Weird Little Art Stories

Being a graduate student at Enema U mostly means languishing in the library for long hours, reading long articles.  While these can be interesting, most of you are unlikely to keep a scholarly article about the iconography of some painting on your nightstand for a bit of leisure reading, even though some are very effective at inducing sleep.

Still, while reading various monographs, I keep discovering little tidbits of humor that are usually hidden away in footnotes… tiny little stories that are too weird not to be true.  I’ve been collecting them in the Moleskin notebook that is my constant companion, and this week I’ve decided to share a few.  Everyone of these is absolutely true (give or take a lie or two).

• Vincent Van Gogh, while an incredible artist, obviously had a few inner demons.  (Or as we would say in Texas, “the jalapeño had slid off the top of his nacho”.)  We’ll never know for sure, but perhaps he developed those demons at a young age.  As a child, he walked to school in the village of Zundert in the Netherlands and had to walk past the cemetery containing the grave of Vincent Van Gogh, his older brother.  After his brother died in infancy, his parents decided to recycle the name for the next child.

• Clementine Churchill wanted her tombstone to read:

Here Lies a Woman Who was Always Tired

For She Lived a Life Where Too Much was Required.

Proving that those requirements continue after death, here is what the family actually put on her tombstone:

Wife of Winston Churchill

The Life of the Nation is Secure

• There are at least two documented cases of a family mistakenly using a Ming vase as an umbrella stand.  The Duke of Wellington used a larger than life statue of a nude Napoleon to hold wet umbrellas.

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  In 1955, Salvador Dali borrowed a Rolls-Royce Phantom II from a friend because he needed to drive to Paris to give a lecture.  He neglected to tell the friend that he was taking with him 1100 pounds of cauliflower—enough to fill the interior of the priceless car to the ceiling. 

• Louis XVI didn’t lose his head; it is still around.  Well, kind of:  When Louis XVI was beheaded, only his body was buried.  His head was displayed but  later went missing.  At roughly the same time, the life-size statue of him was toppled and beheaded, and once again the head was seized by the mob.  After the restoration of the monarchy, the body of Louis XVI was buried at Basilica of Saint-Denis, alongside the headless remains of Marie Antoinette, while the headless remains of the statue were melted down.  Eventually, the head of the statue was recovered and today is on display at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris.

• In 1880, Édouard Manet was commissioned to paint A Bundle of Asparagus by Charles Ephrussi for 800 francs.  When the painting was delivered Ephrussi was so delighted by the work that he insisted on paying 1000 francs.  Manet then painted a smaller work, A Sprig of Asparagus depicting a single stalk of asparagus.  Along with the second painting Manet included a note:  "There was one sprig missing from your bundle."  Both valuable works are now in art museums.

• The portrait painter, John Singer Sargent, had a peculiar habit of asking his subjects to pose in uncomfortable or awkward positions, which he believed would help capture their true character and personality.  He also liked to read all the works of an author, one after the other.  He called this “reading in a wedge.”

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  When the avant-garde artist Cristo displayed his Package on a Wheelbarrow at the Galleria dell'Obelisco in Rome, in 1969, he left to the imagination of the viewer what the lump was under the tarpaulin.  The local bishop, who evidently possessed a vivid imagination, ordered that the exhibition be closed on the grounds of indecency.  Exactly what the bishop believed remained hidden was never explained.

• The most famous painting in the world, the Mona Lisa, was missing for 24 hours before the Louvre realized it had been stolen.  Four different men hung the Mona Lisa in their bedrooms for their own enjoyment.  Leonardo da Vinci kept the painting for four years before gifting it to Francis I, the King of Spain, who displayed it in the royal bedchamber.  After the death of Francis, the painting was moved to the Louvre.  When Napoleon became Emperor, he moved the painting to his bedroom.  In 1911, Vincenzo Peruggia, a handyman at the museum, stole the painting and kept it in his one room apartment for two years.  

• Some of the sketchbooks and notebooks of Gustav Klimt are missing.  The artist, who kept several cats in his studio, used cat urine as a fixative on his drawings.  The resulting sketch books reeked.

• Pablo Picasso famously doodled on some of his checks, often adding small sketches or drawings.  He would sometimes write a check for a relatively small amount, knowing that the recipient might never cash it.  One of those checks recently sold at auction for $10,000.

• The Two-For-One Van Gogh painting.  The Boston Museum of Fine Arts had its Van Gogh painting, Ravine, x-rayed with astounding results.  It turned out that the penniless Van Gogh depended on his brother Theo to provide the necessary funds to purchase art supplies.  In 1889, Theo was late and Van Gogh had an overpowering urge to paint, so Ravine was painted on top of a finished work, called Wild Vegetation.  

• An Andrew Wyeth painting, Braids, was incorrectly labeled at the Farnsworth Art Museum attributing the work to his father.  The mistake was not caught for thirty years.  

• The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen art museum in Germany recently admitted that a modern art piece by Piet Mondrian has been displayed upside down for 75 years.  The piece, New York City I, was discovered to be upside down after comparing the work to a photograph of Mondrian working on the painting on an easel.  Despite discovering that the work had been hung incorrectly for over seven decades, the museum plans has no plans to correct the mistake for fear of damaging the aging work.

• In the 1920s, Picasso created a fake artwork and signed it with the pseudonym "Léon," which was a name he used when he wanted to remain anonymous.  He then had a friend take this piece to a gallery and present it as a genuine work by a "new artist."  The gallery staff admired it and accepted it, unaware that it was actually Picasso's own work under a false identity.  The whereabouts of the Léon artwork is unknown today.

I don’t know of any scholarly work on the humor of art history.  Maybe I’ll work on that.