Behind the Brush: Michelangelo vs The Ceiling Part 2 (audio)

Walk into the Louvre, turn toward the grand Daru staircase, and there she is: wings spread, marble drapery whipped by an invisible sea wind, standing triumphantly on the prow of a ship. The Winged Victory of Samothrace—La Victoire de Samothrace—is one of the most recognizable sculptures in the world. There is just one fairly significant problem: she doesn’t have a head, and nobody knows where it is. In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History, presented by J-Squared Atelier...

You know the face: hands pressed against the head, eyes wide, mouth open, and a blood-red sky twisting behind it. Edvard Munch’s The Scream has been parodied, memed, printed on mugs, and transformed into the international symbol for “I am not handling this well.” But what if the figure isn’t screaming? In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History, presented by J-Squared Atelier, James looks beyond the famous face to uncover what makes The Scream so unsettling. The figure may...

Francisco Goya painted kings, queens, duchesses, and children dressed in silk. He became one of Spain’s most celebrated royal court painters. Then he painted witches, executions, war crimes, mutilated bodies—and Saturn devouring his own child. So what happened? In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History, presented by J-Squared Atelier, James follows Goya’s extraordinary journey from cheerful tapestry designs and glittering royal portraits to Los Caprichos, The Disasters of...

How do you lose an entire room? Not just any room, either. The Amber Room was an eighteenth-century masterpiece made from tons of carved amber, gold, mirrors, and mosaics—a glittering royal treasure so spectacular it became known as the Eighth Wonder of the World. Then the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. German troops stripped the room from the Catherine Palace in roughly thirty-six hours, packed it into twenty-seven crates, and carried it away. After being reassembled and displayed in Königs...

In February 1913, Americans paid twenty-five cents to enter a New York military armory and discover that art had apparently lost its mind. The women were blue, the bodies were geometric, perspective was broken, and Marcel Duchamp had sent a nude down a staircase—although no one could find the nude or, for that matter, the staircase. In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History, James explores the 1913 Armory Show, the exhibition that introduced a massive American audience to...