Verso: An Art History Podcast

On June 3, 1968, Valerie Solanas, author of the SCUM Manifesto, walked into Andy Warhol’s studio, the Factory, and shot him. Warhol survived the 1968 shooting—but his body, his art, and the world he had built around himself would never be the same.

Solanas had wanted Warhol to produce her play, Up Your Ass. How did their uneasy association lead to an attempted murder? And what happened to Warhol after the headlines moved on?

Behind one of art history’s most notorious shootings is a story of thwarted ambition, celebrity, and a studio where the boundaries between art and life were dangerously thin. Its consequences followed Warhol for nearly nineteen years.

Explore the story further in the companion Verso Dossier, featuring the people, timeline, artworks, and archival photographs behind the episode, plus a few strange details that didn’t make it into the story.

Available to paid subscribers only on Substack.

Michelangelo’s Sleeping Cupid was sold as an ancient Roman sculpture. There was just one problem: it wasn’t ancient.

In 1496, the young Michelangelo became entangled in a deception involving an art dealer, a powerful cardinal, and the Renaissance obsession with antiquity. He went to Rome and tried to recover his sculpture. He failed—but the affair introduced him to patrons who could change his career, provided he could deliver on their expectations.

Before the David and the Sistine Chapel, this lost sculpture helped open doors. This episode follows the Sleeping Cupid scandal, the connections behind Michelangelo’s Bacchus and Pietà, and Isabella d’Este, the collector who eventually wanted the Cupid, knowing exactly who had made it.

Explore the story further in the companion Verso Dossier, with a timeline, a guide to the players, sleeping Cupids across the centuries, and rabbit holes into Renaissance forgery and Charles I’s art collection. Available to paid subscribers only on Substack.

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Further reading:

Christian, Kathleen W. Raffaele Riario, Jacopo Galli, and Michelangelo’s Bacchus, 1471–1572. Harvey Miller Publishers, 2025. Read the open-access edition: https://www.census.de/riario-galli-bacchus/.

Wallace, William E. Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man, and His Times. Cambridge University Press, 2010.

How did a relatively unknown pharaoh become one of the most recognizable figures in the world—and help change what modernity looked like?

When Howard Carter’s team discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, the West was already fascinated by ancient Egypt. But the tomb gave that fascination a new protagonist, a stream of astonishing photographs and the suspense of a story unfolding one sealed door at a time. Soon, “King Tut” was appearing everywhere from Cartier jewelry and Art Deco movie palaces to perfume bottles, novelty songs and crates of California lemons.

In this episode, we follow Tutankhamun through two very different lives: his brief reign in ancient Egypt and the strange modern afterlife created for him by archaeologists, photographers, newspapers, designers, advertisers, Egyptian nationalists and museums. Along the way, we look at how the discovery transformed an existing Egyptomania into a global craze—and what disappeared when one young king became the face of an entire civilization.

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Further reading:

• Christina Riggs, Treasured: How Tutankhamun Shaped a Century (PublicAffairs, 2022).
• Jean-Marcel Humbert, Michael Pantazzi and Christiane Ziegler, eds., Egyptomania: Egypt in Western Art, 1730–1930 (National Gallery of Canada, 1994).

Albert Barnes spent decades building an institution that was never supposed to become an ordinary museum. After his death, the collection stayed together—but the Foundation around it changed dramatically.

This episode follows the battles over Barnes’s rules, the people who inherited them, and the eventual move from Merion to downtown Philadelphia. It asks a larger question: when we preserve a legacy, are we preserving the objects themselves—or the ideas, systems, and values that gave them meaning in the first place?

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Further Reading:

• Anderson, John. Art Held Hostage: The Battles over the Barnes Collection. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003.
• Gopnik, Blake. The Maverick’s Museum: Albert Barnes and His American Dream. New York: Ecco, 2025.

In 1914, Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky showed work in the same building in Malmö. He had five paintings in the grand galleries and a reviewer comparing them to bacteria. She had one conventional landscape in a women's section near the fire exit, and ten enormous abstract canvases she'd finished seven years earlier sitting somewhere else entirely.

