Art

Things you may not know about Monet, Van Gogh, Dali and Picasso

An artist creates his painting, through his work, people can take a glimpse into the painter’s soul. But what about his life? What are the artists unusual habits? Are there any skeletons in his closet?

It is said that the great geniuses of the world were not good at school. Claude Monet is an artist who did not like to study at all. In the short biography published in 1900, the artist said: “School always seemed to me as a prison and I could never convince myself that it was better to stay there, more so as it was four hours a day, when the sea was calm, and I had such a craving mood to stay in open-air.” Few people know that from this boredom appeared Monet’s first passion. During classes, he used to draw on the border of the book’s portraits of his teachers and other personalities in the city. Thus, at 15 years old he was known throughout Le Havre as a cartoonist. His fame earned him quite a few orders from friends and colleagues. He said: „In one month, my sponsors have doubled. I could ask for twenty francs without decreasing the number of orders. If I would have continued drawing caricatures today I would have been a billionaire.”

Painting was not Vincent Van Gogh’s first love. The artist had in his youth a special inclination towards religion. He studied theology at the University of Amsterdam, but not for long. Because he did not understand the utility of learning Latin and ancient Greek, he dropped out of school. He later tried to follow a course of a preacher in Brussels, but failed to promote the final exam. After several attempts, the preacher stage ends, and Van Gogh is preparing to pursue his final vocation, that of an artist.

Nevertheless, one of the most eccentric artists is Salvador Dali. Convinced that he is a genius, he decides to write his memoirs in the book called „Dairy of a Genius, Salvador Dali.” Dali even makes the difference between him an ordinary person: „From the French Revolution has developed the vicious tendency to believe that geniuses are human beings more or less similar to the rest of the world. Not so true. And if this is false for me, who I am a spiritual genius, it is false for the Renaissance geniuses, like Raphael, who is an almost divine genius. This book will show you that the daily life of a genius, his sleep, digestion, ecstasy, his fingernails, coldness, blood, life and death are different from ordinary people.”

Pablo Picasso is another artist who besides painting had the passion for writing. In fact, when he had been lacking inspiration in drawing, he dedicated his time to poetry. The lyrics are written spontaneously, and the association of words and images is left to run free. The texts are written in a surreal manner, often without punctuation. One of the artist’s poems is dedicated to women:

Girl
Nice carpenter joining axes
With Rose’s thorns
don’t shed any tears
if you see wood bleeding. – Pablo Picasso