Browse our collection of interesting facts and anecdotes about art, artists and art history. How did Monet turn Kandinsky into a painter? Can mental illness really lead to great art?

did you know...

that Vincent Van Gogh sold only one painting during his lifetime. Ironically, his work titled "Portrait of Dr. Gachet" until recently held the auction record for highest sale of any work of art, $82.5 million (Christie's, May 15, 1990).

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that the Nazis looted and stole more than 600,000 works of art before and during World War II, easily making this the largest organized theft of art in history.

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Abstract pioneer Wassily Kandinsky was a university law professor until he saw one of Monet's "Haystack" paintings at an exhibition in Moscow. He promptly changed careers and moved to Munich to study painting.

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that the Fauves were called "wild beasts" by their contemporaries and critics. The term came from the art critic Louis Vauxcelles, who noted a classic Italian sculpture in the middle of a room at the Salon d'Automne that was also displaying a collection of Fauve works. Vauxcelles exclaimed: "Donatello among the wild beasts." It was probably not a compliment.

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that the large canvases Jackson Pollock used for his Abstract Expressionist action paintings were usually flat on the floor while he painted. Pollock, a chain cigarette smoker, would frequently paint with a cigarette hanging from his lips, leading to the intriguing incorporation of cigarette ashes into the surface of some of his greatest works.

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that Versailles is regarded as the the most impressive example of the Baroque ideal. The unity of the arts found there is astounding, with architecture, painting, sculpture, and garden design all working together to create an overwhelming whole.

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that as the Nazis came to power in 1933, they shut down the Bauhaus School which had moved to Berlin from Weimar. Director Mies Van der Rohe and others moved to the United States and the New Bauhaus was founded by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in 1937 as Institute of Design in Chicago, Illinois.

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that art critic Louis Vauxcelles inadvertently named the Fauves by poking fun at the "wild beast" nature of the paintings. He also inadvertently named Cubism. In a conversation with Henri Matisse after viewing a Juan Gris exhibition in 1908, he spoke of the "bizarre cubiques (cubes)."

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that the Dada movement was named in a way that held up the movements ideals of a non-rational approach to art. It is said that the name Dada (French for 'hobby horse') was selected by the movements founders by inserting a letter opener into a random page of the dictionary.

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that mental illness may be profoundly responsible for the creation and enduring popularity of Expressionism. Van Gogh's well documented mental instability, and Edvard Munch's traumatic childhood and enduring neuroses helped to churn out some of the Expressionists most important works. Munch accepted that his mental illness was part of his genius, "I would not cast off my illness, for there is much in my art that I owe to it."

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that the Harlem Renaissance was also know as the "New Negro" movement, a term coined in 1925 by sociologist Alain LeRoy Locke. In his book by the same title, Locke described the northward and urban migration of blacks as "something like a spiritual emancipation" which had a direct influence on the creation and development of the Harlem Renaissance.

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that the Impressionist movement was named by journalist Louis Leroy in his response to viewing the Monet work titled "Impression, Sunrise".

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that the Impressionists were not initially received very well by the establishment. Reviews were at times abusive: La Figaro, 1876, "Five or six lunatics, one of them a woman, have met here to exhibit their works. Someone should tell M. Pissarro forcibly that trees are never violet, the sky is never the colour of fresh butter, that nowhere on earth are things to be seen as he paints them."

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"But, after all, the aim of art is to create space - space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live." Frank Stella

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that Neo-Classicism is regarded as the advent of the reproduction. This movement was the first to copy or replicate past works in an odd attempt to push art forward

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that the Op Art movement was named by a 1964 Time Magazine article, and the term came into use at the 1965 Museum of Modern Art (New York) exhibition of Op Artists called "The Responsive Eye".

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that the legend and fame achieved by Pop Art master Andy Warhol was unprecedented by any other visual artist with the exception of Pablo Picasso. Warhol and Picasso as personalities at times transcended their own art and became icons in their own right garnering international fame, making Warhol's famous statement that "everyone gets 15 minutes of fame" very fitting.

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that the Post-Impressionist movement, like the Impressionist movement, was named by journalist/art critic. Roger Fry coined "Post-Impressionism" as the title of an exhibition at the Grafton Galleries, London, in 1910-1911: Manet and the Post-Impressionists.

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that Charles Dickens despised the Pre-Raphaelites so much that he called their work in his periodical Household Words, "mean, odious, revolting and repulsive."

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that "Realism" as a movement actually has nothing to do with how something looks, or as if it looks "real". The movement is about the "realness" of the subject not if the "real" subject actually looks "realistic". Got that?

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that Leonardo da Vinci is commonly regarded as the ultimate Renaissance thinker. Because he spent so much time working in his notebooks on schematics for flying machines and the like, his artistic output was shockingly small. Even more amazing, many of the limited number of works that he did produce are regarded as some of the finest art ever created. (See: The Last Supper, Mona Lisa)

did you know...

that Spanish painter Francisco Goya was moderately successful and had achieved some notoriety prior to 1792. However, in that year he developed a mysterious and traumatic illness that left him deaf. The onset of his deafness also marked the turning point in his career and creative sense. Great success soon followed the departure of his hearing as he would become one of the greatest painters of the Romantic era.

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that the quintessential Surrealist painter, Salvador Dali, was actually expelled from the Surrealist group in 1939. Even with all of the fame and publicity that Dali brought the group, they simply felt his odd political interests (his support of General Franco) and his fascination with Adolf Hitler were just too irrational for this irrational movement.