Verso: An Art History Podcast

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.

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Further reading:

• Christina Riggs, Treasured: How Tutankhamun Shaped a Century (PublicAffairs, 2022).
• Jean-Marcel Humbert, Michael Pantazzi and Christiane Ziegler, eds., Egyptomania: Egypt in Western Art, 1730–1930 (National Gallery of Canada, 1994).

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.

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.

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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

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.

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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, 2019

• Deborah 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 Timeline

• Stephanie 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).

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.

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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).

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.

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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).

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.

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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).

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.

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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

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.

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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).

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).

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