Category Archives: secret lives

March 8: A perennial source of conflict between the Hoppers was their car. Edward often forbade Jo to get behind the wheel, which she saw as just one more example of his innate selfishness. Maybe. Or maybe she was a … Continue reading →

March 1: After an 1872-73 trip to New Orleans, Edgar Degas returned to find his friends Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley, and Morisot deep in discussions about breaking away from the state-sponsored Salon. Degas immediately threw in his lot with the … Continue reading →

February 23: “Drunk at 20, wrecked at 30, dead at 40,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote in his notebooks, in one of his occasional impious attempts at concise autobiography. He wasn’t too far off. Dead at age 44, Fitzgerald spend … Continue reading →

February 16: After the first flush of excitement, artists quickly found themselves split over the “correct” Cubist approach. Synthetic Cubists quarreled with Analytic Cubists, collage-creating Cubists fought with paint-only Cubists, and Diego Rivera developed theories about the fourth dimension that, … Continue reading →

February 10: “Art should be independent of all clap-trap — should stand alone and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like.” … Continue reading →

February 5: A flop as a lawyer, Franz Kafka tried his hand at insurance. He took a job as claims manager at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute of Bohemia, but the hours were brutal and the conditions stultifying. He spent … Continue reading →

February 1: The young Michelangelo Buonarroti was a bit of a jerk who delighted in mocking the drawing skills of his peers. He bore the scars of one particularly merciless teasing his whole life. The artist Pietro Torrigiano recalled the … Continue reading →

January 26: In the 1960s, as M.C. Escher’s popularity was growing, Mick Jagger decided it would be a great idea to have the artist design the cover of the next Rolling Stones album. The rock-and-roller wrote a letter that began, … Continue reading →

January 19: Poor Venus. The beauty of her face in The Birth of Venus manages to distract us from her disproportioned body. the figure lacks shoulder blades or a sternum, and her left arm hangs strangely from her side. The … Continue reading →

January 15: What was fueling Honoré de Balzac’s prolific literary output? Why, the same thing that helps millions of Americans brace for those interminable nine-o’clock meetings: good old-fashioned high-octane java. The strung-out Frenchman drank up to fifty cups of thick, … Continue reading →