Who Arted: Weekly Art History for All Ages

I have been making Who ARTed for seven years, and I appreciate everyone who has supported the show and learned along with me over that time. To wrap it all up, I put together a collection of seven of my favorite mini episodes. Learn about all sorts of works, including Paul Van Hoeydonck’s 1971 lunar memorial Fallen Astronaut and Alexei Leonov’s pioneering 1965 sketch made during the first spacewalk, to Katsushika Hokusai’s iconic ukiyo-e woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa, highlighting the dynamic tension between nature and Mount Fuji alongside the revolutionary adoption of imported Prussian blue. In classical painting, the enduring intrigue of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa demonstrates the optical nuances of Renaissance sfumato, anatomical study, and the cultural mythology amplified by its infamous 1911 theft from the Louvre.

Bridging historical tradition with modern and contemporary experimentation, this overview details how unexpected materials and radical conceptual strategies have expanded the definition of visual art. The progression moves from Herb Williams’ high-concept sculptures constructed from hundreds of thousands of wax crayons, to the meditative precision, sacred geometry, and ritual destruction of Tibetan Buddhist sand mandalas, embodying the philosophy of impermanence over material attachment. That exploration of presence and absence culminates in Robert Rauschenberg’s radical 1953 conceptual breakthrough, Erased de Kooning Drawing, which transformed meticulous erasure into a profound act of tribute, followed by Andy Warhol’s 1962 Marilyn Diptych, which appropriated religious altarpiece formats and commercial silkscreening to critique mass media, consumerism, and the tragic commodification of celebrity.

Check out my other podcasts Fun Facts Daily | Art Smart | Rainbow Puppy Science Lab

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My guest this week was Doreen Carvajal, author of The Girl in Blue: Renoir's Portrait of a Dynasty Erased. In our conversation, Carvajal shared her insights into the girl behind the portrait, her family and what happened to them during World War 2.

Find Doreen Carvajal online:

https://www.doreencarvajal.net

Buy the book on Amazon or your favorite bookstore.

In 1880, French Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir was hired by a wealthy Parisian family to paint their eight-year-old daughter, Irène Cahen d'Anvers. The resulting portrait, titled La Petite Irène (or The Girl in Blue), depicts a quiet young girl with flowing reddish hair, a pale blue dress, and piercing blue eyes. Renoir created the painting during an important shift in his career, combining his signature soft brushstrokes with sharp, delicate details in Irène’s face. Remarkably, he painted parts of the work using his left hand after breaking his right arm in an accident. Decades later during World War II, the masterpiece was stolen by Nazi art looters and traded among high-ranking German officials before Allied "Monuments Men" recovered it in Bavaria in 1945. Restituted to an elderly Irène and later acquired by the Kunsthaus Zürich, La Petite Irène stands today as both an Impressionist treasure and an enduring symbol of survival and loss.

Check out my other podcasts Fun Facts Daily | Art Smart | Rainbow Puppy Science Lab

Who ARTed is an Airwave Media Podcast. If you are interested in advertising on this or any other Airwave Media show, email: advertising@airwavemedia.com

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My guest this week is Tim Bogatz from The Art of Education and host of Art Ed Radio. He was kind enough to join me to talk about Robert Longo.

American artist Robert Longo rose to prominence as a defining figure of the late 20th-century art scene, widely recognized for his monumental scale, multidisciplinary projects, and cinematic aesthetic. His breakthrough series, Men in the Cities, created in the late 1970s and early 1980s, features sharply dressed subjects captured in extreme, contorted poses rendered in stark black and white. Working with friends and fellow artists, including Cindy Sherman, as models, Longo photographed figures in dynamic, off-balance movements on a New York rooftop before translating the imagery into towering graphite and charcoal drawings. The resulting compositions present an ambiguous tension between ecstatic dance and sudden physical impact, blending corporate aesthetics with an edgy, post-punk subversion.

Beyond figurative studies, Longo's practice is defined by a mastery of medium, monumental scale, and subtractive drawing techniques. Approaching charcoal much like a sculptor, he applies dense layers of dark pigment and carves light and form back out of the surface using an array of erasers. This process yields dramatic, high-contrast works measuring eight feet or more, spanning subjects from massive ocean waves and wildlife to cathedral interiors and historical iconography. Combined with his work in music video and feature film direction, Longo’s photorealistic drawings interrogate power, modern culture, and the emotional impact of contemporary imagery.

