Intellect PlusVisual arts
680 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 9 of 12.
Buckminster Fuller made the geodesic dome famous, but a German planetarium came firstGeodesic domes are usually credited to Buckminster Fuller, yet the first one was designed after World War I by a Carl Zeiss engineer to shelter a planetarium projector in Jena. Fu…
A Swedish mystic painted abstract art before Kandinsky, then hid itIn 1906 a 44-year-old Stockholm painter began producing huge canvases of spirals, circles and coded colour, years ahead of the pioneers usually credited with inventing abstraction…
India's snowy Himachal Pradesh keeps two capitals, one for each seasonShimla runs the show in summer, Dharamshala in winter. Himachal Pradesh, whose name means roughly the land sheltered by the snows, stretches across the western Himalayas and feeds…
America's first great landscape movement got its famous name as an insultIn the autumn of 1825 an English-born painter rode a steamboat up the Hudson, hiked into the Catskills and painted the blazing colours he found. Thomas Cole's trip launched a scho…
Iconography decodes what a picture shows, not how it was paintedWhy does one saint hold keys and another a wheel? Iconography is the branch of art history that sets style aside and asks what an image depicts: which figures, how many, where the…
Inkscape began as a breakaway: four developers forked a drawing app over SVGIn 2003 four programmers walked away from a free illustration program called Sodipodi because they wanted something stricter: a tool built around the full SVG standard. Their fork…
Britain's stopgap diesel train outlived the futuristic project it was meant to coverIn 1970 British Rail needed something quick while its tilting Advanced Passenger Train stalled. The fallback was a diesel with an engine at each end, and a designer hired only to …
Basquiat went from spray-painted riddles to Documenta's youngest artist in four yearsIn May 1978 a Brooklyn teenager and a friend began tagging Lower Manhattan walls with cryptic slogans signed SAMO. By June 1982, aged 21, Jean-Michel Basquiat was exhibiting in Ka…
Frank Miller rescued a failing Daredevil, then remade Batman as an aging vigilanteIn 1979 Daredevil was selling so poorly that Marvel kept talking about cancelling it. A young penciller called Frank Miller saw promise in a sightless hero living in a visual medi…
Italy's biggest lake hides a fault line and a drowned Roman-era townLake Garda looks serene, but it sits in one of Italy's most earthquake-prone zones. Around the year 243 a quake apparently triggered a landslide and flood that wiped out the town …- Was the Vatican's Laocoön a Michelangelo forgery? Some scholars still askDug up in Rome in 1506, the marble Laocoön has been called Western art's defining image of agony: a Trojan priest and his two sons writhing in serpent coils. Pliny praised a Laoco…
Hans Hofmann's highest praise for Lee Krasner was a backhanded insultWhen her notoriously harsh teacher finally praised a Lee Krasner canvas, he said nobody would guess a woman had painted it. Krasner spent decades in the shadow of her husband Jack…
Leh sits at 3,524 metres and gets barely 35 millimetres of rainHigh on the Indus in Ladakh, Leh was once a caravan stop where salt, cashmere wool, silk yarn and brocade changed hands between Tibet, Kashmir, India and China. Its 17th-century r…
Kaia Gerber booked her first fashion job at ten, for Young VersaceCindy Crawford's daughter did not wait for adulthood. At ten she fronted a Young Versace campaign, at sixteen she opened Alexander Wang's show, and by 2018 the British Fashion Awa…
Keith Haring treated empty subway ad panels as his personal laboratoryFrom December 1980, a young art student began chalking crawling babies and barking dogs onto the black paper covering unused advertising slots in New York's subway. Within a decad…
America's moon launch site was carved out of Florida citrus grovesTo launch a 363-foot Saturn V, NASA needed far more room than Cape Canaveral offered. So from 1962 it bought up farmland on Merritt Island, much of it orange groves, letting growe…
Who was Kilroy? Possibly a shipyard inspector fighting rivet fraudA bald man with a big nose peers over a wall beside three words: Kilroy was here. GIs scrawled it across the Second World War, and legend says Stalin found it in a Potsdam bathroo…
A laptop prize lured Liu Wen into modelling; she became China's first supermodelAt 17, Liu Wen entered a regional model contest in Hunan mostly because the prize included a new laptop. She missed the national top ten, yet within four years she walked 74 shows…
Louis Vuitton's empire began with a trunk you could finally stackIn the 1850s most trunks had rounded lids so rain would run off, which meant nobody could pile them up. Louis Vuitton made his flat-topped and covered in light, airtight grey canv…
Magenta has no place on the rainbow; your brain invents itNo single wavelength of light looks magenta. The colour appears when your eyes pick up strong blue and some red with little green in between, and the brain fills the gap. Its name…