A century later, that coincidence has turned into a contest: the Swedish mystic who got there first, and the well-connected man who took the credit. But af Klint never used the word abstract, Kandinsky spent years insisting he wasn't ready to abandon the visible world, and nobody in 1912 could agree on what to call any of it.

This episode is about what af Klint actually made and who helped her make it, the twenty years she spent trying to find an audience for it, and why the story of a new idea always seems to need one name attached. Featuring séances in Stockholm, a museum that fit inside a suitcase, a conference in London where almost nothing happened, and the question of what we close off when we hand her the title we took from him.

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Further Reading:

• Bashkoff, Tracey, ed. Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2018.

• Dickerman, Leah, ed. Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2012.

• Voss, Julia. Hilma af Klint: A Biography. Translated by Anne Posten. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022.

• Voss, Julia, and Daniel Birnbaum. Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky: Dreams of the Future. New York: David Zwirner Books, 2026

In 1884, John Singer Sargent unveiled a portrait at the Paris Salon that he was certain would make him the most celebrated painter in France. Instead, a single fallen shoulder strap turned into the scandal of the season, and the room laughed at both the artist and his sitter.

The woman in the black dress was Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, a New Orleans–born Creole beauty who had spent nearly her whole life in Paris and was still described in the papers as American. Sargent was an American too, born in Italy, raised nowhere in particular, and equally desperate to be claimed by a French art world that would never quite claim him. They staked their reputations on the same canvas.

Then their paths split. Sargent lost commissions, fled to London, and was back on top within five years. Amélie commissioned portrait after portrait trying to replace the image that had defined her, and watched Paris stop caring. The painting that ruined her made him, and by the time it reached the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1916, her name had been removed from it entirely.

This episode covers the Paris Salon of 1884, the professional beauties of the Third Republic, the nineteenth-century debate over cosmetics and artifice, and what happens when two outsiders take the same risk and only one of them is allowed to recover from it.

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Further Reading:

• Elizabeth L. Block, "Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau: Living Statue," Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 17, no. 2 (Autumn 2018)

• Alina Cohen, "Why Madame X Scandalized the Art World," Artsy, April 9, 2019

• Deborah Davis, Strapless: John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madame X (New York: Tarcher, 2004)

• Justine De Young, "1884 – John Singer Sargent, Madame X (Virginie Gautreau)," Fashion History Timeline

• Stephanie L. Herdrich, "Sargent and Gautreau: Fashioning Celebrity in Paris," in Sargent and Paris (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Yale University Press, 2025).

The Amber Room was an entire chamber made of carved amber, backed in gold, and once called the Eighth Wonder of the World. Prussia built it, gave it to Russia, and the Nazis looted it in 1941. In 1945 it vanished in the ruins of Königsberg and has never been found. For eighty years people have searched mines, lakes, bunkers, and shipwrecks for it. This is the story of what most likely happened to it, the curator who spent his life refusing to accept it, and why a lost treasure is so much easier to live with than a destroyed one.

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Further Reading:

• Catherine Scott-Clark & Adrian Levy, The Amber Room: The Controversial Truth About the Greatest Hoax of the Twentieth Century (Atlantic Books, 2004)

• Russell Shor, "The History and Reconstruction of the Amber Room," Gems & Gemology, vol. 54, no. 4 (Winter 2018), Gemological Institute of America

• "The Amber Room," History's Greatest Mysteries, narrated by Laurence Fishburne (A&E / The HISTORY Channel, 2022).

Stéphane Breitwieser stole more than 200 works of art from the museums of Europe, hid them in his mother's attic, and swore he was never a thief. No masks, no weapons, no ransom. Just a young couple in nice clothes, walking out in broad daylight with a fortune in Renaissance paintings, silver, and ivory.

He called museums "prisons for art." He said he only stole for love, never money. This episode follows the most prolific art thief in history from his first stolen pistol to a canal full of silver, and to the fire in the Alsatian woods that no one can fully explain. It's a story about beauty, obsession, and what happens when loving something means you have to be the only one who has it.

