Intellect PlusVisual arts
680 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 10 of 12.
A bowling-shirt machine helped turn screen printing into the T-shirt boomIn 1960 Michael Vasilantone began selling a rotating press built to print team names on bowling shirts. It was soon redirected to a new craze, the printed T-shirt. Today garments …
Engineering makes a product work once; quality assurance makes it work every timeLong before factories, medieval guilds policed the standard of their members' goods, and an English king sent an overseer to inspect his ships. Quality assurance grew from those r…
Fassbinder made more than 40 films before dying at 37Rainer Werner Fassbinder often skipped rehearsals and kept the first take. Working that fast with a loyal troupe, he could finish four or five low-budget films a year, and in bare…
Why nearly every French king was crowned in one Gothic cathedralReims Cathedral rose unusually fast after a fire in 1210, partly because its builders used stones cut to standard sizes. The church already had centuries of royal prestige behind …
Retrofuturism is nostalgia for a future that never actually arrivedFlying cars, robot butlers and holidays among the stars were once confidently predicted. Retrofuturism takes those old forecasts and treats them as a style, blending vintage looks…
A child's taunt about Mickey Mouse launched Roy Lichtenstein's Pop ArtIn 1961 one of Roy Lichtenstein's sons pointed at a Mickey Mouse comic and bet his father couldn't paint that well. The result, Look Mickey, used hard outlines and hand-painted pr…
Mexico's rain-soaked Tabasco holds the heartland of the Olmec civilizationUnlike most of Mexico, Tabasco gets heavy rain all year, around 2,550 millimetres on average, so rainforest and wetlands cover much of it. The south-eastern state also holds La Ve…
The soft green rock that may have cradled the first life on EarthSerpentinite forms when seawater is forced deep into rock beneath the ocean floor. The reaction releases hydrogen, feeds microbes far underground, and runs most of the chemistry n…
Stalin built seven Moscow skyscrapers so foreign visitors would not sneerIn 1946 Stalin decided Moscow needed skyscrapers, reportedly fearing that visiting foreigners would compare it unfavourably with capitalist cities. The result was seven towers bui…
The avant-garde group whose slogans covered the walls of France in 1968The Situationist International lasted only from 1957 to 1972, but its ideas escaped the group. Blending libertarian Marxism with the rebellious spirit of Dada and Surrealism, it a…
Frank Lloyd Wright's only museum took 15 years and 700 sketchesHilla von Rebay wanted a temple of spirit for abstract art, and in 1943 she and Solomon Guggenheim wrote to Frank Lloyd Wright, although she assumed he was dead. He was 76 and ver…
Why red is the hardest colour to get right in a stained-glass windowRed glass coloured strongly enough to hold its hue looks almost black at the thickness a window needs to survive the wind. Glassmakers solved it by fusing a thin skin of red onto …
From Egyptian tombs to Maya plazas, upright slabs of stone kept the recordsA stele is simply a slab, usually taller than it is wide, set upright and covered in carving, painting or text. Egypt and Mesopotamia raised them, while China and the Maya seem to…
Wounds of the crucifixion on living bodies: the strange history of stigmataIn 1224, two years before his death, Francis of Assisi went to Mount La Verna for a forty-day fast and, according to legend, left bearing wounds like Christ's. He is widely counte…
The lowest-ranked genre in painting was also among the best-sellingStill life sat on the bottom rung of the traditional hierarchy of painting genres, yet buyers loved it. Its roots run from Egyptian tombs, where painted food was meant to become r…
Painters needed cheaper mirrors before the self-portrait could really take offAn Egyptian sculptor named Bak carved his own likeness around 1365 BC, yet self-portraits only became common in Europe from the mid-15th century. Better, cheaper mirrors and the r…
Caligari's villain was modelled on a real army psychiatristCarl Mayer faked madness to dodge service in the First World War and was grilled by a military psychiatrist. That man became the model for Dr. Caligari, the sinister hypnotist of …
A three-week sanatorium visit stretches to seven years in Thomas Mann's great novelHans Castorp climbs to a Swiss clinic to see his sick cousin for three weeks and does not come down for seven years. Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain spends almost half its length…
Bulgakov burned his masterpiece, just as his hero the Master doesIn 1930 Mikhail Bulgakov threw the first draft of his novel about the devil in Moscow into the fire, convinced he had no future as a Soviet writer. He started again, kept revising…
