Death of an Artist

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.

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Episoder(21)

Episode 2: It’s Lonely Without You, Friends

“I would've screamed. I would've shouted. I would've cried out. I would've protested. I would've given a million reasons to not leave this world.” Michael and Petra left their house and the logistics ...

25 Aug 46min

Episode 1: Dear Honeys

DISCLAIMER: This podcast is about suicide. Listener discretion is advised "When Michael and I got together some 40 plus years ago, we’d always planned on checking out together." In February of 2024, ...

25 Aug 39min

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

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...

18 Aug 3min

Bonus: The Women on the Scene with Audrey Flack

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...

23 Aug 202416min

Bonus: Krasner's Way with Eleanor Nairne

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...

28 Jun 202425min

Episode 6: A Phoenix From the Ashes

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.

21 Jun 202424min

Episode 5: The Kiss of Death

1955. Upper West Side. Jackson Pollock seeks help from a psychotherapist practicing controversial methods.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

14 Jun 202422min

Episode 4: Jackson Pollock Inc.

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.

7 Jun 202428min