Joan Kron Celebrates The Renegade Housewives of Pop Art at 98

*Joan Kron, Fern Mallis: Photo Credit Sean Zanni*

"I'm 15 months away from being 100, so listen carefully," said Joan Kron, 98, and the room did. More than 100 friends and admirers had crowded into LaVon Kellner's art-filled triplex for the launch of The Renegade Housewives of Pop Art: A Memoir of the 1960s, her account of being there when Pop Art was invented. The party was hosted by her son, Daniel Kron, her stepson, Jonathan Marder, and Pointed Leaf Press publisher Suzanne Slesin, who, by Kron's telling, forced her to write the book. Kron's own review was already in: "So far as I'm concerned, it's the book of the year."

*Saundra Whitney, Barbara Tober: Photo Credit Sean Zanni*

Kron had come home to New York, where she was born and raised, for the opening of the Whitney Museum's Roy Lichtenstein exhibition, which features Super Sunset, a billboard she commissioned from the artist in 1967. Commissioning Lichtenstein was very much on brand. In 1962, Kron and Audrey Sabol presented the first group show of Pop Art on the East Coast, collaborating with an emerging group that included Jim Dine, Jasper Johns, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, George Segal, Jean Tinguely and Andy Warhol. The two women also produced multiples with Robert Indiana, Lichtenstein and Marisol Escobar, and their swan song, the Museum of Merchandise, had a storefront by an unknown named Christo and a trouble-making product for sale by a rising star named Warhol.

The Pop years turned out to be only the first act. Trained in costume design at the Yale School of Drama, Kron went on to write for Philadelphia magazine, New York Magazine and The New York Times before joining The Wall Street Journal, where she created the fashion beat. She was editor-in-chief of Avenue, then joined Allure and created the plastic-surgery beat, and later directed the prize-winning documentary Take My Nose... Please! Comediennes and Plastic Surgery. The crowd that turned out for her spanned all of it: Fern Mallis, Jackie Hoffman, Barbara Tober, RoseLee Goldberg, Myrna Blyth and Jeffrey Banks among them. Kron lives in Miami now and is at work on a second film, Weapon of Beauty: The Cloak and Dagger History of Botox. The Renegade Housewives of Pop Art can be pre-ordered from Pointed Leaf Press.