Who Arted: Weekly Art History for All Ages

Queen Hatshepsut reigned as the fifth pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty during Egypt’s New Kingdom period. Initially occupying the traditional role of queen consort to her half-brother Thutmose II, she assumed the regency for her infant stepson, Thutmose III, following her husband's death around 1479 BCE. By the seventh year of her regency, she broke with Egyptian tradition by officially crowning herself pharaoh and establishing a co-regency that lasted for two decades. To legitimize her authority within a political theology historically tied to male deities and the preservation of cosmic order (ma'at), Hatshepsut utilized art as a powerful tool of political propaganda. She commissioned hundreds of statues depicting her with masculine physical traits including a muscular torso, traditional royal kilt, and ceremonial false beard, while intentionally maintaining feminine titles, pronouns, and grammatical endings in accompanying written inscriptions. Her reign prioritized domestic stability, international trade revitalization, and an extensive monumental building campaign over military expansion.

The crowning achievement of her building campaign is her mortuary temple, Djeser-Djeseru ("Holy of Holies"), located on the west bank of the Nile River across from the ancient religious capital of Thebes. Designed by her chief architect and closest advisor, Senenmut, this multi-tiered complex rises 80 feet high and features three broad, stacked terraces connected by central ramps that integrate seamlessly into the surrounding limestone cliffs. The temple walls are adorned with detailed relief carvings documenting her divine birth narrative which claimed she was the biological daughter of the supreme god Amun-Re, as well as her famous Year 9 maritime expedition to the Land of Punt, which returned with luxury goods and 31 live myrrh trees. Late in his independent reign, roughly 20 years after her death, her successor Thutmose III enacted a systematic campaign of damnatio memoriae, defacing her monuments and smashing her statues to preserve a strict line of male succession. This targeted vandalism successfully obscured her legacy for millennia until late 19th and early 20th-century archaeological excavations uncovered the fragments, allowing modern scholars to learn more about her true significance.

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James Abbott McNeill Whistler was a prominent figure in the Aesthetic Movement focusing on "Art for art's sake." One of Whistler's most renowned works is "Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1," widely known as "Whistler's Mother," painted in 1871. This oil on canvas depicts his mother, Anna McNeill Whistler, seated in profile. Despite Whistler's insistence that the painting be appreciated for its formal qualities, its subtle harmonies of grey and black and balanced composition, it has garnered widespread sentimental appeal as a profound depiction of maternal dignity and old age. The painting, initially met with mixed reviews in London, achieved masterpiece status in Paris and was acquired by the French state. Its enduring presence in popular culture, including its use as a symbol of American motherhood during the Great Depression, showcases its unique blend of artistic innovation and emotional resonance, continuing to captivate audiences over a century and a half after its creation.

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The image used in the episode cover art came from Adobe's stock photos.

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French Post-Impressionist painter Henri Rousseau is widely celebrated as one of the most significant self-taught artists in history. Born in Laval, France in 1844, Rousseau worked for years as a government toll collector before retiring early to dedicate himself entirely to his art. Because he bypassed traditional academic training, he eschewed standard techniques like linear perspective. Instead, he developed a highly distinctive style defined by flat planes of color, stylized foliage, and a dreamlike, collage-like atmosphere. While his works initially drew intense mockery from the public and traditional critics at the unjuried Salon des Indépendants, they eventually captivated the Parisian avant-garde including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Guillaume Apollinaire who championed his unadulterated creative vision.

Rousseau is best remembered for his immersive, large-scale jungle scenes, which he crafted from his imagination without ever leaving France. To construct these vivid environments, he frequented botanical greenhouses like the Jardin des Plantes, studied taxidermy specimens at the Museum of Natural History, and gathered inspiration from popular postcards and magazines. A man of varied talents, Rousseau was also a musician who taught violin lessons and composed original sheet music. His unique methodology is perfectly encapsulated in masterpieces like his 1909 painting, The Equatorial Jungle, which features a tightly compressed, claustrophobic layout built color-by-color.

