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
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 12, 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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May 4, 2023 • 39 mins
Happy 7th birthday, The Lonely Palette! We're ringing in our itch with an quick update on next season, which starts in June, and a recording of our live show at On Air Fest, which was held in Brooklyn this past February.
Please enjoy this revamped and refreshed episode of Mary Kelly's "Post-Partum Document," smash that subscribe button, and we'll see you next month.
See the episode images:
https://bit.ly/411KA0F
Support the s...
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January 13, 2023 • 40 mins
We're in THE HOME STRETCH of our Patreon Listener Challenge! This is indeed the time to pull up your socks and start supporting the show, all to the dulcet tones of a re-release of our second and most lauded Patreon listener-supported episode from 2019 on the Ecce Homo restoration fiasco, wherein a well-intentioned, though, uh, untrained parishioner in a small Spanish town decided to take it upon herself restore a crumbling fresco ...
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January 6, 2023 • 39 mins
Our Patreon Listener Challenge is ongoing! And if you're on the fence about supporting the show, why not sit back with a re-release of our first-ever Patreon listener-supported episode from 2018 on C.M. Coolidge's "Dogs Playing Poker," where we dive into the trials and tribulations of kitsch, the battle between the Sams and Dianes of the world, and what it means to appreciate art at a frequency that we all can hear.
And if you're...
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December 30, 2022 • 70 mins
A number of years ago, my Twitter pinged. Then it pinged again. All of a sudden, a whole host of people were following the show, and when I giddily found the source, it was the soulful and stylish Avery Trufelman, longtime 99% Invisible producer, currently of Articles of Interest, and fashionista tastemaker, who had pronounced The Lonely Palette her favorite art history podcast. Bestill my heart! It was the beginning of a beaut...
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December 16, 2022 • 29 mins
They say that those who can do and those who can’t teach. But “they” don’t seem to have ever met a proper teacher. In honor of the Norwegian town of Bodø’s recognition as a 2024 European Capital of Culture, we dive into Bodø’s most famous artist, Adelsteen Normann, the teacher you’ve never heard of, the picture-postcard modernist who introduced us to the scream that is Edvard Munch, and, eclipsed though he may have been, the pain...
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December 9, 2022 • 37 mins
Light and dark. Frozen action. Angels with dirty faces. Infamously both a hothead punk and one of the most extraordinarily potent and virtuosic painters in the canon, Caravaggio is nothing if not a man of contrasts.
See the images:
https://bit.ly/3iNqpTY
Music used:
Django Reinhardt, “Django’s Tiger”
The Andrews Sisters, "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen"
Charles Daab, “Irish and Scotch melodies (take 2)”
The Blue Dot Sessions, “Highway...
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October 7, 2022 • 73 mins
Dar Williams has been described by The New Yorker as “one of America’s very best singer-songwriters,” but to thirteen-year-old Tamar she was, quite simply, a personal hero: a songwriter whose poetry, poignancy, and humor could capture at once the authentic voices of an inner child, a searching young adult, and a wizened sage. We met in person in 2013 at Dar’s songwriting retreat, and our friendship has been evolving ever since, exp...
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September 23, 2022 • 10 mins
Hello, friends to art podcasts! I'm giving my feed over today to a preview of a new podcast from Pushkin Industries, Somethin’ Else, and Sony Music Entertainment: "Death of an Artist".
The show examines a tragedy in the art world. For more than 35 years, accusations of murder shrouded one of the art world’s most storied couples: was the famous sculptor Carl Andre involved in the death of his up-and-coming artist wife Ana Mendi...
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