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 time to make room for someone else on this earth.”  The letters Petra and Michael sent out echo the words of a letter i…

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 to understand it as well: Was Michael and Petra’s suicide a move toward something, or away from something else? To figu…

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 was always a romantic. Was the death orchestrated with Petra the ending of a love story he’d been trying to craft all a…

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 left everyone in their lives behind. But it wasn’t the first time: When Petra first fell in love with Michael, she left…

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 of their afterlife to their friend Patty—unbeknownst to Patty’s sister Virginia, who considered he…

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, a letter arrived at the pharmacy in Astoria, Oregon. It was from local residents Petra and Michae…

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 book author and illustrator Petra Mathers. Petra had died by suicide alongside her husband, Michae…

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 Jackson Pollock.  Flack passed away in June. For more about her life, see “Audrey Flack, Creator …

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 Barbican Art Gallery in London. Today she is the Keith L. and Catherine Sacks Curator and Head of …

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.