Pushkin.

It all started with two federal agents who heard a rumor.

She mentions, well, there is this alleged murder to have taken place.

There was just one problem. They had no clue who the victim was.

We have to do our job, and we have to find out who did they kill.

It had been 15 years since this alleged murder. Was it still possible to unearth the truth?

I used to watch the Unsolved mystery shows, and I often thought about calling because I was like, This is not right. How can a person get killed and no one knows anything?

I'm Jake Halpern, and this is Deep Cover, The Nameless Man. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to hear the entire season right now, ad-free, subscribe to Pushkin+ on our Apple podcast show page or on pushkin. Fm/plus.

It's a cool summer evening in Paris, August 1956. An American artist called Lee Krasner is at a friend's place.

It was a magnificent apartment with a huge skylight, easels everywhere. She was completely at home amid the smell of turpentine and Lindsay Doyle.

Paris is Lee's Mecca, the home of modern art. Now, in her late 40s, she's finally here.

Looking at what was happening in Paris and who was doing what, who was painting, who was showing, what galleries were showing what.

But this isn't just a work trip.

Lee was there to recharge her batteries because of a very tricky relationship with the husband she had left behind in the States.

A turbulent relationship, to say the least. His ego, alcoholism, and now an affair. But a month in Paris has helped take her mind off life back home. That evening, Lise relaxed, drifting into sleep.

And as she settled in on her friend's couch for the night, about 3:00 in the morning, the phone rang. Her host answered the phone and didn't say anything, but she could tell by the stricken look on his face that something terrible had happened. Without knowing any of the words on the other end of the phone, Lee knew exactly what had happened. And she shouted out, Jackson's dead.

Lee's husband is Jackson Pollack.

Her host saw that the agony in her face, the absolute pain, and rushed over to her, held her in his arms for what he described as an endless half hour, during which she writhed and moaned and was in utter agony. He was actually terrified for her life because their apartment had a balcony, and he was afraid she might do something drastic, that she might try to throw herself off.

Later, After that same day, Lee would get on a plane to New York, arrange his funeral, and mourn her husband. But the story of Lee and Jackson doesn't end there. After spending weeks in a day unable to sleep, she would embark on something extraordinary. What she'd do next would change history, turning her dead husband into the most famous American painter of all time, and changing the way we all think about art. I'm Katie Hessel, art historian and writer, and this is Death of an Artist Season 2, Krasner and Pollock. Episode 1, Crash.

It all started with two federal agents who heard a rumor.

She mentioned, well, there is this alleged murder to have taken place.

There was just one problem. They had no clue who the victim was.

We have to do our job, and we have to find out who did they kill.

It had been 15 years since this alleged murder. Was it still possible to unearth the truth?

I used to watch the Unsolved Mystory shows, and I often thought about calling because I was like, This is not right. How can a person get killed and no one knows anything?

I'm Jake Halpern, and this is DeepCover, The Nameless Man. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want to hear the entire season right now, ad-free, subscribe to Pushkin+ on our Apple podcast show page or on pushkin. Fm/plus.

Okay, so, Audrey, please can you introduce yourself, who you are and what do you do?

Oh, I don't want to do that. You should do that.

Okay, let's leave that.

You should say, Here's Audrey Flack, and she's blah, blah, blah, and she's an ancient person.

Audrey Flack is 92 years old and is as New York as it comes. She's been a painter for seven decades now, and back in the 1950s, she was right at the center of the downtown art scene, then made up of only a handful of people.

I had a studio on eighth Street and third Avenue. My studio was in a condemned building. The floors were rotted and the stairway was hanging down, and it wasn't safe. So of course, that's a perfect place for artists.

A few blocks up was a dive bar called the Cedar.

The Cedar was the place that everybody went. It's smoky, crowded. It was very busy and jam-packed and exciting. And the talk, there were really arguments about who was a greater artist. A Tintoretto or Caravagia.

Yeah, not my usual Saturday night chat.

It was a bar with stools. They were drinking little shots of Scotch with a beer chaser. Jackson liked to sit towards the back. His face was bloated. His skin, little capillaries had broken in his nose. You never notice when somebody drinks too much.

Audrey would see Jackson looked there most nights. He was a big guy, early '40s, scruffy, often wearing a baggy coat to hide his beer belly. Inside the Cedar, among fellow artists, he was a big deal, the one they all looked up And that goes for Audrey Flack, then a young artist.

One night, I went to the Cedar. Jackson wandered over. He stumbled over because he was clearly plastered and fell into the other chair next to me. We were talking, and I wanted to ask him about his art. And then he started coming close to me. He brushed his face against mine, and he had three-day stub. It was scratchy. And obviously, he didn't smell too good because I don't think he had washed. And then he burped, he belched, and then he was embarrassed, and he tried to pinch my behind. And then he leans over and he says, Let's fuck. I said, No, I'm not going to do that, Jackson. Just calm down. And that was the night that I vowed I would never go back to the Cedar.

