Pushkin.

It's nineteen eighty six, about three decades after Jackson's death.

On a cold winter's day on the Upper West Side, a woman called Maris has been sitting in a parks car watching a house.

She's on a steakout, a steakout of her very own home.

Kind of alternative utopian community hidden in plain sight.

That's Alexander Stiller, who has just written a book about this community.

You could drink as much as you want, you could sleep as many people as you want.

You didn't have to feel guilty.

Great, what's wrong with that?

But it had a darker side.

The year before, Marius had had a baby.

Three months after giving birth, she is told not to your child at all because she's a smothering mother and it's going to be a toxic influence on her daughter.

The kid was taken away from her, and now Maris is parked outside the commune with two hired bodyguards waiting.

Finally she sees some movement.

The front door opens and out comes a pram in It is her baby daughter.

Eight bodyguards immobilize the babysitter and she takes the child and off they go.

But what happened that day would have even bigger consequences.

It triggered the downfall of what had become a full blow cult known as the Sullivanians.

And they literally had people living in communes.

They were controlling their behavior, who they could sleep with, all kinds of things.

But it all started back in the mid fifties, not as a cult, but as an alternative psychotherapy institute, and one of its very first patients was Jackson Pollock.

Polock mis told don't worry about your drinking.

Having affairs and finding a new sex partner was a good idea.

Sending Jackson to a Salavanian therapist was the kiss of death as far as I'm concerned.

I'm Katie Hessel, and this is death of an artist.

Krasner and Pollock Episode five, The Kiss of Death.

Thirty years earlier, on a summer afternoon in nineteen fifty five, Lee Krasner was drinking black coffee in Springs with her friend Clement Greenberg, the same table where eight years ago they created Jackson Pollock inc.

Now both Lee and Jackson looked older, worn down.

The situation at the Polo Krasner house is disastrous.

Pollock, who had for a period of time been sober and produced much of his best work in the late forties and early fifties, has fallen off the wagon, is drinking heavily.

He is tearing into his wife, Lee Krasner, and they're arguing day and night, and he's treating her very abusively.

Lee turned to their old friend Clement Greenberg for advice.

Green You're told Krasner like, you've got to do something.

You've got to get out of here.

You're going to kill each other if you keep this up.

He told her that he'd been having a hard time himself recently, and that he'd started seeing a therapist, someone a bit unusual, but it was really doing wonders for him, and maybe Lean Jackson should give it a go.

This wasn't the first time Jackson tried to get sober.

He'd tried alcoholism, specialists, medication, and analysis, you name it.

Jackson had even made a series of drawings while working with a Youngian therapist.

They would become known as his psychoanalytic Drawings and were later exhibited.

So why not try again?

A few months later?

One Tuesday in September nineteen fifty five, Jackson was sitting in an office on the Upper West Side.

He was waiting for his first therapy session.

Leeds started seeing a therapist and Jackson had agreed to follow suit.

She hoped that it would tame his drinking, but Jackson had other motivations.

For some time now, he'd been in an artistic rut.

Six years ago, Life magazine had suggested he might be America's greatest living painter, but in the past few years he'd barely painted at all.

Jackson wanted his creative mojo back, and he was hoping this session could be a start.

Soon, a therapist breezed into the room, introducing himself as Ralph Klein.

He looked around thirty years old, handsome, He.

Had a kind of rugged good looks, and was more international and more cosmopolitan than other therapists.

He was Jewish and ended up fleeing Austria during the Nazi persecution.

As Ralph began to explain his unique approach to therapy, Jackson felt himself relax.

The traditional family was by definition limiting and suffocating.

This was at the heart of Ralph's worldview.

Now this probably doesn't seem that outlandish to you at all, but remember this was the fifties, the sexual Revolution and hippie culture.

Of the sixties hadn't happened yet, so when Jackson heard this idea, it was truly radical.

This alternative form of psychotherapy was all about breaking up the nuclear family and exploring multiple possibilities as creative people.

This is not how Jackson thought this session would go.

The therapy aimed at separating its patients from their families.

And for Jackson this would mean two things.

The idea was that he would be a happier and more creative person if he broke his ties.

With his mother and crucially with Lee.

He was told that having affairs and finding a new sex partner was a good idea.

Lee had been his rock for fifteen years.

