The Lonely Palette
Welcome to The Lonely Palette, the podcast that returns art history to the masses, one painting at a time. Each episode, host Tamar Avishai picks a painting du jour, interviews unsuspecting museum visitors in front of it, and then dives deeply into the object, the movement, the social context, and anything and everything else that will make it as neat to you as it is to her. For more information, visit thelonelypalette.com | Twitter @lonelypalette | Instagram @thelonelypalette.
Episodes
July 8, 2025 • 38 mins
“I was showing the America I knew and observed to others who might not have noticed.” - Norman Rockwell
Whether arguing for soft versus hard taco shells or the Neo-Nazi right to march in Skokie, freedom of speech is a fundamental right we all enjoy as Americans. But it turns out that telling people that is pretty complicated, actually. Thank goodness we have Norman Rockwell, virtuosic photorealistic painter and America's crown pri...
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April 4, 2025 • 23 mins
“It is not about fixing or mending, but about celebrating the vulnerability of the object and ultimately myself.” - Yee Sookyung
Shattered porcelain is impossible to repair. As impossible as fully, and accurately, reconstructing the past. But who needs that pressure? What if, instead of tossing those shards in the dustbin of history, we acknowledged that the thing will never be what it once was? Maybe then we appreciate the beauty...
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March 5, 2025 • 66 mins
"It's the close focus that draws me into a sound. And then it sort of spreads out and spreads through my body. And I let that happen, and I'm listening in a different way." - Annea Lockwood
The artist and composer Annea Lockwood is not just any musician. She is an artist of sound. She is a composer of art. Her music is performance art, and her art is always, always audio-rich and musical. She sends her microphones into the element...
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February 17, 2025 • 31 mins
"The only thing permanent is change." - Felix Gonzalez-Torres
There is no way around it. The work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, a gay, Cuban-American artist who responded to - and died during - the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 90s, is sad. His work is a memorial, both to a lost generation and to his own partner, Ross. Yet it is through these seemingly banal, industrial, or every day materials, and the powerful metaphor that they repre...
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February 7, 2025 • 60 mins
“In the end, what interests me is the way art connects with life. Because otherwise, I don’t quite understand what it’s for.” - Sebastian Smee
Sebastian Smee has been the art critic for the Washington Post since 2018, but has written extensively about art for every publication you can think of, from here to his native Australia, and winning a Pulitzer prize for criticism along the way. Both his prose and his love of the work leaps...
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January 25, 2025 • 26 mins
"My line does not illustrate. It is the sensation of its own realization." - Cy Twombly
Critics have described the work of consummate scribbler Cy Twombly as at once "barely there" and overly academic, but what about us art civilians? What is it about these half-baked scraps, scratch, and scrawl that speaks to our own creative impulses, our own inner children dying to grab the crayon and crush the tip in an ecstatic series of fat,...
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January 16, 2025 • 3 mins
**Update! Norovirus has entered the chat. The episode will be released on Monday, January 27. Thank you for your patience!
Mark your calendars! The new season of The Lonely Palette drops Thursday, January 23rd! This season, we've got a stellar line-up: Cy Twombly, Lawren Harris, Käthe Kollwitz, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, to name just a few. We've got interviews with the Washington Post's Sebastian Smee, the artist and composer Ann...
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November 1, 2024 • 23 mins
Tamar is alive! The Lonely Palette is alive! But in the year since we last spoke, she's been elbow-deep in audio projects galore - good for the pocketbook, but bad for independent art history podcast productivity. But your patience will be rewarded! And in the meantime, a few announcements:
- Join me and my fellow H&S colleagues at the PRX Podcast Garage in Allson, MA on Wednesday, November 6 for an evening of audio camaraderie. R...
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March 7, 2024 • 60 mins
In this special episode of The Lonely Palette, I’m sharing the episode I made for the PRX limited-run podcast series "Monumental," which interrogates the state of monuments across the greater U.S. and what their future says about where we are now and where we’re going.
This was the concluding episode, exploring how some monuments are larger than life, dwarfing us, making us feel small relative to the grandness of history. But what...
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February 14, 2024 • 50 mins
The Lonely Palette, as you've heard so often, is an enormously proud founding member of the Hub & Spoke Audio Collective, a group of fiercely independent, story-driven, mind-expanding podcasts. Since 2017, we've supported each other while forging our own paths, prioritizing craft and humane storytelling above all else.
