11 Surprising Stories Behind Amazing Artworks

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Did you know that Claude Monet’s beautiful gardens in Giverny once caused him to express frustration towards an entire town? The Impressionist would go on to paint his famous water lily paintings in this serene setting, but navigating the small French commune’s bureaucracy proved stressful. Locals objected to Monet’s plans for an Asian-influenced water garden, fearing the environmental impact of introducing non-native plant species to the area. They made it so difficult to acquire the land that Monet once wrote to his wife, expressing his desire to distance himself from the people in Giverny.

Monet’s ironic frustration in acquiring the tranquil gardens is just the start of many surprising stories behind artistic masterpieces that I’m going to share with you today. From the American who painted in a converted model A Ford to the abstract pioneer whose work is influenced by her fondness for seances, let’s get started.

Despite his initial frustrations, Monet succeeded in acquiring the land necessary for his gardens and soon built the Japanese footbridges he would make so iconic. An avid gardener, Monet also acquired a number of newly bred multi-colored species of water lilies, though he grew them without thinking of painting them. Luckily, the influential painter was able to make that creative leap on his own, but we might not have gotten some of his most beautiful later masterpieces without an assist from Georges Clemenceau, the former Prime Minister of France and an old friend of Monet’s. When the artist developed cataracts late in life, he was resolved to avoid eye surgery, even saying he would give up painting if necessary. Clemenceau helped convince his gifted friend to get the surgery. Monet eventually completed the massive water lily paintings that he called his grand decorations and donated the pieces to the French state as he had promised. Today, they’re housed in Paris’s Musée de l’Orangerie.

Monet’s rough contemporary, Édouard Manet, once gifted what may be history’s most valuable stock of asparagus. When the French art critic and collector Charles Ephrussi purchased a still-life painting of a bunch of asparagus, Manet charged him 800 francs. Ephrussi sent 1,000 francs in payment, and as either a token of appreciation for the extra cash or evidence of a good joke, Manet created an additional painting of a single stalk of asparagus and sent it to his patron with a note reading, “There was one missing from your bunch.” Today, the bonus picture hangs in Paris’s Musée d’Orsay.

Manet evidently had a good relationship with Ephrussi, but it was Mark Rothko’s antipathy for his audience that led to an interesting story with his Seagram Murals. On February 25, 1970, Rothko’s nine paintings arrived at the Tate Gallery in London. The very same day, Rothko was found dead in New York. The paintings had originally been commissioned by Philip Johnson for the newly built Seagram Building, which was the most expensive skyscraper of its type when it was built. They were meant to be hung in the building’s Four Seasons restaurant. However, a venue like the Four Seasons in the center of corporate America didn’t seem like a natural fit for a high-minded artist like Rothko. He had his reasons, though, as he told Harper’s Magazine editor John Fisher, “I accepted this assignment as a challenge with strictly malicious intentions. I hope to paint something that will ruin the appetite of every diner who eats in that room.” Rothko also accepted the assignment with an out built into his contract; at any point, he could return the money and retrieve his paintings. After eating a meal at the Four Seasons, Rothko is said to have remarked, “Anybody who will eat that kind of food for those kinds of prices will never look at a painting of mine.” He withdrew from the agreement and donated the pieces to London’s Tate Gallery.

They eventually ended up in the Tate Modern. Playwright John Logan actually dramatized the creation of the Seagram Murals in his Tony-winning play “Red.” Several decades earlier, a different masterpiece changed locations under much more sinister circumstances. Gustav Klimt’s “Woman in Gold” depicts Adele Bloch-Bauer, the wife of sugar mogul Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. When the Nazis invaded Austria in the late ’30s, they stole from wealthy Jews like Bloch-Bauer, taking his entire art collection and his prized Stradivarius cello. Years later, with the painting now hanging in Vienna’s Austrian Gallery at Belvedere Palace, Frederick’s niece Maria Altman went on a mission to reclaim her family’s property. A lengthy legal battle ensued. Discussing the Austrian government’s tactics with the Los Angeles Times back in 2001, Altman said, “They will delay, delay, delay, hoping I will die, but I will do them the pleasure of staying alive.” The United States Supreme Court even weighed in at one point, and the painting was eventually returned to Ms. Altman, who then sold the piece to philanthropist Ronald Lauder so he could put it on display at Manhattan’s Neue Galerie.

