Death of an Artist
5.0/5
Critic Rating
You’ve heard of Jackson Pollock but you may have never heard of Lee Krasner. Krasner was an artist, Pollock’s wife, and the woman who made him famous. She also changed everything about the landscape of modern art. This is a story about love, power, alcoholism and an ill-timed death. Hosted by curator, author, and broadcaster Katy Hessel, this 6-episode series, offers an inside look into two of the greatest artists of the 20th century, and how their vision impacts ours. And listen back to season one, where host Helen Molesworth revisits the artist Ana Mendieta’s death and the tri...
Critic Reviews
Score: 5
Fiona Sturges • Financial Times • May 26, 2024
"(Season 2) Hessel and her team have assembled some terrific talking heads...There is also some great archive audio of Krasner herself....this one tells a more reflective and evocative tale of 20th-century American art and how one woman quietly shaped it."
Score: 5
Alice Florence Orr • PodcastReview.org • Apr 12, 2024
"Molesworth delivers an excellent series that shows the connection between these two forms of erasure, and asks if we are willing to forgive a man’s actions for the sake of his art."
Score: 5
Miranda Sawyer • The Guardian • Mar 11, 2023
"The story of Mendieta, her exciting life and interesting work, is extremely upsetting, simply because it ends far too soon...what makes this podcast far more than a cold-case examination is how Molesworth also moves the story forward and out, to look at how Mendieta and Andre’s work is received today."
Score: 5
Max Pearl • Vulture • Nov 14, 2022
"The podcast’s most novel element is its analysis of what came after Mendieta died: the war of ideas waged by lawyers, artists, journalists, critics, and activists that turned her from flesh and blood into the loaded symbol she is today. One of the most shocking takeaways from the podcast is that lawyers and art critics alike used Mendieta’s work against her."
Score: 4.9
Kat Rooney • PodcastReview.org • Nov 9, 2022
"A persistent theme in Death of an Arist is the insistence of art world elites on separating the art from its maker, or in this case, on separating Andre’s brilliant sculptures from Andre the alleged murderer. The series is a sort of whodunnit...but it works best when considering what Mendieta’s death revealed about the art world."
Score: 5
Lauren Passell • Podcast The Newsletter • Nov 7, 2022
"This podcast is a sprawling lesson into a woman, a (possible) murder, a movement, and a very sexist industry, but it feels focused and fluffless."
Score: 5
Nicholas Quah • Vulture • Oct 5, 2022
"Death of an Artist does that thing you’d want from a narrative series that means to be more than a genre exercise: It’s itching to hang in a bigger frame, to transcend merely being a routine crime procedural. Part of the podcast’s appeal lies in how it handles quick descriptions of these pasts; they might lead non-art world listeners to wonder about what those scenes look like today. The series displays impressive sensitivity towards how the sensational circumstances of Mendieta’s demise has overpowered her human and artistic legacy."
Score: 5
Ximena Smith • Stuff NZ • Sep 24, 2022
"...the circumstances surrounding Mendieta’s death, and how the broader power dynamics of the art industry played into the incident’s lead-up and its subsequent fallout. Molesworth also grapples with her own complicitness in the story as a high-profile curator who followed along with what she describes as the art world’s tendency to always separate the art from the artist."
Score: 5
Jori Finkel • The Art Newspaper • Sep 20, 2022
"Death of an Artist is a moving portrait of Mendieta as a Cuban-American artist, wife, friend and crime victim. It is also a chilling portrait of the conspiratorial real-world silences that compound the art-historical neglect of women and people of colour."
Score: 5
Erin Vanderhoof • Vanity Fair • Aug 29, 2022
"On the podcast, Molesworth tells the story of how Mendieta’s reputation grew in the wake of her death...So over the course of six episodes, she unpacks the story of Mendieta’s turbulent life, her initial meetings with Andre, and the devolution of their relationship over the course of a few years. She lingers on that last night and the legal questions that emerge afterward, when Andre is charged and eventually goes on trial. The podcast also examines the moral attitudes of the art world and its emphasis on mid-century fixation on the so-called genius. "
