The favorite place of residence of artists in Paris at the beginning of the last century was the subject of jokes. So, the artist Federer in difficult times loved to encourage his friend Amshey Nyurenberg:
"You have a magnificent workshop on Rue de la Santé, 32, next to the famous Santé prison". Above its entrance, at the top of the gate there is a historical revolutionary inscription: "Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood". Of course, you would say what an irony. Then," he added, "in front of your workshop, there is a nunnery. Every morning, in the open window at the gate, you see gentle female hands. A mug of milk is in one of them, a piece of white bread in the other. Here's your breakfast ready! And not far from the studio is the famous Parisian venereal Hospital Cochin. What do you want, my friend?”

When Paul Cézanne didn't like his own painting, he would just throw it out of the window. The gardener Auguste Blanc told how the old trees growing under the windows of the artist's studio were hung with unfinished still lives. Sometimes Paul would think about some not completely hopeless sketches that had been hanging in the garden for several months – and put them back on his easel.
"Son, we must get down The Apples; I think I'll work on that study some more," he asked his son, who brought to Aix-en-Provence a French art dealer Ambroise Vollard for new paintings.

One of the finest and most famous works created by Alfons Mucha is a gold bracelet called Médée Snake. The snake wrapped around the ring wraps the wrist, and the snake's sting passes into the ring through a thin chain. For the first time the image of this bracelet appeared on the playbill for the Médée play. The actress liked it so much that she commissioned jeweller to create a snake bracelet and a ring embellished with gemstones for her to wear on stage. This bracelet shows that his creator was an artist, for the beautiful decoration has no practical application. After all, in the world, there is no such thin and elegant hand, on which it could be put on! The Médée Snake is called "jewelery of the century".

Certainly, the great artist did not do it on purpose. During his voyage to Etretat, a place in Normandy with the most beautiful cliffs in France, Monet was fascinated by the views. So much so that, carried away by his work, he did not notice how the tide began. The water came so quickly that the artist himself almost died, but the almost completed landscape had no chance to survive, it drowned in the risen water. However, Monet made up with the landscapes. As recalled Guy de Maupassant who saw him then: "I often followed Claude Monet when he wandered around searching impression. In those moments, he seemed to be not an artist, but a real hunter. He always had 5 or 6 canvases with him, carried by pleasured local children... He took one or another canvas, according to the changing conditions. Sometimes the artist waited for a long time for suitable weather."

It was a time of the Paris Commune. Once the artist was mistaken for a spy drawing a plan of the Seine embankments and was nearly drowned there. Quickly gathered onlookers got excited and demanded immediate reprisal for spying. But a miracle happened: the guards decided to shoot Renoir instead of drowning him. The execution was decided to take place in the city hall, but on the way there Auguste suddenly saw a familiar face – it was Raoul Rigault, a fugitive Republican journalist, whom Renoir saved from starvation and capture a few years before. Now Rigault was a police commissioner and a big man; the guards who caught the artist cheerfully sang Marseillaise and let him free.

The projects of contemporary creators in Versailles are always bold. In the summer of 2015 in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles near Paris, there was installed a 60-meter steel sculpture, resembling a funnel – a project of the British-Indian artist Anish Kapoor. The sculpture is officially called The Dirty Corner (2011). However, the artist himself dubs the work the “queen's vagina”. He said that it symbolises "the vagina of the queen who took power". The work provoked angry criticism from conservative French commentators who criticized placing The Dirty Corner in such a historic place. This work of art was even subjected to the act of vandalism: the sculpture was spray-painted. The Dirty Corner had to be cleaned.

At one time, Maurits Escher made attempts to translate Bach's works into a graphic language. However, when musicians came to him with a request to illustrate the cover of their new album, he categorically refused. The same cold shoulder received the leader of The Rolling Stones Mick Jagger, who wished to decorate his plate with an engraving "Verbum". However, many musicians did not feel confused about the artist’s position, and they used Escher's drawings without permission, which disturbed him very much.

During the Second World War, the famous fresco "The Last Supper" by Leonardo da Vinci, which was in Milan in the refectory of the Santa Maria del Grazie church, had a miraculous survival. The church was almost destroyed under bombs, three walls and the roof were blown away. And only the wall with the fresco by Leonardo stood unharmed in some incomprehensible way. The wall with the artist's fresco is the only thing left of the building.

This happened when Kandinsky was about 30 years old. After visiting Wagner's Opera Lohengrin in Moscow, he suddenly realized that he could "see" music. Later he wrote: "The violins, the deep tones of the basses, and especially the wind instruments at that time embodied for me all the power of that pre-nocturnal hour. I saw all my colours in my mind; they stood before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me." Shortly afterwards, Wassily Kandinsky decided to leave the legal profession and became an artist.

In 2015, a geologist and art historian Ann Pizzorusso questioned the attribution of the painting Virgin of the Rocks from National Gallery in London to Leonardo da Vinci. It was all about... flowers. The flora in the Louvre version of the piece is painted as perfectly as possible, while the British version contains some irregularly-shaped and unidentifiable flowers. It is unlikely that one and the same person could paint a grotto so neatly in one work and so unnaturally in another. Especially when taking into account Leonardo being immersed in the comprehension of nature and depicting it. By the way, the London painting had long been considered a work of the master’s students and da Vinci's authorship was asserted only in 2010. And the National Gallery refused to comment on a new research.

