Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History

A nervous woman glances over her shoulder. A lonely figure stares through a window. A young ingénue arrives in the city with a suitcase—and somehow, you already think you know what happens next. Between 1977 and 1980, Cindy Sherman created 69 black-and-white photographs inspired by the visual language of classic cinema. But these aren’t stills from real movies, and Sherman isn’t playing actual characters. She gives us costumes, poses, and familiar stereotypes—then lets our own cultural programming write the plots. In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History , James explores how Untitled Film Stills turns the camera on Hollywood’s portrayals of women, the male gaze, and the audience itself. Sherman serves as photographer, director, stylist, performer, and subject—appearing in every image while somehow disappearing behind every role. Long before Instagram taught us to pose, crop, filter, and manufacture our identities, Sherman understood that photographs don’t simply show us who people are. They can teach us who we expect them to be. Cindy Sherman didn’t make the movies. She proved we’d already seen them. Send us a Note! Let us know what you think! J-Squared Atelier, LLC for the love of art Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you. Send us a text Don't miss the video podcast version on Apple Podcasts , YouTube , and Spotify !!! Follow & Subscribe to Art Happens Connect with Us: J-Squared Aterlier (J2Atelier) 🌐 Website: J2 Atelier 📸 Instagram: @J2Atelier James William Moore 🌐 Website: James William Moore 📸 Instagram: @the_jwmartist Catch Lattes & Art , our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work. You can find it on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , ...

A revolution has overturned the government, the economy, and nearly every reliable plan for next Tuesday. The old world is gone. Now someone has to design the new one. In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History , James explores Russian Constructivism—the radical movement that wanted art to leave the museum, enter everyday life, and get a job. Its artists traded precious masterpieces for industrial materials, photography, posters, clothing, theater sets, furniture, and the ambitious belief that design could help build a new society. Meet Vladimir Tatlin and his spectacularly impractical rotating tower; Aleksandr Rodchenko, who declared painting finished and began photographing the world from startling new angles; and Liubov Popova and Varvara Stepanova, whose groundbreaking work brought Constructivism into theater, textiles, fashion, and mass production. It’s a story of revolutionary optimism, bold graphics, impossible architecture, and the dangerous moment when artists who set out to serve a revolution discover that the revolution gets to decide what “service” means. The Constructivists never built their perfect world—but they gave modernity one of its loudest visual identities. Send us a Note! Let us know what you think! J-Squared Atelier, LLC for the love of art Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you. Send us a text Don't miss the video podcast version on Apple Podcasts , YouTube , and Spotify !!! Follow & Subscribe to Art Happens Connect with Us: J-Squared Aterlier (J2Atelier) 🌐 Website: J2 Atelier 📸 Instagram: @J2Atelier James William Moore 🌐 Website: James William Moore 📸 Instagram: @the_jwmartist Catch Lattes & Art , our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work. You can find it on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , ...

Marcel Duchamp could paint. He understood perspective, composition, Cubism, and the rules of art history—and then he decided those rules were optional. Inspired by MoMA’s sweeping Duchamp retrospective, James explores nearly six decades of work by one of modern art’s most disruptive figures. The exhibition moves from Duchamp’s early paintings and drawings through readymades, mechanical contraptions, optical experiments, wordplay, alter egos, and the mysterious installation he constructed in secret for roughly twenty years. Together, these works reveal that the infamous urinal was never the whole story. Duchamp’s real masterpiece may have been the question he left behind: What makes something art—and who gets to decide? Along the way, we encounter Nude Descending a Staircase , a bicycle wheel, Mona Lisa’s mustache, the cracked and complicated Large Glass , Rrose Sélavy, chess, chance, desire, a unrinal, and an artist who made refusing expectations into an art form of its own. If you want to spend more time with the urinal, be sure to listen to Season 1, Episode 13, our deep dive into Duchamp’s Fountain . You can follow this link: Marcel Duchamp The Fountain . And, if you’ve ever stood in a museum and asked, “Why is that art?” congratulations: Marcel Duchamp is still messing with you. Send us a Note! Let us know what you think! J-Squared Atelier, LLC for the love of art Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you. Send us a text Don't miss the video podcast version on Apple Podcasts , YouTube , and Spotify !!! Follow & Subscribe to Art Happens Connect with Us: J-Squared Aterlier (J2Atelier) 🌐 Website: J2 Atelier 📸 Instagram: @J2Atelier James William Moore 🌐 Website: James William Moore 📸 Instagram: @the_jwmartist Catch Lattes & Art , our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work. You can find it on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , ...

