Reading the Art World

For the 50th episode of Reading the Art World, host Megan Fox Kelly speaks with Wanda Corn, Professor Emerita at Stanford University, about her latest book, “The Couple with the Pitchfork: American Gothic from Easel to Icon,” published by Princeton University Press.
Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” is one of the most recognizable paintings in the world. Yet its two famously stern figures have been interpreted in remarkably different ways since the painting first appeared in 1930. Was Wood celebrating Midwestern America or satirizing it? And how did a painting that was nearly rejected by the jury at the Art Institute of Chicago become an enduring cultural icon?
Corn, who has studied Grant Wood for more than fifty years, traces the painting’s extraordinary history, from its creation and early reception to its countless appearances in advertising, political cartoons, photography, and popular culture. Along the way, she reveals the humor, ambiguity, and unexpected history behind an image so familiar that we rarely stop to look at it closely.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR 
Wanda M. Corn is the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor Emerita in Art History at Stanford University, where in 1980 she became the university's first permanent appointment in the history of American art. Her books include "The Great American Thing" and "Georgia O'Keeffe: Living Modern." She has chaired the Advisory Committee for Historic Artist Homes and Studios, an affiliate program of the National Trust, since 2000.
PURCHASE THE BOOK https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691286341/the-couple-with-the-pitchfork
PARTNER 
This episode is sponsored by Brown & Brown, whose fine art specialists advise museums, private collectors, artists, galleries, and artist-endowed foundations around the world on insurance and risk management. Their team combines art-world knowledge with experience navigating complex risks, including loan and consignment agreements, storage, transit, and conservation. Brown & Brown works across the fine art insurance market to help customers secure solutions tailored to their collections and objectives. Learn more at BBrown.com/fineart
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For more information, visit meganfoxkelly.com, hear our past interviews, and subscribe at the bottom of our Of Interest page for new posts.
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"Reading the Art World" is a podcast featuring live interviews with leading authors and writers on important new art books. Megan Fox Kelly is an art advisor and past President of the Association of Professional Art Advisors who works with collectors, estates and foundations.
Music composed by Bob Golden

For the 49th episode of Reading the Art World, host Megan Fox Kelly speaks with Kevin Salatino, chair and Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago, about “Willem de Kooning Drawing,” the exhibition and catalogue published by the Art Institute of Chicago in association with the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and distributed by Yale University Press. 
For an artist predominantly known as a painter, de Kooning built his entire practice on drawing. Salatino makes this the through line of the exhibition—the way de Kooning thought and worked across every medium. He explains the deliberate choice to leave the colon out of the title: “Willem de Kooning Drawing” holds both the noun and the verb, the object on the page and the act that made it. That reading references the artist’s beginnings, when de Kooning trained as a draftsman from the age of twelve and arrived in New York with a command of traditional technique no other painter of the New York School possessed. The conversation follows that foundation forward through a lifetime of reworking and re-skilling, de Kooning’s refusal to separate abstraction from figuration, and his sense that content is a glimpse—something caught at the edge of vision and held until it becomes permanent.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kevin Salatino is chair and Anne Vogt Fuller and Marion Titus Searle Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago. He led the organization of “Willem de Kooning Drawing,” the Art Institute's first solo exhibition of the artist since 1969, developed in collaboration with the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and in consultation with The Willem de Kooning Foundation.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
“Willem de Kooning Drawing” is on view at the Art Institute of Chicago through September 20, 2026, then travels to the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, October 9, 2026–January 17, 2027. The exhibition gathers nearly 250 works from public and private collections, spanning the early 1920s through the 1980s.
PURCHASE THE BOOK
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300288544/willem-de-kooning-drawing/
PARTNER
This episode is sponsored by Brown & Brown, whose fine art specialists advise museums, private collectors, artists, galleries, and artist-endowed foundations around the world on insurance and risk management. Their team combines art-world knowledge with experience navigating complex risks, including loan and consignment agreements, storage, transit, and conservation. Brown & Brown works across the fine art insurance market to help customers secure solutions tailored to their collections and objectives. Learn more at BBrown.com/fineart

SUBSCRIBE, FOLLOW AND HEAR INTERVIEWS:
For more information, visit meganfoxkelly.com, hear our past interviews, and subscribe at the bottom of our Of Interest page for new posts.
Follow us on Instagram: @meganfoxkelly
"Reading the Art World" is a podcast featuring live interviews with leading authors and writers on important new art books. Megan Fox Kelly is an art advisor and past President of the Association of Professional Art Advisors who works with collectors, estates and foundations.
Music composed by Bob Golden

Summer has a way of making room for the kind of reading that gets crowded out the rest of the year — not lighter reading, necessarily, but slower reading. A biography you can actually sink into, an exhibition catalogue that rewards attention. An argument about art and the mind that you can sit with over a few days rather than racing through during weeks of deadlines and meetings.
None of the books on this list are 'beach reads' in the usual sense (I can't see you lugging some of them to the beach or the pool). What follows is a short, deliberate list — books that are genuinely readable, genuinely good, and genuinely worth the time you'll give them.
EPISODE TIMESTAMPS
00:24 - Introduction
01:21 - "Anni Albers: A Life"
02:12 - "Vermeer's Afterlives"
03:07 - "Dorothea Tanning: A Surrealist World"
04:16 - "Cecily Brown: Picture Making"
05:19 - "Willem de Kooning Drawing"
06:58 - "Hidden Modernism: The Fascination with the Occult Around 1900"