An unstudious student, Claude painted the covers of notebooks and drew cartoons of teachers. The latter were so good that by the age of 15 he was famous in his native Le Havre as a skillful caricaturist. They asked him to draw caricature portraits, and he did, this time for money: 20 francs! Soon the amusing drawings by Claude Monet were displayed in the window of the only art supplies store in the city. The young Monet glowed with pride seeing them.

Frida Kahlo created her biggest and most difficult piece, The Wounded Table, in 1940, experiencing a divorce from Diego Rivera. Being a dedicated Communist, she sent the work to the USSR as "a gift of friendship", but Soviet officials considered it to be an example of "decadent bourgeois formalist art" and unsuitable for public display. In 1955, the painting was shown in Poland in an exhibition, but on the way back to Moscow The Wounded Table disappeared as if into thin air. Years of searching in Europe and America have been unsuccessful. The painting remains the "Holy Grail" for art historians, studying Frida Kahlo's work.

After the death of his wife and son, 70-year-old Claude Monet abandoned his brushes for several years and sunk into depression. He didn't work and believed that no one needed his paintings. But he had his friends who found ways to inspire the aging and desperate artist to live. If not painting, then gardening!
The actor, director and writer Sacha Guitry, who was only 28 at that time, managed to capture Monet's interest with one idea: he asked the artist to design a garden in his villa near Rouen. Even the Parisian gossip columns described how Monet with drawings and seedlings of flowers from his own garden was going to Guitry and turning the area around his house into a work of art. Monet gradually recovered.

One druggist commissioned Paul Gauguin to paint him a picture. "Only you know what, the point is to make the picture simple and clear," he said. In response, Gauguin, without a long thought, drew the "White Horse". Upon seeing the picture, the apothecary exclaimed: "Monsieur, but this horse is green! Have you even seen green horses?!" "Just recall how everything seems green, when you watch the sunset with half-closed eyes in the evening, sitting in a rocking chair," Gauguin retorted. "Well, no, that wasn't the agreement," persisted the druggist, "I need a picture to admire in the daylight with eyes wide open!" And even Gauguin found nothing to object.

Leon Bakst came to the conclusion about the advantages of lecturing over creating paintings in 1923, after delivering at the Plaza Hotel his most famous lecture on fashion and design L'art du Costume et les lois, ces applications selon toute individualité. Bakst was paid 2,000 US dollars for this lecture. Its text was published in Vogue magazine. Bakst really enjoyed it and wrote to his sister that he craved more lectures like that: "This is like Chaliapin’s tour – pleasant and much easier than painting."

Having become famous and rich, Renoir still wore the same suit for 10 years, didn't tip waiters, but dispensed money to those deceived by notaries and other unfortunate ones who daily asked him for money for a sick child, a dying aunt or an innocently convicted husband. The artist's relatives protected him from those arrogant canters, therefore most often the “unfortunate” ones were waiting for him on his way from home to the studio. But for these cases, Madame Renoir came up with a protection scheme: seeing the beggar, the model would run to the studio, take her clothes off and quickly take a beautiful pose. Only the fear that his model would catch a cold could make Renoir quickly see the visitor off and light the fireplace, which he never lit for himself alone.

Paul Cézanne had his own creative method of work. He was always dissatisfied with himself and therefore worked for a very long time, and his models had to stay in one position for long hours. And the artist could leave a work before it was finished because it wasn’t perfect! So, Ambroise Vollard posed for Cézanne for 115 (!) times, but he saw his portrait. Cézanne postponed the painting to get back to it later when he "would achieve something". Well, except for he liked, "how the shirt chest is painted". Cézanne could only let his model to take a break under the force of the argument that the model would get tired and therefore become a bad poser. At the same time, the artist demanded complete silence at work: even the dog's barking could prevent him.

The famous Florentine painter of the Pre-Renaissance period Giotto di Bondone once played a trick on his teacher Cimabue Giovanni, and drew a fly on the nose of one of the painted characters. The insect looked so plausible that Cimabue took it for real and tried several times to brush it off from the picture. And only after several unsuccessful attempts, he finally understood what was the matter.

A well-known story: having seen The Bathers by Gustave Courbet at the Paris Salon of 1853, Napoleon III stroke it with his whip. But why did he do that?

Common version: the emperor was outraged by the rough naturalism: instead of the goddess there was a dumpy peasant with dirty feet.

Alternative version: It wasn't about Courbet at all – that’s how Napoleon responded to his wife’s brilliant joke. The Empress Eugénie accompanied him at the exhibition. After she had been struck by the way Rosa Bonheur endowed her horses with large rumps, it had to be explained to her that these were sturdy percherons and not slim-built chargers. When she reached The Bathers, Eugénie indicated the one who was removing her chemise and revealing her buttocks, and asked with a smile if she was a percheron too. Napoleon III was delighted with the joke and took advantage of it, apparently, by cracking his whip over the painting.

In Moscow in May 2015, the Museum AZ has been opened, the museum of the artist Anatoly Zverev (1931-1986). "The best Russian drawer," according to Picasso, the master attracts with his special magic. A couple of years ago, Alika Costakis, the daughter of the famous collector George Costakis, presented more than 600 works for the future museum. In his memoirs, the collector also wrote about a romantic history: the enthusiastic, true artist Zverev was in love with Alika and one day he allegedly painted 57 her portraits! She did not pose, but did her ordinary household chores, and the master caught the cherished curves on the fly!