Art: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 3

Related subjects

Browse this subject and connected topics.

Keep reading below, or choose a related topic to explore something different.

DriveReading mode

StillnessReading mode

WonderReading mode

WonderArt

Claude Monet made about 250 paintings of the water lilies in the pond he created in his garden at Giverny, north-west of Paris. They occupied him for the last three decades of his life, until his death in 1926, and he kept painting them even as cataracts clouded his sight.

Monet moved to Giverny in 1883. In 1893 he bought a plot of land near his house, had a pond dug and planted with water lilies, and spanned it with a Japanese-style footbridge. He painted the pond at every hour and in every season, so that his real subject became the changing light on the water rather than the flowers themselves. In 1909 the Durand-Ruel gallery in Paris showed 48 of these canvases. From 1912 cataracts dimmed his sight and changed the way he saw colour, and his late pictures grow looser and more abstract. His grandest project was a set of huge panels for the French state: eight murals fill two oval rooms at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, which opened to the public on 16 May 1927, a few months after his death.

Art historyRead card

WonderArt

The Mona Lisa measures only about 77 by 53 centimetres (30 by 21 inches), smaller than many visitors expect. Leonardo da Vinci painted it in oils on a panel of poplar wood, not on canvas, starting around 1503.

In the Louvre it hangs in the Salle des États, the museum's largest room, behind bulletproof glass in a case kept at a steady temperature and humidity. Across the room hangs Paolo Veronese's The Wedding at Cana, almost 10 metres wide and the largest painting in the Louvre, which makes the portrait look smaller still. The sitter is traditionally identified as Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of a Florentine silk merchant. Leonardo kept working on the picture for years and never delivered it to the family who had commissioned it; it ended up in the collection of King Francis I of France. Its worldwide fame grew enormously after Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian who had worked at the Louvre, stole it in 1911; it was found in Florence in 1913.

Art historyRead card

WonderArt

Only about 35 paintings are accepted as the work of Johannes Vermeer, the Dutch master of quiet, light-filled interiors such as Girl with a Pearl Earring. He worked slowly in Delft, died in debt in 1675 and was then largely forgotten for about two centuries.

Vermeer (1632–1675) spent his whole life in Delft and probably earned more as an art dealer than as a painter. He used costly pigments, including ultramarine ground from the gemstone lapis lazuli, and many of his scenes seem to be set in the same two rooms of his house. When he died at 43, his widow Catharina was left with 11 children to raise and heavy debts. Afterwards his name faded, and some of his pictures were sold as works by better-known painters such as Pieter de Hooch. The French critic Théophile Thoré-Bürger revived him in 1866 with a catalogue that credited him with far more paintings than he made, and called him 'the Sphinx of Delft' because so little was known about his life. Scholars now accept between 34 and 37.

Art historyRead card

StillnessArt

Painters often use warm colours such as red, orange and yellow to bring things forward, and cool blues and greens to push them back. The trick copies what we see in nature, where distant hills look paler and bluer, and it creates depth on a flat surface.

The natural effect is called aerial or atmospheric perspective: the air between us and a distant object scatters blue light into our view, so faraway things lose contrast and shift towards blue. Roman wall painters already used it, as landscapes preserved at Pompeii show, and Leonardo da Vinci wrote about it and painted it into the misty blue landscape behind the Mona Lisa. In his Theory of Colours, published in 1810, the German writer Goethe described blue as a colour that seems to draw away from us, and yellow and red as lively colours that seem to advance. There is also an optical reason, called chromostereopsis: the lens of the eye focuses red and blue light slightly differently, so red shapes often seem to float in front of blue ones.

Art techniqueRead card

WonderArt

Antonio Stradivari's violins, made in Cremona, Italy, around 1700, are among the most valuable instruments in the world. Yet in blind tests, where players could not see which violin they held, leading soloists often preferred new violins and could not reliably tell old from new.

Stradivari (c. 1644–1737) made more than 1,100 instruments, mostly violins, and about 650 survive. Those from his 'golden period', about 1700 to 1725, are the most prized and sell for millions: the 'Lady Blunt' of 1721 fetched 15.9 million dollars in 2011, raised for victims of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. Researchers have long searched for a secret, from dense wood grown during the cold centuries of the Little Ice Age to chemical treatments of the wood and varnish. The French acoustician Claudia Fritz and the American violin maker Joseph Curtin tested the reputation itself. In a study published in 2012, 21 experienced violinists tried old and new violins without knowing which was which; the least-preferred instrument was a Stradivari. In 2014, 6 of 10 renowned soloists chose a new violin to take on an imagined concert tour.

Ikigai DailyRead card

WonderArt

In 1821 the Louvre chose to show the Venus de Milo without arms.

