Intellect PlusVisual artists
833 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 13 of 14.
Italy's Marche takes its name from a medieval word for borderlandMarche, or the Marches, is named after the medieval marca, a frontier zone of the Holy Roman Empire. This hilly Adriatic region gave the world Raphael, Rossini, Leopardi and Maria…
The Master of Arts began as a medieval Parisian licence to teachA Master of Arts was once literally a qualification to be a master: the University of Paris granted a teaching licence, the licentia docendi, to graduates ready to instruct others…
In Midnight in Paris, even the 1920s geniuses long for an earlier ageWoody Allen's 2011 comedy sends a frustrated screenwriter back to 1920s Paris every night at midnight, to drink with Hemingway and hand his novel to Gertrude Stein. The twist: the…
Plato thought a painted bed stood two steps away from the truthFor Plato, a painter's bed was a copy of a copy. God made the idea of a bed, a carpenter imitated that idea, and the artist imitated the carpenter. That argument about mimesis, th…
Leonora Carrington refused to be a Surrealist muse and painted insteadPresented at court as a debutante, Leonora Carrington brought an Aldous Huxley novel rather than be sold, as she put it, to the highest bidder. She ran off to France with Max Erns…
Lime mortar slowly turns itself back into limestone inside a wallBake limestone above 900 degrees Celsius and it becomes fiercely caustic quicklime. Add water and it calms into slaked lime. Spread that between bricks and, over years, it drinks …
The same trick that cast 6,500-year-old gold now makes dental crownsSculpt a figure in wax, bury it in a heat-proof shell, melt the wax away and pour metal into the empty space. Goldsmiths at Bulgaria's Varna Necropolis did it around 6,500 years a…
Karl Lagerfeld bought his own label back for one francWhen Karl Lagerfeld arrived at Chanel in 1983, insiders called it a near-dead brand. He revived it, ran Fendi at the same time, launched a namesake label, and in 1997 reacquired t…
Katherine Mansfield reshaped the short story and died at just 34A banker's daughter from Wellington, Katherine Mansfield trained as a cellist, fled to London at 19 and became a key modernist voice. Tuberculosis struck in 1917. In the five year…
Kiefer Sutherland once skipped a lead role to go skiingBefore Jack Bauer made him television's best-paid actor, Kiefer Sutherland was a teen vampire and a bully in Stand by Me. He also turned down the lead in My Own Private Idaho with…
The 'von' in Lars von Trier's name was his own inventionLars Trier gave himself the aristocratic 'von' at 25, possibly mocking directors like Erich von Stroheim who had done the same. He went on to co-write the stripped-down Dogme 95 r…
From Vogue cover girl to front-line war photographer: Lee MillerCondé Nast pulled a 19-year-old Lee Miller back from an oncoming car, and months later she was on the cover of Vogue. She then crossed to the other side of the lens, shaping Surre…
Scotland abolished illegitimacy as a legal status only in 2006For centuries a child born to unmarried parents could be barred from inheriting land, from priesthood and from a parent's nationality. Most of those barriers have fallen within li…
Mocked as England's ugliest man, John Wilkes still charmed crowds into a fight for libertyJohn Wilkes had a squint, a jutting jaw and a name as the ugliest man in England, yet he boasted he could talk away his face in half an hour. That charm made him a radical hero, a…
From Queens dropout to the director who launched Marvel's film universeJon Favreau quit college a few credits short, did improv in Chicago and played a clown on Seinfeld. Twelve years after his first screen role, he directed Iron Man, the 2008 hit th…
The world's richest museum started life as a copy of a Roman villaIn 1974 Jean Paul Getty opened his museum inside a replica of Herculaneum's Villa of the Papyri, built on his Malibu estate. Eight years later it inherited US$1.2 billion and beca…
Jin calligrapher whose Orchid Pavilion preface became scriptureWang Xizhi (c.303–c.361), courtesy name Yishao, is traditionally crowned China’s greatest calligrapher. His Lantingji xu—Preface to the Orchid Pavilion Gathering—plus letters and …
Law professor who heard colour as piano keysWassily Kandinsky (16 December 1866 – 13 December 1944) quit a Moscow law-and-economics career at thirty for Munich studios and became a pioneer of Western abstraction. He called …- The Spirit’s creator who named the graphic novelWill Eisner (6 March 1917 – 3 January 2005) entered comic books at their birth and made The Spirit (1940–1952) a weekly lab for layout and mood. In 1978 A Contract with God helped…
- London’s engraver who turned morals into comic stripsWilliam Hogarth (10 November 1697 – 26 October 1764) made “modern moral subjects”—serialized paintings and prints such as A Harlot’s Progress and A Rake’s Progress—that mass audie…