Now, if you haven't noticed, media in general, and podcasting in particular, is in a space some may generously c...
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December 29, 2023 • 45 mins
Since her arrival on the art scene in the 1960s, legendary art writer Lucy Lippard’s work - searing, novelistic, crisp, and endlessly curious - as well as her insights, activism, entrenchment in the art world, and friendships have secured her role as one of the most important minds in art criticism of her generation.
Now, at 86 years old, all of the stuff that she’s collected along the way – photographs, drawings, relationships, g...
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October 13, 2023 • 55 mins
In the 1950s and 60s, Coenties Slip—an obscure street on the lower tip of Manhattan overlooking the East River—was home to some of the most iconic artists in history, and who would define American Art during their time there: Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Delphine Seyrig, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman. As friends and inspirations to one another, these artists created a unique community for u...
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October 3, 2023 • 7 mins
Taking a break from writing about astronauts, Tom Wolfe donned his white suit and strolled to the art museums of New York City, letting the incomprehensible literary works of the movement wash over him like a warm bath of clam broth, and producing what, in the words of art critic Rosalind Krauss, "hit the art world like a really bad, MSG-headache-producing, Chinese lunch."
For you, dear listeners, here is the headache-inducing i...
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September 12, 2023 • 21 mins
Giorgio Vasari (1511-74) may have gone down in history as the very first Western art historian, but he is also a messy bench who loves drama, and we are here for it. Listen to his take on Sandro Botticelli from “The Lives of the Artists” (Bondanella trans., 1991), particularly his practical jokes, from which no friend or neighbor escaped unscathed.
This is a free edition of The Lonely Palette Reads, a perk that will be going out ...
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September 11, 2023 • 35 mins
The neoplatonic ideal of beauty, the girl on the half-shell, the naked chick riding a clam. Her tilted head and fluttery hair are recognized by everyone and their grandma, but no one - experts included - can explain just why in the heck this painting is so iconic. Shell we take on the challenge?
See the images:
https://bit.ly/3LeIwxu
Music used:
Django Reinhardt, “Django’s Tiger”
Joan Baez, “Diamonds and Rust”
The Blue Dot Sessio...
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August 4, 2023 • 30 mins
In April 1989, Barbara Kruger - an artist, activist, and former magazine layout editor - created a flyer for a pro-choice women’s march in Washington, DC to protest the Supreme Court’s potential overturning of Roe vs. Wade. But this flyer was never meant to be a picket sign. Instead, it has become a timeless artwork all its own: directly addressing any viewer from any era, demanding they confront their own politics, and drawing t...
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Whether for his critics, his friends (...?), or his canvases, the Victorian-era, Gilded-age Aesthetic ex-pat painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler had one motto: float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.
See the Images:
https://bit.ly/3PMpK3o
Music Used:
Django Reinhardt, “Django’s Tiger”
The Andrews Sisters, "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen"
The Blue Dot Sessions, “Slate Tracker,” “Laser Focus,” “The Griffiths,” “Crumbtown,” “Discovery H...
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June 7, 2023 • 27 mins
Splotches, spills, and stains. They can evoke shapes, moods, energy, even music. Yet no one seemed to appreciate their very beauty with the same intuitive, delicate flair as Helen Frankenthaler, who created something fiercely new "between cocktails and dinner," or, more accurately, between the broad shoulders of a relentlessly masculine movement. Not bad for a saddle-shoed girl a year out of Bennington.
See the images:
https://...
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May 26, 2023 • 16 mins
The new season of The Lonely Palette is achingly close to starting up on Wednesday, June 7, but in the meantime, this week and next we're giving our feed over to some fellow Hub & Spoke shows that might pique your eardrums.
Hub & Spoke, as you know, is our mighty audio collective of proudly independent podcasts. We aim to expand minds, viewpoints, knowledge, understanding. We have zero corporate interests or expectations, which me...
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May 19, 2023 • 23 mins
The new season of The Lonely Palette is achingly close to starting up on Wednesday, June 7, but in the meantime, this week and next we're giving our feed over to some fellow Hub & Spoke shows that might pique your eardrums.
Hub & Spoke, as you know, is our mighty audio collective of proudly independent podcasts. We aim to expand minds, viewpoints, knowledge, understanding. We have zero corporate interests or expectations, which ...
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