Related episodes:

Pablo Picasso

Henri Matisse

Georges Seurat

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Paul Klee, born on December 18, 1879, in Switzerland, developed into one of modern art's most influential figures, crossing paths with major movements such as Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. Raised in a deeply musical family, he trained extensively as a violinist and played with the Bern Music Association by age eleven before pivoting to the visual arts and moving to Munich in 1900 to study at the Academy of Fine Arts. Klee believed that classical music lacked further room for creative innovation, prompting his shift toward painting. While his early work consisted mainly of monochromatic etchings and drawings, a pivotal two-week trip to Tunisia in 1914 with August Macke and Louis Moilliet completely transformed his relationship with color, marking a permanent transition toward vibrant, abstract compositions. He later achieved significant professional success as a faculty member at the Bauhaus school from 1921 to 1931, where his highly structured teaching methodology and analytical lectures were compiled into the Paul Klee Notebooks, a text considered as foundational to modern art as Leonardo da Vinci’s treatises were to the Renaissance.

The ascent of the Nazi regime dramatically disrupted Klee's career when the government classified his avant-garde creations as "degenerate art," forcing his dismissal from the Düsseldorf Academy in 1933 and leading to the systemic purge of 102 of his works from public museums. He spent his remaining years in Swiss exile fighting scleroderma, a severe autoimmune disease that hardened his skin and internal organs, rendering fine, intricate linework painful and difficult. Rather than stopping, Klee adjusted his style to accommodate his physical limitations, shifting toward simplified geometric forms, larger canvases, thick black outlines, and a somber color palette ultimately producing 1,254 paintings and drawings in 1939 alone. Over a lifetime that yielded more than 9,000 works bridging abstraction and representation, his 1922 oil transfer and watercolor masterpiece, Twittering Machine, remains a definitive highlight. The painting, which satirizes the industrial automation of nature through four wire-like birds operated by a hand crank, was confiscated by the Nazis from Berlin's National Gallery before being sold abroad and permanently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in 1939.

Related Episodes

Bauhaus Parties

Wassily Kandinsky

Helen Frankenthaler

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The Italian Mannerist painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, born in Milan around 1526 or 1527, began his career creating traditional religious artwork, stained glass windows, and tapestries for local cathedrals alongside his father, Biagio. In 1562, Arcimboldo relocated to Vienna to serve as a court portraitist for Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand I, a prestigious role he maintained under successors Maximilian II and Rudolf II, eventually moving with the imperial court to Prague. For over 25 years, Arcimboldo operated as a celebrated court artist and a versatile cultural polymath; he served as a master of festivals, engineered theatrical stage settings, directed the royal cabinet of curiosities (Kunstkammer), and even devised an inventive color-based musical notation system. He achieved lasting historical renown for his unique "composite heads," imaginative busts constructed out of fruits, vegetables, flowers, animals, and everyday objects arranged to seamlessly mimic the human face.

Far from being mere visual jokes, Arcimboldo’s iconic allegorical cycles, such as the Four Seasons and Four Elements, functioned as sophisticated political propaganda that symbolized the Habsburg dynasty's absolute dominion over nature, time, and the universe. These cycles simultaneously mapped out the biological stages of human life, subtly mirroring human aging through the transition from vibrant spring blossoms to gnarled winter tree trunks. His famous portrait The Librarian, painted in the 1560s and widely believed to depict the humanist scholar Wolfgang Lazius, showcases a proto-cubist geometric aesthetic by constructing a human form out of stacked books, key rings, and bookmarks. Following the Swedish army’s pillaging of Prague Castle in 1648 during the Thirty Years' War, many of Arcimboldo’s masterpieces were looted and brought to Sweden, where pieces like The Librarian reside today at Skokloster Castle. Though his unique style fell out of favor after his death in 1593, Arcimboldo was famously rediscovered and celebrated in the 1930s by Salvador Dalí and the Surrealists, who recognized him as a visionary precursor to their own movement.

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