It would have been nice to say that the Lee Krasner retrospective
at the Brooklyn Museum
[1]

totally changed my mind about the work of
this problematic painter, to say that the show makes a convincing
case for Krasner as an important artist in her own right and
that it makes you think of her primarily as an independent force
in the heady days of postwar American painting and only
secondarily as the long-suffering wife of Jackson Pollock. (It’s
worth noting that Krasner’s marriage to Pollock, while
unquestionably of crucial importance to his own short life
and his evolution as an artist, occupied only about fifteen years
of Krasner’s nearly half-century-long painting career.) Pace my
revisionist and feminist colleagues, the Brooklyn exhibition
simply reinforced the impression I had formed from the flurry of
Krasner shows held in the 1970s and early 1980s at various
New York galleries, the Whitney,
and the Corcoran, culminating in the
retrospective, organized by Barbara Rose
at the very end of Krasner’s life,
which came to MOMA in 1985.
Krasner seemed to me
to be an intelligent, ambitious, but limited artist,
someone whose work as a whole never quite fulfilled the promise
of her best individual pictures. I had classified her as a good,
pretty solid, but not first-rank painter, and I can’t say that I
came away from the Brooklyn show—the first full-scale
retrospective to be organized since Krasner’s death in 1985—with a
revised opinion.

The Brooklyn show introduces you first to