The Pollock-Krasner Foundation is one of the most blessed and cherished institutions of the art world, providing financial aid directly to artists who qualify on the twin criteria of commitment and need. The foundation, which marks its 20th anniversary this year, has awarded 2,608 grants to artists in 65 countries, dispensing $37 million.

That’s a staggering achievement: a lifeline as significant, in its way, as the Works Project Administration of the Depression years was to countless American artists, including Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock. During their lives together these painters would have qualified for grants from their own foundation. When Krasner returned from Europe to bury her husband in 1956, she had $200 in the bank: Barnett Newman paid for the funeral.

Now, in association with Robert Miller Gallery, the foundation has mounted a museum-worthy exhibition that charts their creative partnership: “Dialogue: Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock.” The show is an intimate portrait of a working, artistic marriage, with a fitting emphasis on works on paper, as drawing was crucial to these restlessly experimental artists.

Although they had different attitudes toward tradition, both were schooled to believe that drawing was, in Ingres’s phrase, the probity of art. Pollock studied with the Regionalist mural painter Thomas Hart Benton and drew extensively in a heavily stylized manner. Krasner was the star pupil of the Modernist Hans Hofmann, whose training system also emphasized working from direct observation.

The show includes a set of Pollock sketches, including some from El Greco (Benton’s hero) on loan from the Metropolitan Museum. From Krasner there are both accomplished, polished muscly nudes from the life room at the National Academy and Cubist drawings from the setups at the Hofmann School. The two found a common mentor – and through him, each other – in the emigre Russian artist and agitator John D. Graham (the subject of a recent, riveting show at Allan Stone). He encouraged their interest in Picasso and in a sense of the autonomy of line and the importance of “handwriting.”

In addition to drawing – and in contrast – the exhibition also showcases monumental canvases by Krasner from the years immediately following Pollock’s death, when she took over his barn studio and was free, for the first time, to heed the call of the “big picture.” The show is certainly biased toward Krasner in terms of scale and space. This no doubt reflects the strengths of the foundation’s collection – most of its Pollocks doubtless were sold to finance its philanthropy – but in a way the show’s emphasis on Krasner seems only fitting. The Pollock-Krasner foundation supports the unfairly overlooked. Languishing in the shadow of her mythic husband, Krasner herself had to wait a long time before receiving her due as a painter.

Things began to change with her career retrospective, which she saw in Houston in 1984, the year of her death, and which subsequently traveled to the Museum of Modern Art. A second retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum in 2000 taught a new generation to acknowledge a missing link in the canonical Abstract Expressionists.

Different factors held Krasner back. One, certainly, was gender. She wasn’t invited to join the group photograph of “the irascibles,” protesting the exclusion of advanced art from a contemporary show at the Metropolitan Museum, which fixed the New York School in popular consciousness. Clement Greenberg, while acknowledging privately his and Pollock’s debts to Krasner, would never publish criticism about her.

There is an aesthetic reason Krasner has been historically held back from the first rank of Abstract Expressionists: She never hit on an original, “trademark” style. There is no equivalent in her oeuvre to her husband’s drip or Rothko’s lozenge. But the real reason, probably, for Krasner’s raw deal is that she really hit her stride in the 1960s, when radically different styles were in the vanguard.

At the time of Pollock’s most glorious “drip” paintings, represented in this show by the exquisite “Green Silver” (c. 1949), a work in enamel and aluminum paint on paper loaned by the Guggenheim Museum, Krasner was exploring line in a typically tight, rigid grid format.

While both artists arrived at a linear style through an exploration of myth and a sense of the calligraphic, Krasner’s work of this period – closely indebted to Bradley Walker Tomlin, and perhaps, too, Adolph Gottlieb – has the stylized constraint of American Surrealism (despite her aversion to the movement and her long-standing loyalty to the cause of pure abstraction).

This is her “little image” or “hieroglyph” period of works like the untitled oil on pressed wood piece of 1948, with its all-over pattern of white zigs and zags, each in its own little cube of color. In contrast, Pollock’s painting has exhilarating elasticity and a cosmic sense of space. The actual size of the paper belies the unlimited scale implied by the multilayered drips, puddles, and skeins.

Krasner’s career went back and forth in terms of color: In some periods it was paramount. At other crucial periods, including the early 1960s, color took a sabbatical. “Polar Stampede” (1960), painted in Jackson’s barn, recalls his 1943 mural for Peggy Guggenheim, with its frieze-like progression of big gestural black marks against an agitated, fleshy ground. She was working at night on these paintings, battling insomnia, too deep in mourning for both her husband and her mother for color. They show her hitting a majestic stride but are at the same time the coda to her stormy creative partnership.

Until January 28 (524 W. 26th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-366-4774).