Art: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 5

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WonderArt

The Amber Room was a chamber lined entirely with carved amber, gold leaf and mirrors, often called the eighth wonder of the world. German troops dismantled it and took it away in 1941; it vanished at the end of the Second World War and has never been found.

It was made in Prussia from 1701, and in 1716 King Frederick William I gave it to Peter the Great of Russia. Later installed in the Catherine Palace near St Petersburg and enlarged, it covered more than 55 square metres with some six tonnes of amber that glowed gold by candlelight. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union, soldiers took it apart in about 36 hours and sent it in crates to Königsberg, where it was put on show in the castle. The trail ends there in 1944 and 1945: theories say it burned in the bombing, sank on a ship or lies hidden in a mine. Treasure hunters still look for it. A reconstruction, made by Russian craftsmen over 24 years using the original methods, opened in 2003.

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WonderArt

After the Second World War the Dutch painter Han van Meegeren faced a possible death sentence for selling a Vermeer, a Dutch national treasure, to Hermann Göring. His defence was that the painting was not a Vermeer at all but his own forgery, and to prove it he painted another one under supervision.

Critics had dismissed van Meegeren's own paintings as derivative, and he set out to fool them. He mixed Bakelite, an early plastic, into his paints and baked the canvases so the paint hardened like centuries-old oil, then rolled them to make cracks and filled the cracks with ink. In 1937 the leading Vermeer expert Abraham Bredius hailed his Supper at Emmaus as a masterpiece. Göring gave 137 looted paintings for another fake, Christ with the Adulteress. Arrested in May 1945, van Meegeren painted Jesus among the Doctors in front of witnesses. In November 1947 he was convicted of forgery and fraud, not collaboration, and sentenced to a year in prison, but he died of a heart attack that December.

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WonderHistory

In 1917 two cousins in Cottingley, Yorkshire, Elsie Wright, 16, and Frances Griffiths, 9, photographed themselves with fairies cut from card and held up with hatpins. In 1920 Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, published the pictures as proof that fairies exist.

The girls said they took the pictures to prove they had been playing with fairies by the beck, the local word for a stream. Elsie copied the figures from drawings by Claude Shepperson in Princess Mary's Gift Book, a popular children's book, and added wings. Conan Doyle, a committed spiritualist, used the photographs, and three more the cousins took in 1920, in an article for the Christmas 1920 issue of The Strand Magazine. Some readers were convinced; others suspected fakes. In 1983, as elderly women, the cousins admitted the hoax, though both said they had really seen fairies, and Frances insisted the fifth photograph was genuine. The pictures and cameras are now at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford.

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DriveArt

Henri Matisse had cancer surgery in 1941, aged 71, and afterwards often worked from his bed or a wheelchair. He had used cut paper since the 1930s to plan compositions; in the years that followed he made it his main medium, cutting shapes from painted paper with scissors, and produced some of the boldest work of his career.

Matisse had surgery for abdominal cancer in 1941 and nearly died of the complications; he called the years that followed his 'second life'. Assistants painted large sheets of paper with gouache, an opaque watercolour, and he cut shapes from them freehand, then directed where they should be pinned on the walls of his rooms in Nice and Vence. He called this 'drawing with scissors', because a single cut gave line and colour at once. Works from this period include the book Jazz (1947), the Blue Nudes (1952) and The Snail (1953), now at Tate Modern. He also designed the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence. He died in 1954.

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DriveArt

Rheumatoid arthritis twisted Pierre-Auguste Renoir's hands so badly that he could no longer grip a brush. He kept painting for about twenty more years, with brushes placed between his bandaged fingers.

Rheumatoid arthritis is a disease in which the immune system attacks the joints, causing pain and, over time, deformity. Renoir's began around 1892. By his sixties his joints had stiffened and twisted, and in his last years he used a wheelchair. In 1907 he moved to Les Collettes, a house at Cagnes-sur-Mer on the warm Mediterranean coast. Assistants wrapped his hands to protect the skin and set a brush between his fingers, and he painted by moving his arm and shoulder. From 1913 he also made sculpture by directing the hands of a young sculptor, Richard Guino. Asked why he kept painting through the pain, he is said to have replied that the pain passes, but the beauty remains.

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DriveArt

Cataracts clouded Claude Monet's vision in his seventies and changed the way he saw colour. He kept working on his water lilies, had surgery in 1923 and returned to painting a few months later.