In the early hours of March 18, 1990, two men dressed as police officers walked into Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum—and walked out with thirteen works of art worth an estimated $500 million. The haul included a Vermeer, three Rembrandts, five works by Degas, a Manet, and, because apparently priceless masterpieces weren’t enough, the decorative top of a Napoleonic flagpole. More than three decades later, the art is still missing. No one has been charged. And the empty frames still hang on the museum walls, waiting for paintings that may—or may not—ever come home. In this episode of Art Happens , we unravel the largest art heist in American history: fake cops, restrained guards, 81 very strange minutes inside the museum, mob connections, dead ends, questionable suspects, and one enormous unanswered question: Where the hell are the paintings? Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History is produced by J-Squared Atelier , where art history gets a little messy—and that’s usually when things get interesting. All photographic images are courtesy of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 . Send us a Note! Let us know what you think! J-Squared Atelier, LLC for the love of art Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you. Send us a text Don't miss the video podcast version on Apple Podcasts , YouTube , and Spotify !!! Follow & Subscribe to Art Happens Connect with Us: J-Squared Aterlier (J2Atelier) 🌐 Website: J2 Atelier 📸 Instagram: @J2Atelier James William Moore 🌐 Website: James William Moore 📸 Instagram: @the_jwmartist Catch Lattes & Art , our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work. You can find it on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , ...

Ana Mendieta didn’t simply place the body in nature—she let it disappear into it. In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History , James William Moore explores how Ana Mendieta transformed earth, fire, water, blood, flowers, photography, and film into a deeply personal language of exile, memory, ritual, and belonging. From her childhood departure from Cuba and years in Iowa to the haunting Silueta works that fused body and landscape, we trace the experiences that shaped one of the most distinctive practices of the 1970s. We’ll look at the influence of Afro-Cuban, Catholic, and Indigenous traditions on her work, examine why documentation became essential to art designed to vanish, and confront the questions surrounding her 1985 death and the legacy that still shadows discussions of her career. Mendieta’s work reminds us that a body can disappear and still leave a mark—and sometimes absence is the thing we see most clearly. Presented by J-Squared Atelier. Send us a Note! Let us know what you think! J-Squared Atelier, LLC for the love of art Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you. Send us a text Don't miss the video podcast version on Apple Podcasts , YouTube , and Spotify !!! Follow & Subscribe to Art Happens Connect with Us: J-Squared Aterlier (J2Atelier) 🌐 Website: J2 Atelier 📸 Instagram: @J2Atelier James William Moore 🌐 Website: James William Moore 📸 Instagram: @the_jwmartist Catch Lattes & Art , our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work. You can find it on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , ...

In 1715, Amsterdam officials faced a decorating dilemma: Rembrandt’s monumental masterpiece The Night Watch didn’t fit between two doors. Their solution? Cut it down to size. In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History , James explores how Rembrandt transformed a conventional militia portrait into a scene bursting with light, movement, muskets, and one mysteriously glowing girl—only for later generations to trim away figures, architecture, and nearly two feet of canvas. Discover how a small seventeenth-century copy preserved evidence of the original composition, and how the Rijksmuseum used advanced imaging and artificial intelligence to reconstruct what the missing sections may have looked like. It’s a story about artistic intention, changing attitudes toward preservation, and the expensive lesson Amsterdam learned three centuries too late: when a masterpiece doesn’t fit the room, the masterpiece isn’t the furnishing problem. Send us a Note! Let us know what you think! Send us a text Don't miss the video podcast version on Apple Podcasts , YouTube , and Spotify !!! Follow & Subscribe to Art Happens Connect with Us: J-Squared Aterlier (J2Atelier) 🌐 Website: J2 Atelier 📸 Instagram: @J2Atelier James William Moore 🌐 Website: James William Moore 📸 Instagram: @the_jwmartist Catch Lattes & Art , our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work. You can find it on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , ...

