Verso: An Art History Podcast

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.

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21 episodes
Updated Monday

Episodes21

Newest first

Monday · 57 min
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)
July 13 · 50 min
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)
June 30 · 22 min
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
June 15 · 19 min
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)
June 1 · 26 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 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
May 18 · 31 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. Buy Me a Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/versopod Follow Me on TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@versopod Email me: hello@versopod.com
May 4 · 26 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/versopod Follow Me on TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@versopod Email me: hello@versopod.com
April 20 · 1 hr 2 min
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/versopod Follow Me on TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@versopod
April 6 · 1 hr
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.
March 23 · 26 min
Bernini vs Borromini, Part II - What Winning Actually Costs
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? Buy Me a Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/versopod Follow Me on TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@versopod
March 9 · 35 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/versopod Follow me on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@versopod
February 23 · 37 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.
February 9 · 16 min
KILL LIES ALL: Tony Shafrazi and the Vandalism of Guernica
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?
January 26 · 1 hr 24 min
The Mark Rothko Estate Trial: The Art World's Own Little Watergate
Content Warning: Discussion of suicide In 1970, Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko was found dead in his New York studio, leaving behind nearly 800 paintings worth millions. Within weeks, his executors—including his trusted accountant Bernard Reis—had signed contracts turning over his entire life's work to the Marlborough Gallery under terms that would shock the art world. What followed was one of the most dramatic legal battles in art history, as Rothko's 19-year-old daughter Kate fought to expose a conspiracy that reached from Manhattan to Liechtenstein. The case would reveal how the very systems Rothko created to protect his legacy became the weapons used to exploit it. This is the story of how an artist's deepest fears about the art market came true after his death—and how one young woman's fight for justice exposed the mechanisms of power, greed, and betrayal that still define the art world today.
January 12 · 1 hr 9 min
The Ghent Altarpiece, Part III - The Toothache That Saved the Ghent Altarpiece
Adolf Hitler believed the Ghent Altarpiece contained a coded map to supernatural relics that would grant him power. He and Hermann Göring competed to possess it. They built a state-of-the-art storage facility a mile underground in an Austrian salt mine to house it alongside 6,577 other stolen paintings—works by Michelangelo, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Rubens, and, most importantly, Van Eyck. Then, in April 1945, SS soldiers placed bombs in the mine. Six 500-kilogram aircraft bombs positioned to collapse the entire facility and bury everything inside. What happened next involved a toothache in a small German town; four Austrian double agents parachuting onto the wrong mountain; a Nazi collaborator who helped the Allies, then killed his family; competing resistance groups who all claimed credit for the rescue; and a storm that nearly prevented the painting from making it home. This episode explores what happens when obsession becomes industrial-scale plunder, and how the Ghent Altarpiece survived not because of perfect heroism, but because chaos eventually undoes even the most organized theft.
Dec 29, 2025 · 1 hr 10 min
The Ghent Altarpiece, Part II - The Theft No One Wanted to Solve
On April 11, 1934, The Righteous Judges and Saint John the Baptist panels from the Ghent Altarpiece vanished from Saint Bavo Cathedral. The investigation was bungled from the start—police arrived late, didn't seal the scene, took no photographs. Then came thirteen ransom letters from someone signed "D.U.A." who seemed hurt that the bishop wouldn't cooperate with his "gentleman's agreement." Seven months later, Arsène Goedertier died, confessing his involvement in the crime to his lawyer on his deathbed. Carbon copies of the ransom letters were in his desk. Case closed. Except nothing made sense. Goedertier couldn't have acted alone—he was physically unable to carry the panels or see in the dark. His lawyer didn't go to police, but to magistrates who investigated in secret for a month. Files disappeared. People who had money seemed reluctant to pay the ransom. This episode explores what happens when institutions destroy what they claim to love—and why The Righteous Judges panel is still missing ninety years later. Perfect for: true crime fans, art history lovers, conspiracy theory enthusiasts, unsolved mystery podcasts
Dec 15, 2025 · 41 min
The Ghent Altarpiece, Part I - The Art of Protection