A cataract is a clouding of the lens inside the eye. Monet's first signs appeared around 1912, and as his lenses yellowed, reds and browns came to dominate his canvases while blues faded. By 1922 he could barely see and spoke of giving up. His friend Georges Clemenceau, the former French prime minister, urged him to have the operation, and in 1923 surgeons removed the lens of his right eye. Afterwards he saw everything with a strong blue tint for a time and needed special tinted glasses. He went back to the great Water Lilies panels, which were still in his studio when he died in December 1926. They were installed at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris in May 1927.

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DriveArt

Katsushika Hokusai, the Japanese artist behind the famous print The Great Wave, wrote at about 75 that nothing he had made before the age of seventy was worth counting. By 110, he hoped, every dot and every line he drew would be alive.

The lines come from the afterword to his picture book One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, published in 1834, when he was 75 by the traditional Japanese count. He writes that he had loved drawing the shapes of things since the age of six, and that only at seventy-three had he begun to grasp the structure of animals, birds, insects and fish and how plants grow. He hoped to go further in his eighties and nineties and to reach something divine at a hundred. He signed it Gakyō Rōjin Manji, 'the old man mad about drawing'. The Great Wave, from around 1831, was already behind him. He kept working until his death in 1849, at 88.

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StillnessArt

Wabi-sabi is the sense of beauty in things that are imperfect, impermanent and incomplete: a cracked bowl, a weathered post, a garden left slightly wild. It is beauty that admits time exists.

The two words began separately: wabi meant the loneliness of living simply, far from society, and sabi the quiet beauty that comes with age and wear. Together they came to name a sensibility running through the tea ceremony, ceramics and garden design: rough textures, asymmetry, muted colour, objects that show their history rather than hide it. Its meaning has shifted over the centuries and was never fixed by a single rule. It works as a deliberate counterweight to the idea that beauty means flawless and new. Kintsugi, the craft of mending broken pottery with lacquer dusted with gold, is a separate practice, though it is often seen as a vivid illustration of the idea.

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StillnessArt

Ma is the Japanese idea that the space between things is part of a design. Leaving room around an object can draw the eye towards it.

Ma is not empty space but active space: a pause in music, the gap between parts of a building, a silence in conversation, all treated as meaningful rather than as absence. The idea runs through the traditional arts, from the uncluttered tokonoma, the display alcove of a Japanese room, to the measured pauses of Noh theatre. The film-maker Hayao Miyazaki has used the word for the quiet moments in his films where nothing happens and the audience can breathe. When Katayama Masamichi designed the interior of Japan House London, which opened in 2018, he built it around ma, leaving deliberately empty space so the objects on show could stand out. The word has no exact English equivalent, so design writers usually leave it untranslated.

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DriveArt

Vivian Maier, a nanny in Chicago, photographed the city's streets for decades and showed almost no one. Her negatives surfaced at a storage-locker auction in 2007, two years before she died, and she is now counted among the great street photographers of the twentieth century.

A young estate agent and collector, John Maloof, bought a box of her negatives for about $380 while researching a local history book. He found striking, humane street photography and began posting scans online in 2009, shortly after her death; the response was immediate and international. Maier had left many rolls of film undeveloped, sometimes for decades, and told the families she worked for almost nothing about her photography. Exhibitions, books and the Oscar-nominated documentary Finding Vivian Maier (2013) followed. The case also started a lasting debate, and a court dispute over her estate, about whether work its maker never chose to show should be printed, exhibited and sold.

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DriveArt

On 17 September 1925, a streetcar hit the bus carrying eighteen-year-old Frida Kahlo, breaking her spine, pelvis and right leg. She had planned to study medicine; instead, confined to bed for months, she began painting with a mirror fixed above her and an easel made for lying down.

Her mother had the mirror fitted to the top of her four-poster bed and an easel made that she could use lying down, and the self-portraits Kahlo began there became central to her work. She gave a plain reason for painting herself so often: she was often alone, and she was the subject she knew best. Her injuries never fully healed; she went through around thirty operations and long spells in bed over her life. She married the muralist Diego Rivera in 1929, divorced him in 1939 and remarried him in 1940. Alongside still lifes, portraits and work on Mexican politics and identity, her own face became one of the best-known in twentieth-century art.

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DriveMusic

In 1802, realising he was going deaf, Ludwig van Beethoven wrote a private letter to his brothers, now called the Heiligenstadt Testament. In it he described despair, isolation and thoughts of death, and wrote that only his art had held him back from ending his life.

Beethoven wrote it in October 1802 in Heiligenstadt, then a village outside Vienna, where his doctor had sent him to rest his hearing. It is called a testament because it reads partly like a will, but he never sent it; it was found among his papers after his death in 1827. He described the shame of hiding his deafness from others and his resolve to live on because he felt he still had music to write. He lived another twenty-five years and composed many of his greatest works as his hearing failed, including the Ninth Symphony. At its 1824 premiere, according to accounts, a singer turned him round to see the applause he could not hear.

