Artists Francis Newton Souza was born on this day in 1942. One of India’s foremost art world maestros, this Goan man was well known for his wild ways and wilder paintings. He attended St. Xavier’s College in Bombay, being expelled for drawing graffiti in a toilet which he claimed he was correcting, but the...
April 10, On This Day An inspiration in art Although he is more widely known as a writer, philosopher and poet, Kahlil (or Khalil) Gibran was also a prolific painter. Born in January 1883, he passed away on April 10, 1931, and is best known as the author of The Prophet, one of the best-selling...
April 8, On This Day A master is lost It is an undeniably historic day for the world of art, as April 8, 1973, is when Pablo Picasso died of heart failure. This Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and theatre designer is one of the most popular names in art even today. He is known...
April 6, On This Day Together with Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, Italian painter and architect Raphael forms the traditional trinity of great masters of the High Renaissance, a historically iconic period for classical Western art. Interestingly he was both born on and died on April 6, and lived a short 37 years from 1483...
April 4, On This Day Illustrating lore While children and adults around the world have enjoyed the lore of The Brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, fewer people may know that they had yet another sibling who happened to be an artist of a different sort — painter, art professor, etcher and copper engraver Ludwig Emil...
This is the day that brought the great artist Georgia O’Keeffe before the world. In 1917 Alfred Stieglitz opened the first one-person show of O’Keeffe’s work at 291 art gallery in New York. Modern Art came to America because of Stieglitz. It wasn’t a Rockefeller or a Guggenheim, but just a kid from Hoboken, New...
April 3, On This Day Developed in reaction to World War I, the Dada movement consisted of artists who rejected the logic, reason, and aestheticism of modern capitalist society, instead expressing nonsense, irrationality, and anti-bourgeois protest in their works. German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet Max Ernst was a primary pioneer of Dadaism, and...
On This Day, April 1 The Last Supper, revisited Certain historians estimate that the date of Jesus Christ’s crucifixion fell in the range of AD (Anno Domini) 30–36. As a result, Colin Humphreys proposes narrowing down the date of the Last Supper as having occurred in the evening of Wednesday, April 1, AD 33. This...
March 30, On This Day There exist many iterations of Vincent van Gogh’s fascination with sunflowers, but one in particular — Still Life: Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers — made art history on March 30, 1987, when a Japanese insurance magnate reportedly paid the equivalent of US $39,921,750 for the artwork at a Christie’s London auction....
March 29, On This Day From pop art to protest art It is easily one of the best known products in consumer culture across the world today — but fewer people know that Coca Cola started out as a non-alcoholic wine on March 29, 1886, when John Pemberton brewed the first batch of his altered...