Verso: An Art History Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

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Verso: An Art History Podcast

Emma Laramie

Arts

Frequency: 1 episode/14d. Total Eps: 25

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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Data updated on 22/09/2026

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https://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/david-lavoisier-conservation
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https://tiktok.com/@versopod
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The Afterlife of Albert Barnes

Episode 24

Monday, September 21, 2026 • Duration 44:49

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.

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Hilma af Klint, Wassily Kandinsky, and Who Really Invented Abstract Art

Episode 22

Monday, September 7, 2026 • Duration 43:00

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.

Buy Me a Coffee: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://buymeacoffee.com/versopod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Follow Me on TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://tiktok.com/@versopod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Email me: hello@versopod.com

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

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

Episode 21

Monday, August 24, 2026 • Duration 47:26

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," 17, no. 2 (Autumn 2018)

The Mystery of the Lost Amber Room

Episode 18

Monday, August 10, 2026 • Duration 40:09

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).

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The Art Thief and His Attic Full of Masterpieces

Episode 20

Monday, July 27, 2026 • Duration 57:48

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).

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

Episode 19

Monday, July 13, 2026 • Duration 50:48

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).

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The Painter and the Guillotine

Episode 18

Tuesday, June 30, 2026 • Duration 22:41

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

When Bob Dylan Traded an Andy Warhol Painting for a Couch

Episode 17

Monday, June 15, 2026 • Duration 19:33

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).

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Whistler v. Ruskin: The Trial Over a Pot of Paint

Episode 12

Monday, June 1, 2026 • Duration 26:27

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

Robert Mapplethorpe and the Corcoran: The Imperfect Moment

Episode 15

Monday, May 18, 2026 • Duration 31:30

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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Verso: An Art History Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

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Verso: An Art History Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

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