Art Stories

A wine grower from Béziers, Gustave Fayet bought Gauguin, Van Gogh and Redon when almost nobody was buying them, and slept for more than twenty years beside the self-portrait with the bandaged ear. The Fondation Louis Vuitton now rescues the collector whom art history forgot.

A Painterly Architectonic by Liubov Popova has just shattered the artist’s record at Christie’s: £7.6 million. Behind the price lies the short life of a Russian avant-garde pioneer who painted her brother in a top hat, lost her husband and her son, and swapped the canvas for textile design.

The Museo Sorolla reopens in Madrid after two years of closure with an exhibition on the house that tells the intimate story of the painter of light. A Valencian orphan, more than 2,000 love letters exchanged with Clotilde, an Andalusian garden and the unfinished 1920 portrait that ended his career.

Behind the grids that now sell for tens of millions stood a man who ate lentils, painted flowers to pay the rent and sat with his back to the window so as not to see trees. With Mondrian back in the news thanks to a Christie's sale and a new presentation at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, we tell the secret life of the painter of the straight line.

A new book of more than 400 letters by Claude Monet, published in the centenary year of his death, reveals the man behind the water lilies: debts, a leap into the river, the portrait of his dead wife and the canvases he destroyed. From youthful poverty to blindness and the gift of the Orangerie, the painter's intimate story told in his own words.

Painted in Sèvres in 1907, during Kandinsky's years of crisis at Gabriele Münter's side, Das bunte Leben left an Amsterdam museum in 1940 and was sold at auction under Nazi occupation. Restituted to the Lewenstein heirs, it now arrives at Christie's carrying a story of love, abandonment and memory.

In July someone paid $30 for a small panel of nine shells at a Michigan estate sale; on October 1 it sold at auction in New York for $1.35 million. Its maker, Gertrude Abercrombie, thought herself ugly, called herself a “good witch,” opened her Chicago home to Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, and paid her doctor with this very painting.

The theft and recovery of two Renoir paintings in Cagnes-sur-Mer reopen the story of the house where the painter spent his last twelve years. Arthritis, war, mourning, sculptures made with another artist's hands and a model who would end up in the movies: this was the last Renoir.

The Whitney in New York opens Roy Lichtenstein’s first major New York retrospective since 1993: the perfect moment to look behind his famous dots. A soldier too shy to knock on Picasso’s door, a broken marriage, the controversy with comic book artists and the secret discipline of the painter who turned comic panels into masterpieces: all of it hides behind the dots.

Seventy years after Pollock’s death, New York’s Metropolitan Museum finally brings Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock together as equals. Paintings signed with initials, destroyed canvases, collages made from fragments of Pollock’s paintings and sleepless nights turned into masterpieces: the secret story of the couple who reinvented abstract painting.

From Klimt’s record-shattering $236 million portrait to a Sorolla seascape and a near-forgotten Danish painter who beat his estimate twenty-five times over: 26 paintings sold between 2024 and 2026 that reveal what people are really buying – and why.

A tour of the 50 most important painters in art history, from Basquiat to Giotto. Discover each master's contribution, key works and how they transformed painting forever.