Art: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 8

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WonderArt

Autochrome, the first widely used colour photography process, went on sale in France in 1907. Invented by the Lumière brothers, it recorded colour on glass through a mosaic of microscopic potato-starch grains dyed red-orange, green and blue-violet.

The brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière, already famous for their cinema projector, patented the process in 1903. Millions of starch grains, each dyed one of three colours, were spread across a glass plate, the gaps filled with soot, and the whole layer coated with light-sensitive emulsion. Each grain acted as a tiny colour filter. The plate was developed directly into a positive image on the glass, which glowed only when light shone through it or when it was projected. Exposures were far longer than black-and-white plates needed, so sitters had to keep still, and the random mosaic gave pictures a soft, dotted look reminiscent of pointillist painting. Autochrome remained the main colour process until the mid-1930s, when colour films such as Kodachrome replaced it.

Autochrome LumièreRead card

DriveArt

Anna Mary Robertson Moses, known as Grandma Moses, took up painting in her late seventies after arthritis made embroidery too painful. She had her first solo show in New York at 80 and kept painting into her 101st year, becoming one of America's best-loved folk artists.

Born in 1860 in upstate New York, Moses spent most of her life as a farm wife, raising children and making embroidery and other decorative work at home. When arthritis made needlework painful, her sister suggested painting instead. In 1938 the collector Louis Caldor saw her pictures in a drugstore window in Hoosick Falls, New York, bought them, supplied her with materials and promoted her work. Her first solo exhibition, “What a Farm Wife Painted”, opened at the Galerie St. Etienne in New York in October 1940. She went on to paint more than 1,500 canvases of farm life and the changing seasons, mostly from memory. She died in 1961, and in 1969 the US Post Office issued a stamp showing her painting “July Fourth”, which is in the White House collection.

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DriveArt

In 1772, at 72, Mary Delany began making botanically detailed flower collages from cut coloured paper. She described the technique as a 'new way of imitating flowers' and went on to create 985 works in the series she called Flora Delanica.

Delany, a widow in her seventies, belonged to the Duchess of Portland's circle of artists and naturalists, nicknamed 'the Hive', where she met botanists such as Joseph Banks. She is thought to have dissected each plant first, then layered tiny pieces of coloured paper on a black background to match the real specimen petal by petal. Admirers sent her flowers to copy. King George III and Queen Charlotte, who later gave her a house at Windsor and a pension, asked for rare plants to be sent to her while in bloom. She worked for about a decade, until her eyesight failed. The ten volumes are now in the British Museum, left to it by a relative, Lady Llanover.

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DriveArt

Bill Traylor was born into slavery in Alabama around 1853. In 1939, in his mid-eighties and living rough in Montgomery, he picked up a pencil, and in roughly three years produced more than a thousand drawings on scavenged cardboard.

He sat on the pavement of Monroe Street by day, drawing sharp-edged mules, dogs, dancing figures and memories of plantation life, and slept in the back room of a funeral home. In 1939 the young white artist Charles Shannon began supplying him with poster paint, brushes and paper, and later kept hundreds of the drawings safe. Traylor died in 1949, almost unknown. In 2018 the Smithsonian American Art Museum opened 'Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor', a retrospective billed as the first ever for an artist born into slavery.

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DriveLiterature

E. E. Cummings's 1935 poetry collection was turned down by fourteen publishers, so he published it himself with his mother's help and called it No Thanks. The dedication lists the fourteen publishers, set in a narrowing shape often likened to a funeral urn.

By 1935 Cummings was a well-known poet, but publishers were wary of his experiments with spelling, punctuation and layout. When fourteen houses turned the book down, he brought it out through the small Golden Eagle Press, with money from his mother, Rebecca Haswell Cummings. The title answers those rejections with the polite phrase for refusing an offer, and the dedication page opens with the words 'No thanks to' before naming the fourteen firms. The first edition was unconventional too: it was bound at the top, like a stenographer's notepad, rather than down the left side.

E. E. CummingsRead card

DriveMind

Brazilian psychiatrist Nise da Silveira refused to treat her patients in Rio de Janeiro with lobotomy or electroshock. From 1946 she gave them studios for painting and modelling instead, and their work became the core of the Museum of Images of the Unconscious, founded in 1952.

Da Silveira qualified in medicine in Bahia in 1926, the only woman among 157 graduates. At a public psychiatric hospital in Rio she ran the occupational therapy section, where patients were treated through practical and creative activities. She saw painting not as a pastime but as a way to understand patients who could not easily put their experiences into words. In 1956 she opened Casa das Palmeiras, an outpatient centre where former patients could keep making art as they adjusted to life outside hospital. She corresponded with Carl Jung and led Rio's C. G. Jung Study Group until 1968. In 2022 Brazil entered her name in its official Book of Heroes and Heroines of the Homeland.

