Hub and spoke. Audio Collective.

I'm Tamara Vichai, and this is the Lonely Pallet.

Sebastian Smee has been the art critic for the Washington Post since 2018,

but he's written extensively about art for every publication you can think of,

from here to his native Australia, and bagging a Pulitzer Prize for criticism along the way.

Both his prose and his love of the work leap off the page and right into your lap.

It's like he offers this guiding hand past the velvet rope.

And it's not just for his readers, but you get the sense that it's for himself, too.

He's a critic who is constantly looking inward, curious about his own response to artworks,

and what that can teach him about teaching us. Sebastian joined me to discuss his latest book,

Paris and Ruins, Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism, as well as talk about

writing and the different kinds of writing that critics do. We talked about becoming an expert

about a movement on deadline, about how looking back at the muddiness of a historical moment can

help us understand the muddiness of ours.

And what happens when art critics themselves are at a loss for words to express why they just love a painting so darn much?

Today on the Lonely Pallet, my conversation with Sebastian Smee.

Yeah. Today on The Lonely Pallet, my conversation with Sebastian Smey. Sebastian Smey, welcome to the Lonely Pallet. Thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you for having me. It's great to be here.

You are the art critic for The Washington Post, but you've had a few other posts along the way that have brought you to this place. And I just want you to,

you know, if you could give kind of a quick and dirty summary of what brought you into this field and what brought you to where you are right now. Right. Well, yeah, it is, it is a bit messy,

a bit dirty. I joined the post in 2018. but prior to that, I'd been at the Boston Globe. The editor of the Globe, Marty Barron, brought me over from Australia in 2008. So I had a wonderful time at the Globe, spent a year back in Australia in 2017, which is where I'm

from, and then joined the Globe, sorry, joined the Washington Post from there. Yeah, prior to all that,

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