Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History

She turns, meets our eyes, and seems ready to speak. For centuries, viewers have wondered who she was—but Vermeer’s most famous “portrait” may not be a portrait at all.

James explores how Girl with a Pearl Earring fits the Dutch tradition of the tronie: a study of expression, costume, and character rather than the likeness of a named sitter. Along the way, discover why her enormous pearl may not be a pearl, how her familiar black background was once a green curtain, and what modern conservation uncovered beneath centuries of aging and artistic assumptions.

We may never know her name, what she heard, or what she was about to say—and that unanswered possibility may be precisely why we cannot stop looking.

Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History is presented by J-Squared Atelier.

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After the Mexican Revolution, the country needed a new way to tell its story. The answer was impossible to ignore: hand artists enormous walls and tell them to paint the revolution.

James explores how Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros—the celebrated “Big Three” of Mexican Muralism—transformed public buildings into monumental arguments about workers, Indigenous history, capitalism, violence, and national identity. They shared a belief in art’s public power, but their competing politics and personalities ensured they rarely agreed on what the revolution actually meant.

From Rivera’s ill-fated Rockefeller Center commission to murals that shaped public art, Chicano muralism, and street art around the world, discover how these artists took history out of the museum and put it where everyone could see it. The revolution didn’t stay in the streets—it got painted on the wall.

Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History is presented by J-Squared Atelier.

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Walk into the Louvre, turn toward the grand Daru staircase, and there she is: wings spread, marble drapery whipped by an invisible sea wind, standing triumphantly on the prow of a ship.

The Winged Victory of Samothrace—La Victoire de Samothrace—is one of the most recognizable sculptures in the world. There is just one fairly significant problem: she doesn’t have a head, and nobody knows where it is.

In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History, presented by J-Squared Atelier, James investigates the disappearance of Victory’s face. Follow the sculpture from its creation in ancient Greece through its discovery in more than a hundred fragments, Charles Champoiseau’s unsuccessful return expedition, and the remarkable recovery of pieces from the goddess’s missing hand.

Yes, archaeologists found part of one finger, waited seventy-five years, and found another piece of the same finger. But the entire marble head? Nothing.

What might Victory’s missing face have revealed—and what would happen if it were discovered tomorrow? More than 160 years after the sculpture arrived at the Louvre, its absence has become part of its identity. Without a face, the wings become her expression, the drapery becomes emotion, and the goddess becomes something larger than an individual figure.

Perhaps the missing piece is part of the reason we cannot stop looking.

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You know the face: hands pressed against the head, eyes wide, mouth open, and a blood-red sky twisting behind it. Edvard Munch’s The Scream has been parodied, memed, printed on mugs, and transformed into the international symbol for “I am not handling this well.”

But what if the figure isn’t screaming?

In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History, presented by J-Squared Atelier, James looks beyond the famous face to uncover what makes The Scream so unsettling. The figure may be covering its ears—overwhelmed by what Munch described as an enormous scream passing through nature itself.

Explore Munch’s experiences with grief, illness, anxiety, and isolation; the multiple versions of his masterpiece; and the revolutionary way he transformed color, line, landscape, and distortion into pure psychological emotion. There is no visible monster or attacker. Instead, the entire world seems to be having a breakdown.

Munch didn’t simply paint what fear looks like. He painted what it feels like when anxiety escapes the body—and infects the entire universe.

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Francisco Goya painted kings, queens, duchesses, and children dressed in silk. He became one of Spain’s most celebrated royal court painters.

Then he painted witches, executions, war crimes, mutilated bodies—and Saturn devouring his own child.

So what happened?

In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History, presented by J-Squared Atelier, James follows Goya’s extraordinary journey from cheerful tapestry designs and glittering royal portraits to Los Caprichos, The Disasters of War, The Third of May 1808, and the haunting Black Paintings he created on the walls of his own home.

Along the way, Goya survived a life-altering illness, lost his hearing, witnessed Napoleon’s brutal invasion of Spain, and watched reason, power, and political order collapse around him. His art stopped flattering humanity and began exposing what it was capable of—superstition, cruelty, organized violence, and monsters that did not always need wings.

Was Goya losing faith in humanity, or was he simply one of the first artists willing to show us what humanity really looked like?

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How do you lose an entire room?

Not just any room, either. The Amber Room was an eighteenth-century masterpiece made from tons of carved amber, gold, mirrors, and mosaics—a glittering royal treasure so spectacular it became known as the Eighth Wonder of the World.

Then the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.

