Art-e-Facts Archives – Page 3 of 3

Art-e-Facts: 5 Random Art Facts IV

June 23, 2009 By Wendy Campbell

1. Of all the writing and drawing materials, paper is the most widely used around the world. Its name derives from papyrus, the material used by the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans. It is believed that in 105AD, the Chinese court official, Ts’ai Lun, invented paper-making from textile waste using rags. This can be considered as the birth of paper as we know it today.

2. On the morning of Aug. 21, 1911, the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre. The theft wasn’t noticed until the next day. Once discovered, the Louvre was shut down for nine days, the French border was sealed, and departing ships and trains searched. Thousands of people lined up at the Louvre just to see the empty spot where the painting once hung. Over two years later, the thief was found – Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian house painter and carpenter living in France who had once worked at the Louvre.

3. A student of Eastern religions and Rosicrucianism, Klein’s quest for pure color led him to paint in monochrome. He worked with a chemist to develop his “International Klein Blue” which was made from pure colour pigment and a binding medium. Klein considered monochrome painting to be an “open window to freedom, and the possibility of being immersed in the immeasurable existence of color.”

4. Adobe Photoshop, considered to be one of the greatest image manipulation and editing software programs, was first introduced in 1987 with the Mac application called Display, created by Thomas Knoll. In 1988, Display was renamed ImagePro and then finally Adobe licensed it as Photoshop. The origin of the name Photoshop is uncertain, but legend has it that it was suggested by a potential publisher during a demo, and it stuck.

5. Pocket art is not a new idea. Miniature portraits were popular from the 16th to the early 19th centuries where small paintings were carried as remembrances of loved ones, and paintings on personal items such as jewelry and snuff box covers. With the invention of early photography in the 19th century, however, miniature paintings fell out of popularity.

Sources: Paper Online, Time, Centre Pompidou, Computer Arts, DAF

Art-e-Facts: 5 Random Art Facts III

June 10, 2009 By Wendy Campbell

1. Robert De Niro’s father – Robert De Niro senior, was a leading postwar artist. Throughout the fifties he exhibited at the Charles Egan Gallery alongside artists such as Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Philip Guston. Today, his work is on display in numerous major American museums.

2. A tessellation is a collection or tiling of shapes that fills the plane with no overlaps and no gaps. Tessellations can be seen throughout art history, from ancient architecture to modern art. Tessellations frequently appeared in the art of M. C. Escher.

3. The earliest known European cave paintings date to Aurignacian, about 32,000 years ago. The Cave paintings were drawn with red and yellow ochre, hematite, manganese oxide and charcoal. Some theories guess that they may have been a way of transmitting information, while other theories give them a religious or ceremonial purpose.

4. Henri Rousseau is known for his scenes of exotic jungles and animals. In fact, Rousseau never left France. His paintings were based on images adapted from printed sources, and from visits to the Paris Natural History Museum, and the Jardin des Plantes, a botanical garden and zoo.

5. Labeled a “degenerate” artist by the Nazis, more than 600 of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s works were confiscated from German museums and were either destroyed or sold. The psychological suffering caused by the Nazi’s rejection, the confiscation and destruction of his works led to Kirchner’s suicide on June 15, 1938.

Sources: Hackett-Freedman, Wikipedia, Wikipedia, MOMA, National Gallery of Art

Art-e-Facts: 5 Random Art Facts II

May 30, 2009 By Wendy Campbell

1. Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream was vandalized with lightly scrawled graffiti that reads in Norwegian, “Could only have been painted by a madman.” It is unclear whether it was Munch himself or a visitor at an early exhibit that wrote the words.

2. Vincent van Gogh was not a successful artist during his lifetime and sold only one painting while he was alive. “The Red Vineyard” was sold to impressionist painter Anna Boch for 400 francs a few months before his death.

3. The pencil is a descendant of the ancient Romans who wrote with a thin metal rod called a stylus, which produced a light marking. Other early styluses were made of lead. The core of a pencil is still called the “lead” though it is now made from graphite.

4. Salvador Dali painted “The Persistence of Memory” in 1931 after seeing some Camembert cheese melting in the heat on a hot summer day. Later that night, he dreamt of clocks melting on a landscape. The small work (24 cm x 33 cm) is one of the most famous of the surrealist paintings.

5. The term ‘Art Nouveau’ is French for ‘new art’. The name originated from the Maison de l’Art Nouveau (House of New Art), a gallery opened in 1895 by German art dealer Samuel Bing in Paris. It is also known as Jugendstil – German for ‘youth style’, and named after the magazine Jugend that was founded in 1896 by Georg Hirth.

Sources: NY Times, Van Gogh Gallery, Pencils.com, MOMA, Wikipedia

Art-E-Facts: 5 Random Art Facts

May 23, 2009 By Wendy Campbell

1. The term Impressionism originated from the title of a Claude Monet work, Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant). Critic Louis Leroy coined the term in a satiric review published in Le Charivari in the 1860s.

2. The colour yellow, when seen from a distance or when used with a dark background, is easiest to see, but when used alone, it is the most difficult color for eyes to process. Research has shown that people lose their tempers more often in yellow rooms and infants cry more when surrounded by yellow.

3. In 1961, Matisse’s Le Bateau (The Boat) hung upside-down for 47 days in the Museum of Modern Art, New York – none of the 116,000 visitors had noticed, including the art dealer Pierre Matisse, the artist’s own son.

4. The first permanent colour photograph, was conceived by James Clerk Maxwell in 1861. Thomas Sutton, inventor of the single-lens reflex camera, photographed a tartan ribbon three times, each time with a different colour filter over the lens.

5. The Louvre was originally constructed as the fortress of Philippe Auguste in 1190. Charles V oversaw the first modernisation process in the 1300s which resulted in what was to be the beginnings of one of the largest palace complexes in the world. Located on the right bank of the Seine River in Paris, the Louvre is the most visited Museum in the world.