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Lyt når som helst, hvor som helst 

Pushkin Industries

In February 2024, celebrated children’s book author and illustrator Petra Mathers and her husband, photographer Michael Mathers, mailed letters to dozens of friends and family members to let them know they had died by suicide. Petra and Michael were by all accounts healthy, happy, and in love. Why did they choose to die together? And what did that decision do to the people left to mourn them? 

In season 3 of Death of an Artist, journalists Leon Neyfakh and Alice Gregory set out to interview everyone who got one of Petra and Michael’s letters—as one married couple trying to understand another. Through intimate conversations with Petra and Michael’s friends and family about their own relationships to aging, grief, death, and the friends they thought they knew, Death of an Artist weaves together a portrait of a community grappling with the Mathers’ deaths and the final words they left behind.

Listen back to season 2, where Katy Hessel offers an inside look at how Jackson Pollock and his wife, Lee Krasner, changed everything about the landscape of modern art. And in season 1, host Helen Molesworth revisits the artist Ana Mendieta’s death and the trial that followed—interrogating both the silence and the protest that have accompanied her story ever since. 

Death of an Artist Season 1 is a co-production between Pushkin Industries, Somethin’ Else, and Sony Music Entertainment.

Death of an Artist Season 2 is a co-production between Pushkin Industries and Samizdat Audio.

Death of an Artist

When Alice Gregory and Leon Neyfakh started building a library for their infant daughter, they stumbled across a name in an obituary that Alice recognized from her own childhood: celebrated children’s book author and illustrator Petra Mathers. Petra had died by suicide alongside her husband, Michael Mathers. Both were in their late 70s, seemingly happy and healthy.
 
The details of Petra and Michael’s deaths pulled Alice and Leon down a rabbit hole that neither were expecting—a plan many years in the making, dozens of letters mailed out across the country, friends and family caught between betrayal and envy, and a community grappling with their own feelings around aging and death.
 
Death of an Artist drops weekly on Tuesdays starting August 25. Get early, ad-free access to the entire season of Death of an Artist by subscribing to Pushkin+. Subscribers also get bonus episodes, exclusive binges, full audiobooks, and early ad-free listening for all Pushkin shows.
 
Subscribe on Apple: apple.co/pushkin
Subscribe on Pushkin: pushkin.com/plus

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Introducing Death of an Artist Season 3: Petra Mathers and Her Michael

Artist, musician and writer Audrey Flack shares her firsthand accounts of the downtown New York City art scene in the mid-twentieth-century and a song she and her band, The History of Art, wrote about Jackson Pollock. 
 
Flack passed away in June. For more about her life, see “Audrey Flack, Creator of Vibrant Photorealist Art, Dies at 93.” 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Bonus: The Women on the Scene with Audrey Flack

Katy speaks with Eleanor Nairne, who first introduced her to Lee Kranser’s work. Back in 2019, Nairne exhibited a groundbreaking retrospective of Lee Krasner’s work while she was senior curator at the Barbican Art Gallery in London. Today she is the Keith L. and Catherine Sacks Curator and Head of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In this episode, a dive into Krasner’s artistic career. 
 
Artwork Discussed:
 
Joan Miro Constellations (1940-41)
 
Mosaic Table (1947)
 
Stop and Go (1949)
 
Prophecy (1956)
 
Birth (1956)
 
Three in Two (1956)
 
Pablo Picasso Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)
 
Earth Green (1957)

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Bonus: Krasner's Way with Eleanor Nairne

1956. New York City. After Pollock’s death, Krasner balances her new role as executor of his estate and her ambitions to continue making art.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode 6: A Phoenix From the Ashes

1955. Upper West Side. Jackson Pollock seeks help from a psychotherapist practicing controversial methods.

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Episode 5: The Kiss of Death

1945. East Hampton. Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock start a new life in a farmhouse 100 miles east of New York City.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode 4: Jackson Pollock Inc.

1942. Midtown. Peggy Guggenheim arrives, opens a gallery and gives hungry artists hope.

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Episode 3: The Collector

1936. Brooklyn. A young Lee Krasner leaves home and starts to create a kind of art America has never seen before.

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Episode 2: Inner Rhythm

1956. Paris. An artist named Lee Krasner learns that her husband is dead.
 
 

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Episode 1: Crash

On May 17th, Death of an Artist returns with an all new season hosted by Katy Hessel about the woman who made the modern art world: Lee Krasner. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Introducing Death of an Artist Season 3: Petra Mathers and Her Michael

Lyt når som helst, hvor som helst

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