Art
Naturally
Someone once asked Jean Cocteau, “Suppose your house were on fire and you could remove only one thing. What would you take?”
Cocteau considered, then said, “I would take the fire.”
Veiled Symbolism
Finland’s national painting is Hugo Simberg’s The Wounded Angel.
Simberg refused to explain its meaning … but it was his favorite work.
The Two Cultures
James McNeill Whistler failed his West Point chemistry exam.
“If silicon had been a gas,” he said later, “I should have been a major general.”
What’s In a Name?
PIET MONDRIAN is an anagram of I PAINT MODERN.
Careful!
Before conductors used batons, they kept time by banging a long staff against the floor. In January 1687, Jean-Baptiste Lully was conducting a Te Deum in this way when he struck his toe. The wound turned gangrenous, the gangrene spread — and he died.
The “Cat Raphael”
Born in Bern in 1768, the autistic Gottfried Mind could barely write his name, but on seeing a cat in a painting by his drawing-master, he immediately said, “That is no cat!” The master asked whether he thought he could do better, and Mind produced a drawing so good that the master copied it.
Thereafter Mind worked surrounded by cats, painting them with a remarkable eye for their individual character and occasionally carving them from chestnuts for sport. In the work of other artists it’s said that he liked nothing but the lions of Rubens, Rembrandt, and Paulus Potter, and he looked down even on celebrated cats by Cornelius Vischer and Wenzel Hollar.
“First and last,” said Goethe, “what is demanded of genius is love of truth.”
See Other Canvas
Picasso’s full name was Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Clito Ruiz y Picasso.
“Dürer in the Forest”
Etching by Hungarian artist István Orosz.
Oscar Wilde said, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.”
Unquote
“See what will happen if you don’t stop biting your fingernails?” — Will Rogers, to his niece on seeing the Venus de Milo