Question Art

The models were apparently his sister and his dentist, and it supposedly won him $300 and instant fame overnight. People still argue about whether he was making fun of farm folk or standing up for them — he insisted it was the second.

He'd never seen a jungle. From what I've read the closest he got was the glasshouses at the botanical gardens in Paris, and he built the plants up from there. He had a day job and taught himself, and the critics gave him a hard time for it.

Ensor's family ran a souvenir shop in Ostend that sold carnival masks, and he never really stopped painting them after that. This one comes out of the war years, when food was short across occupied Belgium — which the title seems to be having a go at.

Apparently this was one of six paintings a merchant banker in Antwerp commissioned to track the months of the year — this one's high summer. Only five are known to survive.

This showed at a Paris salon alongside a handful of painters using color this wild — critics apparently called them 'the wild beasts,' and the nickname (Fauves) stuck.

This was a commission — her parents were rich Viennese patrons who put money behind a lot of the design world there. The story goes she was nine, and that she picked how she wanted to stand herself.

The man in it was a rich young aristocrat with a habit of ordering paintings of himself — this was one of several he commissioned from the same painter, going by the museum's own notes. His father, I gather, had been a heavyweight in French law and politics, so the family was well used to being looked at.

This is one of three engravings from the same few years that historians consider his best — what it actually means has apparently been argued over for centuries.

The odd name comes from the Cowper family, who used to own it — nothing to do with the subject. Like a lot of British collections, it eventually made its way into an American museum in the early 1900s.

A Russian businessman ordered this for the staircase of his Moscow house, along with a second panel to hang near it. Supposedly he got nervous about all the bare bodies, pulled out, then changed his mind and took them anyway.

The village in the title had turned into an artists' colony by then — painters moving out to a farming place on the heath specifically to paint the people already living there. From what I read, whole careers got built on that arrangement. The farmers mostly stayed farmers.

They say this was one of a set of three — a mural for people arriving by air, a pavement mosaic in the middle of town for those on foot, and a poster — all meant to welcome you to Barcelona. Apparently a ceramicist friend did the actual tilework.

As the story goes, the original version of this dog was stolen right off this same spot, and what's standing here now is the replacement. According to Wikipedia, it's also one of only two standalone sculptures in the whole square.

This one was reportedly once catalogued as a copy of a lost original; now the thinking is it's based on one of his drawings instead — the credit's still murky.

Apparently 'Fantômas' was a wildly popular pulp villain in French novels and early films back then — the kind of cheap thrill respectable painting wasn't supposed to notice. Cubists of the period put newsprint and pulp covers like this straight into their paintings anyway, which was kind of the point: you didn't need a myth or a portrait anymore, a newsstand would do.