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Verso: An Art History Podcast: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Emma Laramie
Discover the hidden side of art history with Verso. Every other week, we peel back the layers of famous and forgotten masterpieces to reveal the stories that shaped them—art heists, secret paintings, scandals, and more. Whether it’s uncovering the drama behind the canvas or exploring the unexpected connections between art and culture, Verso will change how you see the art, and the world, around you. Want to support the show? Buy me a coffee here: https://buymeacoffee.com/versopod Email me: hello@versopod.com
Latest Episodes
The most recent episodes — sign up to get AI-powered summaries of each one.
- 4 days ago26 min
Whistler v. Ruskin: The Trial Over a Pot of Paint
In 1877, the most powerful art critic in Britain published a review calling the painter James McNeill Whistler a fraud. Whistler sued him for libel. What followed was a two-day trial in which paintings were held upside down, a jury of twelve people was asked to determine the future of art criticism, and the whole thing ended with a verdict of one farthing in damages.Ruskin and Whistler never met. Not before the trial, not during it, and not after. Two men who had never been in the same room managed to derail each other's careers entirely from a distance, over a painting of fireworks in the dark.This episode is about what the farthing actually cost both of them, and why the thing that ruined Whistler financially turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to his art.Suggested Further ReadingLinda Merrill, A Pot of Paint: Aesthetics on Trial in Whistler v. Ruskin (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992)James McNeill Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890, repr. Dover Publications, 1967)Daniel E. Sutherland, Whistler: A Life for Art's Sake (Yale University Press, 2014)Buy Me a Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/versopodFollow Me on TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@versopodEmail me: hello@versopod.com
- 2 weeks ago31 min
Robert Mapplethorpe and the Corcoran: The Imperfect Moment
In 1989, the Corcoran Gallery of Art canceled a Robert Mapplethorpe photography exhibition to protect the NEA from a congressional culture war. The decision backfired spectacularly, triggering mass resignations, donor defections, and a chilling effect on American arts institutions that lasted decades. The Corcoran never fully recovered. It closed in 2014, its $2 billion collection given away for free.This episode traces the full arc: Mapplethorpe's life and work, the NEA funding wars of the late 1980s, the board meeting that changed everything, and the slow institutional decline that followed. It's a story about censorship, cowardice, good intentions, and the long consequences of a single wrong decision — and about what American cultural life lost when one museum flinched.
- May 4, 202626 min
The Disappearance of Agnes Martin
In the summer of 1967, Agnes Martin walked into a New York gallery, handed over her brushes, her canvases, and her stretchers, and asked the dealer to give them away to young artists. Then she got in a truck and left. She would not make another painting for four and a half years.The art world didn't know what to make of it. But then, the art world had never quite known what to make of Agnes Martin.This episode is the story of one of the most critically acclaimed painters in New York at the height of her career, and what happened when she walked away from all of it. It's about the mythology that built up around her so-called disappearance, the more complicated reality underneath it, and the work she made in the New Mexican desert that many consider the most significant painting of her life. It's also about what her story reveals about the art world's geography of legitimacy: the idea that you must be in the right city, the right room, the right scene to matter, and what it costs to believe that.Agnes Martin's story touches on abstract art and minimalism, the New York art scene of the 1950s and 60s, women in art history, mental health and creativity, and the mechanics of the art market. It moves from Coenties Slip to the Betty Parsons Gallery to a fifty-acre mesa in New Mexico, and ends, decades later, with a joint retrospective at the Tate, LACMA, and the Guggenheim. It is, at its core, a story about what it means to trust your own instincts over the art world's idea of where you're supposed to be.Buy Me a Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/versopodFollow Me on TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@versopodEmail me: hello@versopod.com
- Apr 20, 20261h 2m
Han van Meegeren: The Last Vermeer
In 1945, Dutch painter Han van Meegeren was arrested for selling a stolen Vermeer to Nazi war criminal Hermann Goering. His defense: he hadn't sold a Vermeer at all. He'd painted it himself.This episode tells the full story of the twentieth century's most audacious art forger — and the story most people don't know. Van Meegeren didn't just fool the art world's greatest experts with his fake Vermeers. He fooled them because he understood something about desire that they didn't: people don't see what's in front of them. They see what they've already decided is there.What emerges is a story about Nazi ideology embedded in Old Master brushwork, a postwar nation desperate for a hero it could believe in, and a man who spent his entire life performing one role or another — right up until the moment he performed his way out of a death sentence.Buy Me a Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/versopodFollow Me on TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@versopod
- Apr 6, 20261h 0m
How Michelangelo's David Became Everybody's Symbol
Michelangelo's David was commissioned for a cathedral buttress 150 feet off the ground. But it quickly became one of the most potent political symbols in all of art history.In this episode, we trace the full political life of the most famous sculpture in the Western world: from the abandoned block of marble that sat in a Florentine courtyard for thirty-five years, to the placement debate that turned a religious commission into a republican statement, to the riot that shattered its arm and the sixteen years Florence spent walking past the damage without fixing it. We look at how the Medici, the very family the David was built to oppose, ended up absorbing it, repairing it, and paying for Michelangelo's funeral. And we look at what happened after the statue moved indoors in 1882 and became available to every era that needed it: the AIDS crisis, post-9/11 New York, Banksy, Warhol and Basquiat, and a man with a hammer who said it was just too beautiful.This is a story about how political symbols get made, stolen, and remade. About who gets to write the history of a masterpiece, and what five hundred years of being everybody's symbol does to a piece of marble.