Futurism wanted art to move at the speed of modern life—and it wasn’t interested in asking permission. In this episode, James follows Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and the Italian Futurists as they transform speeding cars, factories, electric lights, experimental typography, and industrial noise into a new artistic language. Along the way, paintings learn to move, words escape their sentences, orchestras become factories, and performances erupt into confrontations. But Futurism’s obsession with youth, aggression, destruction, and war carried it toward increasingly dangerous politics. Its artists helped reinvent modern art while confusing speed with progress—and innovation with wisdom. Start your engines. Hide the museum collection. And perhaps take away Marinetti’s keys. Send us a Note! Let us know what you think! J-Squared Atelier, LLC for the love of art Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you. Send us a text Don't miss the video podcast version on Apple Podcasts , YouTube , and Spotify !!! Follow & Subscribe to Art Happens Connect with Us: J-Squared Aterlier (J2Atelier) 🌐 Website: J2 Atelier 📸 Instagram: @J2Atelier James William Moore 🌐 Website: James William Moore 📸 Instagram: @the_jwmartist Catch Lattes & Art , our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work. You can find it on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , ...

Alexander Calder didn’t just make sculpture move—he taught it how to dance. In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History, James William Moore explores how a mechanically minded artist transformed gravity, air, balance, and motion into artistic materials. From Calder’s miniature, five-suitcase circus and his wire “drawings in space” to the encounter with Piet Mondrian that helped set abstraction in motion, we follow the experiments that led to his revolutionary mobiles and stabiles. We’ll meet the avant-garde artists who helped name Calder’s inventions, discover why he abandoned predictable motors for the commitment-challenged behavior of air, and examine the careful engineering concealed inside sculptures that seem wonderfully effortless. Calder’s work proves that playfulness can be rigorous, joy can be profound, and even gravity can earn a creative credit. Presented by J-Squared Atelier. Send us a Note! Let us know what you think! J-Squared Atelier, LLC for the love of art Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you. Send us a text Don't miss the video podcast version on Apple Podcasts , YouTube , and Spotify !!! Follow & Subscribe to Art Happens Connect with Us: J-Squared Aterlier (J2Atelier) 🌐 Website: J2 Atelier 📸 Instagram: @J2Atelier James William Moore 🌐 Website: James William Moore 📸 Instagram: @the_jwmartist Catch Lattes & Art , our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work. You can find it on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , ...

On a stormy night in Palermo in 1969, thieves entered the Oratory of San Lorenzo and sliced a priceless Caravaggio masterpiece from its frame. Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence hasn’t been seen since. In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History , James follows the painting from Caravaggio’s turbulent life and revolutionary use of light and shadow into a decades-long mystery filled with Mafia informants, black-market collectors, contradictory confessions, and rumors of a masterpiece destroyed by rats and pigs. Was the missing Caravaggio hidden, sold, buried—or lost forever? Explore how a sacred painting became criminal currency, why its disappearance continues to haunt the art world, and what we truly lose when a masterpiece vanishes. Send us a Note! Let us know what you think! J-Squared Atelier, LLC for the love of art Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you. Send us a text Don't miss the video podcast version on Apple Podcasts , YouTube , and Spotify !!! Follow & Subscribe to Art Happens Connect with Us: J-Squared Aterlier (J2Atelier) 🌐 Website: J2 Atelier 📸 Instagram: @J2Atelier James William Moore 🌐 Website: James William Moore 📸 Instagram: @the_jwmartist Catch Lattes & Art , our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work. You can find it on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , ...

Museums, spectacle, velvet ropes, and the moment art became an event. In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History , James looks at how museums went from quiet temples of culture to full-blown engines of anticipation, crowds, merch, timed tickets, and “limited engagement” panic. From the King Tut exhibition craze to Van Gogh posters, immersive rooms, gift-shop snow globes, and blockbuster shows marketed like superhero movies, this episode asks what happens when art history becomes an event experience. Blockbusters brought millions of people into museums, sometimes for the first time. They created unforgettable encounters with masterpieces, expanded access, and made art feel exciting and public. But they also changed what museums value, what gets funded, and which artists get pushed aside when exhibitions have to sell tickets. Because yes, art can be scholarly, moving, complicated, and transformative. It can also apparently come with a forty-eight-dollar tote bag. Send us a Note! Let us know what you think! J-Squared Atelier, LLC for the love of art Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you. Send us a text Don't miss the video podcast version on Apple Podcasts , YouTube , and Spotify !!! Follow & Subscribe to Art Happens Connect with Us: J-Squared Aterlier (J2Atelier) 🌐 Website: J2 Atelier 📸 Instagram: @J2Atelier James William Moore 🌐 Website: James William Moore 📸 Instagram: @the_jwmartist Catch Lattes & Art , our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work. You can find it on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , ...

