Art dealer Ambroise Vollard was acquainted with many of the foremost artists of the early 20th century, and as a result he appears often in their work. Above are portraits by Cézanne, Renoir, and Bonnard, and he sat also for Rouault, Forain, Vallotton, Bernard, and Picasso.
Picasso wrote, “The most beautiful woman who ever lived never had her portrait painted, drawn, or engraved any oftener than Vollard.”
chirurgic
adj. manual; relating to work done by the hand
armillary
adj. consisting of hoops or rings
operosity
n. laboriousness, painstaking endeavour; elaborateness
idoneous
adj. appropriate; fit; suitable; apt
From Hungarian typographer Peter Virágvölgyi, a beautiful instance of “meta-calligraphy.”
Thomas Deininger makes assemblages of trash that take on new meaning when viewed from a particular angle — offering a new perspective on environmental degradation.
The first nonhuman artist to be given her own art exhibition was a female pig rescued from a South African slaughterhouse in 2016. When her keeper, Joanne Lefson, noticed that the pig ate everything in her stall except some paintbrushes, she taught her to hold a brush in her mouth and apply paint to an easel, and Lefson could sell the resulting works to raise funds for the sanctuary.
Pigcasso’s works have been exhibited in the Netherlands, Germany, the United Kingdom, and China. In 2021 German collector Peter Esser paid £20,000 for her painting Wild and Free, a record price for an artwork created by an animal. Altogether the pig’s sales have raised more than $1 million. She died in March 2024, one day before Jane Goodall could arrive to meet her.
The Greek architect Dinocrates proposed carving Mount Athos into a colossal man who held a city in one hand and with the other poured a river into the sea.
Alexander the Great rejected the proposal because (among other things!) it would have required importing grain by ship rather than growing it near the city.
When old Green, the frame-maker, had finished the frame for Holman Hunt’s The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple, Hunt went to see it and told him it was quite satisfactory. ‘Ah,’ said Green, ‘but you’ll see the picture will set it off amazingly.’
— Henry Holiday, Reminiscences of My Life, 1914
Franz Liszt’s 1851 étude “La Campanella” is one of the most technically demanding pieces ever written for piano.
In bar 102, below, the left hand has to jump 35 half-steps, nearly three octaves, in the space of a sixteenth note.
That’s about 46 centimeters.
Rinaldo Carnielo’s sculpture Tenax Vitae stands in the Galleria Rinaldo Carnielo in Florence.
After meeting the sculptor in 1893, Helen Zimmern observed that “for him, the shadow of death pervades all existence,” but “he cares not one jot whether his statues find purchasers so long as he himself is satisfied with the results.”
This just caught my eye: In his manuscripts and notebooks, Alexander Pushkin often sketched the characters he was describing, as well as friends, family, romantic partners, and other literary figures. One biographer calls the drawings Pushkin’s graphic diary. This page is from his 1822 poem The Prisoner of the Caucasus.
Nearly every station in the London Underground contains an enamel plaque depicting a labyrinth. The collection were installed in 2013 by artist Mark Wallinger to mark the system’s 150th anniversary. Each of the 270 black and white designs is unique to its location, and all of them are posted in publicly accessible locations, so visitors can examine them directly, tracing the path with a finger. They’re numbered according to the route taken by the contestants in a 2009 Guinness World Records challenge to visit all stations in the system in the fastest time.
A list of all 270 labyrinths is here.