Of course, the Nazis aren’t the only ones to have stolen precious works of art. One particularly damning episode took place near the end of the 19th century during the colonial fervor known as the Scramble for Africa. In 1896, the British acting consul in the Niger Coast Protectorate, Captain James Robert Phillips, sought permission to depose the Abba or ruler of Benin, a kingdom located in present-day Nigeria. Phillips believed the Abba was standing in the way of profitable trade in the region and wrote, “I have reason to hope that sufficient ivory would be found in the king’s house to pay the expenses incurred in removing the king from his stool.” When Phillips and his men were denied an audience with the Abba, they went anyway, ostensibly on a peaceful mission, though that account has been called into question. Almost the entire party was killed, and in less than two months, retaliatory British forces were sent to occupy Benin City. While the number of casualties is unknown, contemporary accounts make it clear the number was substantial. British forces burned down buildings, including the royal palace, and looted thousands of works of art, including the so-called Benin Bronzes. These sculptures, many of which are actually made of brass, represent not just part of Benin’s history but artistic excellence so advanced that an early 20th-century curator of the Berlin Ethnographic Museum declared them to stand at the summit of what can be technically achieved. Many of the sculptures were made with the time-intensive lost wax casting process by master artisans in Benin’s brass casting guild. Today, most of the Benin Bronzes are in museums and private collections far outside the original kingdom of Benin. The British Museum owns over 900 such pieces, and while new conversations about repatriating ill-gotten artwork have led to initiatives like the Benin Dialogue Group and plans for a new museum in Benin filled with artwork loaned back to the area, very little has been permanently returned to Nigeria or to the present-day Abba. One notable exception comes from a Welsh doctor named Mark Walker, whose grandfather took part in the 1897 raid of Benin. Through a series of coincidences and the efforts of two former British police officers, Steve Dunstone and Timothy Aweimi, the younger Mr. Walker helped return two artifacts to the Abba of Benin back in 2014.

You can read about the whole saga in a New York Times piece we’ve linked to below. Kara Walker’s work is also inextricably tied to the legacy of colonialism and slavery. While she became famous largely for her provocative work with paper cutouts, it was a much different type of piece that showed some of the possibilities and limitations of public art. In 2014, she installed “A Subtlety” or “The Marvelous Sugar Baby,” an homage to the unpaid and overworked artisans who have refined our sweet tastes from the cane fields to the kitchens of the New World. This installation took place on the occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant. The piece was financed largely by the real estate company Two Trees, which owned the Domino Sugar Refinery site and was planning a costly development at the location. The exhibit’s centerpiece was a massive sculpture that took a team of dozens to create. It mixes the posture of a sphinx with elements taken from stereotypical depictions of the “mammy” archetype, with the entire figure covered in thousands of pounds of actual sugar donated by Domino. The floor of the site was still stained with molasses from its history as a working plant. The piece alludes to the history of sugar production and trade and the bitter role the ingredient played in accelerating the African slave trade. Walker called her piece “A Subtlety,” a nod to the old label for grand sugar sculptures created for nobility in the past.

Georgia O’Keeffe probably could have made her own short film about the dissonance between her paintings and the reactions they provoked. While many reduce her wide-ranging body of subjects to flowers, O’Keeffe resisted that simplistic reading. She once said, “You hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower, and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower, and I don’t.” O’Keeffe spent many years visiting and then living near the Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, but she might never have discovered the area if she hadn’t struggled with driving. Her difficulties in learning to operate a car were legendary. According to art critic Calvin Tompkins, she once said, “One day, the boy who was trying to teach me to drive said he knew of a place he thought I’d like better than any I’d seen, and he brought me to the Ghost Ranch.” O’Keeffe didn’t leave everything up to chance, though; she eventually started driving her Model A Ford to find interesting landscapes and then used it as a mobile studio where she painted pieces like “Gerald’s Tree.” Upon arriving at a location, O’Keeffe would remove the detachable driver’s seat and turn the passenger seat around so she could face the back seat easel. The mobile studio allowed O’Keeffe to paint during oppressively hot days and protect her from the bees that tended to gather.

O’Keeffe wasn’t the only artist who had to contend with bugs to bring us beauty. While John Everett Millais was painting his “Ophelia,” he wrote of the stresses of painting in the open air, saying, “My martyrdom is more trying than any I have hitherto experienced. The flies of Surrey are more muscular and have a still greater propensity for probing human flesh.” On top of that, Millais was threatened with reproach for trespassing on a field and destroying the hay. His model, Elizabeth Siddal, had it even worse. In order to represent the story of Ophelia’s drowning from “Hamlet,” Millais had Siddal pose in a bathtub full of water. During one sitting, the oil lamps responsible for keeping the water warm went out, and Siddal grew severely ill as a result. Her father eventually had to pressure the artist into paying for his daughter’s medical bills. Millais may have felt that the tumultuous process would be a greater punishment to a murderer than hanging, but the finished painting stands today as one of the finest exponents of the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