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DriveArt

In the early 1820s, Francisco Goya painted fourteen dark murals straight onto the walls of his house outside Madrid. He never titled or exhibited them; they became known later as the Black Paintings.

Goya bought the farmhouse in 1819, in his seventies, and had been almost completely deaf since a serious illness in the early 1790s. The house was already known as the Quinta del Sordo, the Deaf Man's Villa, after an earlier owner who was also deaf. On its plaster walls he painted scenes such as Saturn Devouring His Son, and left no word about whom they were meant for. When he left Spain for Bordeaux in 1824, the murals stayed on the walls. In 1873 the banker Baron Frédéric Émile d'Erlanger bought the house, and from 1874 the restorer Salvador Martínez Cubells transferred the flaking paintings onto canvas. D'Erlanger gave them to the Spanish state in 1881, and they now hang in the Prado.

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DriveArt

Michelangelo was still carving the Rondanini Pietà, a marble of Mary holding the dead Christ, shortly before his death in 1564 at eighty-eight. The phrase 'ancora imparo' ('I am still learning') is traditionally attributed to him, though the attribution is not firmly documented.

Michelangelo began the Rondanini Pietà in the early 1550s and kept returning to it until the last days of his life, cutting the marble back again and again. The figures grew ever thinner and more abstract, and a spare arm from an earlier version still stands beside them. The statue was left unfinished and is now in the Castello Sforzesco in Milan. In the same years he was chief architect of St Peter's Basilica in Rome, a post he held from 1546 without taking a salary. A Pietà is an image of Mary mourning over the body of Christ; his best-known one, carved in his early twenties, is in St Peter's.

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DriveLanguage

Modern Greek meraki describes doing something with care, attention, enthusiasm or personal involvement, especially cooking or craft. The word comes from Turkish merak, whose meanings include curiosity and keen interest.

Greek borrowed the word from Ottoman Turkish merak, which Turkish had itself taken from Arabic. In Ottoman usage merak covered desire, passion and fondness as well as worry and curiosity; modern Turkish uses it mostly for curiosity, keen interest and worry, and a meraklı is an enthusiast. In Greek the word went another way: meraki came to mean the care and love someone puts into a task, and in some uses it still means longing. A dish cooked me meráki, 'with meraki', is one made with real attention. English lists of 'untranslatable words' gloss it as 'putting your soul into something', a poetic reading rather than a dictionary definition.

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WonderArt

A hand stencil in Liang Metanduno cave on Indonesia's Muna Island is at least 67,800 years old, the oldest cave art dated so far. Someone pressed a hand to the rock and blew pigment around it, leaving the hand's outline.

An Indonesian and Australian team reported the find in the journal Nature in January 2026. They dated a thin mineral crust that had grown over the pigment, using a method based on the slow decay of uranium; the crust gives only a minimum age, so the stencil may be older. Its fingertips were deliberately narrowed, a style otherwise known only from nearby Sulawesi, and the team credits modern humans, Homo sapiens. That would mean our species had reached these islands by then, on the likely route to Australia. The previous candidates for oldest cave art were Spanish paintings over 64,000 years old, often credited to Neanderthals. Some scientists warn that uranium dating can overestimate ages.

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WonderArt

The Benin Bronzes are thousands of brass and bronze plaques and sculptures made for the royal palace of the Kingdom of Benin, in today's southern Nigeria. They recorded kings, ceremonies and court life until British troops looted them in 1897.

The works were made by a royal guild of casters in Benin City, now in Edo State, Nigeria, from at least the 13th century; many plaques date from the 16th and 17th centuries and honour past kings, called obas. In February 1897 British forces took the city, the palace was burned and thousands of objects were carried off. Britain presented the raid as punishment after Benin soldiers killed most of a British party travelling to the city, but historians see it as part of a push for colonial control. The works were sold and scattered across museums and private collections in Europe and North America. In 2022 Germany transferred ownership of about 1,130 bronzes to Nigeria, and other museums have begun returns.

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WonderArt

Pointillist painters such as Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, working in France in the 1880s, built pictures from small dots of pure colour set side by side, so that the colours would blend in the viewer's eye rather than on the palette.

The style is also called Neo-Impressionism, a name the critic Félix Fénéon gave it in 1886, or divisionism. It drew on the chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul's 1839 study of how neighbouring colours change each other's appearance. Seurat spent about two years on his best-known painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884–86), building it from countless small, carefully placed touches. Signac later set out the group's ideas in his 1899 book From Eugène Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism. Real perception is more complicated than the slogan that 'the eye mixes the paint': the dots often read as a shimmer rather than a smooth blend, and Seurat's effect also depended on composition and contrast.