Little Nemo’s draftsman who commanded a vaudeville dinosaurWinsor McCay (c.26 September 1869 – 26 July 1934) drew Little Nemo’s dream architecture and, as Silas, Dream of the Rarebit Fiend. Between 1911 and 1921 he self-funded about ten a…
Oran’s prodigy who put women in Le SmokingYves Saint Laurent (1 August 1936 – 1 June 2008), raised in Oran, Algeria, took over Dior at twenty-one, founded his own house in 1962, and became the last grand couturier of the …
Baghdad-born Dame who bent architecture into curvesDame Zaha Hadid (31 October 1950 – 31 March 2016) was the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize (2004) and took the Stirling Prize in 2010 and 2011. The Guardian’s “Queen of Curve…
A Ming prince who painted with one primordial lineShitao, born Zhu Ruoji about 1642 into the Ming imperial clan, survived the 1644 Manchu collapse by entering Buddhist orders as Yuan Ji. Later known as the Bitter Gourd Monk, he b…
The artillery engineer who defined architectural beautyVitruvius, active about 80–70 BC to after 15 BC, left De architectura—the only complete architectural treatise from antiquity. He demanded firmitas, utilitas, venustas—strength, u…
Bauhaus founder who turned factories into modern iconsWalter Gropius (18 May 1883 – 5 July 1969) founded the Bauhaus in Weimar and ranks among modernism’s architects. From Peter Behrens’s office—alongside Mies and Le Corbusier—he and…
Cézanne built Cubism's bridge with stubborn Aix brushstrokesPaul Cézanne, 19 January 1839 to 22 October 1906, turned Post-Impressionist color planes into a new pictorial grammar between Impressionism and Cubism. Dealers laughed for decades…- Gauguin left the Paris Bourse for Tahiti's saturated colorEugène Henri Paul Gauguin, 7 June 1848 to 8 May 1903, quit a booming stockbroker career after the 1882 crash and remade Post-Impressionist and Symbolist painting with Breton, Mart…
- Klee taught Bauhaus color while drawing like a childPaul Klee, 18 December 1879 to 29 June 1940, filtered Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism into a dry-humored, musical draftsmanship. With Wassily Kandinsky he taught at the Bauh…
- Rubens painted Europe's courts and negotiated their treatiesSir Peter Paul Rubens, 28 June 1577 to 30 May 1640, ran Antwerp's most powerful Baroque workshop while serving as a knighted diplomat for Spain and England. Movement, color, and C…
Phidias stamped Classical Greece onto gold, ivory, and bronzePhidias, active about 480 to 430 BC, designed the Olympian Zeus counted among the Seven Wonders and the Acropolis Athenas that defined Periclean Athens. No securely original statu…
Johnson sold the International Style—then built a glass housePhilip Cortelyou Johnson, 8 July 1906 to 25 January 2005, curated MoMA's 1932 International Style show, later designed the New Canaan Glass House and postmodern AT&T tower at 550 …
Renoir painted pleasure after years too poor to buy paintPierre-Auguste Renoir, 25 February 1841 to 3 December 1919, helped invent Impressionist sociability and was dubbed the last heir of a Rubens-to-Watteau line of feminine beauty. Fa…- Mondrian boiled painting down to red, yellow, blue, and gridPieter Cornelis Mondriaan, known after 1911 as Piet Mondrian, lived from 7 March 1872 to 1 February 1944 and helped found De Stijl with Theo van Doesburg. Neo-Plasticism limited h…
Bruegel made peasants and landscapes as grand as altarpiecesPieter Bruegel the Elder, born about 1525–1530 and dead 9 September 1569, turned genre scenes and wide landscapes into large-scale Flemish Renaissance statements. After Italy he d…
Raphael packed three careers into thirty-seven yearsRaffaello Sanzio da Urbino, born 28 March or 6 April 1483 and dead on his birthday in 1520 aged thirty-seven, joined Leonardo and Michelangelo as a High Renaissance pyramid peak. …
Loewy streamlined everything from locomotives to cigarette packsRaymond Loewy, 5 November 1893 to 14 July 1986, emigrated from Paris to New York and became Time's 31 October 1949 cover star as industrial design's public face. Shell, Exxon, TWA…- Magritte made ordinary objects refuse to behaveRené Magritte, 21 November 1898 to 15 August 1967, placed familiar objects in unexpected settings to question how pictures relate to reality. The Belgian Surrealist spent years pa…
- Dalí melted clocks and turned eccentricity into a brandSalvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 11 May 1904 to 23 January 1989, joined the Surrealists in 1929 and finished The Persistence of Memory in August 1931. Figueres-bor…
A tsar's railcar darkroom colorized an empire before film couldSergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky, 30 August 1863 to 27 September 1944, hauled three-plate color photography across Nicholas II's realms from about 1909 to 1915. Chemist-trained…