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Suggested Further Reading:

• Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession (Knopf, 2023)
• Vincent Noce, La Collection égoïste (J. C. Lattès, 2005)
• Stéphane Breitwieser with Yves de Chazournes, Confessions d'un voleur d'art (Anne Carrière, 2006).

In 1863, the Paris Salon rejected thousands of paintings, including Édouard Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe, and a nervous Napoleon III made a snap political decision: exhibit the rejects and let the public decide. The Salon des Refusés became the scandal of the season, and the laughingstock exhibition quietly set off a chain of rejections, refusals, and workarounds that led straight to the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874 and the birth of modern art. The story of the emperor who accidentally changed art history, the jury that judged eighty paintings an hour, and the painters who finally stopped asking permission.

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Suggested Further Reading

• Ross King, The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism (Walker & Company, 2006)
• Albert Boime, "The Salon des Refusés and the Evolution of Modern Art," Art Quarterly 32 (Winter 1969)
• Patricia Mainardi, Art and Politics of the Second Empire: The Universal Expositions of 1855 and 1867 (Yale University Press, 1987)
• Beth Archer Brombert, Édouard Manet: Rebel in a Frock Coat (University of Chicago Press, 1996)
• Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life (1863).

Jacques-Louis David painted Antoine and Marie Anne Lavoisier in 1788, in one of the most famous portraits of the 18th century. Six years later, Lavoisier was guillotined during the French Revolution's Reign of Terror, and David, now a member of the Committee of General Security, helped run the machine that sent him there. This is the story of the painter, the chemist who founded modern chemistry, and the unanswerable question of how much David's loyalty to the Revolution cost the man he'd once painted with such tenderness. Art as propaganda, complicity in the Terror, and a portrait that still won't tell us the truth.

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Suggested Further Reading

• Roberts, Warren. Jacques-Louis David, Revolutionary Artist: Art, Politics, and the French Revolution. University of North Carolina Press, 1989.
• Dowd, David L. "Jacques-Louis David, Artist Member of the Committee of General Security." The American Historical Review, vol. 57, no. 4, 1952, pp. 871–892.
• Schnapper, Antoine. David. Translated by Helga Harrison, Alpine Fine Arts Collection, 1982
• Centeno, Silvia A., Dorothy Mahon, and David Pullins. "Refashioning the Lavoisiers." The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2021. https://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/david-lavoisier-conservation

In 1966, Bob Dylan left Andy Warhol's Factory with a silver Elvis painting tied to the roof of his car, then traded it for a couch. This episode follows that Double Elvis through the Factory, the supposed Dylan–Warhol rivalry, Edie Sedgwick, and a much stranger truth, all the way to its home at MoMA and a $27 million auction that proves Dylan should've kept it. A story about myth, fame, and what we decide is worth keeping.

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Suggested Further Reading

• Blake Gopnik, Warhol: A Life as Art (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2020)
• Jean Stein and George Plimpton, Edie: An American Biography (Knopf, 1982)
• Howard Sounes, Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan (Grove Press, 2001).

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 Reading

• Linda 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).

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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

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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

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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

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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

TW: Discussions of suicide

In 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?

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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

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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

In February 1974, a young artist named Tony Shafrazi walked into the Museum of Modern Art, pulled out a can of cherry-red spray paint, and wrote "KILL LIES ALL" across Picasso's Guernica—the most famous antiwar painting in the world

His act made headlines, exactly as he'd planned. But was it protest or publicity stunt? Political intervention or narcissistic vandalism? And how did the man who defaced a masterpiece go on to become one of the most powerful art dealers of the 1980s, launching the careers of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat?

This episode tells the story of Tony Shafrazi's impossible comeback and asks: can political art survive institutionalization? What happens when protest becomes a museum artifact? And fifty years later, as climate activists throw soup at van Gogh, what can Shafrazi's act teach us about the limits—and endurance—of art that tries to change the world?