She'd gotten him out of some pretty ropy situations and had always encouraged his work.

But his therapist was telling him that this is what he needed to do to get his creative juices flowing again.

And then came maybe the strangest piece of advice.

Ralph Klein appears to have told Pollock, don't worry about your drinking.

Pollock was happy to be told that he didn't have to stop drinking, and so he would tell people, Hey, look, you know if I want to digital lye and go drinking with the boys.

There's nothing wrong with that.

And that's essentially what he was hearing from his therapist.

And so that's what Jackson does every Tuesday.

After finishing therapy, Jackson began to put Ralph's teachings into practice, and that meant one thing, heading straight to a favorite haunt, a dive bar called the Cedar Tavern.

He's getting ship faced drunk and carrying on and making a spectacle and fighting with people and taking over the place.

This Tuesday night, It's a Jackson Pollock show.

Jackson would regurgitate what he'd heard in Ralph's living room hours.

Before he told people that he and his wife had stopped having sex.

He began propositioning women at the Cedar Tavern.

This is around the time he came on to Audrey Flack, the artist you heard back in episode one.

And then he started becoming close to me, and then he brought two belch and then he was embarrassed and he tried to pinch my behind.

Night after night, Jackson sat at the bar drinking whiskey and beer.

He was of somewhat angry drunk and would you know, and saw people in break clads.

One time Jackson was slumped over finishing his final whiskey.

He smashed the glass onto the table, shattering it into shards in between his fingers.

His blood dripping from his hands onto the surface of the table, like a kind of parody of his own painting process.

Jackson had been spending more and more time in New York City and less and less time at home in Springs, less time with Lee.

These last few months lead been in Springs trying to paint Once.

She'd have been grateful to have all this time to herself to focus on her own art.

She actually had a show coming up, and she was excited, but she just couldn't concentrate.

All she could think about was where the hell Jackson was a few months later, on a hot morning in July nineteen fifty six, Lee was walking up her driveway when she saw Jackson's mint green convertible.

This is Mary Gabriel, author of Ninth Street Women.

Lee and Jackson were still living together, but their lives were completely separate socially and artistically.

The relationship was existing and fumes.

As Lee walked past the car, something caught her eye, an elegant scarf.

It definitely wasn't hers, Lee snatched it, marched into the house, and laid down the scarf in front of Jack Jackson.

She confronted Jackson and asked who had belonged to and what was going on.

Slurring his words, he said that the scarf belonged to another woman, a woman he'd been sleeping with, and then more proudly, he said it was necessary for his creative potential.

Hearing this, Lee felt something break inside her.

She had sacrificed her life literally to keep him, saying, to keep him sober, to keep him working, and now he had thrown their relationship to the wayside in favor of this young woman.

Jackson had met Ruth Kligmann at the Cedar one night.

She was an aspiring artist who just moved to the city, and they'd been dating all summer.

No way, Lee Krasner, as fierce as she was, as defensive as she was of her own life, of Jackson's life, was going to share it with a young woman.

And so she took a breath and composed herself.

Lee presented him with an ultimatum, get rid of her or stay with me.

A few days later, Lee woke up early alone in the house.

As Lee came out on the porch in the back of the house which faced the barn, dressed in her bathrobe.

She saw Pollock and Ruth emerge from the barn run across the yard hand in hand, giggling.

The raid she felt was so intense she couldn't control herself.

She shouted at Jackson, get her off my property.

With a smug still on his face, his arms still around Ruth, Jackson shouted, first.

Of all, this isn't your property, and second, stop being a goddamn ass.

Lee must have felt all the wind go out of her.

The drunken fool she saw with a giggling young woman on his arm was not the man she loved or respected.

The rage had gone, and in its place came something worse.

Her fighting spirit, by this point had been totally destroyed.

There hurt, the agony, the pain that Lee felt at that moment, seeing that act of disloyalty and that cruelty from a man she had supported with her whole being, shook her to her core.

Lee quite frankly didn't know where to go from there.

But what Lee did know is that she couldn't stay there any longer, and in just a matter of days, Lee would be on a boat to Paris.

While she was there, she got the phone call that would change everything.

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.

When Lee heard the news of her husband's death, she immediately came back to New York.

