately legible. Saara Pritchard, now a partner at Fair Warning and formerly of Sotheby's and Christie's, said collectors regularly ask for“a colorful Krasner under $3 million.” Her response:“Good luck.” Even at $10 million, she said,“that does not exist.”

That tension helps explain why Krasner's prices have risen without producing a broad, liquid market. Her burnt umber paintings, collages, and“Little Images” have not attracted the same level of demand as the more accessible works that circulate most easily. In other words, the market has rewarded a narrow version of her practice rather than the full range of it.

The current phase of that market was shaped by a deliberate intervention. In 2016, Kasmin gallery secured the rights to sell Krasner's work through the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and brought a major painting to Art Basel Miami Beach with an asking price of about $6 million. It sold, and multiple sources say it later traded privately for roughly four times that amount. In 2024, Kasmin secured the rights to sell Pollock's work as well, and last year Olney Gleason re-secured exclusive representation rights for both artists.

Private sales have since become central to the story. Saara Pritchard and Sarah Friedlander, deputy chairman of postwar and contemporary art at Christie's, both said Krasner works have been changing hands outside the auction room, with some major examples reaching or surpassing public benchmarks. ARTDAI data underscores the scale of the gap: from 2005 to 2015, Krasner's market totaled about $14 million across 22 lots, compared with $32 million for Helen Frankenthaler across 114 lots. Since 2015, Krasner's average price has climbed roughly 170 percent to just under $2.8 million, but her overall market remains far smaller than Frankenthaler's.

The Met's exhibition may not close that gap, but it does sharpen the question behind it: how much of an artist's value is shaped by scholarship, and how much by the market's appetite for a familiar story?

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