10 AMAZING art facts

Artists and their artworks surprise us on a daily basis. These amazing art facts are things you have hopefully never heard of before. They are very different than what you hear and see everyday and quite exceptional. And – in my opinion – truly interesting! Enjoy the read!

1. Learning art correlates strongly with your achievements in math and reading.

Have you ever told yourself that you are either a humanitarian or a math person? Well, the facts tell otherwise: if you are good at art, there is a high probability you are also good at math or other technical sciences. Researchers find that learning art correlates strongly with higher achievement in math and reading. So, if you learn art at school it will apparently help with algebra!

1. Creating a website or designing a home requires mastering skills which are developed through arts education.

“Do I need to study art in school?” – an answer to this question can be only “YES”. Art basics will help you to photoshop, to make a proper colour choice for your powerpoint presentation or to even decorate your house. Indeed, art education helps preparing you for every kind of visual activity further in life.

1. Roman statues were made with detachable heads, so that one head could be removed and replaced by another.

This comes not only in the line of amazing art facts, but also amazing history facts. I guess it seemed very practical for the ancient sculptors not to make a separate bust for every emperor, but to wait for him to be killed and create only a head instead. Handy, huh?

1. Picasso could draw before he could walk, and his first word was the Spanish word for pencil.

Or at least this is what his mother told. The Spanish for pencil was lápiz and he was pronouncing it like “piz, piz”. Already when he was 13, Picasso’s father (being a painter himself) saw his drawing of a pigeon and concluded that his son had surpassed him.

1. Leonardo da Vinci was a vegetarian and animal rights activist. He bought caged birds and set them free.
2. 4 of the 21 most expensive paintings sold at auction are by Van Gogh and 4 by Picasso.

So, if you ever posed a question of “Who is the best painter?” this is a numerical expression. But does money really talk in the case of art?.. Not quite Picasso or van Gogh but equally colourful and powerful, check out these paintings!

1. In 1961, Henri Matisse’s painting Le Bateau was hung upside down at New York’s Museum of Modern Art for 46 days before anyone noticed.
2. When the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1911, the empty space it left on the wall attracted more visitors than the painting had.

Sometimes it is hard to explain people’s behaviour. But this makes amazing art facts what they are! The perfect proverb for this case could be: “We know not what is good untill we have lost it”.

1. Anish Kapoor has recently received has his £350,000 in damages after an art storage company mistook one piece of work for rubbish and threw it away.

Art or not? One cannot deceive storage company workers. Or can you? And should you understand art to love it? Modern art poses more questions than clear answers.

1. It took a year for German Art student Benjamin Harff to rewrite the Silmarillion in elfish style.

Benjamin is a German student of art and this is something he wanted to present as his exam assignment in the Academy of Arts. He was not exactly making the nice calligraphy, but rather illuminated the text he has printed and then bound the pages himself. For everybody who got bored after the ten first pages of the book: he probably knows it by heart…