The marble statue, just over 2 metres tall, is usually identified as the goddess Aphrodite. A farmer dug it up on the Greek island of Milos on 8 April 1820, when the island was part of the Ottoman Empire. A French naval officer, Olivier Voutier, watched him dig and sketched the pieces, and French diplomats bought it for King Louis XVIII. It dates from the Hellenistic period, probably the 2nd century BC, and a now-lost inscription may name the sculptor as Alexandros of Antioch on the Maeander, a town in western Anatolia. Found with it were part of an arm and a hand holding an apple; recent analysis supports the idea that the hand belongs to the statue, so she may once have held the golden apple that Paris awarded to Aphrodite in Greek myth. Restoring missing limbs was normal at the time, but the scholar Quatremère de Quincy argued against it, believing she had once stood beside a lost statue of Mars. The Louvre showed her as she was found.

Ikigai DailyRead card

StillnessArt

Origami, from the Japanese ori, 'folding', and kami, 'paper', is the art of folding paper into figures. Modern origami usually starts from a single square sheet with no cuts or glue, so every shape, from a crane to a dragon, comes from folds alone.

Paper folding grew up separately in Japan, China and Europe. In Japan, folded paper wrappings became part of formal etiquette among the samurai class in the 14th and 15th centuries, and the oldest known book of origami instructions, Hiden senbazuru orikata ('The secret of folding a thousand cranes'), appeared in 1797. In the 20th century Akira Yoshizawa invented wet-folding, which dampens thick paper so it can be moulded into curves, and his system of dotted lines and arrows became the standard way to draw folding instructions. Folding turned out to be serious mathematics too: a sheet of paper can divide any angle into three equal parts, which is impossible with a compass and straight edge alone. The Miura fold, invented by the Japanese astrophysicist Kōryō Miura, opens with a single pull and was used for the solar panels of the Space Flyer Unit satellite in the 1990s.

Ikigai DailyRead card

WonderArt

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, the ash that buried Pompeii also preserved thousands of messages on its walls: election notices, jokes, love notes, prices and insults written by ordinary Romans.

Scholars have recorded more than 10,000 painted and scratched wall inscriptions from Pompeii and the nearby towns buried by the same eruption. Since 1871 they have been published in volume IV of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, the great collection of Latin inscriptions. Painted notices urged people to vote for candidates in local elections. Scratched graffiti include fans of the gladiator Celadus calling him the girls' heartthrob, and a weary writer telling a wall he is amazed it has not collapsed under so much scribbling. Others list prices, record debts, greet friends or simply leave a name. The spelling and grammar are often those of everyday speech rather than of literature, so the walls are one of the best sources for the spoken Latin that later grew into Italian, Spanish and the other Romance languages.

Ikigai DailyRead card

StillnessArt

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

Not Leonardo's. The French poet Paul Valéry wrote in 1933, looking back on his poem 'Le Cimetière marin', that a work is never finished, only abandoned: the poet simply stops revising it. The line was later widened to all art and given Leonardo's name, perhaps because his life seemed to prove it. He left the Adoration of the Magi unfinished when he moved to Milan in 1482, and he kept reworking the Mona Lisa for years, taking it with him to France, where he died in 1519.

Leonardo da Vinci (attributed)Read card

StillnessArt

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.

The line is not in Michelangelo's letters or poems. A version of the anecdote was printed in 1884 about an unnamed sculptor, and by 1916 a self-help magazine called Ambition was telling it of Michelangelo. His real poetry holds a similar idea. In a sonnet written around 1540 he says that even the greatest artist can conceive nothing that a block of marble does not already contain, and that the hand guided by the mind simply finds it there. Both describe carving as taking stone away, not adding to it.

Anecdote told of an unnamed sculptor by 1884; credited to Michelangelo by 1916Read card

WonderArt

Vincent van Gogh made almost all of his roughly 2,100 artworks, including about 860 oil paintings, in the last ten years of his life.

Van Gogh decided to become an artist in 1880, at 27, after unsuccessful spells as an art dealer, a teacher and a preacher, and he died in 1890 at 37. His brother Theo, an art dealer in Paris, supported him with money throughout. The pace rose towards the end: in his last 70 days, at Auvers-sur-Oise, he painted around 70 canvases. He sold very few works in his lifetime. Fame came after his death, largely through Theo's widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, who organised exhibitions and in 1914 published his letters to Theo, which showed readers the thoughtful man behind the paintings.

Van Gogh MuseumRead card

WonderArt

Hand stencils are among the oldest art we know: people pressed a palm to a cave wall and blew pigment around it. One on Muna Island in Indonesia has been dated to at least 67,800 years ago.

