Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchLas Meninas: How Velazquez Painted His Way Into Spanish Nobility
Episode 10926
In 1656 Diego Velazquez painted himself into the official portrait of the Spanish royal family, looking straight out at the viewer with brush in hand…
4 days, 6 hours ago
Vincent van Gogh: The Ten-Year Sprint That Changed Modern Art
Episode 10925
Vincent van Gogh did not begin his true career until age 27, and in roughly ten years he produced more than 2,100 works, including around 860 oil pai…
4 days, 6 hours ago
Tank Man: The Mystery of Tiananmen's Unknown Rebel and His Photograph
Episode 10924
On June 5, 1989, one day after the Chinese military cleared Tiananmen Square, a man in a white shirt holding two shopping bags stepped in front of a …
4 days, 6 hours ago
Roy Lichtenstein: Pop Art, Benday Dots, and the Comic Book Controversy
Episode 10923
In the early 1960s a national magazine asked whether Roy Lichtenstein was the worst painter in America. Decades later one of his paintings sold priva…
4 days, 6 hours ago
Erased de Kooning Drawing: How Rauschenberg Made Art by Erasing It
Episode 10922
At the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art hangs a gilded frame containing what looks like a blank, faintly smudged sheet of paper. It is Robert Rausc…
4 days, 6 hours ago
Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and the Birth of Cubism
Episode 10921
In 1907 Pablo Picasso unveiled a massive eight-by-eight-foot canvas to his closest circle and the room went silent. Matisse thought it was a prank, a…
4 days, 6 hours ago
Ophelia Beyond Hamlet: From Paintings to Warships and a Moon of Uranus
Episode 10920
How does a drowned character from Hamlet become a Royal Navy destroyer, a neo-psychedelic band, an EDM record label, a hurricane name, and a moon of …
4 days, 6 hours ago
Monet's Impression, Sunrise: The Painting That Named Impressionism
Episode 10919
Look at Monet's most famous painting in black and white and the sun disappears. This episode explores Impression, Sunrise, painted in 1872 from a hot…
4 days, 6 hours ago
Michelangelo's David: How a Ruined Marble Block Became a Masterpiece
Episode 10918
In 1501, a 26-year-old Michelangelo signed on to salvage a 17-foot block of Carrara marble that had sat abandoned in a Florence cathedral courtyard f…
4 days, 6 hours ago
Kazimir Malevich and the Black Square: Art at Year Zero
Episode 10917
A self-taught teenager near Kiev copying Orthodox icons and Ukrainian folk art grew up to paint a single black square so radical it cost him a week o…
4 days, 6 hours ago