Art

Hilma af Klint painted large-scale abstract works in Stockholm in 1906, years before Kandinsky. She believed the paintings were dictated by spirits and stipulated they not be shown until 20 years afte...

Mark Rothko accepted a commission to paint murals for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York. After visiting the space, he returned the $35,000. He said he wanted to paint something that would ruin t...

Remedios Varo fled the Spanish Civil War, then fled the Nazis in France, and finally settled in Mexico City. There she painted surreal worlds of women scientists performing alchemical experiments in t...

El Anatsui, a Ghanaian sculptor, makes enormous shimmering curtains from thousands of flattened bottle caps collected from recycling yards. Each piece weighs hundreds of pounds but drapes like cloth....

The Benin Bronzes, looted by British soldiers in 1897, are among the most technically sophisticated metal sculptures ever made. European scholars initially refused to believe Africans had created them...

Banksy shredded one of his own paintings at Sotheby's the moment the hammer fell on a $1.4 million sale. The half-shredded work then sold again three years later for $25.4 million. He called the piece...

In 12th-century Cambodia, artisans carved 1,796 individual apsara dancers on the walls of Angkor Wat. No two have the same face or hairstyle. Scholars believe each was modeled after a real woman from...

Frida Kahlo painted 55 self-portraits. She started painting after a bus accident at 18 shattered her spine and pelvis. She spent months in a full-body cast. Her father set up a mirror above her bed so...

Artemisia Gentileschi was raped by her painting teacher in Rome in 1611. Her father brought the case to trial. She was tortured with thumbscrews to verify her testimony. She then painted Judith Slayin...

Australian Aboriginal dot paintings encode maps of water sources, food locations, and sacred sites. The artists deliberately obscure key information so outsiders can't read the full meaning. What hang...

In 12th century China, Emperor Huizong was so obsessed with painting that he neglected his empire. He founded the greatest art academy in Chinese history while the Jurchen armies closed in. He was cap...

Persian miniature painter Kamal ud-Din Behzad worked in 15th century Herat with brushes made from single kitten hairs. His paintings fit on a single page but contain dozens of figures, each with indiv...

Hokusai, who painted The Great Wave off Kanagawa, didn't consider anything he made before age 70 worthy of notice. He said at 73: At 90 I will have reached the truth. At 100, each dot and each line wi...

In 1863, the Paris Salon rejected so many paintings that Napoleon III ordered a separate exhibition for the rejects. The Salon des Refuses showed work by Manet, Whistler, and Pissarro. Art history spl...

In 1960s Japan, the Gutai group poured paint from watering cans, threw mud at canvases, and ran through paper screens. Kazuo Shiraga painted with his feet while hanging from a rope. They invented perf...

The Benin Bronzes, looted by British soldiers in 1897, showed a level of metalworking sophistication that European experts refused to believe could come from Africa. They spent years trying to credit...

Yayoi Kusama first saw hallucinations of polka dots covering the world when she was ten years old in rural Japan. She has voluntarily lived in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo since 1977, walking to he...

In 1961, Henri Matisse's painting Le Bateau hung upside down at MoMA in New York for 47 days. About 116,000 people walked past it before anyone noticed.

Ai Weiwei filled the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern with 100 million hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds. Each seed was made by hand in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen by 1,600 artisans over two years....

Hilma af Klint painted abstract art in Stockholm seven years before Kandinsky, who is credited as the inventor. She was a spiritualist who believed the world wasn't ready for her work and ordered it s...

Sofonisba Anguissola was painting portraits in the 1550s, decades before most women were allowed to hold a brush. Philip II of Spain hired her as court painter. Historians attributed many of her works...

Brazilian artist Lygia Clark stopped making objects entirely in the 1960s. She gave participants goggles, gloves, and bodysuits and asked them to feel things. She called it therapy through sensation....

Vermeer painted only 34 known works in his entire life. He died in debt at 43 with 11 children. For two centuries nobody cared about his paintings. Now a single Vermeer is worth more than most countri...

In 1917, Marcel Duchamp submitted a urinal signed "R. Mutt" to an art exhibition that claimed to accept all entries. They rejected it. A century later, that urinal was voted the most influential artwo...

El Greco was mocked in Spain for painting elongated figures with ghostly colors. Critics called his work deformed. He told them: I paint what I see, and what I see is different from what you see. Thre...

The Lascaux cave paintings in France are about 17,000 years old. When the cave was opened to tourists in 1963, the carbon dioxide from their breath began destroying the paintings. The cave was sealed....