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.
It's August, 1956.
A cool summer night in Paris.
An American artist named Lee Krasner is drifting off to sleep at a friend's house when the phone rings.
Her host answered the phone.
She could tell by the stricken look on his face that something terrible had happened.
Lee knew exactly what had happened, and she shouted out, jackson's dead.
Jackson?
As in the painter Jackson Pollock, Lee's husband?
Oh, my God.
The whole world stopped.
Well, the whole art world stopped.
You know him now, of course.
You can probably close your eyes and picture one of his paintings.
When you enter a Pollock painting, you're entering outer space.
You're going through ropes and knots and tangles of galaxies.
He might be the most mythologized figure in American art.
He was like a living God.
But how much of the story that we've been told about him is just that, a myth.
Nobody knew Pollock.
He was just a figure in the village.