Art Stories

Hilla Rebay persuaded Solomon R. Guggenheim to collect abstract painting, commissioned a “temple of the spirit” from Frank Lloyd Wright and ended up expelled from the museum she had invented. Now her first Kandinsky, Betonte Ecken, which the Guggenheim sold in 1964 for $62,000, heads to Christie’s with a shot at breaking the painter’s record.

In December 1888, Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh traveled to Montpellier to see a painting by Courbet; a week later came the night of the razor. That journey gave rise to Bonjour, Monsieur Gauguin, the portrait of the solitary walker who fled the Bourse, his family and Europe until he died in the Marquesas.

A fall into a trench at Ypres saved Paul Nash from the Hill 60 massacre and set him on the path to becoming Britain’s great painter of the First World War. From the mud of Flanders to the downed German aircraft of Totes Meer, the life of the man who called himself “a messenger.”

Olga Boznańska painted for more than thirty years in a Montparnasse studio sealed shut, among canaries, mice and tobacco smoke, and turned slowness into an art. This is the story of the great Polish portraitist: the fiancé who tired of waiting, the sister she lost and her last days in occupied Paris.

A small 1953 grattage, hidden for seventy years by the family who bought it in Mexico, goes to auction, bringing Leonora Carrington back into the light. From the debutante who fled her father with Max Ernst to the Santander asylum and the chosen family in Mexico, these are the secrets of the Surrealist who refused to be a muse.

A drawing that has only just come to light, made by Duncan Grant at Vanessa Bell’s deathbed, opens the door to the intimate story of the couple who gave Bloomsbury its colour. Crossed loves, a daughter deceived with kindness and the 1910 exhibition that changed their lives, as Tate Britain devotes its major autumn show to them.

A new book by Wanda M. Corn reopens the story of American Gothic, one of the most parodied paintings in the world. Behind the pitchfork lie a father who despised fantasy, a sister who defended the work all her life and a painter who hid almost everything about himself.

A journey through 20 of the most controversial paintings of the last 100 years, from Balthus and Picasso to Banksy and Dana Schutz. Works that provoked censorship, protests, attacks and debates about religion, politics, sexuality, race and artistic freedom.

The internet is full of places promising “museum quality”. We compared five real specialists in hand-painted oil painting reproductions and looked at what each one offers before choosing our favourite.

Prussian soldiers destroyed his earliest paintings at Louveciennes, and after his death the Nazis seized his canvases from Jewish families across Europe. We retrace the life of Camille Pissarro, patriarch of Impressionism, through grief, poverty, anarchism and the Dreyfus affair, and the path by which his works are back before the courts today.

Behind Woman with a Hat stood a milliner, a notorious swindle that ruined her family and forty-one years of marriage to Henri Matisse. This is the story of Amélie Parayre, from the “cage of the wild beasts” in 1905 to the break of 1939 and the Resistance.

Sixty years ago, the Arno flooded Florence, stripped the paint from Cimabue’s Crucifix and submerged Vasari’s Last Supper. This is the story of the restorers, the mud angels and the works that survived.