Art Stories

A study published in Scientific Reports argues that the sky of The Starry Night reproduces the predawn of July 22, 1889, over Saint-Rémy. Behind that waning moon lies the hardest year of Vincent van Gogh’s life: the asylum, illness, Theo and stars that he himself judged a failure.

A hundred years after her death, the Musée d’Orsay celebrates Mary Cassatt, the only American who exhibited with the Impressionists. Behind her mothers and children stands a proud, untamable woman: the rebellion against her father, the stormy bond with Degas, the death of her sister Lydia, spiritualism and blindness.

An orchard of plums painted around 1899 has just become the most expensive Bonnard ever sold at auction in France. Behind its colors lies the secret life of Pierre Bonnard: Marthe, the wife with a false name; Renée, the tragic love; and his habit of slipping into museums to retouch his own paintings.

In 1917 a young woman of the Lieser family sat nine times for Gustav Klimt in his Hietzing studio; the painter died before finishing the picture. More than a century later, his last portrait still lacks a definitive name for its sitter and is caught in a war between heirs that grew out of Nazi persecution.

The Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza explores Salvador Dalí's obsession with Sigmund Freud. From the dead brother who bore his name to the 1938 meeting in London, this is the story of the man who turned his traumas into images.

A new biography reveals that the first six oils Edward Hopper painted were copies of printed images. Behind the painter of loneliness emerges a shy, tight-fisted, conservative man, and Jo, the wife who posed for him and recorded everything in her diaries.

The son of a Courland blacksmith, Janis Rozentāls painted his neighbors leaving Sunday service, Death dressed in white and a red-haired princess beside a monkey hired for a ruble a day. On the 160th anniversary of his birth, we trace the life of the painter who gave Latvia a face of its own: his love at first sight for a Finnish singer, the writer who lived under his roof and a final chapter in exile.

Before painting his endless necks, Amedeo Modigliani wanted to be a sculptor: he gathered stone from the building sites of Montparnasse and carved heads that he lit with candles. This is the story of that dream, of the sick body that forced him to give it up, and of the fake heads that fooled Italy in 1984.

On October 15, 1906, Paul Cézanne kept painting through a storm on the Les Lauves hill and died a week later. 120 years after his death, we trace the secret life of the father of modern art: the banker who watched over him, the hidden family, Zola, his faith and his dread of being touched.

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.