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Joan Kron Celebrates ‘The Renegade Housewives of Pop Art’ at Star-Studded New York Book Party
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More than 100 guests gathered to toast the 98-year-old journalist, author and Pop Art pioneer whose new memoir revisits her collaborations with Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and other groundbreaking artists of the 1960s.
“I’m 15 months away from being 100, so listen carefully,” declared Joan Kron, 98, to a room packed with friends and admirers celebrating her new memoir, The Renegade Housewives of Pop Art: A Memoir of the 1960s.
“Apparently you’re all here because you’ve heard about my latest book, which Suzy Slesin forced me to write. So far as I’m concerned, it’s the book of the year.”
More than 100 guests gathered in the art-filled New York triplex of LaVon Kellner for the celebration, hosted by Kron’s son, Daniel Kron; stepson, Jonathan Marder; and Suzanne Slesin, publisher of Pointed Leaf Press.
Kron, who now lives in Miami, was back in her native New York for the opening of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Roy Lichtenstein exhibition, which features Super Sunset, a billboard she commissioned from the artist.
A Pop Art Pioneer
In the 1960s, Kron and Audrey Sabol helped shape the emerging Pop Art movement, collaborating with artists including Jim Dine, Jasper Johns, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, George Segal, Jean Tinguely and Andy Warhol.\
In 1962, the pair presented what has been described as the first group exhibition of Pop Art on the East Coast. They also produced limited-edition works with Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein and Marisol Escobar.
Their final venture, the Museum of Merchandise, featured a storefront by the then-little-known Christo and a provocative product by a rising star named Andy Warhol.
Kron went on to forge a remarkable career in journalism. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, now the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, she wrote for Philadelphia magazine, New York magazine and The New York Times. At The Wall Street Journal, she helped establish fashion coverage before becoming editor-in-chief of Avenue.
She later joined Condé Nast’s Allure, where she pioneered coverage of plastic surgery, and produced and directed the award-winning documentary Take My Nose Please! Comediennes and Plastic Surgery.
Her books include High-Tech: The Industrial Style and Source Book for the Home, written with Suzanne Slesin, and Home-Psych: The Social Psychology of Home and Decoration.
At 98, Kron shows no signs of slowing down. She is working on her second documentary, Weapon of Beauty: The Cloak and Dagger History of Botox.
On the Scene
Among the guests celebrating Kron were Teri Agins and J. Paul Hands, Steven M.L. Aronson, Jeffrey Banks, Bina and Walter Bernard, Myrna Blyth, Michele Oka and Fred Doner, RoseLee Goldberg and Dakota Jackson, Andrew Hawkins, Phoebe Hoban, Jackie Hoffman, Michele Gerber Klein and Leigh Seippel, W. Wilder Knight II, Helen Little, Fern Mallis, Gillian McCain and Jim Marshall, Liane Pei, Virginia and Steve Postrel, Pascale Richard, Jeff Roth, Susan Roy, Dan Shaw, Barbara Tober, Désirée von la Valette and Saundra Whitney.
The Renegade Housewives of Pop Art: A Memoir of the 1960s, published by Pointed Leaf Press, is available for preorder at:
https://www.pointedleafpress.com/order/the-renegade-housewives-of-pop-art-a-memoir-of-the-1960s
Photos by Sean Zanni.