Death of an Artist by Pushkin Industries — Podcast Rankings & Episodes

Chart positions today

Ranking history

History builds daily. We started tracking this show on the Trending chart recently, so the trend line appears after a second day of data.

View as table

Date	Pocket Casts
Oct 1	#81

About the show

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 understand another. Through intimate conversations with Petra and Michael’s friends and family about their own relationships to aging, grief, death, and the friends they thought they knew, Death of an Artist weaves together a portrait of a community grappling with the Mathers’ deaths and the final words they left behind. Listen back to season 2, where Katy Hessel offers an inside look at how Jackson Pollock and his wife, Lee Krasner, changed everything about the landscape of modern art. And in season 1, host Helen Molesworth revisits the artist Ana Mendieta’s death and the trial that followed—interrogating both the silence and the protest that have accompanied her story ever since. Death of an Artist Season 1 is a co-production between Pushkin Industries, Somethin’ Else, and Sony Music Entertainment. Death of an Artist Season 2 is a co-production between Pushkin Industries and Samizdat Audio.

Latest episodes

Episode 6: By the Time You Get This Letter

September 22, 2026 · 42 min

“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…
Episode 5: We Are Without Fear

September 15, 2026 · 44 min

“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…
Episode 4: Bird on a Wire

September 8, 2026 · 41 min

“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…
Episode 3: The Train Has Left the Station

September 1, 2026 · 44 min

“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…
Episode 2: It’s Lonely Without You, Friends

August 25, 2026 · 47 min

“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…
Episode 1: Dear Honeys

August 25, 2026 · 40 min

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…
Introducing Death of an Artist Season 3: Petra Mathers and Her Michael

August 18, 2026 · 3 min

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…
Episode 5: The Kiss of Death

June 14, 2024 · 22 min

1955. Upper West Side. Jackson Pollock seeks help from a psychotherapist practicing controversial methods. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.