Picasso cut the Weeping Woman out of Guernica, then painted her obsessivelyWhile painting Guernica, Picasso sketched a weeping woman and slipped her into a corner of the mural, then scraped her out, fearing she would upstage the other figures. She would …
Why a perfect photograph of the Mona Lisa still lacks something, according to BenjaminWriting in Paris exile in 1935, Walter Benjamin argued that even a flawless copy misses one thing: the original's presence in a particular time and place. He called that quality t…
Tiki bars were invented in Hollywood by a former rum-runner from TexasThe Pacific never produced a tiki bar. The style began in 1933 when a young man with a rum-running past opened Don's Beachcomber in Hollywood, mixing Cantonese food, Caribbean rum…- In 2009 hackers from 4chan rigged Time's influence poll to spell a jokeWhen Time let readers vote in 2009, the winner was Christopher Poole, founder of the message board 4chan, with more than 16.7 million votes. Organised pranksters had gamed the tal…
Takashi Murakami trained in classical Japanese painting, then put his art on handbagsA Tokyo painter with a doctorate in Nihonga ended up designing Louis Vuitton bags, Kanye West's Graduation cover and plush toys. Takashi Murakami argues that Japan never drew a ha…
An amulet wards off evil, but a talisman is meant to attract luckPeople often treat the words as twins, yet they point in opposite directions. An amulet defends its owner against harm, while a talisman is supposed to draw good fortune in. For o…
The Avalanches stitched a classic album from roughly 3,500 vinyl samplesA Melbourne band built its debut out of crates of second-hand records, then took sixteen years to follow it up. Since I Left You, assembled by the group's own estimate from about …
Transgressive art only works if there is a line to crossA shop-bought urinal signed 'R. Mutt' was refused by exhibition organisers in 1917, and Marcel Duchamp quit their society in protest. That porcelain object became a founding examp…
An ancient painter lost a contest by trying to pull back painted curtainsZeuxis painted grapes so lifelike that birds swooped down to peck them. Then his rival Parrhasius invited him to draw aside a pair of ragged curtains, and Zeuxis reached for fabri…
Ugly Betty was so costly to lose that California changed its tax lawWhen Ugly Betty packed up its Los Angeles sets and moved back to New York for a state tax credit, local crew lost their jobs. A California assemblyman answered with the so-called …
Two dreams over lunch became the founding film of surrealist cinemaLuis Buñuel told Salvador Dalí about a dream of a cloud cutting the moon like a razor. Dalí replied with his own: a hand swarming with ants. Buñuel declared they had their film. U…
The humble dollar bill carries the oldest design in American walletsThe back of the US one-dollar bill has barely changed since 1935, and the front since 1963, giving it the oldest design of any American note still in use. Notes of five dollars an…
Vaporwave turned elevator music and Windows graphics into an internet art movementTake smooth jazz or a forgotten 1980s pop hook, slow it to a crawl, drown it in reverb and loop it past the point of usefulness. Pair it with Greek statues, glitchy 1990s web grap…
Leonardo fixed a Roman architect's maths by moving the square's centreVitruvius claimed a man with limbs outstretched fits both a circle and a square centred on his navel. Artists tried and failed to draw it. Around 1490 Leonardo da Vinci made it wo…
The Yorkshire chemist's son who took kitchen sink realism to the OscarsTony Richardson, born in Shipley in 1928, helped launch Britain's angry young men on stage, then filmed their working-class stories in grainy realism. In 1964 his romp Tom Jones w…
Tracey Emin went from Britart provocateur to the Royal Academy's drawing professorIn 1999 Tracey Emin put her own unmade bed, stained sheets and all, into the Tate as a Turner Prize nominee. Twelve years later the Royal Academy made her Professor of Drawing, on…
Trajan's Column tells a war story almost nobody could actually readA stone ribbon 190 metres long spirals 23 times around Trajan's Column in Rome, packed with 2,662 carved figures. Yet tall libraries hemmed it in so tightly that no Roman could fo…
The Winter Palace has 1,500 rooms and began as a log cabinRussia's tsars governed almost a sixth of the planet's land from a green-and-white palace on the Neva with 1,886 doors and 117 staircases. Yet the first royal home on that spot wa…
The oldest securely dated printed scroll was a gift made for free distribution in 868Printing in East Asia grew out of Buddhist belief that copying sacred words earned merit. Early printed charms were buried rather than read. The Diamond Sutra found at Dunhuang, 1…
Many famous woodcuts were never cut by the artist whose name they carryFor centuries a woodcut was a team effort. The artist drew the picture, a specialist carver called a formschneider cut away everything else, often destroying the drawing in the pr…