PURCHASE THESE BOOKS
"Anni Albers: A Life" by Nicholas Fox Weber
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300269376/anni-albers/
"Vermeer’s Afterlives" by Ruth Bernard Yeazell
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691277820/vermeers-afterlives
"Dorothea Tanning: A Surrealist World" by Alyce Mahon
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300244601/dorothea-tanning/
"Cecily Brown: Picture Making"
https://shop.serpentinegalleries.org/products/cecily-brown-picture-making-catalogue
"Willem de Kooning Drawing" Edited by Kevin Salatino, Mel Becker Solomon, Charlotte Healy and Margaret Holben Ellis. Contributions by Stephen Mack, Christa Noel Robbins, Robert Storr and Ludo van Halem
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300288544/willem-de-kooning-drawing/
"Hidden Modernism: The Fascination with the Occult around 1900" 
Edited by Matthias Dusini, Ivan Ristic, Hans-Peter Wipplinger. Text by Karl Baier, Matthias Dusini, Laura Feurle, Kira Kaufmann, Astrid Kury, Michaela Lindinger, Therese Muxeneder, Ivan Ristic.
SUBSCRIBE, FOLLOW AND HEAR INTERVIEWS:
For more information, visit meganfoxkelly.com, hear our past interviews, and subscribe at the bottom of our Of Interest page for new posts.
Follow us on Instagram: @meganfoxkelly
"Reading the Art World" is a podcast featuring live interviews with leading authors and writers on important new art books. Megan Fox Kelly is an art advisor and past President of the Association of Professional Art Advisors who works with collectors, estates and foundations.
Music composed by Bob Golden

For the 47th episode of Reading the Art World, host Megan Fox Kelly speaks with Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Sterling Professor of English at Yale University, about "Vermeer's Afterlives," published by Princeton University Press.
Vermeer's Afterlives traces how Vermeer, who died in 1675 and was largely forgotten within decades, was reconstructed by the critics, forgers, poets, and novelists who encountered his work over the following two centuries. Yeazell argues that the quiet, enigmatic Vermeer we revere was shaped as much by the process of recovery as by the paintings themselves: by the order in which his canvases were reattributed, by the near-absence of biographical record, and by the frameworks critics brought to an artist they were meeting for the first time.
The conversation moves through those afterlives in full: Théophile Thoré, the French journalist who encountered Vermeer in The Hague in 1842 and assembled a catalogue—more than three-quarters of which no longer holds—but whose act of naming shaped what Vermeer would become; Han Van Meegeren, whose forged Supper at Emmaus was declared the greatest Vermeer ever painted because it supplied a scholarly gap critics had convinced themselves was waiting to be filled; and the writers who have tried to narrate the stories his paintings leave untold. The conversation closes on Proust, who Yeazell argues grasped what most literary respondents missed: Vermeer's paintings stage acts of looking, not storytelling.
For anyone interested in Dutch Golden Age painting, the history of artistic reception, or how a body of work accumulates meaning across time and discipline, this episode is essential listening.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ruth Bernard Yeazell is Sterling Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies at Yale University. Her books include "Picture Titles: How and Why Western Paintings Acquired Their Names" and "Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel," both published by Princeton University Press. Her writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books.
PURCHASE THE BOOK
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691277820/vermeers-afterlives
SUBSCRIBE, FOLLOW AND HEAR INTERVIEWS:
For more information, visit meganfoxkelly.com, hear our past interviews, and subscribe at the bottom of our Of Interest page for new posts.
Follow us on Instagram: @meganfoxkelly
"Reading the Art World" is a podcast featuring live interviews with leading authors and writers on important new art books. Megan Fox Kelly is an art advisor and past President of the Association of Professional Art Advisors who works with collectors, estates and foundations.
Music composed by Bob Golden

For the 46th episode of Reading the Art World, host Megan Fox Kelly speaks with Georgina Adam, editor-at-large of The Art Newspaper, about her new book NextGen Collectors and the Art Market, published by Lund Humphries in association with Sotheby's Institute of Art.
Adam argues that the generational shift now underway is different from those that came before it—not just in scale, but in kind. Younger collectors grew up online, which has reshaped how they discover and evaluate art, who influences their taste, and what they're willing to buy. Their conversation covers the collapse of traditional connoisseurship, the geographic expansion of the collector base into China, India, and the Middle East, and whether galleries, auction houses, and museums are adapting fast enough to a generation that collects very differently from the one before it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Georgina Adam is the former Art Market editor of The Art Newspaper, where she is now editor-at-large. She is a contributor to the Financial Times Life & Arts Section, lectures at Sotheby's and Christie’s institutes in London and regularly participates in panels about the art market.

PURCHASE THE BOOK
https://www.lundhumphries.com/products/nextgen-collectors-and-the-art-market

PARTNER
This episode is sponsored by Neuberger Wealth, a firm with a founding story at the intersection of investing and the arts. Neuberger Wealth provides individuals, families and their charitable organizations with comprehensive wealth management solutions, from investments across public and private markets to wealth and estate planning, fiduciary services, and philanthropic and family governance advisory. With the experience that only comes from advising across generations, they understand that the most meaningful financial lives are built around purpose. Learn more at neubergerwealth.com.
SUBSCRIBE, FOLLOW AND HEAR INTERVIEWS:
For more information, visit meganfoxkelly.com, hear our past interviews, and subscribe at the bottom of our Of Interest page for new posts.
Follow us on Instagram: @meganfoxkelly
"Reading the Art World" is a podcast featuring live interviews with leading authors and writers on important new art books. Megan Fox Kelly is an art advisor and past President of the Association of Professional Art Advisors who works with collectors, estates and foundations.
Music composed by Bob Golden