German troops stripped the room from the Catherine Palace in roughly thirty-six hours, packed it into twenty-seven crates, and carried it away. After being reassembled and displayed in Königsberg Castle, the Amber Room vanished during the final chaos of World War II. Did it burn? Was it buried inside a secret bunker? Hidden beneath a ruined castle? Or loaded onto a ship now resting at the bottom of the Baltic Sea?

In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History, James follows one of history’s greatest missing-art mysteries through royal extravagance, Nazi cultural looting, treasure hunters, shipwrecks, and decades of tantalizing theories. He also steps inside the extraordinary reconstruction that now stands in the Catherine Palace—and asks whether rebuilding a masterpiece can ever truly replace what war destroyed.

Sponsored by J2 Atelier.

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In February 1913, Americans paid twenty-five cents to enter a New York military armory and discover that art had apparently lost its mind. The women were blue, the bodies were geometric, perspective was broken, and Marcel Duchamp had sent a nude down a staircase—although no one could find the nude or, for that matter, the staircase.

In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History, James explores the 1913 Armory Show, the exhibition that introduced a massive American audience to European modernism. Encounter the radical colors of Henri Matisse, the fractured figures of Cubism, and Duchamp’s notorious Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2—the painting America mocked, parodied, condemned, and lined up to see.

Former President Theodore Roosevelt called the movement a “lunatic fringe,” newspapers treated modern art like a national emergency, and curious crowds kept buying tickets. Somewhere along the way, the outrage backfired: collectors started buying, artists discovered new possibilities, and modernism became impossible to ignore.

The Armory Show didn’t make the people of the United States love modern art. It did something far more disruptive—it kicked open the door to everything that came next.

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A nervous woman glances over her shoulder. A lonely figure stares through a window. A young ingénue arrives in the city with a suitcase—and somehow, you already think you know what happens next.

Between 1977 and 1980, Cindy Sherman created 69 black-and-white photographs inspired by the visual language of classic cinema. But these aren’t stills from real movies, and Sherman isn’t playing actual characters. She gives us costumes, poses, and familiar stereotypes—then lets our own cultural programming write the plots.

In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History, James explores how Untitled Film Stills turns the camera on Hollywood’s portrayals of women, the male gaze, and the audience itself. Sherman serves as photographer, director, stylist, performer, and subject—appearing in every image while somehow disappearing behind every role.

Long before Instagram taught us to pose, crop, filter, and manufacture our identities, Sherman understood that photographs don’t simply show us who people are. They can teach us who we expect them to be.

Cindy Sherman didn’t make the movies. She proved we’d already seen them.

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A revolution has overturned the government, the economy, and nearly every reliable plan for next Tuesday. The old world is gone. Now someone has to design the new one.

In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History, James explores Russian Constructivism—the radical movement that wanted art to leave the museum, enter everyday life, and get a job. Its artists traded precious masterpieces for industrial materials, photography, posters, clothing, theater sets, furniture, and the ambitious belief that design could help build a new society.

Meet Vladimir Tatlin and his spectacularly impractical rotating tower; Aleksandr Rodchenko, who declared painting finished and began photographing the world from startling new angles; and Liubov Popova and Varvara Stepanova, whose groundbreaking work brought Constructivism into theater, textiles, fashion, and mass production.

It’s a story of revolutionary optimism, bold graphics, impossible architecture, and the dangerous moment when artists who set out to serve a revolution discover that the revolution gets to decide what “service” means. The Constructivists never built their perfect world—but they gave modernity one of its loudest visual identities.

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Marcel Duchamp could paint. He understood perspective, composition, Cubism, and the rules of art history—and then he decided those rules were optional.

Inspired by MoMA’s sweeping Duchamp retrospective, James explores nearly six decades of work by one of modern art’s most disruptive figures. The exhibition moves from Duchamp’s early paintings and drawings through readymades, mechanical contraptions, optical experiments, wordplay, alter egos, and the mysterious installation he constructed in secret for roughly twenty years. Together, these works reveal that the infamous urinal was never the whole story. Duchamp’s real masterpiece may have been the question he left behind: What makes something art—and who gets to decide?

Along the way, we encounter Nude Descending a Staircase, a bicycle wheel, Mona Lisa’s mustache, the cracked and complicated Large Glass, Rrose Sélavy, chess, chance, desire, a unrinal, and an artist who made refusing expectations into an art form of its own.

If you want to spend more time with the urinal, be sure to listen to Season 1, Episode 13, our deep dive into Duchamp’s Fountain. You can follow this link: Marcel Duchamp The Fountain.