The Maginot Line largely did its job, and France fell anywayFrance's great concrete barrier of the 1930s was nearly impossible to break: bomb-proof, tank-proof, air-conditioned, served by underground railways. Its purpose was to steer any …
A paint drip exposed Lenin inside Rockefeller Center's lobby muralIn 1933 the Rockefellers hired Diego Rivera, a known communist, to paint the lobby of the RCA Building. When a newspaper called his fresco anti-capitalist, Rivera slipped in a por…
Monks spend weeks on a sand mandala, then sweep it into a riverTibetan monks trained for three to five years tap coloured grains of powdered stone from copper funnels, building a palace for a deity one blessing at a time. When the design is f…
Mari was built, destroyed and rebuilt three times on the EuphratesA mound on the Euphrates near today's Abu Kamal hides a city that rose and fell repeatedly for over a thousand years. Dug up from 1933, Mari yielded more than 25,000 clay tablets …- Mary Cassatt pressed her nose to a shop window and found ImpressionismIn 1875 a Pittsburgh-born painter kept returning to a Paris dealer's window to stare at pastels by Edgar Degas. It changed her life, she said. Two years later, rejected by the Sal…
The comic that drew Jews as mice won a Pulitzer in 1992Art Spiegelman spent over a decade turning taped conversations with his father, a Polish Jew who survived Auschwitz, into a comic where Jews are mice, Germans cats and Poles pigs.…
Tilt cards trace back to corrugated pictures older than photographyThat winking-eye postcard works because a sheet of tiny ridged lenses sends each thin stripe of an image in its own direction. Tilt it, and your eye catches a different picture. T…
How a surreal Western at a Chelsea cinema turned midnight into a cult ritualIn December 1970, a surreal Mexican Western by Alejandro Jodorowsky opened at midnight in New York's Elgin Theater and sold out night after night for months. Fans came back weekly…
Mie, the Japanese prefecture that guards Shinto's holiest and oldest shrinesMie Prefecture on Honshu holds both Ise Grand Shrine, counted as Japan's holiest Shinto site, and Tsubaki Grand Shrine, called its oldest. The same prefecture also claims the birt…
The Moulin Rouge was built to let rich Parisians go slumming in MontmartreWhen Joseph Oller and Charles Zidler opened the Moulin Rouge on 6 October 1889, the idea was to lure wealthy visitors into raffish Montmartre, where they would mix with workers, a…
Mother-of-pearl is a wall of microscopic bricks thin enough to bend lightNacre, the shimmering lining of oyster and abalone shells, is built like a wall of tiny hexagonal bricks of aragonite glued together with springy protein. Each brick is thin enoug…
Natural history once covered everything, from the stars to human superstitionWhen Pliny the Elder published his Natural History around 77 to 79 AD, it took in astronomy, geography, medicine, human inventions and superstition along with plants and animals. …
Medieval necromancers were often clergymen who borrowed prayers to summon demonsIn medieval Europe, the people accused of raising spirits were mostly literate clerics, not village witches. Trained in exorcism and armed with astrology texts, they blended Chris…
British MPs cannot legally resign, so they take a sham Crown job insteadNo member of the House of Commons is allowed to quit. Yet every one of them can leave whenever they like, by asking the Chancellor of the Exchequer for a ceremonial post such as C…
A looping Bob Dylan record named the loudest design group of the 1980sOn the night of December 6, 1980, Ettore Sottsass gathered young designers to plot an escape from Modernism while a Bob Dylan record kept looping. They took its word Memphis as th…
No one has found a natural English sentence using each letter exactly onceA pangram squeezes the whole alphabet into one sentence. The fox that jumps over a lazy dog has done that job since at least the late 19th century, testing Western Union's telex l…
A pope was crowned in a paper tiara, and it was no jokeWhen Pius VII was crowned in Venice on 21 March 1800, the papal tiara he wore was papier-mâché. The humble mix of scrap paper and paste began in Han dynasty China around 200 CE, a…- The four gospels disagree on who carried the cross and what hour it wasThe Passion, from the Latin for suffering, covers the last days of Jesus and is remembered every Holy Week. Read side by side, the gospels diverge: Mark sets the crucifixion at ni…
Before anyone knitted a sock, people were stitching fabric with one needleNålebinding, a Scandinavian word meaning needle-binding, builds cloth by dragging the entire working thread through every loop. A fragment found in the Judean Desert dates to arou…
A pleasure palace that was never built fed straight into the Centre PompidouNeo-futurism grew from mid-century structural experiments by Alvar Aalto and Buckminster Fuller into a movement blending art, technology and design. Cedric Price's Fun Palace of 1…