In 1432, Jan and Hubert van Eyck completed a painting so revolutionary it changed art forever. The Ghent Altarpiece introduced techniques no one had seen before—translucent oil glazes, luminous depth, obsessive detail. It was made for one chapel in one Belgian city. But because it was so brilliant, everyone else decided they deserved it too. Over the next six centuries, the Ghent Altarpiece became the most stolen artwork in history. Fourteen thefts. And almost every time, the thief had the same justification: we're not stealing it, we're saving it. Napoleon took it to Paris in 1794, calling it cultural liberation. During World War I, Canon Gabriel Van den Gheyn coordinated a secret network to hide it from German occupiers, scattering panels across Belgium and lying about their location. He was a hero. He saved the painting. But here's the complication: Van den Gheyn used the exact same logic the thieves did. Protection. Safeguarding. Keeping it from people who would misuse it. Diving into the first thefts, from its inception up until World War I, this episode explores how the language of protection becomes indistinguishable from the language of theft—and how a masterpiece survived centuries of people who loved it enough to take it. Perfect for listeners interested in: art history podcasts, art theft stories, Napoleon history, WWI history, museum ethics, European history, stolen art, art world scandals
Dec 1, 2025 · 33 min
MoMA, The CIA, and the Weaponization of Abstract Expressionism
Jackson Pollock died in a car crash in 1956, two years before his painting Number 12 was crated up and shipped to Basel to start its run in of the most important American art exhibitions of the decade. He never knew his work would be used to fight a war. He never knew the CIA was involved. He never got to say no. This is the story of how Abstract Expressionism became a weapon in the Cold War, deployed by people who genuinely believed culture could save democracy, even if it meant lying about where the money came from and manipulating what the art meant. It's about Tom Braden, a former OSS agent who joined the CIA and created a "pretty simple device" for laundering money through fake foundations. It's about Nelson Rockefeller, who learned during World War II that culture could do things treaties couldn't. It's about René d'Harnoncourt, the six-foot-six Austrian count who ran MoMA and believed modern art was "the foremost symbol of democracy." And it's about the artists themselves—Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning, Krasner, Still—most of whom had leftist politics, most of whom distrusted power, and none of whom knew their paintings were being used to prove that American capitalism produced better art than Soviet communism. We follow the money. We follow the paintings. We follow the exhibition that changed everything: "The New American Painting," which toured eight European cities in 1958–59 and made New York the capital of contemporary art. And we sit with the uncomfortable question at the heart of it all: the paintings are real, the genius is real, but the story of how they became important was at least partly manufactured. So what do we do with that?
Nov 17, 2025 · 1 hr 4 min
Elizabeth Siddal and the Tragic Fate of Ophelia
Elizabeth Siddal was the face of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood—the model for John Everett Millais's iconic Ophelia painting and the lover of Dante Gabriel Rossetti for ten years before they married. But was she a victim of a toxic relationship, a talented artist erased by history, or something more complicated? This episode explores her life as a model and artist in Victorian England, her decade-long relationship with Rossetti, her addiction to laudanum, and her death at 32. We also examine how every generation since has rewritten her story—from Victorian tragic muse to 1920s hysteric to 1960s groupie to feminist icon—and what that says about how we consume historical women. CW: addiction, stillbirth, postnatal depression, suicide.
Nov 3, 2025 · 41 min
The Theft That Made the Mona Lisa Famous (and Nearly Destroyed Picasso)
On August 21, 1911, the Mona Lisa vanished from the Louvre. What followed wasn't just the greatest art heist of all time—it was a scandal that destroyed friendships, exposed the hypocrisy of the avant-garde, and transformed a Renaissance portrait into the most famous painting in the world. This is the story of Vincenzo Peruggia, the Italian glazer who walked out of the museum with the painting tucked under his smock. Of Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet who went to prison for crimes he didn't commit. And of Pablo Picasso, who stood in a courtroom and denied even knowing his closest friend. For all their talk of burning down museums and killing their artistic fathers, when the avant-garde was actually accused of stealing from the Louvre, they crumbled. Picasso lied. Apollinaire was arrested. And their friendship—the soul of early modern art—died in a Paris courtroom.

Verso: An Art History Podcast

The Art Thief and His Attic Full of Masterpieces

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

The Painter and the Guillotine

When Bob Dylan Traded an Andy Warhol Painting for a Couch

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

Robert Mapplethorpe and the Corcoran: The Imperfect Moment

The Disappearance of Agnes Martin

Han van Meegeren: The Last Vermeer

How Michelangelo's David Became Everybody's Symbol

Bernini vs Borromini, Part II - What Winning Actually Costs

Bernini vs Borromini, Part I - The Rivalry that Shaped Rome

Jo van Gogh-Bonger: The Woman Who Made Vincent van Gogh Immortal

KILL LIES ALL: Tony Shafrazi and the Vandalism of Guernica

The Mark Rothko Estate Trial: The Art World's Own Little Watergate

The Ghent Altarpiece, Part III - The Toothache That Saved the Ghent Altarpiece

The Ghent Altarpiece, Part II - The Theft No One Wanted to Solve

The Ghent Altarpiece, Part I - The Art of Protection

MoMA, The CIA, and the Weaponization of Abstract Expressionism

Elizabeth Siddal and the Tragic Fate of Ophelia

The Theft That Made the Mona Lisa Famous (and Nearly Destroyed Picasso)