HeyJaredVerso: An Art History Podcast
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.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 5
- Latest publication
- Sep 7, 2026
- Audience
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 13, 2026
Latest episodes
Hilma af Klint, Wassily Kandinsky, and Who Really Invented Abstract Art (opens the original)
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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 cre
John Singer Sargent, Madame X, and The Strap That Scandalized Paris (opens the original)
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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,
The Mystery of the Lost Amber Room (opens the original)
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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
The Art Thief and His Attic Full of Masterpieces (opens the original)
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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 silv
The Salon des Refusés: How Napoleon III Accidentally Opened the Door to Modern Art (opens the original)
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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
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