And she didn't, but plenty of others did. Because the reality was that if you wanted to be in the art scene, if you really wanted to make it, you had to show your face at the Cedar.

There were the... What are the girls who follow the rock stars? Groupies. Groupies. They were groupies. They thought if they slept with the the hanchos that would rub off and they would have some importance. That is how it was.

It was there, at the Cedar, that Jackson met a friend of Audrey's who just moved to the city, a 26-year-old artist called Ruth Kliemann.

Ruth was unbelievably sexy. It just reeked. Thick black hair, rimmed sunglasses, and red lipstick. She looked like Elizabeth Taylor. She was really knock out. She really had a good eye and an ability to talk that mesmerized you, which she must have done to Jackson. She really got him.

By this point, Jackson had been married to Lee for a decade. Their marriage, well, it had its ups and downs, and the downs largely correspond under to Jackson's binges. And when Jackson met Ruth at the Cedar, he was in one of his spirals.

Jackson had carried on his affair in secret, well, secret to Lee.

That's Mary Gabriel, a journalist who wrote the book, Ninth Street, Women, all about the women of the American modern art scene. You'll be hearing a lot from her throughout the show. Anyway, back to Jackson's affair.

Everyone else in their community was well aware of it because he wore Ruth Klingon on his arm like a prize.

A few months after getting together, Ruth started spending more and more time at Jackson's home in Long Island, a little farmhouse right by the beach. Lee was away that summer in Paris, and Ruth made the most of it. One hot day, she invited her friend, Edith Metzger, to take the two-hour train ride out to Jackson's place with her. Ruth couldn't wait to take a cool dip in the ocean and show off her new artist boyfriend.

They were met at the train station by a sodden middle-aged drunk who barely spoke, who was angry that Ruth had brought Edith with her.

It was 10:00 AM, and already he reaped of booze. Not knowing what else to do, Ruth and her friend Edith piled into Jackson's mint green '88 Oldsmobile convertible. But instead of going to the house or to the beach, Jackson headed straight to a bar.

Pollock's usual drink of choice was beer, but that day he turned to gin and got immediately hammered.

Jackson drank until lunchtime, then finally drove them home. The two women changed into their bathing suits, ready to go to the beach. But when they came into the kitchen, they found Jackson raiding the cupboards for more booze. Ruth was desperate to salvage the situation, to show her friend at least some Saturday night. She started arguing with Jackson, but he didn't want to go to the beach. All he wanted to do was drink. Ruth wore him down, and finally, he announced that they were going to a party.

It was going to be a concert at a mansion on Long Island.

The hottest ticket in town.

That was exactly what Ruth and Edith needed to hear to resurrect their fantasy and their plans. So they changed into party dresses, and Jackson cleaned himself up.

They got into Jackson's convertible. It was getting dark out. No streetlights.

The moment we got in the car, I knew it was a mistake.

That's Ruth speaking in a rare interview.

We were on our way, kept stopping the car, crying. Edith became provocative in the sense that she didn't understand, and she got very scared.

Jackson was paying so little attention at this point that the car simply rolled to a stop.

A policeman pulled up alongside of him and asked if everything was okay. He had his wits about him enough to reassure the policeman that, yes, he said they had just stopped to talk.

The policeman drove on and Jackson turned the car around. He headed towards home, stopped at another bar, but changed his mind about going in. Edith couldn't take it anymore. She got out of the car and refused to get back in. Jackson was furious. They were just two minutes from his house. Ruth managed to coax her friend to get back in the car. Jackson put his key in the ignition. Jackson just wildly started to speed, and he put his foot on the gas.

He just started to scream, and he laughed. We speeded down Thorpey's road. That's when the car swurred.

The car hurtled off the road into a ditch and smashed into some trees. Ruth blacked out. She was woken up a few minutes later.

The young girl came up to me and she was patting me, and there was a man, and I was holding his hand, and they covered me. And I made this girl. I said, Go over there to where the car is, and I'll be watching you, and come back and tell me if he's all right. And she did. And she came back and I said, Is he alive? She said, Yes. I said, Swear by God. She said, I can't. So I knew.

Both Jackson and Edith were dead. In only a few hours, the art world would find out. That's coming up after break.

It all started with two federal agents who heard a rumor.

She mentioned, well, there is this alleged murder to have taken place.

There was just one problem. They had no clue who the victim was.

We have to do our job, and we have to find out who did they kill.

It had been 15 years since this alleged murder. Was it still possible to unearth the truth?

I used to watch the Unsolved Myst shows, And I often thought about calling because I was like, This is not right. How can a person get killed and no one knows anything?

I'm Jake Halpern, and this is Deep Cover, The Nameless Man. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want to hear the entire season right now, ad-free, subscribe to Pushkin+ on our Apple podcast show page or on pushkin.

Fm/plus.

The news that Jackson Pollack was dead spread quickly through the art world. Within a few hours, it seemed like everybody knew.

Oh, Oh, my God. The whole world stopped. Well, the whole art world stopped.