Nise da SilveiraRead card

StillnessScience

Asperitas, a rough, wave-like underside to a layer of cloud, was added to the World Meteorological Organization's International Cloud Atlas in 2017. Amateurs got it there: the Cloud Appreciation Society collected its members' photographs of the pattern and campaigned for its recognition.

The International Cloud Atlas is the official reference that weather services around the world use to name and classify clouds. The 2017 edition was its first full revision in about 30 years, and asperitas, Latin for 'roughness', was one of its new supplementary features: a detail that can appear on several kinds of cloud rather than a cloud type of its own. Despite its menacing look, it does not usually bring severe weather itself. The Cloud Appreciation Society was founded in January 2005 by the British writer Gavin Pretor-Pinney to celebrate clouds for their own sake and now has more than 60,000 members in about 120 countries. It is a rare case of amateur observers shaping the official vocabulary of meteorology.

AsperitasRead card

WonderMind

The 'Mozart effect', the popular idea that listening to Mozart makes you cleverer, grew from a 1993 study of just 36 college students. After hearing a Mozart sonata, their scores on a spatial-reasoning task rose for only 10 to 15 minutes; later reviews found no lasting boost to intelligence.

Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw and Catherine Ky published the study in the journal Nature. Students listened to ten minutes of Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos in D major, a relaxation recording or silence, then did paper-folding-and-cutting puzzles from the Stanford-Binet intelligence test. The Mozart group did better, but only briefly, and the study involved no babies, no children and no measure of general intelligence. Publicity turned it into a promise that classical music makes children smarter: in 1998 the governor of Georgia, Zell Miller, proposed $105,000 a year to give every newborn in the state a classical recording. Later analyses found at most small, short-lived effects, most likely because lively music lifts mood and alertness.

The Mozart effectRead card

WonderArt

On 12 March 1951, two unrelated comic characters called Dennis the Menace made their debut: an American newspaper cartoon launched in 16 papers, and a British strip went on sale in The Beano. Neither side knew of the other.

Hank Ketcham, a cartoonist in Carmel, California, took the idea from his four-year-old son, Dennis: in October 1950 the boy refused his nap and wrecked his room, and his exasperated mother called him a menace. Ketcham's Dennis is a blond, well-meaning boy whose curiosity causes chaos. In Dundee, Scotland, Beano editor George Moonie took the name from a music-hall song, 'I'm Dennis the Menace from Venice', and artist David Law drew a scowling boy in a striped jumper for issue 452. To avoid confusion, the American strip was retitled simply 'Dennis' for British readers, while the British boy often appears abroad as 'Dennis and Gnasher'. Both are still published.

A transatlantic coincidenceRead card

WonderHistory

The Codex Gigas, or 'Giant Book', is the largest surviving medieval manuscript: made in Bohemia in the early 1200s, it stands about 92 centimetres tall, has 310 parchment leaves and weighs some 75 kilograms. The handwriting shows that a single scribe wrote it, over more than 20 years.

It was probably made at the Benedictine monastery of Podlažice, in today's Czech Republic, and brings together a complete Latin Bible, histories, medical texts and an encyclopedia in one volume. Legend calls it the Devil's Bible: a monk facing punishment was said to have promised to write it in a single night and to have sold his soul to the Devil for help. The story is folklore, but the book does contain a famous full-page picture of the Devil. In 1648, at the end of the Thirty Years' War, Swedish troops seized it in Prague as war booty. It has been in Stockholm since 1649 and is kept today at the National Library of Sweden.

Codex GigasRead card

WonderScience

NASA's Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes, launched in 1972 and 1973, each carry a small gold-anodised aluminium plaque showing a man, a woman and a map of where the probe came from. They were the first messages deliberately sent on spacecraft bound to leave the Solar System.

Carl Sagan and Frank Drake designed the plaque, about 23 by 15 centimetres, and Linda Salzman Sagan drew the figures. Its key is hydrogen, the most common element in the universe: a hydrogen atom can flip between two energy states and give off radiation of a fixed wavelength, about 21 centimetres, which offers any finder a universal unit of length and time. Using that unit, a map shows the Sun's position relative to 14 pulsars, collapsed stars that spin and send out radio pulses at precise, recognisable rates. The nude figures drew complaints, and some newspapers censored them. The plaques are mounted where the probes shield them from interstellar dust. Voyager 1 and 2 followed in 1977, carrying the more elaborate Golden Record.