Yama, the Hindu god of death, started out as the first man to dieBefore he was a buffalo-riding judge with a noose for catching souls, Yama in the oldest Vedic hymns was simply the first mortal who died. Having found the road to the other world…
Yayoi Kusama's famous polka dots began as hallucinations she had at tenAs a child in Matsumoto, Yayoi Kusama saw fields of dots, talking flowers and fabric patterns that multiplied until they swallowed her. She called the feeling self-obliteration an…
The first YouTube Poop was uploaded months before YouTube itself existedA chopped-up Super Mario cartoon, stitched together in Windows Movie Maker and posted to SheezyArt on 22 December 2004, is counted as the first YouTube Poop. The deliberately crud…- Wampum beads carried treaties, names and titles long before colonists spent them as cashShell beads drilled from whelk and quahog were how Northeastern Woodlands peoples recorded treaties, confirmed a chief's authority and handed a dead person's name to a successor. …
- Bouguereau painted 822 known works, won every honour, then fell out of fashionIn his lifetime William-Adolphe Bouguereau was the model salon painter: prized in France and America, showered with official honours and paid top prices. The Impressionists loathe…
- Floating-world prints were merchant-class home décorUkiyo-e means pictures of the floating world—not courtly myth, but kabuki stars, courtesans, and travel views bought by Edo merchants legally ranked at society's bottom. Full-colo…
The Louvre left Venus armless on purposeFound by a farmer on Melos on April 8, 1820, the Venus de Milo arrived at the Louvre with missing arms—and stayed that way. Quatremère de Quincy argued against the era's usual ful…
Willendorf's limestone Venus may have crossed the AlpsOnly 11.1 centimetres tall and tinted with red ochre, the Venus of Willendorf sat in Austrian soil for about thirty thousand years. The oolite she is carved from is not local—2022…
Visual arts once excluded crafts from the word artistToday visual arts stretch from painting and sculpture to design, crafts, and architecture. For centuries in the West, artist often meant only fine-art painters and sculptors. The …- Americas' oldest known art may be a carved mammoth boneNear Vero Beach, Florida, a mineralized bone—possibly mammoth—bears a walking megafauna profile cut before the bone fossilized, more than ten thousand years ago. From that Paleo-I…
England turned tinted drawings into a national watercolor artFor generations Western painters treated watercolor as a sketching tool, even calling finished sheets drawings into the twentieth century. In late-Georgian and Victorian England, …
Early websites were built with tables and spacer GIFsTim Berners-Lee proposed a global hypertext project at CERN in 1989; by November 1992 the lab's site was live. Designers then bent HTML tables and blank GIF spacers into multi-col…- The oldest wood sculpture is about twelve thousand years oldStone and bronze outlast fire, insects, and rot, so woodcarving's role in art history is often invisible even where it dominated—as in much African, Oceanic, Chinese, and Japanese…
Symbolists painted the Ideal, not the muddy streetLate nineteenth-century French and Belgian poets refused to catalogue ordinary life. They wanted absolute truths dressed as metaphors. Jean Moréas named the movement in an 1886 ma…
Taxidermy means arranging skin, not stuffing ragsThe Greek roots taxis and derma translate simply as arrangement of skin. Mounts can record extinct species for museums or memorialize household pets. Victorian England turned the …
Farmers digging a well found China's buried clay armyIn March 1974, near Xi'an, local farmers struck clay fragments while digging for water. Archaeologists then uncovered thousands of life-size terracotta warriors buried with Qin Sh…
Cloth built empires long before it hung on gallery wallsFrom Tyrian purple to Silk Road cargos, textiles were trade itself. Flax wrapped mummies by 6500 BCE; cotton spread from India after 327 BCE. The Industrial Revolution's cotton gi…
Apollo 17 caught Earth looking like a glass marbleOn 7 December 1972, roughly 29,400 kilometers from Earth, an Apollo 17 Hasselblad froze Africa from the Mediterranean to Antarctica. The cropped, rotated frame became one of histo…- Leonardo's wall dinner began dying within decadesPainted about 1495–1498 in Milan's Santa Maria delle Grazie, The Last Supper freezes the instant after Jesus says a betrayer sits among the Twelve. Leonardo chose tempera on seale…
Raphael's philosophers point heavenward and earthwardBetween 1509 and 1511, for Pope Julius II's Vatican Stanze, Raphael frescoed philosophy itself. At the vanishing point, Plato lifts Timaeus toward the vault; Aristotle levels Ethi…
Movable type began in Song China, not only MainzTypography arranges type so written language stays legible—choosing typefaces, sizes, leading, tracking, and kerning. Bi Sheng cast ceramic movable type in eleventh-century Song C…