Who Arted: Weekly Art History for All Ages

Rachel Ruysch was an incredibly skilled Dutch painter in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. She was renowned for her still lives. The objects in this work were carefully selected and the image is loaded with symbolism. Her painting, Fruit and Insects is one of the works on the list for the AP Art History curriculum. Those prepping for the test may want to check out my Spotify playlist: AP Art...

Diego Velazques was one of the most significant painters of Spain's Golden Age in the 17th century. He was a master of both portraiture and genre painting, Las Meninas is a sort of mix of both. We see people who seem rather formally dressed by today’s standards, but the subject is also, it was a peak behind the curtain of royal life. Withing the work, the first focal point would be the little girl...

Faith Ringgold is a contemporary American artist. She studied art education and started as a painter, but she is best known for her story quilts. She has written and illustrated seventeen children's books. The most famous was Tar Beach which started as a quilt but later became an award-winning, best-selling book. In this episode I discussed her story quilt Dancing at the Louvre, which is one of th...

Maria Martinez belonged to the Tewa-speaking Pueblo people, known for their rich artistic heritage. Pottery-making was deeply rooted in Puebloan culture, serving as a means of artistic expression and a reflection of their close connection with the natural world. Maria grew up watching her family members create pottery, learning the traditional techniques. Of course, we seldom talk about those who...

The Bay was painted in 1963 as Frankenthaler had refined her soak and stain process. While Mountains and Sea was made with diluted oil paints, The Bay is acrylic on unprimed canvas. She had found that using acrylics gave her greater control over the viscosity or how fluid the paint was. As I look at The Bay, the title indicates a landscape and the brightness, the organic shapes of blue and green g...

Thomas Jefferson may be a surprising person to find in an art history podcast, but the writer of the Declaration of Independence, third president of the US was also a self-taught architect. Monticello is considered a UNESCO Heritage Site. Jefferson believed that great architecture could not only reflect the community, but also inspire the people to seek enlightenment. Monticello is a neoclassical...

Jean-Michel Basquiat has created some of the most highly valued American paintings ever to go on auction. Basquiat sought to remake art history in his image, and I would say he was successful. His triptych, Horn Players, is one of the artworks required for the AP Art History curriculum studied by American high school students. In the middle of February 1981, a group exhibition opened at P.S.1 in N...

Turner's painting of The Slave Ship from 1840 was originally titled "Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying" and the event that inspired this work is exactly as horrific as it sounds. The captain of the ship was throwing men overboard in order to collect insurance money on those lost at sea, or to use a more accurate term, murdered. In this episode, I mentioned that one of my favorite fello...

While Raphael sadly passed away just in his 30s his work has lived on for hundreds of years. Learn a bit about the great Renaissance painter and architect as well as his most famous work, The School of Athens. Other episodes to check out: Art Smart: The Renaissance Michelangelo Leonardo da Vinci (theft of the Mona Lisa), (The Last Supper) Arts Madness 2024 I am once again posting daily mini-episod...

Michelangelo was considered to be one of the greatest examples of a Renaissance man. He is also one of the worst examples of personal hygiene. Learn a little bit about the artist who painted the ceiling on the Sistine Chapel. Related episodes: Michelangelo | The Sistine Chapel Ceiling Art Smart: The Renaissance Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous works is not housed in a museum. It is in the Convent of Santa Maria in Milan Italy. It seems totally fitting for a depiction of the last supper was painted on the wall in the convent’s dining hall. Visitors today are often surprised by how enormous the work it. The People are life sized on this massive 15 by 29 foot painting. Another surprising fact is that whi...

Donatello’s statue of David, just like the story, seems straightforward and simple at first glance, but with great art, there is always more than meets the eye. His bronze statue of the boy who slayed the giant depicts a figure who seems young and vulnerable yet with confidence and a bit of swagger. This was the first life-sized, free-standing nude statue since antiquity. Donatello and his David w...