Pioneer plaqueRead card

WonderScience

In 2025, five people saw a colour called 'olo', a blue-green more saturated than anything in nature. Berkeley researchers produced it by aiming lasers at single cells in the retina so that only the eye's 'green' cone cells responded, something natural light cannot do.

The eye sees colour with three kinds of cone cell, sensitive to short, medium and long wavelengths and loosely called blue, green and red. Their sensitivities overlap, so any natural light that reaches the medium, or 'M', cones also stimulates their neighbours. The team, led by Ren Ng and Austin Roorda at the University of California, Berkeley, mapped individual cones in a small patch of each participant's retina, tracked the eye as it moved and sent tiny laser pulses to M cones alone. Their paper appeared in Science Advances in April 2025. The name comes from 0-1-0: only the middle cone type switched on. The closest a screen can show is a strong teal, but participants described olo as far more saturated.

The 'Oz' experimentRead card

WonderTechnology

The Long Now Foundation is building a giant mechanical clock inside a mountain in West Texas, designed to keep time for 10,000 years. It is meant to draw power from the daily swing between warm and cold, and to correct itself by the Sun at noon.

Computer scientist Danny Hillis dreamed up the clock as a symbol of long-term thinking, and the Long Now Foundation, set up in 1996 by Hillis, Stewart Brand and others, took on the project. The full-size clock is being built in a shaft cut into the Sierra Diablo mountains near Van Horn, Texas, on land owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who has put about $42 million into it through his firm Bezos Expeditions. A first working prototype started ticking on 31 December 1999 and is now in London's Science Museum. The musician Brian Eno helped design the chimes, which are meant to ring a different sequence of bells every day. The clock is designed to be understood and repaired with simple tools.

Clock of the Long NowRead card

WonderHistory

Ise Grand Shrine, the holiest site of Shinto, Japan's native religion, takes down its main sanctuaries every 20 years and rebuilds them exactly on the plot next door. The custom began in 690 and, despite some long interruptions, continues today; the next rebuilding is due in 2033.

The rebuilding is called Shikinen Sengū. Along with the buildings, the shrine's furnishings and sacred objects are made anew, and the wooden Uji Bridge at the entrance is rebuilt too. The timber is hinoki, a Japanese cypress. Power tools are not allowed within the shrine grounds, so the work falls to miyadaiku, carpenters trained in traditional shrine building; less experienced carpenters usually learn on the bridge before they work on the sanctuaries. Shinto calls the idea tokowaka, 'ever young': renewing a sacred building keeps it fresh and passes the skills from one generation to the next. The present buildings, from 2013, are the 62nd set. Wars have delayed the cycle more than once, most notably for over a century during Japan's civil wars of the 15th and 16th centuries.

Ise Shikinen SenguRead card

WonderHistory

A hoard buried in Norfolk, England, about 2,000 years ago contained a near-complete carnyx, a tall bronze war trumpet topped with an animal's head. Found in 2025 and announced in January 2026, it also held parts of a second carnyx, a boar-headed standard and five shield bosses.

The carnyx was played across Iron Age Europe, roughly between 200 BC and AD 200. Held upright, its bell, shaped like an animal's open mouth, rose high above a crowd. This is only the third found in Britain: one dredged from the River Witham in Lincolnshire in 1768 was later destroyed while its metal was being analysed, and of the Deskford carnyx, found in Scotland in 1816, only the boar's-head bell survives. A standard is an emblem carried on a pole to mark a group of fighters, and this is the first boar's-head standard found in Britain. A shield boss is the metal dome at a shield's centre that covers the hand grip. The hoard was probably buried in the first century AD, in the lands of the Iceni, the people of Boudica, who rose against Rome in AD 60 or 61.

Norfolk carnyx hoardRead card

WonderArt

Font-de-Gaume, a cave in France's Dordogne famous for its Ice Age paintings, has had some of them dated directly for the first time. Charcoal found in the black paint showed that a bison was drawn about 13,300 years ago; the results were published in 2026.

Radiocarbon dating measures how much of a slowly decaying form of carbon is left in material that was once alive, such as charcoal. The cave's black figures were long thought to be painted with manganese minerals, which contain no carbon and cannot be dated this way. A team led by France's national research centre, the CNRS, used Raman spectroscopy and hyperspectral imaging, methods that identify materials by the way they react to light, and found charcoal in two drawings: a bison and a face-like 'mask'. Their study, published in March 2026 in PNAS, the journal of the US National Academy of Sciences, dated the bison to about 13,300 years ago and two samples from the mask to between about 14,200 and 16,000 years. A third mask sample came out at about 8,800 years, which suggests part of the figure was added or retouched thousands of years later.