The first NFT sold for four dollars; seven years later one fetched $69 millionIn May 2014 Kevin McCoy registered a short video on the Namecoin blockchain and sold it to Anil Dash for $4 at a New York museum talk. That token, Quantum, launched a market that …
A court ordered every copy of Nosferatu destroyed, and the film survived anywayF. W. Murnau's 1922 silent vampire film borrowed Dracula without permission, renaming the count Orlok and moving him to a German town. Bram Stoker's widow Florence sued and won an…
Most of a hydrogen bomb's power comes from cheap, ordinary uraniumThe fusion fuel in a thermonuclear weapon is not where most of its energy comes from. Fast neutrons from fusion split the outer jacket of uranium-238, a cheap leftover of enrichme…- Sardinia is studded with more than 7,000 stone towers left by a people without writingFrom about 1800 BC the Bronze Age inhabitants of Sardinia raised cone-shaped stone towers called nuraghi, roughly one every three square kilometres. They left no texts of their ow…
The Oregon Trail's easiest mountain crossing was found by traders detouring on their way homeAbout 400,000 people followed the 2,170-mile Oregon Trail from the Missouri River to the Pacific Northwest. Its key gap through the Rockies, South Pass, was stumbled on by fur tra…
Otaku began as a stiffly polite way of saying youBefore it meant an obsessive anime fan, otaku was an honorific word for someone else's home, used as a distant, courteous you. Fans meeting at conventions adopted it in the 1970s,…
Sumerians pictured a Gulf trading hub called Dilmun as a paradise gardenLong before Islam, Bahrain sat at the heart of Dilmun, a Bronze Age trading power whose sweet groundwater and safe anchorages drew goods from as far as the Indus Valley. Mesopotam…
Singapore's president holds a second key to the national savingsSingapore's head of state is mostly ceremonial, yet since 1991 the office has carried an unusual power: the elected president can block any budget that dips into reserves built up…
Malaysia has had ten premierships but only nine prime ministersMahathir Mohamad is counted twice in Malaysia's list of leaders, as fourth and seventh prime minister. On his return he took the oath 62 days short of his 93rd birthday and left o…
Pastiche takes its name from an Italian pie stuffed with mixed fillingsImitating another artist's style sounds like cheating, yet pastiche is built on affection rather than mockery. The word comes from pasticcio, an Italian pâté of assorted ingredien…
The first camera photograph of a real scene needed hours or days of exposureWhen Nicéphore Niépce pointed a camera obscura at Le Gras in 1826, his bitumen plate was so sluggish that the shutter effectively stayed open for hours, possibly days. Within abou…
A painter was billed for rebuilding the Paris column he helped toppleIn May 1871 the Paris Commune pulled down the Vendôme Column, Napoleon's bronze-clad salute to Austerlitz. Once order returned, Gustave Courbet was ordered to fund its reconstruct…
Sony lost about 300 dollars on every early PlayStation 3 it soldThe PlayStation 3 was pitched as a living-room supercomputer, and its bill of materials proved it. Analysts put the cheaper launch model at roughly 806 dollars to build against a …
Aristotle's lost book on comedy left only his thoughts on tragedyAround 335 BCE Aristotle wrote the first surviving treatise devoted purely to literary theory, and half of it vanished. The part on comedy was lost in antiquity, and the remaining…
A 1974 McDonald's till stored key numbers only as multiples of threeLong before tablets on shop counters, a McDonald's cash register built in 1974 ran on an Intel 8008 chip, kept three copies of every important figure and could keep a whole restau…- Paris streets once served as the poor man's picture galleryIn the 1890s the walls of Paris became an open-air exhibition. Colour lithography let printers turn out huge, cheap, vivid sheets, censorship of public space had eased, and advert…
The Spanish university town that helped shape the modern calendarSalamanca's university, founded in 1218, ranks among Western Europe's oldest. Its scholars wrote the first grammar of Spanish, debated Columbus's voyage and sent calendar studies …- Paris's first great salons were held around a hostess's bedBefore the late 17th century, a French literary gathering often meant a lady reclining on her bed while friends pulled up stools beside it. The gap between bed and wall, the ruell…
Santiago Calatrava tilted a Seville bridge pylon at the Great Pyramid's angleThe Alamillo bridge in Seville hangs from a single concrete pylon 142 metres high, leaning at 58 degrees, the same slope as the Great Pyramid of Giza. Its own weight balances the …
Schönbrunn began as a Habsburg hunting ground stocked with boar and pheasantsVienna's most visited sight started life in 1569 as a fenced floodplain where an emperor kept deer, ducks and boar for sport. It grew into a 1,441-room Baroque summer palace, host…