See more of Longo's work at his website: https://www.robertlongo.com/series/meninthecity/

Find Tim Bogatz online:

The Art of Education

The Art of Ed Community

Art Ed Radio

Related episodes of Who ARTed:

Christo and Jeanne-Claude | The Floating Piers

Walter de Maria | The Lightning Field

Felix Gonzales-Torres

Claude Monet

Wassily Kandinski

Check out my other podcasts Fun Facts Daily | Art Smart | Rainbow Puppy Science Lab

Who ARTed is an Airwave Media Podcast. If you are interested in advertising on this or any other Airwave Media show, email: advertising@airwavemedia.com
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Aztec art served as a vital instrument of statecraft, religious ceremony, and cosmic order rather than individualized aesthetic expression. Organized into royal and religious guilds, master artisans known as tolteca worked in dedicated neighborhoods across Tenochtitlan, mastering lapidary arts, stone carving, and metalwork. Elite featherworkers (amanteca) produced radiant mosaic tapestries, headdresses, and ceremonial shields from iridescent quetzal, macaw, and hummingbird plumage, items prized far above gold or silver for their spiritual association with breath, solar rays, and divine vitality. Aztec sculptors carved massive, dense volcanic rocks such as basalt and andesite without iron chisels, relying instead on harder mineral hammerstones, quartzite abrasives, and water to achieve crisp detail. Although centuries of weathering left these stone monuments bare and monochromatic, they were originally coated in lime plaster and brilliantly painted with mineral pigments like ochre, cinnabar, and Maya blue to demarcate cosmological realms. Beyond monumental sculpture, scribe-painters (tlacuiloque) documented historical chronologies, rituals, and tributary records on accordion-folded deerskin and amatl bark paper using an intricate system of pictographs, ideographs, and phonetic rebuses.

Monumental stone sculpture served as both a spiritual anchor and an expression of imperial cosmology, alternating between stylized divine iconography and striking anatomical naturalism. Sculptors observed the natural world with precision, carving lifelike toads, rattlesnakes, grasshoppers, and canines that captured the vital essence and seasonal rhythms of sacred fauna. The pinnacle of this stonework is exemplified by the iconic Aztec Sun Stone, an intricately carved volcanic monolith commemorating the creation of the Fifth Sun, dated to 13 Reed. At its core, the stone features a solar or terrestrial deity, variously interpreted as Tonatiuh, Yohualtonatiuh, or the earth monster Tlaltecuhtli, flanked by the four previous world ages destroyed by jaguars, wind, fiery rain, and floods. Encircling the central deity are bands depicting the twenty day signs of the 260-day ritual calendar (tonalpohualli), cosmological symbols of jade and turquoise denoting the heavens, and two celestial fire serpents (xiuhcoatl) framing the perimeter. Together, these elements transformed raw volcanic stone into a permanent theological treatise mapping the cycles of time, divine sacrifice, and cosmic stability.

Check out my other podcasts Fun Facts Daily | Art Smart | Rainbow Puppy Science Lab

Who ARTed is an Airwave Media Podcast. If you are interested in advertising on this or any other Airwave Media show, email: advertising@airwavemedia.com
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Sir Anish Kapoor is an internationally acclaimed British-Indian sculptor celebrated for his pioneering investigations into scale, void, and perceptual depth. Emerging in the early 1980s as part of the New British Sculpture movement, Kapoor initially gained renown for forms coated in intense, unbound raw pigments, a technique influenced by traditional Hindu ritual powders, before expanding into colossal public installations using materials such as reflective stainless steel, polished stone, and light-absorbing Vantablack. His decorated career includes major honors such as the 1991 Turner Prize, a 2013 knighthood for services to the visual arts, and the 2017 Genesis Prize, from which he directed the full $1 million award toward humanitarian organizations aiding Syrian and Rohingya refugees.

Among his most iconic monumental installations is Cloud Gate, commonly known as "The Bean," situated in Chicago’s Millennium Park. Inspired by the fluid properties of liquid mercury, the elliptical structure measures 33 feet high, 42 feet wide, and 66 feet long, weighing approximately 110 tons. Engineered in collaboration with Performance Structures, Inc. and Arup, the exterior comprises 168 stainless steel plates welded together and polished to an entirely seamless, mirror-like finish that reflects the Chicago skyline and surrounding park. Featuring a 12-foot concave underbelly known as the omphalos, Cloud Gate eliminates traditional pedestals to create an interactive civic landmark that draws millions of visitors each year.

Check out my other podcasts Fun Facts Daily | Art Smart | Rainbow Puppy Science Lab

Who ARTed is an Airwave Media Podcast. If you are interested in advertising on this or any other Airwave Media show, email: advertising@airwavemedia.com
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