RS Vacations – Big Bear Lake, CA

The 14th annual ‘Art on the Lake‘ festival is held this weekend in Big Bear Lake, so I thought I would share some (hopefully true) fun-facts about the arts.

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

• When Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1912, 6 replicas were sold as the original, each at a huge price, in the 3 years before the original was recovered.

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

• On 3rd December 1961 Henri Matisse’s painting Le Bateau was put the right way up after hanging upside-down for 46 days without anyone noticing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, America.

• Mental illness may be profoundly responsible for the creation and enduring popularity of Expressionism. Van Gogh’s well-documented mental instability, and Edvard Munch’s traumatic childhood and enduring neuroses helped to churn out some of the Expressionists’ most important works. Munch accepted that his mental illness was part of his genius, “I would not cast off my illness, for there is much in my art that I owe to it.”

• When Auguste Rodin exhibited his first important work, The Bronze Period, in 1878 it was so realistic that people thought he had sacrificed a live model inside the cast.

• Rodin died of frostbite in 1917 when the French government refused him financial aid for a flat, yet they kept his statues warmly housed in museums.

• Left-handed painter, Michelangelo, painted his famous David and Goliath with David holding his sling in his left hand.

• Another famous left-hander, Leonardo da Vinci, wrote all of his personal notes from right to left, forcing those who read them to use a mirror.

• In all of Dali’s paintings you can find a self-portrait. That is, if you look hard you will see at-least a silhouette of Dali himself.