- Mar 23, 202626 min
Bernini vs Borromini, Part II - What Winning Actually Costs
TW: Discussions of suicideIn Part Two of our deep dive into the Bernini and Borromini rivalry, the stakes get personal. With a new pope in power and Bernini in disgrace, Borromini finally had what he'd spent a decade working toward: the commissions, the recognition, and the satisfaction of having been right all along. It didn't last. What followed was a slow, painful unraveling — a series of ruptures with patrons, a knighthood delivered by proxy because nobody could stand to be in the room with him, and a rival who kept winning even when he was supposed to have lost. Meanwhile, Bernini was building the colonnades of St. Peter's Square, entertaining Louis XIV in Paris, and accumulating a fortune that would dwarf Borromini's estate by a factor of forty.This episode covers the Fountain of the Four Rivers, the greatest commission of Borromini's life, the Baroque architecture scandal that defined 17th century Rome, and the question that the whole story leaves you with: is it better to be celebrated in your time, or vindicated by history? And is there any version of this art history story where you get to have both?Buy Me a Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/versopodFollow Me on TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@versopod
- Mar 9, 202635 min
Bernini vs Borromini, Part I - The Rivalry that Shaped Rome
In 17th century Rome, architecture wasn't just art, it was power. The Catholic Church was fighting to reassert its authority over a changing world, and the artists who could build something transcendent enough to make people believe were the most valuable people in the city. Two men defined that moment more than anyone else: Gianlorenzo Bernini, the charming, theatrical papal favorite who understood the game instinctively, and Francesco Borromini, the brooding geometric genius who refused to play it. They worked together, fell apart, and spent the next four decades locked in one of the most consequential rivalries in art history, one that would shape the Rome we know today and raise a question that still doesn't have a clean answer: does it matter how good you are, if you don't know how to work the room?Part One covers their origins, their years together at St. Peter's, and the moment the Baldacchino — one of the most celebrated works of art in the world — became the fault line between them. It also covers a crowbar, a razor, and the kind of papal favor that makes attempted murder disappear.Buy Me a Coffee: buymeacoffee.com/versopodFollow me on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@versopod
- Feb 23, 202637 min
Jo van Gogh-Bonger: The Woman Who Made Vincent van Gogh Immortal
You know Vincent van Gogh: Sunflowers. Starry nights. The guy who cut off his ear. One of the most famous artists in history.But you probably don't know Jo van Gogh-Bonger, the woman who made him famous.When Jo's husband Theo died in 1891 after just twenty-one months of marriage, she was left with a baby, no income, and hundreds of paintings that critics called "nearly vulgar." She had zero art world experience. Male dealers dismissed her as a grieving amateur. Her own brother was embarrassed to ask her permission to sell paintings.So Jo did what the experts told her was impossible: She spent the next thirty-five years turning Vincent van Gogh into the most famous artist in the world. Not by pretending to be an expert, but by trusting instincts the art world didn't have, and creating a template for the modern "struggling" artist in the process.
About Verso: An Art History Podcast
Discover the hidden side of art history with Verso. Every other week, we peel back the layers of famous and forgotten masterpieces to reveal the stories that shaped them—art heists, secret paintings, scandals, and more. Whether it’s uncovering the drama behind the canvas or exploring the unexpected connections between art and culture, Verso will change how you see the art, and the world, around you. Want to support the show? Buy me a coffee here: https://buymeacoffee.com/versopod Email me: hello@versopod.com
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