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WonderArt

Edvard Munch's The Scream is not one painting: the Norwegian artist made two painted versions, in 1893 and 1910, two in pastel and a lithograph print, all showing the same figure under a blood-red sky.

Munch described the moment behind it in a diary entry headed Nice, 22 January 1892: walking at sunset near Oslo, he felt a great scream pass through nature. So the scream belongs to the landscape; the figure is hearing it and covering its ears, not making it. The 1893 painting hangs in Norway's National Museum, and the Munch Museum in Oslo holds the 1910 painting and a pastel. A faint pencil note on the 1893 picture says it could only have been painted by a madman; in 2021 the National Museum confirmed the handwriting is Munch's own, probably added after critics attacked the work. The 1895 pastel, the one version in private hands, sold in 2012 for about 120 million dollars, then an auction record.

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WonderArt

In October 2018, seconds after Banksy's painting Girl with Balloon sold at Sotheby's in London for just over £1 million, a shredder hidden in its frame cut the lower half of the canvas into strips. The half-shredded work was renamed Love is in the Bin.

The sale took place on 5 October 2018, at a final price of £1,042,000. Banksy, the anonymous British street artist, later released a video showing that he had built the shredder into the frame years earlier, and said it had shredded the whole picture in rehearsals; on the night it stopped about halfway. The buyer, a European collector, chose to keep the altered work. The stunt attacked the very room that had just priced the painting, yet the market absorbed it: in October 2021 the same work returned to Sotheby's and sold for £18,582,000, then a record for Banksy at auction. The destruction did not end the artwork; it became part of its story.

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StillnessMusic

John Cage's 4′33″, first performed in 1952, asks the performers to play nothing for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The coughs, rustling and rain the audience hears instead become the music.

The pianist David Tudor gave the premiere on 29 August 1952 at the Maverick Concert Hall near Woodstock, New York, a wooden hall open to the woods. He marked the three sections by closing the keyboard lid at the start of each and opening it at the end, without playing a note. Cage later recalled hearing wind in the first part, rain on the roof in the second and people talking or walking out in the third. The idea grew partly from a visit to an anechoic chamber at Harvard, a room built to absorb all sound, where he still heard two sounds: his own nervous system and his blood circulating. True silence, he concluded, does not exist; there is only sound we did not intend.

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WonderMusic

Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring caused an uproar at its first performance in Paris on 29 May 1913, with its pounding, irregular rhythms and stamping dancers. Stories of a full riot grew later, but the shock was real.

The ballet was made for Sergei Diaghilev's company, the Ballets Russes, with choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky and sets and costumes by Nicholas Roerich. It shows pagan rites in ancient Russia and ends with a young woman chosen as a sacrifice, who dances until she dies. Nijinsky turned the dancers' feet inward and had them stamp rather than float. In the music, accents fall where the ear does not expect them and the metre changes from bar to bar. The conductor Pierre Monteux kept going through jeers, laughter and shouting; tales of fighting in the aisles come mostly from memories written years later. The score soon triumphed in the concert hall and is now one of the most performed works of 20th-century music.

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WonderArchitecture

The Great Mosque of Djenné in Mali, often called the largest mud-brick building in the world, survives because the whole town re-plasters its walls with fresh mud every year before the rains.

The present building was completed in 1907 under Ismaila Traoré, head of the town's guild of masons, on the site of a mosque said to date from the 13th century. Its walls are made of sun-dried mud bricks, and bundles of palm wood jutting from them serve as permanent scaffolding. Rain wears the plaster away each year, so every spring the town holds a festival, the Crépissage, to renew it. Men and boys race to carry baskets of mud up the walls, women bring water from the river, and the elders of the masons' guild direct the work. Djenné's old town has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1988.

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WonderArchitecture

Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, finished in 537 as the cathedral of Constantinople, has one of the most influential interiors in architecture. Its great dome rests on pendentives, curved triangles of masonry that let a round dome sit on a square plan, and 40 windows around its base fill it with light.

Emperor Justinian I ordered the church after riots in 532 burned down its predecessor. Two scholars, Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus, both skilled in mathematics and mechanics, designed it, and it was finished in under six years. The dome is about 31 metres across and its crown rises some 55 metres above the floor. The historian Procopius wrote that it seemed not to rest on masonry but to hang from heaven on a golden chain. Earthquakes brought part of the first dome down in 558, and it was rebuilt higher and steeper. The building was a cathedral for over 900 years, a mosque after the Ottoman conquest of 1453 and a museum from 1934, and it has been a mosque again since 2020.

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