He was the center of their world, and now he was gone.

Everybody called each other. It was electrifying. Like a spark went out. Everybody was shocked and sad and depressed.

Later that day, while Lee Crasner, Jackson's wife, was on a plane back to New York, their friends gathered at their house in Long Island waiting for her arrival.

They weren't sure how much she knew about the circumstances of Jackson's death, that Ruth was in the car, that a young woman had died with him.

Ruth's clothes were still everywhere, as were Jackson's bottles, broken glasses, cigarette butts.

No one was sure what to expect from Lee.

Late afternoon on Monday, the 13th of August, 1956, barely 48 hours after the death of her husband, Lee opened the door.

She walked in the house strong and calm and determined and focused. They were shocked because it was a house of morning she had entered. Their friends were grieving. Their friends were crying. And yet Lee wasn't. She was there dry-eyeed, seemingly to console them. It was Lee who put her arms around people. It was Lee who was the strength in that community at that moment.

As their friends were crying, not knowing what to do, Lee took charge. She was ready to face what was coming.

To be the person she always was, which was the person who took care of a situation coldly, analytically. If there was any private morning to be done, if there was any pain or grief to be shown, she would do that later.

Because first, Lee was going to have to organize her husband's funeral, and there was a problem.

They only had $200 in the bank.

Yeah, only $200.

And with that, she had to find a way to bury her husband, to arrange a funeral in a chapel, to buy burial plots.

Lee moved quickly. She borrowed money from friends, called Jackson's family, made arrangements with the vicar. And just four days after the crash, the small local chapel was hosting an odd mix of people, artist friends, Jackson's family, and locals.

The funeral at the Spring's Chapel was somber and silent. The artists were silent. The minister didn't mention Jackson's name.

Not the send-off you might have imagined for Jackson Pollock.

This was where the locals from Spring's were buried, the fishermen and the farmers.

After the burial, the mourners headed back to the house.

All of that emotion that had been pent up through the morning at the Chapel and at the Cemetery exploded in what everyone agreed was the most raucous party that had ever been thrown at Fireplace Road. Someone joked at one point that Jackson must have been spiking the punch because they all got drunk so quickly, and they danced, and the releases This was palpable.

If this story had finished here, Jackson might have been forgotten. That would be it.

But as you know, that's not what happened.

Here it is then at $52 million. His work would go on to sell for eye-watering sums. Sold at $52 million. He would become the most famous American artist of all time. Jackson Pollack is a name recognized by people well beyond the art world. He's famous for those drip paintings that seem to- His paintings would influence filmmakers, musicians, fashion, you name it. They would change the course of 20th century culture.

When you enter a Pollock painting, you're entering outer space. He was like a living God.

Many of us have been told a certain story about Jackson Pollack as the man who changed art forever, who changed America, who changed how we see. That's probably what you know about him. And that's what's so intriguing to me, because as I see it, the story we've been told about Jackson Pollack is a myth. The real story is so much better. I'm Katie Hessel, and I've spent the past decade uncovering the stories of great women artists, but I've never come across one more game-changing than this one. When Jackson Pollack dies, in 1956, his global Fame and fortune hadn't peaked yet. Nowhere near. And none of it would ever have happened if not for someone else. Someone hiding in plain sight. The woman who just put her husband in the ground and had less than $200 to her name. Lee Crasner.

Nobody knew Pollard. He was just a figure in the village, a drunk.

You're getting all these Jackson Pollard paintings. What are you going to do with a paper in your living room?

This shy, good-looking young man appeared at this art opening on the arm of a supernova.

In one fell swoop, she reset the entire market, not just Jackson Pollack's market, but the market for American abstract painting.

If it hadn't been for Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollack would not have been the power that it was.

That's all coming up on Death of an Artist, Season 2, Krasner and Pollack. Death of an Artist, Krasner and Pollack, is produced by Pushkin Industries and Sammerstatt Audio. Clem Hitchcock is our producer. Story editing by Dasha Litzitzina, Sophie Crane, and Karin Shakergy. From Pushkin, the executive producer is Jacob Smith. From Sammerstatt Audio, the executive producers are Dasha Litzitzina and Joe Sykes. Sound design by Peregrin Andrews. Original scoring and our theme were composed by Martin Ostwick. Fact checking by Arthur Gomperts. Special thanks to Jacob Weisberg. I'm Katie Hessel.

It all started with two federal agents who heard a rumor.

She mentioned, well, there is this alleged murder to have taken place.

There was just one problem. They had no clue who the victim was.

We have to do our job, and we have to find out who did they kill.

It had been 15 years since this alleged murder. Was it still possible to unearth the truth?

I used to watch the Unsolved Misery shows, and I often thought about calling because I was like, This is not right. How can a person get killed and no one knows anything?

I'm Jake Halpern, and this is Deep Cover, The Nameless Man. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to hear the entire season right now, ad-free, subscribe to Pushkin+ on our Apple podcast show page or on pushkin. Fm/plus.