Waldy and Bendy's Adventures in Art


Fun new art podcast from the Sunday Times featuring two of my favourite TV art historians, Waldemar Januszczak and Bendor Grosvenor.

From its jaunty opening music I was hooked and I found their good humoured discussion easy and interesting to list to. They seem to be planning to divide the show into four sections which is about right for one listening,

They started with an opinion piece on a topic in the art world, in this case the decommissioning of works from collections. They talked about why galleries and museums to this and the pros and cons. Waldy, as I feel I should now call him, then talked about how good Gauguin was at painting children while mourning the cancellation of the Royal Academy’s Gauguin and Impressionism show.

Next came a fun section called Art in Isolation where they reviewed what some of the galleries are doing online while they can’t open. This week they looked at a tour of a Raphael exhibition in Rome to make 500 years since his death along with other Raphael resources online and the Tate’s virtual tour of the Andy Warhol show, again sadly now closed.

Finally I love the section called On the Wall where each chose a picture from a gallery they would like to hang on their own walls. Bendy chose a lovely, but little known, Van Dyck from Puerto Rico and Waldy chose the wonderful Savaldo Mary Magdalene from the National Gallery. A picture I loved but had never realised that the wonderful light hitting her silver gown in the light of Christ standing where you the viewer are. I can’t wait to get back and look at that picture again.

I do hope this is going to be a regular podcast and I will definitely be a fan.


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