The method leaves a negative outline: the rock stays bare where the hand was, framed by pigment blown from the mouth or dabbed on. Stencils are found from El Castillo in Spain to Sulawesi in Indonesia, and some are around 40,000 years old. Scientists date them from thin mineral crusts that formed over the paint, measuring the slow decay of uranium in them. In January 2026 a team writing in Nature reported stencils in Liang Metanduno cave on Muna Island, one at least 67,800 years old, which would make it the oldest cave art yet dated. Some experts caution that this method can overstate ages. Why people made them, whether for ritual, identity or simply to leave a mark, is still unknown.

ArchaeologyRead card

WonderArt

Ballet's five basic foot positions were set down more than 300 years ago at the French court of Louis XIV, and dancers still build their training on them.

Ballet grew out of court entertainments in Renaissance Italy and reached France with the Italian-born Catherine de' Medici, who married the future Henry II; the Ballet Comique de la Reine, staged at the French court in 1581, is often called the first ballet. Louis XIV, a keen dancer who performed in court ballets as a young man, founded the Académie Royale de Danse in 1661. His ballet master Pierre Beauchamp is credited with defining the five positions of the feet, with the legs turned outward from the hips. Because the rules were written down in France, ballet's vocabulary, from plié to pirouette, is still French all over the world.

History of danceRead card

WonderArt

A single colour can change its whole character depending only on the colours placed beside it.

The painter and teacher Josef Albers (1888–1976) built a whole course around this idea. He studied and taught at the Bauhaus, the German art and design school, and after it closed under Nazi pressure in 1933 he moved to the United States, teaching at Black Mountain College and, from 1950, at Yale. His 1963 book Interaction of Color turned his classroom exercises into a method still taught today, and his painting series Homage to the Square explores how nested squares change each other's colour. The effect itself, called simultaneous contrast, was described by the French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul in 1839: the same grey looks warmer beside blue and cooler beside orange.

Josef Albers, Interaction of Color (1963)Read card

WonderHistory

Tyrian purple, the most prized dye of the ancient world, came from sea snails. It took about 12,000 of them to make 1.4 grams of dye, enough to colour only the trim of one garment.

The dye comes from a gland of several Mediterranean sea snails, mainly the spiny dye-murex. The fresh secretion is almost colourless and turns purple in air and sunlight. The name refers to Tyre, a Phoenician port in today's Lebanon and a centre of the trade. Snails left to rot in large vats gave the dye works a stench that ancient writers complained about. Roman emperors kept the finest purple for themselves, and the Byzantine court later reserved purple silk for imperial use; a child born to a reigning Byzantine emperor was called 'born in the purple'. The 12,000-snail figure comes from the German chemist Paul Friedländer, who in 1909 extracted the pure dye and showed that it is a close chemical relative of indigo.

Ikigai DailyRead card

WonderArt

The Benin Bronzes, thousands of brass plaques and sculptures made for the royal court of Benin in today's Nigeria, were looted by British troops in 1897 and scattered among Western museums.

Most pieces were cast in brass rather than bronze by guilds of Edo craftsmen working for the Oba, the king. The oldest date from the 14th century, and many plaques once covered the wooden pillars of the palace, showing court life and history. In January 1897 a British party led by acting consul James Phillips set out for Benin City against the Oba's wishes and was ambushed; most of its members were killed. Weeks later a British force took the city, burned much of it, sent Oba Ovonramwen into exile and carried off thousands of objects, some of which were sold to pay for the expedition. Nigeria has asked for their return for decades. In 2022 Germany agreed to return 1,130 pieces, and several British museums and universities have handed objects back.

Ikigai DailyRead card

StillnessArt

John Cage's 4′33″ (1952) is a piece of music in which the performers play nothing for four minutes and 33 seconds, so the audience hears the sounds of the room instead.

Pianist David Tudor gave the premiere on 29 August 1952 at the Maverick Concert Hall near Woodstock, New York. He sat at the piano and closed the lid to begin each of the three movements, opening it to end them. Cage recalled that wind stirred the trees outside during the first movement, rain pattered on the roof in the second, and in the third the audience muttered and some walked out. Two things led him to the piece: Robert Rauschenberg's all-white paintings, and a 1951 visit to an anechoic chamber at Harvard, a room built to absorb almost all sound. There he still heard two sounds, which he was told were his nervous system and his blood. He concluded that true silence does not exist.

MoMARead card

DriveArt

Hip-hop began at 1970s block parties in the Bronx, New York, where DJs used two turntables to repeat the drum breaks of records so that people could keep dancing.

Hip-hop is often dated to 11 August 1973, when Clive Campbell, known as DJ Kool Herc, played at a back-to-school party his sister Cindy held in the community room of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. Herc had noticed that dancers went wildest during the break, the short stretch of a record where the singing stops and the drums and rhythm take over. With two copies of the same record on two turntables, he switched from one to the other to stretch the break for minutes. Dancers who waited for it became known as b-boys and b-girls, and MCs began speaking and rhyming over the beat, which grew into rapping. DJs such as Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa took the ideas further.

Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and CultureRead card

WonderArt

Many of the footsteps, rustling clothes and small everyday sounds in a film are recreated after shooting by Foley artists, who perform them in a studio while watching the picture.

The craft is named after Jack Foley, who worked at Universal Pictures. When sound arrived in cinema, Universal's Show Boat (1929), begun as a silent film, needed sound added after filming, and Foley and his team performed effects live in time with the projected picture. He went on doing this work for about 30 years. Today Foley artists walk on trays of gravel, wood or concrete in different shoes, rub fabric close to the microphone and use props: cornstarch squeezed in a leather pouch, for example, sounds like footsteps in snow. The microphone on set mostly records dialogue, so these sounds are added separately, and a separate effects track is also needed when a film is dubbed into another language.

Academy Museum of Motion PicturesRead card

DriveArt

Motown, the record label Berry Gordy founded in Detroit in 1959, made its records in a converted house called Hitsville U.S.A. Between 1960 and 1969, 79 of its songs reached the American top ten.

Berry Gordy Jr. had worked on a Detroit car assembly line and written songs before he started Tamla Records in January 1959 with an 800-dollar loan from his family; the company became Motown Record Corporation in 1960. In 1959 he bought a former photography studio at 2648 West Grand Boulevard, turned the back into a small recording studio and moved his family upstairs. Songwriters, producers, the house band later known as the Funk Brothers and coaches who taught stage manners all worked under one roof, and a weekly meeting voted on which recordings to release. The Supremes, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder came through the house. As a Black-owned label, Motown won huge white audiences at a time when American radio and charts were still divided by race.

GRAMMY Museum / Motown MuseumRead card

WonderHistory

A griot is a West African storyteller, musician and oral historian who carries memory through performance.

In Manding languages a griot is called a jeli or jali, and in Wolof a gewel. The tradition is tied to the Mali Empire, founded in the 13th century by Sundiata Keita: in the Epic of Sundiata, the griot Balla Fasséké advises the young king, and the Kouyaté family of griots, who trace their line back to him, still perform today. The role usually passes down within griot families. A griot learns genealogies, histories and praise songs by heart, often performing them with the kora, a 21-string harp-lute, the balafon, a wooden xylophone, or the ngoni, a small lute. Griots have also served as advisers to rulers, go-betweens in disputes and keepers of a community's memory of who is related to whom.

The Metropolitan Museum of ArtRead card

DriveArt

In 1931 Harry Beck, a draughtsman who had worked for the London Underground, redrew the Tube map as a diagram: straight lines, fixed angles and evenly spaced stations, ignoring real distances. Passengers found it far easier to read, and most metro maps today follow his idea.

Beck had worked as an engineering draughtsman in the Underground's signals office, drawing electrical circuit diagrams, and he designed the map in 1931 while laid off from that job. The Underground's managers were at first sceptical of an uncommissioned design that did not show real distances, and tried it only in a small pamphlet in 1933. Passengers liked it at once. Beck was paid ten guineas for the artwork and five more for the poster version (a guinea was one pound and one shilling), and he went on revising the map until 1960. Every Tube map now carries a line crediting his original 1931 design.

London Transport Museum / TfLRead card

WonderLiterature

French writer Georges Perec's novel La Disparition (1969) never uses the letter e, and that was deliberate. It came out of Oulipo, a group of writers and mathematicians founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, who set themselves writing rules like this one.

A text written without a chosen letter is called a lipogram. In French, e is the most common letter, found in articles, verb endings and countless everyday words, so leaving it out forces constant rewording rather than one clever trick. The title means 'The Disappearance', and the plot turns on something missing. Oulipo stands for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, 'workshop of potential literature': its members used mathematical and linguistic rules to push writing where habit would not take it. Gilbert Adair's English translation, A Void (1994), also avoids e. Other translators dropped the letter hardest to avoid in their own language: the Spanish version has no a, the Russian no о.

OulipoRead card

StillnessArt

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with lacquer dusted with gold, silver or platinum, so the repaired cracks shine instead of being hidden and become part of the object's history.

The lacquer is urushi, the sap of the Japanese lacquer tree, which hardens slowly in humid conditions; a single repair can take weeks of gluing, filling and polishing before the metal powder is applied. An often-told but unproven story traces the craft to the late fifteenth century, when the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa sent a cracked Chinese tea bowl to China for repair and it came back held together with plain metal staples, prompting Japanese craftsmen to find a more beautiful method. Kintsugi grew up alongside the tea ceremony and wabi-sabi, an aesthetic that values simplicity, age and imperfection. Some repaired bowls came to be prized more than unbroken ones.

Smithsonian Institution / New Orleans Museum of ArtRead card