The Abstract Expressionist wives seem to have had it worse than many. Although the market was not really a factor in those days (Manley notes that in the early ’50s “nobody was buying anything by anyone, man or woman”), the movement itself was legendarily unfriendly to women. Elaine de Kooning, Mercedes Matter and Krasner might have been asked to join the Eighth Street Club, an influential Ab-Ex discussion group founded in 1949, but they weren’t included in board meetings. The Sidney Janis Gallery threw some of them a bone that year by mounting the show “Artist: Man and Wife.” Then there’s the famous comment Krasner’s teacher, Hans Hofmann, once made about one of her paintings: “This is so good you would not believe it was done by a woman.”

For Krasner especially, “the market has shown that there was an ill effect from being married to someone who was such a proponent of that field,” says Anthony Grant, a senior international contemporary-art specialist at Sotheby’s. She seems to have spent much of her marriage introducing Pollock to influential people, keeping him sober and generally putting his needs before her own. In East Hampton, he painted in an expansive barn, while she worked in a bedroom. “In 1950s America, she was still expected to play the traditional role of wife,” says Reilly. “If we didn’t have Lee Krasner, we wouldn’t have Jackson Pollock. She kept him alive—she was his rock.”

After her husband’s death, in 1956, Krasner moved into his studio and eventually arrived at the exuberant abstractions that she’s known for today. Still, for decades, she didn’t have a major retrospective in the United States. Why? “I’d have to say principally because I am Mrs. Jackson Pollock,” she commented in a 1972 interview. She finally got one, in 1983, the year before her death; it was organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and later traveled to the Museum of Modern Art, in New York.

Life seems to have been better for women active in more communal movements, such as the Bauhaus. The relationship between the weaver Anni Albers and her husband, Josef, began on somewhat unequal footing: She was a student at the Bauhaus; he was her mentor. He was working-class Catholic; she came from a prominent Jewish family in Berlin. Yet they were “two soul mates from the start,” says Nicholas Fox Weber, the executive director of the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation. Their work also had much in common: Both were essentially geometric abstractionists who experimented endlessly—she with materials and structure, he with color and light.

In addition, each had relationships that were beneficial to the other. Philip Johnson, who helped get them to America in 1933, after the Nazis closed the Bauhaus, was primarily Anni’s acquaintance and preferred her work to Josef’s. In 1949 he gave Anni a solo retrospective at MoMA that “at the time was a more major museum exhibition than any Josef had had,” Fox Weber says. By the same token, he notes, “when museum directors or world-famous photographers would walk into the house to see Josef, they would see Anni. There were collectors who would go to see work by one and then buy work by the other. The Hirshhorns [ Josef and Olga, who later founded the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.] collected her because of him.” Yet today, in large part because Anni worked in textiles—one of the few disciplines open to women at the Bauhaus after 1920—her art is far less known than Josef’s and commands a fraction of the price.

Certainly, marriage to an older, more renowned artist offers some advantages. For Tanning, it provided an entrée into “the ongoing Surrealist adventure,” as she put it. Likewise, Frida Kahlo’s 1929 union with Diego Rivera, a star of Mexican Muralism, immediately “catapulted her into a very international cosmopolitan life,” says Carmen Melián, the director of the Latin American art department at Sotheby’s, which has achieved most of Kahlo’s recent records.