Zen monk Sesshū forged Japanese ink painting in Ming ChinaSesshū Tōyō, about 1420 to 26 August 1506, trained as a Kyoto Zen monk under Tenshō Shūbun before a 1467–1470 Ming voyage remade his brush. Winter Landscape and seasonal scrolls m…
Miyamoto turned a Kyoto cave walk into global game designShigeru Miyamoto, born 16 November 1952 in Sonobe, Kyoto, joined Nintendo in 1977 after showing toys to Hiroshi Yamauchi. Donkey Kong rescued unsold Radar Scope cabinets; a 1985 M…
Escher drew infinity while calling himself no mathematicianMaurits Cornelis Escher, born 17 June 1898 in Leeuwarden and dead 27 March 1972, filled woodcuts and lithographs with impossible stairs and endless tilings. Art critics long shrug…
Michelangelo finished David before thirty and still reshaped RomeMichelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, 6 March 1475 to 18 February 1564, sculpted the Pietà and David before age thirty, then frescoed Genesis on the Sistine ceiling and The …
Janissary engineer Sinan became the Ottoman MichelangeloMimar Sinan, born Joseph around 1488–1490 near Kayseri and dead 17 July 1588, rose from Janissary engineer to chief architect for Suleiman the Magnificent, Selim II, and Murad III…- Poussin fled the French court to keep painting in RomeNicolas Poussin, June 1594 to 19 November 1665, led classical French Baroque painting yet spent most of his career in Rome for Italian and French collectors. A brief turn as First…
- Rockwell sold America itself on magazine covers for decadesNorman Percevel Rockwell, 3 February 1894 to 8 November 1978, painted more than four thousand works and 322 Saturday Evening Post covers across forty-seven years. Critics called h…
Tezuka rewired manga and still finished medical schoolOsamu Tezuka, 3 November 1928 to 9 February 1989, earned nicknames from Father to God of Manga after New Treasure Island ignited a postwar boom in 1947. Astro Boy, Princess Knight…- Niemeyer curved Brasília into a capital of concreteOscar Niemeyer, 15 December 1907 to 5 December 2012, designed Brasília's civic core and helped shape the United Nations headquarters in New York. Over seventy-eight years and roug…
- Picasso co-founded Cubism and never stayed in one stylePablo Ruiz Picasso, born in Málaga on 25 October 1881 and dead in France on 8 April 1973, helped invent Cubism, constructed sculpture, and collage. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 19…
Whistler signed paintings with a stinging butterflyJames Abbott McNeill Whistler (10 July 1834 – 17 July 1903) left America for Europe and preached art for art's sake. He titled canvases arrangements, harmonies, and nocturnes, sig…
A self-taught writer killed the expressway through SoHoJane Isabel Jacobs (4 May 1916 – 25 April 2006) had no planning degree, yet The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) called urban renewal a pseudoscience. From Greenwich…- Miró tried to assassinate bourgeois painting itselfJoan Miró i Ferrà (20 April 1893 – 25 December 1983) turned Catalan childhood symbols into Surrealist signs. From Barcelona's Gothic quarter to Paris automatism, he mocked convent…
- Constable made Dedham Vale feel like a private religionJohn Constable (11 June 1776 – 31 March 1837) painted Suffolk's Stour valley with such intensity the district is still called Constable Country. The Hay Wain (1821) and other six-…
- Malevich's Black Square declared painting without objectsKazimir Severinovich Malevich (23 February 1879 – 15 May 1935) founded Suprematism in 1915 as pure geometry on monochrome fields. Black Square at Petrograd's Last Futurist Exhibit…
Le Corbusier rebuilt cities as machines for livingCharles-Édouard Jeanneret (6 October 1887 – 27 August 1965), styling himself Le Corbusier from 1920, pioneered modern architecture across five decades and seven countries later ga…
Alberti wrote the Renaissance rulebook for buildings and picturesBy the time he was twenty, Leon Battista Alberti had written a comedy that readers accepted as a genuine ancient text. The Genoa-born priest (1404–1472) went on to explain perspec…- Leonardo left fewer than twenty-five major paintings—and remade artA notary's illegitimate son from a Tuscan hill town left fewer than 25 major paintings, several unfinished, yet one of them, the Mona Lisa, is counted the most famous picture on E…
Kahn's heavy concrete made modern rooms feel ancientAt three, a boy on the Estonian island of Saaremaa scooped glowing coals into his apron and scarred his face for life. As Louis Kahn (1901–1974), he later raised massive buildings…
Mies turned "less is more" into steel-and-glass destinyMaria Ludwig Michael Mies, who grew up in his father's stone-carving shop in Aachen, built himself a grander surname: the Dutch "van der" plus his mother's maiden name, since Germ…