Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History

Walk into the Louvre, turn toward the grand Daru staircase, and there she is: wings spread, marble drapery whipped by an invisible sea wind, standing triumphantly on the prow of a ship.
The Winged Victory of Samothrace—La Victoire de Samothrace—is one of the most recognizable sculptures in the world. There is just one fairly significant problem: she doesn’t have a head, and nobody knows where it is.
In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History, presented by J-Squared Atelier, James investigates the disappearance of Victory’s face. Follow the sculpture from its creation in ancient Greece through its discovery in more than a hundred fragments, Charles Champoiseau’s unsuccessful return expedition, and the remarkable recovery of pieces from the goddess’s missing hand.
Yes, archaeologists found part of one finger, waited seventy-five years, and found another piece of the same finger. But the entire marble head? Nothing.
What might Victory’s missing face have revealed—and what would happen if it were discovered tomorrow? More than 160 years after the sculpture arrived at the Louvre, its absence has become part of its identity. Without a face, the wings become her expression, the drapery becomes emotion, and the goddess becomes something larger than an individual figure.
Perhaps the missing piece is part of the reason we cannot stop looking.
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J-Squared Atelier, LLC
for the love of art

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J-Squared Aterlier (J2Atelier)
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James William Moore
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Catch Lattes & Art, our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work.
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You know the face: hands pressed against the head, eyes wide, mouth open, and a blood-red sky twisting behind it. Edvard Munch’s The Scream has been parodied, memed, printed on mugs, and transformed into the international symbol for “I am not handling this well.”
But what if the figure isn’t screaming?
In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History, presented by J-Squared Atelier, James looks beyond the famous face to uncover what makes The Scream so unsettling. The figure may be covering its ears—overwhelmed by what Munch described as an enormous scream passing through nature itself.
Explore Munch’s experiences with grief, illness, anxiety, and isolation; the multiple versions of his masterpiece; and the revolutionary way he transformed color, line, landscape, and distortion into pure psychological emotion. There is no visible monster or attacker. Instead, the entire world seems to be having a breakdown.
Munch didn’t simply paint what fear looks like. He painted what it feels like when anxiety escapes the body—and infects the entire universe.
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J-Squared Aterlier (J2Atelier)
🌐 Website: J2 Atelier
📸 Instagram: @J2Atelier
James William Moore
🌐 Website: James William Moore
📸 Instagram: @the_jwmartist
Catch Lattes & Art, our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work.
You can find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, ...

Francisco Goya painted kings, queens, duchesses, and children dressed in silk. He became one of Spain’s most celebrated royal court painters.
Then he painted witches, executions, war crimes, mutilated bodies—and Saturn devouring his own child.
So what happened?
In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History, presented by J-Squared Atelier, James follows Goya’s extraordinary journey from cheerful tapestry designs and glittering royal portraits to Los Caprichos, The Disasters of War, The Third of May 1808, and the haunting Black Paintings he created on the walls of his own home.
Along the way, Goya survived a life-altering illness, lost his hearing, witnessed Napoleon’s brutal invasion of Spain, and watched reason, power, and political order collapse around him. His art stopped flattering humanity and began exposing what it was capable of—superstition, cruelty, organized violence, and monsters that did not always need wings.
Was Goya losing faith in humanity, or was he simply one of the first artists willing to show us what humanity really looked like?
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J-Squared Atelier, LLC
for the love of art

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

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Don't miss the video podcast version on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and Spotify!!!
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Connect with Us:
J-Squared Aterlier (J2Atelier)
🌐 Website: J2 Atelier
📸 Instagram: @J2Atelier
James William Moore
🌐 Website: James William Moore
📸 Instagram: @the_jwmartist
Catch Lattes & Art, our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work.
You can find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, ...

How do you lose an entire room?
Not just any room, either. The Amber Room was an eighteenth-century masterpiece made from tons of carved amber, gold, mirrors, and mosaics—a glittering royal treasure so spectacular it became known as the Eighth Wonder of the World.
Then the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.
German troops stripped the room from the Catherine Palace in roughly thirty-six hours, packed it into twenty-seven crates, and carried it away. After being reassembled and displayed in Königsberg Castle, the Amber Room vanished during the final chaos of World War II. Did it burn? Was it buried inside a secret bunker? Hidden beneath a ruined castle? Or loaded onto a ship now resting at the bottom of the Baltic Sea?
In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History, James follows one of history’s greatest missing-art mysteries through royal extravagance, Nazi cultural looting, treasure hunters, shipwrecks, and decades of tantalizing theories. He also steps inside the extraordinary reconstruction that now stands in the Catherine Palace—and asks whether rebuilding a masterpiece can ever truly replace what war destroyed.
Sponsored by J2 Atelier.
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Don't miss the video podcast version on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and Spotify!!!
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J-Squared Aterlier (J2Atelier)
🌐 Website: J2 Atelier
📸 Instagram: @J2Atelier
James William Moore
🌐 Website: James William Moore
📸 Instagram: @the_jwmartist
Catch Lattes & Art, our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work.
You can find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, ...

In February 1913, Americans paid twenty-five cents to enter a New York military armory and discover that art had apparently lost its mind. The women were blue, the bodies were geometric, perspective was broken, and Marcel Duchamp had sent a nude down a staircase—although no one could find the nude or, for that matter, the staircase.
In this episode of Art Happens: The Divine Mess of Art History, James explores the 1913 Armory Show, the exhibition that introduced a massive American audience to European modernism. Encounter the radical colors of Henri Matisse, the fractured figures of Cubism, and Duchamp’s notorious Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2—the painting America mocked, parodied, condemned, and lined up to see.
Former President Theodore Roosevelt called the movement a “lunatic fringe,” newspapers treated modern art like a national emergency, and curious crowds kept buying tickets. Somewhere along the way, the outrage backfired: collectors started buying, artists discovered new possibilities, and modernism became impossible to ignore.
The Armory Show didn’t make the people of the United States love modern art. It did something far more disruptive—it kicked open the door to everything that came next.
Send us a Note! Let us know what you think!
J-Squared Atelier, LLC
for the love of art

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Send us a text
Don't miss the video podcast version on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and Spotify!!!
Follow & Subscribe to Art Happens

Connect with Us:
J-Squared Aterlier (J2Atelier)
🌐 Website: J2 Atelier
📸 Instagram: @J2Atelier
James William Moore
🌐 Website: James William Moore
📸 Instagram: @the_jwmartist
Catch Lattes & Art, our sister podcast—coffee-fueled conversations with artists about process, inspiration, and the beautiful mess behind the work.
You can find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, ...