And, if you’ve ever stood in a museum and asked, “Why is that art?” congratulations: Marcel Duchamp is still messing with you.

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In the early hours of March 18, 1990, two men dressed as police officers walked into Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum—and walked out with thirteen works of art worth an estimated $500 million.

The haul included a Vermeer, three Rembrandts, five works by Degas, a Manet, and, because apparently priceless masterpieces weren’t enough, the decorative top of a Napoleonic flagpole.

More than three decades later, the art is still missing. No one has been charged. And the empty frames still hang on the museum walls, waiting for paintings that may—or may not—ever come home.

In this episode of Art Happens, we unravel the largest art heist in American history: fake cops, restrained guards, 81 very strange minutes inside the museum, mob connections, dead ends, questionable suspects, and one enormous unanswered question:

Where the hell are the paintings?

Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History is produced by J-Squared Atelier, where art history gets a little messy—and that’s usually when things get interesting.

All photographic images are courtesy of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

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Ana Mendieta didn’t simply place the body in nature—she let it disappear into it.

In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History, James William Moore explores how Ana Mendieta transformed earth, fire, water, blood, flowers, photography, and film into a deeply personal language of exile, memory, ritual, and belonging. From her childhood departure from Cuba and years in Iowa to the haunting Silueta works that fused body and landscape, we trace the experiences that shaped one of the most distinctive practices of the 1970s.

We’ll look at the influence of Afro-Cuban, Catholic, and Indigenous traditions on her work, examine why documentation became essential to art designed to vanish, and confront the questions surrounding her 1985 death and the legacy that still shadows discussions of her career.

Mendieta’s work reminds us that a body can disappear and still leave a mark—and sometimes absence is the thing we see most clearly.

Presented by J-Squared Atelier.

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In 1715, Amsterdam officials faced a decorating dilemma: Rembrandt’s monumental masterpiece The Night Watch didn’t fit between two doors. Their solution? Cut it down to size.

In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History, James explores how Rembrandt transformed a conventional militia portrait into a scene bursting with light, movement, muskets, and one mysteriously glowing girl—only for later generations to trim away figures, architecture, and nearly two feet of canvas.

Discover how a small seventeenth-century copy preserved evidence of the original composition, and how the Rijksmuseum used advanced imaging and artificial intelligence to reconstruct what the missing sections may have looked like.

It’s a story about artistic intention, changing attitudes toward preservation, and the expensive lesson Amsterdam learned three centuries too late: when a masterpiece doesn’t fit the room, the masterpiece isn’t the furnishing problem.

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Catch Lattes & Art, our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work.

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Futurism wanted art to move at the speed of modern life—and it wasn’t interested in asking permission.

In this episode, James follows Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and the Italian Futurists as they transform speeding cars, factories, electric lights, experimental typography, and industrial noise into a new artistic language. Along the way, paintings learn to move, words escape their sentences, orchestras become factories, and performances erupt into confrontations.

But Futurism’s obsession with youth, aggression, destruction, and war carried it toward increasingly dangerous politics. Its artists helped reinvent modern art while confusing speed with progress—and innovation with wisdom.

Start your engines. Hide the museum collection. And perhaps take away Marinetti’s keys.

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Catch Lattes & Art, our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work.

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Alexander Calder didn’t just make sculpture move—he taught it how to dance.

In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History, James William Moore explores how a mechanically minded artist transformed gravity, air, balance, and motion into artistic materials. From Calder’s miniature, five-suitcase circus and his wire “drawings in space” to the encounter with Piet Mondrian that helped set abstraction in motion, we follow the experiments that led to his revolutionary mobiles and stabiles.

We’ll meet the avant-garde artists who helped name Calder’s inventions, discover why he abandoned predictable motors for the commitment-challenged behavior of air, and examine the careful engineering concealed inside sculptures that seem wonderfully effortless.

Calder’s work proves that playfulness can be rigorous, joy can be profound, and even gravity can earn a creative credit.

Presented by J-Squared Atelier.

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On a stormy night in Palermo in 1969, thieves entered the Oratory of San Lorenzo and sliced a priceless Caravaggio masterpiece from its frame. Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence hasn’t been seen since.

In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History, James follows the painting from Caravaggio’s turbulent life and revolutionary use of light and shadow into a decades-long mystery filled with Mafia informants, black-market collectors, contradictory confessions, and rumors of a masterpiece destroyed by rats and pigs.

Was the missing Caravaggio hidden, sold, buried—or lost forever? Explore how a sacred painting became criminal currency, why its disappearance continues to haunt the art world, and what we truly lose when a masterpiece vanishes.

