Art-e-Facts: 5 Random Art Facts III
1. Robert De Niro’s father – Robert De Niro senior, was a leading postwar artist. Throughout the fifties he exhibited at the Charles Egan Gallery alongside artists such as Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Philip Guston. Today, his work is on display in numerous major American museums.
2. A tessellation is a collection or tiling of shapes that fills the plane with no overlaps and no gaps. Tessellations can be seen throughout art history, from ancient architecture to modern art. Tessellations frequently appeared in the art of M. C. Escher.
3. The earliest known European cave paintings date to Aurignacian, about 32,000 years ago. The Cave paintings were drawn with red and yellow ochre, hematite, manganese oxide and charcoal. Some theories guess that they may have been a way of transmitting information, while other theories give them a religious or ceremonial purpose.
4. Henri Rousseau is known for his scenes of exotic jungles and animals. In fact, Rousseau never left France. His paintings were based on images adapted from printed sources, and from visits to the Paris Natural History Museum, and the Jardin des Plantes, a botanical garden and zoo.
5. Labeled a “degenerate” artist by the Nazis, more than 600 of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s works were confiscated from German museums and were either destroyed or sold. The psychological suffering caused by the Nazi’s rejection, the confiscation and destruction of his works led to Kirchner’s suicide on June 15, 1938.
Related Books:
The Art Lover’s Almanac : Serious Trivia for the Novice and the Connoisseur
Facts On File Encyclopedia Of Art ( 5 vol. set)
Sources: Hackett-Freedman, Wikipedia, Wikipedia, MOMA, National Gallery of Art
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