Content Warning: Discussion of suicide

In 1970, Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko was found dead in his New York studio, leaving behind nearly 800 paintings worth millions. Within weeks, his executors—including his trusted accountant Bernard Reis—had signed contracts turning over his entire life's work to the Marlborough Gallery under terms that would shock the art world.

What followed was one of the most dramatic legal battles in art history, as Rothko's 19-year-old daughter Kate fought to expose a conspiracy that reached from Manhattan to Liechtenstein. The case would reveal how the very systems Rothko created to protect his legacy became the weapons used to exploit it.

This is the story of how an artist's deepest fears about the art market came true after his death—and how one young woman's fight for justice exposed the mechanisms of power, greed, and betrayal that still define the art world today.

Adolf Hitler believed the Ghent Altarpiece contained a coded map to supernatural relics that would grant him power. He and Hermann Göring competed to possess it. They built a state-of-the-art storage facility a mile underground in an Austrian salt mine to house it alongside 6,577 other stolen paintings—works by Michelangelo, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Rubens, and, most importantly, Van Eyck.

Then, in April 1945, SS soldiers placed bombs in the mine. Six 500-kilogram aircraft bombs positioned to collapse the entire facility and bury everything inside.

What happened next involved a toothache in a small German town; four Austrian double agents parachuting onto the wrong mountain; a Nazi collaborator who helped the Allies, then killed his family; competing resistance groups who all claimed credit for the rescue; and a storm that nearly prevented the painting from making it home.

This episode explores what happens when obsession becomes industrial-scale plunder, and how the Ghent Altarpiece survived not because of perfect heroism, but because chaos eventually undoes even the most organized theft.

On April 11, 1934, The Righteous Judges and Saint John the Baptist panels from the Ghent Altarpiece vanished from Saint Bavo Cathedral. The investigation was bungled from the start—police arrived late, didn't seal the scene, took no photographs. Then came thirteen ransom letters from someone signed "D.U.A." who seemed hurt that the bishop wouldn't cooperate with his "gentleman's agreement."

Seven months later, Arsène Goedertier died, confessing his involvement in the crime to his lawyer on his deathbed. Carbon copies of the ransom letters were in his desk. Case closed.

Except nothing made sense. Goedertier couldn't have acted alone—he was physically unable to carry the panels or see in the dark. His lawyer didn't go to police, but to magistrates who investigated in secret for a month. Files disappeared. People who had money seemed reluctant to pay the ransom.

This episode explores what happens when institutions destroy what they claim to love—and why The Righteous Judges panel is still missing ninety years later.

Perfect for: true crime fans, art history lovers, conspiracy theory enthusiasts, unsolved mystery podcasts

In 1432, Jan and Hubert van Eyck completed a painting so revolutionary it changed art forever. The Ghent Altarpiece introduced techniques no one had seen before—translucent oil glazes, luminous depth, obsessive detail. It was made for one chapel in one Belgian city. But because it was so brilliant, everyone else decided they deserved it too.

Over the next six centuries, the Ghent Altarpiece became the most stolen artwork in history. Fourteen thefts. And almost every time, the thief had the same justification: we're not stealing it, we're saving it.

Napoleon took it to Paris in 1794, calling it cultural liberation. During World War I, Canon Gabriel Van den Gheyn coordinated a secret network to hide it from German occupiers, scattering panels across Belgium and lying about their location. He was a hero. He saved the painting.

But here's the complication: Van den Gheyn used the exact same logic the thieves did. Protection. Safeguarding. Keeping it from people who would misuse it.

Diving into the first thefts, from its inception up until World War I, this episode explores how the language of protection becomes indistinguishable from the language of theft—and how a masterpiece survived centuries of people who loved it enough to take it.

Perfect for listeners interested in: art history podcasts, art theft stories, Napoleon history, WWI history, museum ethics, European history, stolen art, art world scandals

Jackson Pollock died in a car crash in 1956, two years before his painting Number 12 was crated up and shipped to Basel to start its run in of the most important American art exhibitions of the decade. He never knew his work would be used to fight a war. He never knew the CIA was involved. He never got to say no.

This is the story of how Abstract Expressionism became a weapon in the Cold War, deployed by people who genuinely believed culture could save democracy, even if it meant lying about where the money came from and manipulating what the art meant.

It's about Tom Braden, a former OSS agent who joined the CIA and created a "pretty simple device" for laundering money through fake foundations. It's about Nelson Rockefeller, who learned during World War II that culture could do things treaties couldn't. It's about René d'Harnoncourt, the six-foot-six Austrian count who ran MoMA and believed modern art was "the foremost symbol of democracy."

And it's about the artists themselves—Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning, Krasner, Still—most of whom had leftist politics, most of whom distrusted power, and none of whom knew their paintings were being used to prove that American capitalism produced better art than Soviet communism.

We follow the money. We follow the paintings. We follow the exhibition that changed everything: "The New American Painting," which toured eight European cities in 1958–59 and made New York the capital of contemporary art. And we sit with the uncomfortable question at the heart of it all: the paintings are real, the genius is real, but the story of how they became important was at least partly manufactured. So what do we do with that?

Elizabeth Siddal was the face of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood—the model for John Everett Millais's iconic Ophelia painting and the lover of Dante Gabriel Rossetti for ten years before they married. But was she a victim of a toxic relationship, a talented artist erased by history, or something more complicated?

This episode explores her life as a model and artist in Victorian England, her decade-long relationship with Rossetti, her addiction to laudanum, and her death at 32. We also examine how every generation since has rewritten her story—from Victorian tragic muse to 1920s hysteric to 1960s groupie to feminist icon—and what that says about how we consume historical women.

CW: addiction, stillbirth, postnatal depression, suicide.

On August 21, 1911, the Mona Lisa vanished from the Louvre. What followed wasn't just the greatest art heist of all time—it was a scandal that destroyed friendships, exposed the hypocrisy of the avant-garde, and transformed a Renaissance portrait into the most famous painting in the world.

This is the story of Vincenzo Peruggia, the Italian glazer who walked out of the museum with the painting tucked under his smock. Of Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet who went to prison for crimes he didn't commit. And of Pablo Picasso, who stood in a courtroom and denied even knowing his closest friend.

For all their talk of burning down museums and killing their artistic fathers, when the avant-garde was actually accused of stealing from the Louvre, they crumbled. Picasso lied. Apollinaire was arrested. And their friendship—the soul of early modern art—died in a Paris courtroom.

Verso: Stories from the Back of the Canvas

The theft that changed everything. The sale that rewrote the rules. The friendship that ended a movement.

Host Emma Laramie uncovers the stories the art world forgot—or never told in the first place. Each episode reveals what really happened behind a masterpiece, a movement, or a moment that shaped art history.

Because the human story is always more interesting than the museum plaque.

New episodes every other week starting November 3rd.

For anyone fascinated by obsession, timing, and what happens when desire meets opportunity.