She spent the next weeks and months organizing a funeral, taking phone calls, and helping to put on a big show of his work at the Museum of Modern Art.

The art world was mourning its hero.

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.

You know, everybody called each other.

It was electrifying, like a spark went out.

Everybody was shocked and sad and depressed.

Lee had helped everyone else grieve, but had barely begun to process his death herself.

She was devastated by Jackson's death.

No sooner does she leave him on his own than he self destructs.

This is Helen Harrison again, who managed the polk Krasna House.

I mean, what could be worse.

You've been nurturing this alcoholic all these years, and then you finally take a break and that's it.

One day in the summer of nineteen fifty seven, Lee found herself in the barn at Springs.

I can imagine her looking at the vast space she'd renovated with Jackson to give him room to paint, where he created the work that had made his name.

Some of her friends have told me that they thought that she would have sold this place after that happened, because of the bad associations and everything.

Lee's eyes drifted down to a roll of canvas that she'd brought from the house.

All the time they'd lived there, she kept making art, but mainly in their tiny spare bedroom the barn had always been Jackson's.

Lee started unraveling the canvas and taped it up on the longest wall, the only place it would fit.

It was huge, seventeen by eight feet of endless possibility.

Lee stad at it and found herself thinking what could she create.

She picked up a brush, dipped it in one of the cans, and heard a voice inside her.

Say now it's my turn.

Lee moved the brush from one side of the canvas to the other, making sweeping, curving strokes.

It's much larger than the studio she had upstairs.

Really gave her a scope to spread out what she had always wanted to do but never had the opportunity to do.

She'd never done anything on this scale before.

It was as if she was painting with her whole body for the first time.

For her, it was a way of claiming the space and also just physically able to work so much larger and with so much more energy.

Lee was using earthy greens and deep reds, creating a swirling mass of plant and flower forms.

You know what, we expect a woman in mourning to paint dark, maybe angry pictures, maybe things how negative.

No, she pets these beautiful, bright, colorful, upbeat pictures that she later called her happy pictures.

Lee felt like she was in a trance.

She barely even noticed the shape she was making.

While she's painting them.

She wasn't even seeing them because her eyes were filled with tears.

Until this moment, Lee couldn't see how she could ever move on after Jackson's death.

But here in the bond, just simply painting.

She felt like she could handle anything, like maybe this could be a new beginning.

It seems to me that she was working in spite of her grief.

She was working over her grief and overcoming it through her art.

From that moment on, Lee would contain, I knew to paint on a scale and at a rate she never had.

Before, and in her case what came out was a positive, life affirming energy.

How did she do that?

I think I know what Hella means here.

Lee had painted for thirty years, but for me, this is her first real masterpiece.

She ended up calling this particular painting The Seasons.

It's one of my favorite works of all time, and it now hangs pride of place in the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Colossal green and red plant shapes roll into each other, sometimes looking torturous, sometimes joyous, but always changing, all about hope and renewal.

After so many years of supporting Jackson to find his artistic voice, Lee was rediscovering her own.

When Lee was later asked how she was able to start painting so soon after Jackson's death, she had a simple answer, quote, painting is not separate from life.

It is one.

It is like asking do I want to live?

My answer is yes, and I paint coming up.

In the final episode.

Lee Krasner had two hundred dollars in her bank account.

There was nobody spending money on American abstract painting.

With cash tight.

After Jackson's death, Lee sees a chance to boost the price of one of his paintings.

In one fells who she reseaid the entire market, not just Jackson Pollock's market, but the market for American abstract.

Painting, and Lee's own artistic career begins to take off the most accomplished work of her career, extraordinary, lyrical, vibrant, luscious paintings.

That's next time on the season finale of Death of an Artist.

Death of an Artist Krasner and Pollock is produced by Pushkin Industries and Samasdat Audio.

Clem Hitchcock is our producer.

Story editing by Dasherlitz at Sina, Sophie Crane and Karen Schakerji from Pushkin.

The executive producer is Jacob Smith from Samazdat Audio.

The executive producers are Dasherlitz at Sina and Joe Sykes.

Sound design by Peregrin Andrews.

Original scoring and our theme were composed by Martin Austwick.

Fact checking by Arthur Gompertz.

Special thanks to Jacob Weissberg.

I'm Katie hessel daaaaaaaa.