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DriveLiterature

If you find a book you really want to read but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

Toni Morrison (1931–2019), the American novelist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, said this at the annual meeting of the Ohio Arts Council in 1981, and The Cincinnati Enquirer reported it on 27 September that year. She had lived by it: she began her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), because it was the book she wanted to read and could not find. Others had said something similar, from Benjamin Disraeli in the 1830s to C. S. Lewis, but this wording is hers.

Toni Morrison, speech to the Ohio Arts Council (1981)Read card

DriveLiterature

You must change your life.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), the German-language poet born in Prague, wrote this sonnet in Paris and published it in 1908 in New Poems. It describes an ancient Greek statue of Apollo that has lost its head and limbs, yet seems to glow and to look back at the viewer from every part of its body. After thirteen lines of close looking, the poem ends with this sudden command. The philosopher Peter Sloterdijk took the line as the title of his 2009 book about how people shape their lives through practice and training.

Rainer Maria Rilke, 'Archaic Torso of Apollo' (1908)Read card

DriveArt

There is safety in the midst of danger. What would life be if we didn't dare to take things in hand?

Van Gogh wrote these sentences to his brother Theo on 29 December 1881, days after a bitter quarrel with his father, a Protestant minister, on Christmas Day. He had left the family home in Etten and settled in The Hague to work as an artist, taking lessons from the painter Anton Mauve, who was married to Van Gogh's cousin. He was twenty-eight, had been drawing seriously for barely a year, and lived on money Theo sent him each month. This wording follows the scholarly edition of the letters; the familiar 'if we had no courage to attempt anything' is an older, looser translation of the same passage.

Vincent van Gogh, letter to his brother Theo (1881)Read card

DriveArt

I found that I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say in any other way — things that I had no words for.

Georgia O'Keeffe, later known for her large paintings of flowers and of the New Mexico desert, said this in an interview with the New York Sun in December 1922. The breakthrough she was describing came in 1915: while teaching art in South Carolina, she set aside much of her academic training and began a series of abstract charcoal drawings. Her friend Anita Pollitzer showed them to the photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz in New York without asking her first; Stieglitz exhibited some of them in 1916 and began writing to her. He became her dealer and, in 1924, her husband.

Georgia O'Keeffe, New York Sun (5 December 1922)Read card

DriveArt

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique.

Martha Graham, the American dancer and choreographer who helped create modern dance, said this in 1943 to her fellow choreographer Agnes de Mille. De Mille had just had the biggest success of her life with the dances for the musical 'Oklahoma!' and was miserable about it: she thought the work only fairly good and no longer trusted her own judgement. Graham's reply was that an artist does not get to grade the work. The job is to keep the channel open, and no artist is ever satisfied; that restlessness, Graham said, is what keeps us marching. De Mille recorded the conversation in her 1991 biography of Graham.

Martha Graham, quoted in Agnes de Mille, Martha (1991)Read card

DriveHistory

Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.

Jacobs had no training in planning. She was a magazine writer who looked out of her window in Greenwich Village and noticed that the streets officials called slums were working, and the tidy projects replacing them were not. The argument here is about rent, not nostalgia: new construction has to earn back its cost, so only proven, well-funded ventures can afford it. Bookshops, studios, odd little businesses and untested ideas need cheap old rooms.

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)Read card

StillnessArt

Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognises before it can speak.

John Berger was an English art critic, novelist and painter. These are the first two sentences of Ways of Seeing, a book that grew out of his four half-hour BBC television programmes of 1972, made deliberately without reverence for the art world. In the first programme he cut into a reproduction of a Botticelli painting with a scalpel on camera, to show how a detail changes meaning once it is separated from the whole. His point in this opening is simple and hard to argue with: the eye gets there first, and everything we are later told about a picture arrives to explain something we have already seen.

John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972)Read card

WonderLanguage

Linguist Marc Okrand expanded the Klingon dialogue created for Star Trek into a usable language. His 1985 Klingon Dictionary described its vocabulary and grammar. The individual sounds occur in human languages; their unusual combination helps Klingon sound alien while remaining pronounceable by actors.

The first Klingon words were devised by the actor James Doohan, Star Trek's Scotty, for 'Star Trek: The Motion Picture' (1979). For 'Star Trek III' (1984) the producers asked Okrand to build a real language from them. He made its most common word order object-verb-subject, close to the reverse of English, and used sounds that are rare in European languages, such as consonants made with the tip of the tongue curled back, or far back in the mouth near the uvula. Few people speak it well: the writer Arika Okrent guessed in 2009 that there were 20 to 30 fluent speakers. Fans still perform in it, and in 2010 the Washington Shakespeare Company staged scenes from Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing in Klingon.

Marc Okrand, The Klingon Dictionary (1985)Read card