Show Notes
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?
More from Verso: An Art History Podcast
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.
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.
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?
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
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.