Robert Frank’s The Americans looks like a road trip, but it feels more like a cracked mirror held up to postwar America. In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History , James William Moore follows Frank across the highways, diners, jukeboxes, parades, cemeteries, sidewalks, and lonely rooms of 1950s America. Published in 1958 in France and 1959 in the United States, The Americans challenged the glossy national story of prosperity, confidence, and cheerful conformity. Instead of photographing the country as it wanted to see itself, Frank photographed the tension underneath the shine. As a Swiss immigrant traveling through the United States, Frank brought an outsider’s eye to the myths of American success. His pictures reveal a country full of motion but also isolation, patriotism but also unease, abundance but also exclusion. From flags and cars to jukeboxes and segregated spaces, The Americans asks what gets left out when a nation becomes too busy believing its own mythology. It is a photography book, a road trip, a cultural critique, and one of the most influential visual statements of the twentieth century. Send us a Note! Let us know what you think! J-Squared Atelier, LLC for the love of art Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you. Send us a text Don't miss the video podcast version on Apple Podcasts , YouTube , and Spotify !!! Follow & Subscribe to Art Happens Connect with Us: J-Squared Aterlier (J2Atelier) 🌐 Website: J2 Atelier 📸 Instagram: @J2Atelier James William Moore 🌐 Website: James William Moore 📸 Instagram: @the_jwmartist Catch Lattes & Art , our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work. You can find it on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , ...

In this episode of Art Happens , we step into the strange, rebellious, magical world of Leonora Carrington: painter, writer, Surrealist, mythmaker, and professional refuser of being decorative. Born into wealth in England, Carrington was expected to become obedient, polished, marriageable, and socially useful. Naturally, she chose horses, hyenas, witches, alchemy, Celtic myth, feminist rebellion, and a lifelong commitment to making reality behave badly. We’ll follow Carrington from her debutante beginnings to the chaos of Surrealist Paris, her relationship with Max Ernst, the trauma of war and institutionalization, and her eventual reinvention in Mexico, where her work fully transformed into a world of hybrid creatures, powerful women, ritual kitchens, dream logic, and absolute refusal. Because Carrington was never interested in being someone’s muse. She was building the mythology herself. Send us a Note! Let us know what you think! J-Squared Atelier, LLC for the love of art Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you. Send us a text Don't miss the video podcast version on Apple Podcasts , YouTube , and Spotify !!! Follow & Subscribe to Art Happens Connect with Us: J-Squared Aterlier (J2Atelier) 🌐 Website: J2 Atelier 📸 Instagram: @J2Atelier James William Moore 🌐 Website: James William Moore 📸 Instagram: @the_jwmartist Catch Lattes & Art , our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work. You can find it on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , ...

Did one of the world’s greatest cultural treasures get rescued… or stolen? In this episode of Art Happens , we climb the Acropolis and unravel one of the art world’s longest-running controversies: the Parthenon Marbles. Carved nearly 2,500 years ago for the Parthenon in ancient Athens, these remarkable sculptures have spent more than two centuries in London after being removed by Lord Elgin during the days of the Ottoman Empire. But who should own them today? Join James William Moore as he explores the history of the Parthenon, the rise and fall of empires, the role of museums, and the passionate arguments on both sides of the debate. Were the marbles legally acquired? Does the British Museumserve as a steward of world culture, or should the sculptures be reunited with the monument they were created for in Athens? Along the way, we’ll follow the marbles through their surprising journey—from temple to church, church to mosque, gunpowder magazine to museum centerpiece—and discover why this centuries-old dispute continues to shape conversations about cultural heritage, restitution, and who gets to tell the story of the past. Because sometimes the biggest mysteries in art history aren’t about who made the art—they’re about who gets to keep it. #ArtPodcast #ArtHistory #ParthenonMarbles #NotYourStuffyArtClass #Art Send us a Note! Let us know what you think! J-Squared Atelier, LLC for the love of art Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you. Send us a text Don't miss the video podcast version on Apple Podcasts , YouTube , and Spotify !!! Follow & Subscribe to Art Happens Connect with Us: J-Squared Aterlier (J2Atelier) 🌐 Website: J2 Atelier 📸 Instagram: @J2Atelier James William Moore 🌐 Website: James William Moore 📸 Instagram: @the_jwmartist Catch Lattes & Art , our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work. You can find it on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , ...

