“Facts are like cows. If you look them in the face long enough, they generally run away”*…
Modern and contemporary works typically hang at 1.55 metres from the floor, to the middle of the picture. It’s the height used by museums, and for displays at Christie’s.
Artist signatures first became prevalent during the early Renaissance, when co-operative guild systems gave way to the celebration of individual creativity.
The most precious materials in classical Chinese furniture are zitan and huanghuali, two types of hardwood found, among other places, on China’s largest island, Hainan.
The earliest, securely attributed self-portrait by a European Master was made by Albrecht Dürer at the age of 13. Although there are works defined as self-portraits that pre-date this, he was the first artist considered to have looked at his own image in this way.
97 other tasty tidbits from the venerable auction house Christie’s at “101 things we have learned from the Online Magazine.”
* Dorothy L. Sayers
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As we consider our bids, we might send well-shaped birthday greetings to Korczak Ziolkowski; he was born on this date in 1908. A designer and sculptor, he is best known as the creator of the Crazy Horse Memorial, a monument to Native American life and culture in Wyoming. He began work in 1948, but died (in 1982) before the work was finished; all ten of his children have continued the carving of the monument or are active in the Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation, which supports the work. If and when it is finished to Ziolkowski’s design, it is expected to be the largest sculpture in the world: 563 feet high by 641 feet long. Crazy Horse’s head would be large enough to contain all the 60-foot-high heads of the Presidents at Mount Rushmore.
Ziolkowski and Lakota Chief Henry Standing Bear, standing with a model of the Crazy Horse Memorial