Emily Kame Kngwarreye was born around 1910, a time when the Aboriginal people were not considered full citizens in their own country. Earth’s Creation is an absolutely massive painting about 9 feet tall and 20 feet wide. She painted it in 1994 when she was around 84 years old. Most biographies will say that she only painted for the last 8 years of her life, but really, she was only painting for We...

Jan van Eyck was a remarkable painter. He worked in oils during the Renaissance, and created stunning photorealistic portraits centuries before photography was developmed. In the Arnolfini portrait, he captures not only the subjects standing before him, but also a reflection of the room in a convex mirror showing the full scene and accurately rendering the distortions caused by the curved glass. C...

Skipping ahead a few hundred years, the artist Xu Bing created Book from the Sky as a monumental print. It is probably among the most ambitious, labor-intensive, and useless books ever to be printed in China or anywhere else. He created 4,000 unique characters on wood blocks to print this massive "book" but while those characters look like Chinese writing, they are actually completely meaningless....

Modernists said, “form follows function” focusing on how people will use a space, but Gehry focuses on how people will react to the space. His goal is to inspire, to make them feel. He talks about the challenge of creating feeling with inert materials. He says it is the movement that brings out a feeling. With his design in Bilbao, Spain, rather than simply designing a building to house a collecti...

In 1896, Louis Sullivan wrote about skyscrapers and architectural design in “The Tall Building Artistically Considered” This was the origin of the famous phrase, “form follows function.” What Sullivan actually said was “form must ever follow function” but regardless of phrasing, the meaning remains the same - architects should first consider how a building will be used then base the design on that...

In 1778, Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun met Marie Antoinette at the Royal palace in Versailles. The queen had heard of Le Brun’s talent and asked to paint her portrait. Marie Antoinette loved the way Le Brun painted her and from that point on, she was pretty much her official royal portrait painter. Le Brun painted 30 portraits of the queen. Almost as quickly as her star rose, her fortunes changed. In 17...

Frank Lloyd Wright was one of America's most famous and influential architects. He famously said, "No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other." It was this emphasis on unity between the construction and the surrounding landscape that made Falling Water such a breathtaking design. Re...

Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series was not his only narrative series of paintings, but it was his biggest hit. This collection of 60 painted panels tells the story of The Great Migration as millions of black families moved from the rural South to Northern cities around the time of World War 1. Lawrence was speaking to his experience and the experience of many black Americans in the period between t...

Christo and Jeanne Claude are best known for their monumental works using fabric to transform public spaces. These massive works outside of the museum or gallery context helped to bring art to the masses. Whether people wanted to or not, they were forced to reconsider the space as the building, or the coast was covered in masses of fabric. Related Episodes: Christo and Jeanne Claude | The Floating...

Ai Weiwei is possibly the most interesting man in the world. He is not only a famous contemporary artist. He was a top rated blackjack player, a political prisoner and released a heavy metal album about his incarceration. His installation, Kui Hua Zi, consisted of 100 million hand-crafted, porcelain sunflower seeds. Related episodes: Ai Weiwei (full episode) Marchel Duchamp Check out my other podc...

Pablo Picasso was among the most influential artists of the 20th century and Guernica is possibly his greatest work. While I am not a fan of Picasso as a person, his significance as an artist is undeniable. Related Episodes: Pablo Picasso Art Thief? Art Smart: Cubism Check out my other podcasts Art Smart | Rainbow Puppy Science Lab Who ARTed is an Airwave Media Podcast. If you are interested in ad...

In this portrait, Andy Warhol presented Marilyn Monroe in the format typically associated with religious artworks. This work was created just a few weeks after Monroe’s untimely death and it seems like a pop art shrine. Hers was a face that graced the pages of every magazine and tabloid. She was a young girl, Norma Jean who had been plucked from obscurity and celebrated around the world for her be...

Katsushika Hokusai is best known for The Great Wave off Kanagawa, part of his series of 36 Views of Mount Fuji. His family was in the mirror business, but Hokusai showed a proclivity for art starting at a young age. When he was 14 he started apprenticing as a wood carver. He spent 4 years carving wood blocks to use as stamps for printmaking. He then went on to study under artists to produce his ow...