Verso: An Art History Podcast

Emma Laramie
  • 4.9 (43)
  • Visual Arts
  • Updated Biweekly

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

  1. 1d ago

    John Singer Sargent, Madame X, and The Strap That Scandalized Paris

    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. Buy Me a Coffee: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://buymeacoffee.com/versopod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Me on TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://tiktok.com/@versopod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Email me: hello@versopod.com 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, 2019Deborah 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 TimelineStephanie 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)

  2. Aug 10

    The Mystery of the Lost Amber Room

    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. Buy Me a Coffee: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://buymeacoffee.com/versopod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Me on TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://tiktok.com/@versopod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Email me: hello@versopod.com 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)

  3. Jul 27

    The Art Thief and His Attic Full of Masterpieces

    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. Buy Me a Coffee: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://buymeacoffee.com/versopod⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Me on TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://tiktok.com/@versopod⁠⁠⁠⁠ Email me: hello@versopod.com 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)

  4. Jul 13

    The Salon des Refusés: How Napoleon III Accidentally Opened the Door to Modern Art

    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. Buy Me a Coffee: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://buymeacoffee.com/versopod⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Me on TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://tiktok.com/@versopod⁠⁠⁠⁠ Email me: hello@versopod.com 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)

  5. Jun 30

    The Painter and the Guillotine

    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. Buy Me a Coffee: ⁠⁠⁠https://buymeacoffee.com/versopod⁠⁠⁠ Follow Me on TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠https://tiktok.com/@versopod⁠⁠⁠ Email me: hello@versopod.com 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

  6. Jun 15

    When Bob Dylan Traded an Andy Warhol Painting for a Couch

    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. Buy Me a Coffee: ⁠⁠https://buymeacoffee.com/versopod⁠⁠ Follow Me on TikTok: ⁠⁠https://tiktok.com/@versopod⁠⁠ Email me: hello@versopod.com 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)

  7. Jun 1

    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 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) Buy Me a Coffee: ⁠https://buymeacoffee.com/versopod⁠ Follow Me on TikTok: ⁠https://tiktok.com/@versopod⁠ Email me: hello@versopod.com

  8. May 18

    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. Buy Me a Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/versopod Follow Me on TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@versopod Email me: hello@versopod.com

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About

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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