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Museums, spectacle, velvet ropes, and the moment art became an event.

In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History, James looks at how museums went from quiet temples of culture to full-blown engines of anticipation, crowds, merch, timed tickets, and “limited engagement” panic. From the King Tut exhibition craze to Van Gogh posters, immersive rooms, gift-shop snow globes, and blockbuster shows marketed like superhero movies, this episode asks what happens when art history becomes an event experience.

Blockbusters brought millions of people into museums, sometimes for the first time. They created unforgettable encounters with masterpieces, expanded access, and made art feel exciting and public. But they also changed what museums value, what gets funded, and which artists get pushed aside when exhibitions have to sell tickets.

Because yes, art can be scholarly, moving, complicated, and transformative. It can also apparently come with a forty-eight-dollar tote bag.

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Robert Frank’s The Americans looks like a road trip, but it feels more like a cracked mirror held up to postwar America.

In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History, James William Moore follows Frank across the highways, diners, jukeboxes, parades, cemeteries, sidewalks, and lonely rooms of 1950s America. Published in 1958 in France and 1959 in the United States, The Americans challenged the glossy national story of prosperity, confidence, and cheerful conformity. Instead of photographing the country as it wanted to see itself, Frank photographed the tension underneath the shine.

As a Swiss immigrant traveling through the United States, Frank brought an outsider’s eye to the myths of American success. His pictures reveal a country full of motion but also isolation, patriotism but also unease, abundance but also exclusion. From flags and cars to jukeboxes and segregated spaces, The Americans asks what gets left out when a nation becomes too busy believing its own mythology.

It is a photography book, a road trip, a cultural critique, and one of the most influential visual statements of the twentieth century.

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In this episode of Art Happens, we step into the strange, rebellious, magical world of Leonora Carrington: painter, writer, Surrealist, mythmaker, and professional refuser of being decorative. Born into wealth in England, Carrington was expected to become obedient, polished, marriageable, and socially useful. Naturally, she chose horses, hyenas, witches, alchemy, Celtic myth, feminist rebellion, and a lifelong commitment to making reality behave badly.

We’ll follow Carrington from her debutante beginnings to the chaos of Surrealist Paris, her relationship with Max Ernst, the trauma of war and institutionalization, and her eventual reinvention in Mexico, where her work fully transformed into a world of hybrid creatures, powerful women, ritual kitchens, dream logic, and absolute refusal.

Because Carrington was never interested in being someone’s muse.
She was building the mythology herself.

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J-Squared Atelier, LLC
for the love of art

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Don't miss the video podcast version on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and Spotify!!!

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Connect with Us:
J-Squared Aterlier (J2Atelier)
🌐 Website: J2 Atelier
📸 Instagram: @J2Atelier
James William Moore
🌐 Website: James William Moore
📸 Instagram: @the_jwmartist

Catch Lattes & Art, our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work.

You can find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, ...

Did one of the world’s greatest cultural treasures get rescued… or stolen?

In this episode of Art Happens, we climb the Acropolis and unravel one of the art world’s longest-running controversies: the Parthenon Marbles. Carved nearly 2,500 years ago for the Parthenon in ancient Athens, these remarkable sculptures have spent more than two centuries in London after being removed by Lord Elgin during the days of the Ottoman Empire.

But who should own them today?

Join James William Moore as he explores the history of the Parthenon, the rise and fall of empires, the role of museums, and the passionate arguments on both sides of the debate. Were the marbles legally acquired? Does the British Museumserve as a steward of world culture, or should the sculptures be reunited with the monument they were created for in Athens?

Along the way, we’ll follow the marbles through their surprising journey—from temple to church, church to mosque, gunpowder magazine to museum centerpiece—and discover why this centuries-old dispute continues to shape conversations about cultural heritage, restitution, and who gets to tell the story of the past.

Because sometimes the biggest mysteries in art history aren’t about who made the art—they’re about who gets to keep it.

#ArtPodcast #ArtHistory #ParthenonMarbles #NotYourStuffyArtClass #Art

Send us a Note! Let us know what you think!

J-Squared Atelier, LLC
for the love of art

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Send us a text

Don't miss the video podcast version on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and Spotify!!!

Follow & Subscribe to Art Happens

Connect with Us:
J-Squared Aterlier (J2Atelier)
🌐 Website: J2 Atelier
📸 Instagram: @J2Atelier
James William Moore
🌐 Website: James William Moore
📸 Instagram: @the_jwmartist

Catch Lattes & Art, our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work.

You can find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, ...