What happens when a group of artists decides that reality is overrated? In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History , James William Moore dives into Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) , the short-lived but enormously influential German Expressionist movement that helped change the course of modern art. From the vibrant visions of Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc to ideas about spirituality, symbolism, color theory, and what Kandinsky called “inner necessity,” this movement challenged the very idea of what painting was supposed to do. Along the way, we’ll explore blue horses, abstract landscapes, artistic rebellion, and the question that would echo through the twentieth century: What if painting didn’t have to behave anymore? Discover how a movement that lasted only from 1911 to 1914 helped pave the way for abstraction, Abstract Expressionism, and generations of artists who believed that emotion, intuition, and the inner world mattered just as much as what the eye could see. Because sometimes the most revolutionary thing an artist can do is stop painting the world—and start painting the soul. #ArtHistory #ArtEducation #BlueRider #WassilyKandinsky #BlaueReiter Send us a Note! Let us know what you think! J-Squared Atelier, LLC for the love of art Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you. Send us a text Don't miss the video podcast version on Apple Podcasts , YouTube , and Spotify !!! Follow & Subscribe to Art Happens Connect with Us: J-Squared Aterlier (J2Atelier) 🌐 Website: J2 Atelier 📸 Instagram: @J2Atelier James William Moore 🌐 Website: James William Moore 📸 Instagram: @the_jwmartist Catch Lattes & Art , our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work. You can find it on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , ...

Masterpiece Moment: Migrant Mother Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother became one of the defining images of the Great Depression — a photograph of poverty, endurance, and uneasy compassion. But behind the symbol was Florence Owens Thompson, a real woman whose life was far more complex than the image America came to know. In this episode, we look at how one photograph shaped public memory, what it reveals about documentary photography, and what happens when a person becomes an icon. Send us a Note! Let us know what you think! J-Squared Atelier, LLC for the love of art Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you. Send us a text Don't miss the video podcast version on Apple Podcasts , YouTube , and Spotify !!! Follow & Subscribe to Art Happens Connect with Us: J-Squared Aterlier (J2Atelier) 🌐 Website: J2 Atelier 📸 Instagram: @J2Atelier James William Moore 🌐 Website: James William Moore 📸 Instagram: @the_jwmartist Catch Lattes & Art , our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work. You can find it on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , ...

Before she became one of the most important war photographers of the twentieth century, Lee Miller was known as a model, a fashion icon, and a muse within the Surrealist circle. But that version of her story barely scratches the surface. In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History , James William Moore follows Miller’s remarkable transformation from Vogue cover model to groundbreaking photographer, tracing her journey through Surrealism, the London Blitz, the liberation of Dachau, and the haunting image of her bathing in Hitler’s apartment on the day his regime collapsed. Along the way, we explore how Miller challenged expectations placed on women artists, documented both beauty and devastation, and created photographs that continue to shape how we remember war, trauma, and survival. Because sometimes the person history casts as a muse ends up becoming the one holding the camera. Video Podcasts now available on Apple Podcasts! Send us a Note! Let us know what you think! J-Squared Atelier, LLC for the love of art Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you. Send us a text Don't miss the video podcast version on Apple Podcasts , YouTube , and Spotify !!! Follow & Subscribe to Art Happens Connect with Us: J-Squared Aterlier (J2Atelier) 🌐 Website: J2 Atelier 📸 Instagram: @J2Atelier James William Moore 🌐 Website: James William Moore 📸 Instagram: @the_jwmartist Catch Lattes & Art , our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work. You can find it on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , ...

