The Met is Treating Lee Krasner as Pollock’s Equal—Will Market Follow?

Editor’s note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, art news Newsletter about the art market and beyond. Register here Receive it every Wednesday.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art says its upcoming exhibition “Krasner and Pollock: Continuity of the Past” is an “equality story.” The survey, which opens in October and brings together 120 works from more than 80 lenders, focuses on considering Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner “on their own terms” while also connecting them to each other.

This is the museum’s version of the story. But the art market’s version is harsher, simpler, and 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 had to fight for every inch of price recognition.

The price gap between the two long-dead artists is considerable: Pollock’s auction record is $61.2 million, while Krasner’s is just under 20% of that figure, at $11.7 million, which Sotheby’s set in 2019 Eyes are the first circle (1960). But the more interesting question is why this gap persists after years of academic research, Krasner retrospectives at the Barbican Center in London and the Guggenheim in Bilbao, and a shift in the art world narrative that made her more than just “Pollock’s wife.”

Part of the answer is obvious. Krasner reached artistic maturity during the period of Abstract Expressionism, which mythologized masculinity and self-destruction into artistic testaments to life. Pollock was perfect for the role. Krasner was stronger, smarter, and in some ways more creative, but he wasn’t. For decades, culture has preferred drunken “geniuses” in barns to women who work tirelessly.

But Krasner’s market was also thin, selective and narrow. While collectors say they want a Krasner, what they usually mean is that they want a piece in a specific style—big, colorful, clear—and the price they want doesn’t exist.

As Saara Pritchard (now a partner at Fair Warning and previously at Sotheby’s and Christie’s) told me, buyers typically ask for “color Krasners under $3 million.” Her answer was straightforward: “Good luck.” Even $10 million, she said, “wasn’t there.”

This diagnosis gets to the heart of the matter. The problem with Krasner is not only that she is undervalued, but that the market continues to reward the most accessible versions of her work. Krasner’s burnt sepia paintings, collages, and “small images” were not embraced by collectors. Buyers still want the hit single.

The current phase of the Krasner market can be traced to deliberate intervention. In 2016, Kasmin Gallery acquired the sales rights to Krasner’s work through the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and brought an important painting by Krasner to Art Basel Miami Beach with an asking price of approximately $6 million. It sold, and according to multiple sources, the work privately traded for about four times that price. This sale is a clear signal that there is a market for artists. In 2024, Kasmin also acquired the sales rights to Pollock’s work. Last year, gallery Olney Gleason, run by former Kasmin president Nick Olney and its head of sales Eric Gleason, regained those exclusive rights. (Olney Gleeson declined to comment for this article, as did the foundation.)

Since then, most sales have taken place outside the auction room. Pritchard and Sarah Friedlander, Christie’s vice president of postwar and contemporary art, both said art news Krasner’s works trade on a growing private market, with some major works selling for prices that meet or exceed public benchmarks. Friedlander emphasizes that Krasner’s best works have been traded privately, despite little or no public activity on them. In this sense, auction records tell only part of the story.

“In my opinion, the market hasn’t seen the best yet,” she said, pointing to major paintings from the 1970s and 1980s that were mostly traded privately. She added that Krasner occupied a unique position even among her peers: “She had an important voice of her own” and her influence on Pollock and postwar abstraction was only now fully understood.

Scarcity comes into play. Friedlander added that the number of Krasner works that have appeared at auction in recent years is about half that of Helen Frankenthaler’s. Many of the best paintings are already held by institutions or collectors who are less keen to sell their art, and even as interest grows, supply is limited. Krasner is also the third woman to have a retrospective at MoMA, following Georgia O’Keefe in the 1940s and Louise Bourgeois in the 1980s, a reminder that institutional recognition has long outstripped market confidence.

Data from ARTDAI make this imbalance harder to ignore. From 2005 to 2015, the market for Krasner’s 22 lots totaled approximately $14 million, while the market for Helen Frankenthaler’s 114 lots totaled $32 million, more than twice the difference in value and more than five times the difference in quantity. Krasner prices have risen dramatically since 2015, with the average price rising about 170% to nearly $2.8 million. But the broader market structure has not changed. During the same period, Frankenthaler’s overall market size remained larger, totaling approximately $222 million, while Krasner’s average price was $82.9 million, although Krasner’s average price has increased significantly.

But even as Krasna’s price increases, there’s no corresponding increase in activity, which may speak to how rare the material is to begin with. Since 2015, only 29 of Krasner’s works have been publicly traded. The result is a series of isolated spikes in value, driven by a handful of high-quality works rather than by deep, liquid markets.

Adding Pollock to the picture further clarified the picture. Like Krasner, Pollock’s market was limited by the quantity of material. From 2005 to 2015, only 20 works were traded, with a total value of $226; over the next decade, only 15 works were traded, for a total price of $181 million. This means the average prices are $11 million and $12 million respectively. But even if Pollock’s prices remain stable and Krasner’s rise significantly, the value of her work remains lower. This gap illustrates a structural problem with how the market allocates value at the top.

The Met show could loosen Krasner’s market. Krasner 2019-20 The Barbican Center retrospective Lee Krasner: Living Color is the institution’s last major effort to reintroduce her work. The show toured throughout Europe but never generated a sustained conversion in the U.S. market. The Met’s survey thus has the potential to make a difference by exposing the full scope of Krasner’s practice to a broad American audience.

Luckily, we’ll be testing it next month. In May, two Krasner works will be auctioned at Christie’s. Painting from 1972 lotus” ,” a clear, angular floral abstract from the 1973 painting-focused Whitney Biennial, will appear in the evening sale with an estimate of $1.8 million to $2.5 million. On the second day of sales, volcano” ,” an early canvas of dense gestures from around 1951, is estimated at $1 million to $1.5 million. The latter’s work is more closely associated with the language of Abstract Expressionism.

Together they paint a microcosm of the problem – two Krasners, from two different jobs, attracting two different types of buyers, but with no guarantee the market will value them equally.

There is precedent for this expectation. Ahead of the Whitney Museum’s 2015 Frank Stella retrospective, the museum’s first career survey of the artist in its new downtown building, dealers and consultants have viewed the show as a market catalyst. This brought Stella’s work into the spotlight, focused attention on an artist with a stable but unstable market, and gave his market a shot in the arm. Stella sets new auction record in 2015 delaware crossroads (1961) sold for $13.6 million at Sotheby’s in New York. Four years later, his 1959 pine corner Christie’s sold for $28 million. Prior to the Whitney show, Stella’s market record had never topped $7 million.

Like Stella, Krasner was neither a painter of ten years nor one who produced a few desirable canvases in a year or two. She spans styles, scales and moods, destroying everything she retains and adhering to what one market participant called “ruthless standards.” Both Pritchard and Friedlander emphasize the extent to which she shaped Pollock’s development, not as a supporting character but as a force within the same intellectual and visual realm.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art could present Krasner as an equal to Pollock. The question is whether the market is ready to follow this trend—not just to raise prices for familiar pieces, but to recognize the entire oeuvre she created.