Many of Frida Kahlo’s paintings employ visual metaphor to allude to her tumultuous life, but her self-portrait dedicated to Leon Trotsky doesn’t leave much guesswork for the modern viewer. In the painting, Kahlo holds a note of dedication to the Russian revolutionary, “Cantor Carino,” a Spanish phrase which can be translated as “with all love.” This probably doesn’t imply the same level of romantic passion as “con todo amore” would have, but if she’d made the piece half a year earlier, there’s no telling what she might have inscribed. Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera were avowed Marxists. It was actually Rivera who convinced Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas to offer Trotsky political asylum in Mexico years after he was exiled from the Soviet Union. Trotsky and his wife stayed in their host’s second home, the Casa Azul, while in Mexico. That’s when things got messy, perhaps in part to get revenge for Rivera’s affair with her sister Christina. Frida began her own affair with Trotsky, and the lovers apparently conspired right in front of Trotsky’s wife, who couldn’t follow along in English, their shared second language. By July of 1937, the relationship had fizzled out, with Frida reportedly telling a friend, “I am very tired of the old man.” The self-portrait was nonetheless dedicated to Trotsky in November. A few years later, he was killed in Mexico by an undercover agent working for Stalin, and Kahlo was actually brought in for questioning by the Mexican police.

When the Swedish painter Hilma af Klint rose to prominence decades after her death, the art history narrative suggested it had to be rewritten. For years, many had considered artists like Wassily Kandinsky and Francis Picabia the fathers of abstract art. Before they began experimenting with abstraction around 1910, the medium was dominated by figurative work representing real or imagined scenes. Af Klint’s abstract, often geometric pieces predate the work of the supposed abstract pioneers by several years. The story of why it took so long to rediscover her work is almost as interesting as the motivations behind the pieces themselves. Af Klint did show her more traditional figurative paintings during her life and even exhibited her more abstract work in London back in 1928. Perhaps the tepid reaction to the work led her to believe she was ahead of her time. A skeptical studio visit from philosopher Rudolf Steiner, whose Anthroposophical Society Af Klint was an acolyte of, certainly didn’t help. Whatever the reason, Af Klint decided to bequeath her paintings to her nephew with the clear direction that he not display any of them until 20 years after her death.

Af Klint had taken an interesting journey to arrive at abstraction. She attended her first séance at 17 and eventually formed a spiritual collective of five women who called themselves “Dom Femme” or “The Five.” The women went on to conduct other séances, with one resulting in a commission for a series of paintings from a spiritual entity the group called “High Master Amaliel.” Af Klint eventually fulfilled this commission by creating 193 paintings for the temple, and while Af Klint once said the pictures were painted directly through her, suggesting some kind of channeling, she also specified that it was not the case that she was to blindly obey the high lords of the mysteries, leaving some tension between her own agency and the spiritual dimensions of the work. The temple Af Klint had envisioned for her opus was a custom-built spiral that never came to be. It’s fitting then that a record-breaking 2018 exhibition of her work took place at a museum once envisioned as a temple for the spirit by its director, Hilla von Rebay: Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic spiral masterpiece, the Guggenheim.

There’s one last masterpiece I wanted to discuss today. Stephen Sondheim is widely regarded as Broadway royalty, but in 1982, he was coming off of one of the biggest flops of his career, “Merrily We Roll Along,” which had run for just 16 performances. Searching for inspiration, he and collaborator James Lapine turned to visual art, including Georges Seurat’s pointillist painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” Lapine noted that though the painting resembled a scene that might be seen on a stage, the main character, Seurat himself, was absent. The musical that eventually came out of this moment, “Sunday in the Park with George,” beautifully examines the creative process with a focus on “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” However, it wasn’t a biography of the painter; Seurat died at just 31 years old, and one biographer described him as inclined to secrecy and isolation. We know that the painting took over two years to complete and that Seurat had a secret mistress whom Sondheim obliquely worked into his musical. But the fictionalized George was almost entirely Sondheim’s invention. Whether by dramatic necessity or a lack of available information, it couldn’t have been a simple matter to dramatize the internal inspiration and rigorous dedication needed to create a piece as singular as “La Grande Jatte.” But as someone once said, art isn’t easy.

Our video for May 7th is all about old-timey scams and grifts. If you know of a famous con man maneuver from history, drop it in the comments for a chance to be featured in that episode. Thanks for watching!

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