Hilma af Klint may be one of the most important artists modern art history almost erased. Long before Kandinsky, Mondrian, or the official arrival of abstraction, af Klint was painting massive works filled with spirals, symbols, radiant color, cosmic diagrams, and mysterious systems that blended science, spirituality, philosophy, and the unseen world. And then she did something almost unbelievable: she packed much of the work away, convinced the future would understand it better than her own time ever could. In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History , James William Moore explores the life, work, and rediscovery of the Swedish artist who forces us to rethink one of modern art’s favorite origin stories. From séances and automatic drawing to the age of X-rays, radio waves, and invisible scientific forces, af Klint’s work emerged from a world obsessed with what existed beyond ordinary sight. Her paintings challenge the idea that abstraction was simply a formal modernist experiment and instead suggest something stranger, bigger, and far more spiritual. Why was her work hidden for decades? Why did the art world take so long to catch up? And what happens when history realizes one of its “official” timelines may have been wrong all along? This is Hilma af Klint — and the modern art timeline is about to get messy. Send us a Note! Let us know what you think! J-Squared Atelier, LLC for the love of art Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you. Send us a text Don't miss the video podcast version on Apple Podcasts , YouTube , and Spotify !!! Follow & Subscribe to Art Happens Connect with Us: J-Squared Aterlier (J2Atelier) 🌐 Website: J2 Atelier 📸 Instagram: @J2Atelier James William Moore 🌐 Website: James William Moore 📸 Instagram: @the_jwmartist Catch Lattes & Art , our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work. You can find it on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , ...

There are paintings you admire. And then there are paintings that refuse to let you look away. In this Masterpiece Moment , James William Moore dives into Guernica by Pablo Picasso —a work that doesn’t document war so much as detonate it across the surface of the canvas. Created in response to the 1937 bombing of the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, this monumental painting rejects tidy storytelling in favor of fracture, distortion, and emotional truth. There are no heroes here. No victories. No clean endings. Instead, Picasso gives us something harder to face: the afterimage of violence. In this episode, we unpack how scale turns the painting into confrontation, how fragmentation becomes a moral language, and why its stark black-and-white palette feels less like art and more like evidence. We explore the horse, the bull, the grieving mother—not as fixed symbols, but as unstable forms that refuse easy interpretation. Because Guernica doesn’t ask you to understand war. It asks you to witness what it does to people. Nearly a century later, it still functions as a siren—echoing across classrooms, protests, and memory—reminding us that when violence lands on civilians, the damage doesn’t stay contained in history. It reshapes what it means to be human. Send us a Note! Let us know what you think! J-Squared Atelier, LLC for the love of art Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you. Send us a text Don't miss the video podcast version on Apple Podcasts , YouTube , and Spotify !!! Follow & Subscribe to Art Happens Connect with Us: J-Squared Aterlier (J2Atelier) 🌐 Website: J2 Atelier 📸 Instagram: @J2Atelier James William Moore 🌐 Website: James William Moore 📸 Instagram: @the_jwmartist Catch Lattes & Art , our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work. You can find it on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , ...

In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History , J ames William Moore steps into the pristine white room of Minimalism and asks the question so many viewers have thought: Wait… this is art? From boxes, slabs, and fluorescent lights to the radical quiet of Agnes Martin , this episode unpacks how Minimalism stripped art down to form, repetition, material, and space—and in doing so, shifted the focus from the object alone to the viewer’s encounter with it. Along the way, James explores Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin , and the movement’s chilly brilliance, its philosophical bite, and the delicious irony of how an anti-dramatic art movement became a visual language of luxury, taste, and modern sophistication. Send us a Note! Let us know what you think! J-Squared Atelier, LLC for the love of art Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you. Send us a text Don't miss the video podcast version on Apple Podcasts , YouTube , and Spotify !!! Follow & Subscribe to Art Happens Connect with Us: J-Squared Aterlier (J2Atelier) 🌐 Website: J2 Atelier 📸 Instagram: @J2Atelier James William Moore 🌐 Website: James William Moore 📸 Instagram: @the_jwmartist Catch Lattes & Art , our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work. You can find it on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , ...

In Part Two of Behind the Brush: Michelangelo vs. the Ceiling , James William Moore looks past the glory of the Sistine Chapel ceiling and into the grind that made it possible. This episode explores the power of Pope Julius II , the politics of patronage , the physical misery of fresco painting , and the psychological pressure of making something monumental under scrutiny. The result is a masterpiece that does not feel effortless, but wrestled into being. Beneath the beauty is strain, ambition, damage, and endurance—and that may be part of why the ceiling still hits so hard. Send us a Note! Let us know what you think! J-Squared Atelier, LLC for the love of art Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you. Send us a text Don't miss the video podcast version on Apple Podcasts , YouTube , and Spotify !!! Follow & Subscribe to Art Happens Connect with Us: J-Squared Aterlier (J2Atelier) 🌐 Website: J2 Atelier 📸 Instagram: @J2Atelier James William Moore 🌐 Website: James William Moore 📸 Instagram: @the_jwmartist Catch Lattes & Art , our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work. You can find it on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , ...