Death of an Artist podcast review — how Jackson Pollock became a posthumous superstar

When we first meet the painter Jackson Pollock in the second season of Death of an Artist, it’s 1955 and he is in a dive bar called the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village. He is drunk, bloated-looking and frankly in need of a wash. The artist Audrey Flack, now 92, remembers him being “clearly plastered” as he stumbled over to her one night, belched in her face and then rudely propositioned her; after this she vowed never to go to the Cedar again.

But a friend of hers, Ruth Kligman, had also begun hanging out there and was more receptive to Pollock’s advances. She became his mistress and, the following year, went with him and a friend, Edith Metzger, to his house in the Hamptons. On August 11 1956, while Pollock’s wife, Lee Krasner, was away in Paris, the three of them set off in his car for a nearby party, with Pollock insisting on driving despite having been drinking all day. Less than a mile from his home, the car skidded off the road and turned over. Kligman was thrown from the car and survived; Metzger and Pollock were killed. 

Death of an Artist isn’t only the story of Pollock’s untimely demise. It is also about his professional afterlife, as masterminded by Krasner. When he died, the couple had $200 in the bank and Krasner had to go begging to friends and relatives to raise funds for his funeral; in 2015, Pollock’s 1948 painting “Number 17A” sold for $200mn.

The podcast is written and hosted by the British writer and curator Katy Hessel. As the author of 2022’s The Story of Art Without Men, a corrective to EH Gombrich’s supposedly definitive, male-centred The Story of Art, Hessel is a specialist on the female artists ignored by art historians. Krasner’s name isn’t exactly obscure, of course. An artist in her own right, she was an established, if impoverished, figure among American abstract artists in the 1940s, and exhibited alongside Picasso and Braque. But, following Pollock’s death, she became a tireless promoter of his work. Without her, Hessel argues, he wouldn’t be the giant of Abstract Expressionism that we know today. 

Hessel and her team have assembled some terrific talking heads, among them the writer Mary Gabriel, an expert on the unsung heroines of the New York art world, and Flack, who is gloriously cranky, refusing to introduce herself — “I don’t wanna do that, you should do that,” she tells Hessel. There is also some great archive audio of Krasner herself.

If the first series of Death of an Artist, about the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta and the shocking fall from a 34th-floor apartment that killed her, was essentially a whodunnit, this one tells a more reflective and evocative tale of 20th-century American art and how one woman quietly shaped it. 

pushkin.fm/podcasts/death-of-an-artist