Who Arted: Weekly Art History for All Ages9 Apr 2021

Fun Fact Friday - From a King‘s Bathroom to an Iconic Museum

The Louvre is one of the most famous museums in the world with an expansive collection of some of the greatest masterpieces ever created. Interestingly, it did not start out that way. The building actually started as a medieval fortress. It had a moat, walls and a fortified tower in the center. Of course as Paris expanded, the fortifications moved to the exterior of the city and the Louvre was converted to a royal residence in the 14th century. The fortress was mostly demolished and extensive renovations were underway but people got distracted with the whole hundred years war going on and the Louvre basically was dormant for some time. In 1527, King Francois changed all that. He was a poet, a patron of the arts and he built up quite the collection. He acquired the Mona Lisa among other works and he is said to have hung the iconic masterpiece in his bathroom. Of course his bathroom was a little nicer than the average outhouse. His sprawling residence housed numerous works of art and eventually he started to display these works making them accessible to the public. This will be the final new episode for this season of Who ARTed. I will rebroadcast either the Georgia O'Keeffe, or Yayoi Kusama episode on Monday depending on who wins the Arts Madness tournament, but then I will be taking a break for a while. I may do a run of a few mini episodes if I have time over the summer, but otherwise look for new episodes in your podcast feed when Season 3 starts in the fall. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Episoder(784)

Joseph Ducreux | Self-Portrait of the Artist in the Guise of a Mocker

Joseph Ducreux (1735–1802) was an innovative French portrait painter known for defying the rigid conventions of 18th-century academic art. After training under masters such as Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Du...

24 Aug 11min

Fernand Léger | Composition in Blue

Fernand Léger was a pioneering French modernist painter whose foundational training as an architectural draftsman profoundly shaped his structured, geometric approach to art. After absorbing the influ...

17 Aug 11min

Stuart Davis | Swing Landscape

Stuart Davis was an influential 20th-century American modernist painter who bridged European abstract movements like Cubism with distinctively American subjects and aesthetics. Born in 1892, Davis stu...

10 Aug 12min

Tamara de Lempicka | Tamara in a Green Bugatti (encore)

Tamara de Lempicka remains the definitive icon of the Art Deco era, blending polished Cubist techniques with the glamorous, high-stakes atmosphere of the Roaring Twenties. From her harrowing escape du...

7 Aug 10min

Artist Interview Emil Wilson | The Nightingales

My guest this week is Emil Wilson, the author and illustrator behind the new graphic novel, The Nightingales. Wilson started his career in advertising before attending art school in his fifties, spurr...

3 Aug 43min

Francisco Goya | The Third of May 1808 (encore)

Francisco Goya (1746-1828) is one of Spain's most important and complex artists. His career bridged the gap between the Old Masters and the modern era. He found success as a court painter for the Span...

31 Jul 16min

Neil Harbisson | Cyborg Artist (encore)

Neil Harbisson is a contemporary artist who hears colors. He deliberately chose to hear colors and to make that happen, he underwent surgery which has caused him to become the first person ever to be ...

27 Jul 9min

David Hockney | A Bigger Splash (encore)

Explore the life and work of David Hockney, one of the most influential British artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Born in Yorkshire in 1937, Hockney's rebellious spirit and prodigious talent wer...

24 Jul 16min