Sitting down to a holiday feast with family can be a special time for loved ones can reconnect and enjoy some much-needed togetherness. It can also be a potential minefield, with politics and religion threatening to turn dinner into a family feud.
Luckily, Artnet News is here to help, with a selection of art historical facts that we promise are safe topics of conversation to help close out the year with good vibes only. Plus, these fascinating but little-known factoids will make you look cultured and sophisticated—perfect if you’re trying to impress judgmental parents or make a good first impression with a new significant other’s family.
From lollipops to craters on Mercury, here’s our fully vetted list of snackable art facts to serve up alongside the roast and mashed potatoes this year.
Salvador Dalí designed the Chupa Chups lollipop
Enric Bernat, who founded Chupa Chups in 1958. Photo by Bernard Annebicque/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images.
Everyone knows that the prettiest lollipop—even if it tastes fairly mid—is the Chupa Chups, with its cursive red logo on a yellow flower. Turns out, it’s a design by none other than the great Surrealist Salvador Dalí, and it helped make the now-beloved brand a success.
The planet Mercury honors famous artists
IN SPACE – JANUARY 14: The planet Mercury is shown by NASA’s Messenger spacecraft. Photo by NASA via Getty Images.
In outer space, most of the planets and other celestial bodies take their names from mythology. But on the surface of tiny Mercury, baking in the hot sun, the craters are all named after influential creatives, including writers, artists, and choreographers such as Alexander Calder, Vincent van Gogh, and Augusta Savage. Ruth Asawa joined the list recently as well.
Claude Monet had eyes like a bee
Claude Monet, The Japanese bridge (Le Pont Japonais), 1918–24. The artist made this work while he suffered from cataracts, rendering his familiar Japanese Bridge nearly unrecognizable. Collection of Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris. Artist Monet, Claude (1840-1926). Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images via Getty Images.
Grandma isn’t the only one with failing eyesight. The great Impressionist Claude Monet painted some wild, abstract looking canvases before he had cataract surgery—yes, way back in 1923—to reverse his blindness. In the process, the surgeons removed the lenses of his eyes, allowing the artist to see ultraviolet light much like a bee.
Leonardo da Vinci was probably a pescatarian
The evidence suggests that in addition to being an engineer, architect, artist, and scientist, Leonardo da Vinci was also against eating meat—we actually have his shopping lists!
There’s a can of poop at the MoMA
Piero Manzoni, Artist’s Shit (1961). Photo: Jens Cederskjold, Creative Commons.
If someone brings up that $6 million banana, you can tell them that New York’s Museum of Modern Art owns a sculpture that Italian Conceptual artist Piero Manzoni claims is a can full of his own excrement. He made the work in an edition of 90, and one sold in 2016 for $300,000.
This peachy-keen cocktail is named after an Italian Renaissance great
Making Bellinis at Harry’s Bar. Photo: Sylvain GRANDADAM/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images.
The bellini, that fizzy and refreshingly delicious drink of prosecco mixed with peach nectar invented at Harry’s Bar in Venice, is actually named after Giovanni Bellini.
Alfred Hitchcock based the Psycho house on an Edward Hopper painting
Edward Hopper, House by the Railroad (1925). Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
One of cinema’s most famous homes, the Victorian mansion of Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 masterpiece Psycho, actually comes from a (far less creepy) painting by famed American artist Edward Hopper.
Georgia O’Keeffe Was Sent to Hawaii to Paint Pineapples. She Painted Everything But
Fruit company Dole sent the artist to Hawaii to paint pineapples, but she had other plans.
by Tim BrinkhofDecember 21, 2024 Share This Article
In 1938, Dole, then known as the Hawaiian Pineapple Company, offered to take the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe on a paid trip to the Pacific island to paint their flagship fruit for an upcoming marketing campaign.
Although O’Keeffe wasn’t a fan of commissions, especially commissions coming from large corporations, the deal arrived at an opportune time. The 51-year-old artist was eager to get away from her husband, photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz, whose affair with activist Dorothy Norman had contributed to her suffering several nervous breakdowns.
At the same time, she hoped that the Hawaiian landscape—utterly different from the New Mexico environments she frequently depicted in her paintings—would silence critics who had begun to label her increasingly monotonous work as “a kind of mass production.”
While O’Keeffe was blown away by the natural beauty of Honolulu’s pineapple fields, which she described as “all sharp and silvery stretching for miles off to the beautiful irregular mountains,” the first round of paintings she produced for Dole upon returning home the following year included everything but pineapples. Among an array of interesting subjects, she painted lobster-claws, papaya trees, dried lava, and waterfalls. But why?
Georgia O’Keeffe, Hibiscus with Plumeria (1939) on view at the New York Botanical Gardens. Photo: Christina Horsten / picture alliance via Getty Images.
The artist’s distaste of commissions likely contributed to this unusual decision. She was notoriously difficult to work with, not in the least because—in the words of art historian Sharyn R. Udall—her “energies and emotions were intimately intertwined” to the point that “the strain of working to a company’s specifications… created tensions and discord.”
Accounts of O’Keeffe’s stay on Hawaii suggest that Dole’s rigid travel plan made the artist even more disinterested in completing her assignment. The company’s executives, for one, rejected O’Keeffe’s request to sleep close to the pineapple plantations, arguing it would be “improper for a woman to live among the laborers.”
For another, instead of allowing her to paint pineapples outside, in the field, they expected the artist to paint her subject in a studio, removed from nature. To make matters worse still, the pineapples they provided her with were peeled, cut up, and—as O’Keeffe herself put it—“manhandled.” In short, unworthy of being painted.
Sneaking of, O’Keeffe spent two months traveling to and from a sizeable portion of Hawaii’s 137 islands by herself. The highlight of this journey was her stay at a sugar plantation in the town of Hana, on Maui, where she was shown around not by the plantation’s owner, but his 12-year-old daughter, Patricia. In a letter addressed to Stieglitz, she joked about her procrastination, writing, “By the time I leave the islands I am going to know so much more about sugar than I do about pineapples that is funny…”
It goes without saying that Dole wasn’t happy with the lack of pineapples in O’Keeffe’s commission. Insisting she fulfill her end of the bargain, the company actually delivered one straight to her home in New Mexico. If she had disliked the fruits she had seen in the Pacific, this one proved to her liking.
“It’s a beautiful plant,” she later told a reporter from TIME magazine. “It is made up of long green blades and the pineapples grow on top of it. I never knew that.”
True to her style, O’Keeffe painted only a part of her subject, in this case, the sharp leaves that make up the pineapple’s crown. Rendered with reds, greens, and oranges, the end result is just barely recognizable as a pineapple. Still, considering everything its marketing team had been through, the image was good enough for Dole, and promptly featured in advertisements in Vogue, the Saturday Evening Post, and other magazines.
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cREDIT: news.artnet