pplpod

Charles Ives ran one of the most successful insurance agencies in America by day and composed the most radical music in the Western world by night and on weekends. He quoted hymns, marching bands, and...

15 Jun 19min

Paul Gauguin abandoned his wife and five children, fled to Tahiti, and painted a tropical paradise of golden-skinned women in lush landscapes that the art world celebrated as visionary primitivism. Th...

15 Jun 19min

Edgar Degas painted ballerinas with such grace and intimacy that the public assumed he loved them. He did not. Degas was a misanthrope who alienated nearly every friend he had, made anti-Semitic remar...

15 Jun 20min

J.M.W. Turner was a barber's son from Covent Garden who became the most revolutionary painter in British history. He painted light itself — dissolving ships, storms, and landscapes into blazing abstra...

15 Jun 23min

Robert Schumann invented fictional alter egos to write his music criticism — the impetuous Florestan and the dreamy Eusebius — and the split personality was not entirely an act. He married Clara Wieck...

15 Jun 21min

Pierre-Auguste Renoir spent his final decades painting with brushes strapped to hands so crippled by rheumatoid arthritis that he could barely hold them. While the art world raced toward abstraction, ...

15 Jun 22min

Wassily Kandinsky heard colors and saw sounds — a neurological condition called synesthesia that became the foundation of abstract art. He painted the first purely abstract works in Western art histor...

15 Jun 22min

Johannes Brahms spent twenty-one years writing his First Symphony because he was terrified of the comparison to Beethoven. When it finally premiered, a critic called it "Beethoven's Tenth" — exactly t...

15 Jun 22min