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 underst...
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3 min
Introducing: Bone Valley Season 6 | The Devil’s Quarry II
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42 min
Episode 6: By the Time You Get This Letter
“Dear Lottie and Herbie, by the time you read this, I will be dead . . . That's why I'm writing this letter. I've had a long and happy life doing what I loved best . . . Now it's t…
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44 min
Episode 5: We Are Without Fear
“I wrestle with: Was it courage, or was it cowardice?” This question animates a memorial service for Michael and Petra, held several months after their death. Alice and Leon want t…
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41 min
Episode 4: Bird on a Wire
“It brought up all the things I've never done. All the risks I haven't taken. It was always about trying to be free, you know?” According to Michael Mathers’s first true love, he w…
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44 min
Episode 3: The Train Has Left the Station
“I have never regretted my decision, only the amount of unhappiness it caused you. Still, unforgivingness is the product of those who feel it.” When Petra and Michael died, they le…
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47 min
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 hous…
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40 min
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…
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3 min
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: c…
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16 min
Bonus: The Women on the Scene with Audrey Flack
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26 min
Bonus: Krasner's Way with Eleanor Nairne
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25 min
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…
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22 min
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.
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29 min
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.
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33 min
Episode 3: The Collector
1942. Midtown. Peggy Guggenheim arrives, opens a gallery and gives hungry artists hope.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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29 min
Episode 2: Inner Rhythm
1936. Brooklyn. A young Lee Krasner leaves home and starts to create a kind of art America has never seen before.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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21 min
Episode 1: Crash
1956. Paris. An artist named Lee Krasner learns that her husband is dead. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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3 min
Death of an Artist Season 2: Krasner and Pollock
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32 min
An Epilogue: Live from A.I.R. Gallery
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22 min
The Numbers
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