The best art history podcasts for looking with your ears

Describing a painting out loud should not work. The image is the whole subject, the listener cannot see it, and every art history podcast is therefore doing something that looks structurally impossible.

It works because looking is a skill and skills are teachable in words. Most people have never been taught to look at a painting for more than four seconds. A good art podcast slows you down, tells you where the light is coming from and why that was a choice, and then the next time you are in front of a picture you notice things unprompted. That is the actual product. The audio is a training method.

Start here

The Lonely Palette is the best show in the genre and the right place to begin. Tamar Avishai takes one work per episode, starts by asking people in the gallery what they see, then spends twenty minutes on the thing. The structure is perfect for the medium, because you hear a stranger being confused before you hear the expert, which is exactly the position you are in.

ArtCurious is Jennifer Dasal on the stranger corners. Art crime, forgeries, the artists who were written out. It is the most narratively driven show on the list and the best one to hand someone who says they are not interested in art.

A Piece of Work was a limited run from WNYC and MoMA with Abbi Jacobson, and it is the friendliest introduction to modern art in existence. Five episodes. Finish it in an afternoon. It is deliberately aimed at people who find modern art irritating.

Go deeper

The Great Women Artists is Katy Hessel interviewing artists, curators and historians about women whose work sat outside the canon for a century. It has done more to reshape general knowledge of the subject than any other podcast on this list.

Talk Art is Russell Tovey and Robert Diament talking to living artists, which makes it the only show here that is mostly about contemporary practice rather than history. Loose, long, occasionally brilliant.

Death of an Artist takes one relationship at a time, starting with Ana Mendieta and Carl Andre, and treats art history as a place where real harm happened. Serious, careful, and not a comfortable listen.

The Art History Babes are four art historians talking with much less formality than the field usually allows. Best for the periods you already have a foothold in.

The practical problem with the genre

Most of these shows are episodic and irregular. Several have stopped. The Lonely Palette has fewer than fifty episodes across its whole run. If you get properly interested in art history through audio, you will exhaust the good material in a couple of months, and what is left is museum audio guides that only work while you are standing in the museum.

The other problem is coverage. The podcasts cluster hard around the same forty works. There is enormous amounts of the field with no good audio at all.

Where to go for the range

HearLore is a listening library of short narrated entries, and art is one of the deeper parts of it. Not one work per episode with a critic. One artist, movement or object per entry, written to be heard, linked to whatever it touches.

Vincent van Gogh, about eleven minutes, is the life without the myth, which turns out to be sadder and much more interesting. Caravaggio, about fifteen minutes, is a genuinely violent man who invented how European painting handles darkness. Michelangelo, about sixteen minutes, and the Sistine Chapel ceiling, about sixteen minutes, work well back to back, because the second one is four years of physical labour rather than a masterpiece. Leonardo da Vinci, about twelve minutes, is mostly a story about not finishing things. Hieronymus Bosch, about nine minutes, is the strangest painter before the twentieth century and nobody is sure what he meant.

Rembrandt, about nine minutes, is a hundred self-portraits as a record of a face ageing and a career collapsing. Mona Lisa, about twenty-three minutes, is the longest of these, and most of the length is about the theft and the fame rather than the painting. Pablo Picasso, about twelve minutes, is the most consequential and least likeable artist of the century.

For movements rather than people, impressionism, about ten minutes, and post-impressionism, about eight, are the two that explain most of what a general audience means by modern art. Ukiyo-e, about fifteen minutes, and Hokusai, about eight, are the pair that explain where the impressionists got their ideas, which is the connection most Western art courses mention in one sentence and then drop.

Start with van Gogh on the way home. Then follow him to the impressionists, or to Paul Gauguin, or to the asylum at Saint-Remy. Choose the part of his story you want to hear next.

Knowledge worth getting lost in.