Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchBerthe Morisot: The Woman Who Helped Invent Impressionism From a Nursery
Episode 10876
In February 2013 a vibrant 1881 portrait of a red-haired woman in a straw hat sold at Christie's for 10.9 million dollars, making its painter the hig…
4 days, 19 hours ago
Benvenuto Cellini: The Renaissance Goldsmith Who Got Away With Murder
Episode 10875
Imagine hands steady enough to carve microscopic detail into solid gold, and the same hands plunging a dagger into a rival's neck on a cobblestone st…
4 days, 19 hours ago
Jean-Michel Basquiat: From Park Bench to the Pinnacle of the Art World
Episode 10874
In May 2017 a 1982 painting of a skull sold for 110.5 million dollars after a ten-minute bidding war. A few years before it was painted, the artist w…
4 days, 19 hours ago
Banksy's Love Is in the Bin: Shredder, Siren, and an 18-Fold Payday
Episode 10873
On October 5, 2018, seconds after Banksy's Girl with Balloon sold at Sotheby's London for 1,042,000 pounds, a siren wailed and the canvas began slidi…
4 days, 19 hours ago
Augusta Savage: The Harlem Sculptor Whose Masterpiece Was Bulldozed
Episode 10872
At the 1939 New York World's Fair, a 16-foot plaster sculpture shaped like a harp, its strings formed by twelve singing Black children and its soundi…
4 days, 19 hours ago
Annie Leibovitz: How a Military Brat Became Fame's Master Portraitist
Episode 10871
Five hours before John Lennon was murdered, Annie Leibovitz photographed him nude, curled around a fully clothed Yoko Ono, and he told her the Polaro…
4 days, 19 hours ago
Nefertiti's Bust: Ancient Photoshop, a Missing Eye, and Who Owns Her
Episode 10870
Queen Nefertiti is the undisputed icon of ancient beauty, yet the 3,300-year-old painted bust that made her famous is defined by contradictions: a mi…
4 days, 19 hours ago
Yasujiro Ozu: Tatami Shots, Tokyo Story, and a Life of Contradictions
Episode 10869
In a cemetery in Kamakura, Japan, sits a gravestone with no name, only the single character Mu, meaning nothingness. It belongs to Yasujiro Ozu, whos…
5 days, 20 hours ago
Winsor McCay: The Obsessive Genius Who Built Comics and Animation
Episode 10868
The man who hand-drew 25,000 mathematically precise animation frames left no reliable record of his own birth year, which falls anywhere from 1866 to…
5 days, 20 hours ago
The Lumiere Brothers: Inventing Cinema, Then Walking Away From It
Episode 10867
Imagine inventing the most powerful storytelling medium in human history and then declaring it an invention without any future. That is the paradox a…
5 days, 20 hours ago