Recording Artists

This episode focuses on Eva Hesse (1936–1970). Joining host Helen Molesworth are artist Mary Weatherford and art historian Darby English. Hesse is one of the most influential artists of her generation, despite having a career that lasted only 10 years. In a rare 1970 recording, made only a few months before her death, Hesse discusses the trajectory of her practice, her distinctive materials, and the meaning of art and life.

Additional Resources

• Estate of Eva Hesse, Hauser & Wirth
• Cindy Nemser Papers Finding Aid

It’s July 1942, and the artist Marcel Duchamp has recently arrived in New York City after fleeing the Nazis in Vichy France. As he settles in, he writes to his longtime friend and fellow artist Man Ray, who is living in California. In this casual letter, Duchamp asks Man Ray for help. He needs buyers for his latest artwork: a suitcase containing miniatures of many of his most famous pieces, from the mass-produced urinal he signed his name to and called art to his mustachioed Mona Lisa. He ends with a short, cryptic note about his romantic partner, Mary, who has stayed behind in France to join the resistance.

In this episode of Recording Artists: Intimate Addresses, you’ll meet the man behind some of the most controversial and influential artworks of the 20th century. Anna Deavere Smith voices the letter. Host Tess Taylor unpacks Duchamp’s wit, his decades-long friendship with Man Ray, and how he used his own archive to create new works of art. Photographer Dayanita Singh shares her experiences mining her own archive and art historian T. J. Demos weighs in on the artist’s life and legacy.

The Getty Patron Program is a proud sponsor of this podcast.

In the mid-1960s, Nam June Paik is living in a run-down studio in SoHo, struggling to make ends meet. But even as he jokes about his ongoing battle against cockroaches, he is building his network, seeking out support for his artist friends, and always experimenting with form. Paik’s vibrant personality is on full display in a letter from this period to musician David Tudor. Partially typewritten, partially handwritten, and full of wild punctuation and inside jokes, the letter’s main purpose is to help find work for his friend, Japanese musician Takehisa Kosugi.

In this episode of Recording Artists: Intimate Addresses, you’ll meet the wildly charming artist whose theories on technology and our relationship to it remain eerily prescient today; the man who coined the phrase “electronic superhighway” and advocated for artists to be at the vanguard of using the newest tech; and the person who tirelessly looked out for his friends. Host Tess Taylor unpacks some of Paik’s best-known artworks and traces his evolving thinking about art and tech. Anna Deavere Smith reads the letter. Korean American artist Sueyeun Juliette Lee and art historian and conservator Hanna Hölling help you make sense of Paik’s networks—both personal and electronic—and his legacy.

The Getty Patron Program is a proud sponsor of this podcast.

Check out Getty’s newest podcast, ReCurrent, a series about what we gain by keeping the past present. In this inaugural episode, host and producer Jaime Roque shares a heartfelt journey through his family’s history and the role of food in preserving cultural heritage.

Hear the rest of the series and learn more at getty.edu/recurrent. Look for it and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

In 1944, Frida Kahlo is at a crossroads, both in terms of her health and her career. In April of that year, with World War II dragging on, she writes to her gallerist—and former lover—Julien Levy. In this tender and personal letter, she moves from the logistical challenges of sending art across national borders during wartime, to describing her painful new steel corsets, to asking after her many friends in New York, where Levy lives. Unpacking this letter and exploring Kahlo’s words written in her own hand provides a new understanding of an artist who has become larger than life in the years since her death at age 47.

In this episode of Recording Artists: Intimate Addresses, host Tess Taylor highlights Kahlo’s vibrant personality, tracing how her artistic career developed alongside her long-running health struggles and her now-iconic style and persona. Anna Deavere Smith voices the letter. Photographer and poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths, whose work often addresses pain and the body, provides her artist’s insight while historian Circe Henestrosa, who co-curated the Kahlo exhibition Making Herself Up at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2018, shares charming anecdotes and important details of Kahlo’s life.

The Getty Patron Program is a proud sponsor of this podcast.