In 1938, Dole company approached Georgia O'Keeffe, offering her an all-expenses-paid trip to Hawaii to produce two print-ad images for the Hawaiian Pineapple Company. Though the artist only spent nine weeks visiting the island paradise, she completed no fewer than 20 paintings. Ironically, the one thing that O’Keeffe neglected to paint was a pineapple. After the trip, she turned two pieces into Dole: Heliconia, Crab’s Claw Ginger and Papaya Tree, ‘Íao Valley, Maui. The second one was rejected because the papaya was the rival fruit to the pineapple. Upon the artist’s return to New York, Dole sent her a pineapple so she could finish the assignment. In the summer of 2018, almost all of the works from the series were on view at the exhibition Georgia O’Keeffe: Visions of Hawaii at the New York Botanical Garden.

Sometimes not only counterfeits get exposes, but also ... originals! "The Procuress" was considered a forgery by the great falsifier of paintings Hans van Meegeren (famous for his marvelous counterfeit "Vermeers") for a long time. However, after a detailed study, it was authenticated as the genuine picture created by the Dutchman Dirk van Bauburen in 1622. It was probably the first case of an unfairly "slandered" picture faker, who took up the illegal forgery of canvases in order to avenge the world for not recognizing his pictorial talent.

William Turner's love of money was widely known and became the subject of many jokes. One of them was described by the artist's biographer George Walter Thornbury. When Turner arrived in Yorkshire, he brought the bookseller Robinson a sealed letter of recommendation from London Longman publishers. It was written there that “Above all things remember that Turner is the Great Jew.” Most likely, it was about his commerciality, but Robinson took everything literally. He would loudly assume that the guest would not want to go to church on Sunday and apologize when pork was served at the table.

Did you know that Auguste Renoir has the most organized and active opponents? In the past several years, Renoir Sucks At Painting movement has been demanding removal of the artist’s works from museums and staging demonstrations (not particularly crowded, but very reckless). They usually hold homemade signs reading "God Hates Renoir" and "Stop Aesthetic Terrorism". The community has an eponymously-named page on Instagram, where users post their own photos with Renoir's most awful (in their opinion) paintings in the background.
Admittedly, the activists have nothing against his Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette or La Grenouillère. All protests are focused mainly on the late works of the aging Renoir, when all his characters began to look the same, pursuing the artist's conceptual ideal.

They say, manuscripts do not burn, but pictures do... In his youth, Modigliani was so poor that he paid with his pictures to the hostess of the cafe, where he boarded daily. The kind woman always agreed to "barter", but at the same time (o woe to us, the admirers of Modigliani!) she actually used them to kindle her stove. We’ll never know how many paintings by the famous artist were burned in such a villainous manner!

Piero della Francesca is the creator of "the greatest painting in the world": that's how English writer Aldous Huxley described the painter's Resurrection in his essay Along the Road. The fresco was created somewhere between 1450 and 1465 in the artist's hometown Sansepolcro on the wall of the town hall (which is now a museum). The masterpiece survived until the modern times: it had been hidden beneath a layer of plaster for nearly two hundred years. And during the Second World War, an officer of the Royal Horse Artillery, Anthony Clarke saved the fresco and the town by holding back from using his troop's guns to shell Sansepolcro. He’d read Aldous Huxley's essay about "the greatest picture in the world." And in return, the locals named in his honour a Sansepolcro suburban street. By the way, in translation from the Italian, the name of the tower means "the Church of the Holy Sepulchre" and the fresco depicts the risen Christ on the brim of the sepulchre. Read more about the artist on Arthive.

In France, in April 2015, a picture of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, a famous French artist of the 19th century, was discovered – a true miracle of the stock control conducted by Emmanuelle Busline, curator and adviser on historical monuments of the region. In the chapel attic of the former Hotel Dieu Hospital, a large canvas of 4.3 by 3.4 meters was found, rolled up and covered with dust – an image of the Madonna with a baby in her arms and a kneeling king. A well-known plot for the artist!

It is believed that Ingres presented the picture to the city in 1826, when he finished it. It hung in the local church of Saint-Désiré, and in 1936, when the restoration began in the temple, it was transferred to the former hospital and forgotten. It is believed that this is the second version of "The Vow of Louis XIII". The leader of European academicism created the first version in 1824 by the order of the King of France, Charles X.

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.

One day, in the gallery of the collector spouses from New York Maya and Anatoly Bekkerman, the bell rang: the outfitter’s granddaughter offered them a picture, which Fyodor Chaliapin paid 100 years ago with ... for a tailcoat! The lady spelled the surname of the great singer as "Shatapkin", but the canvas was undoubtedly of Korovin's brush. The creators were friends, Korovin painted a portrait of Chaliapin’s daughters, so he had several works by the artist. Four of them were used to pay the merchant for the clothes.

Turner was an “expensive” and respectable artist, a member of the Royal Academy. The collector, who bought “The Golden Bough” from Turner, turned to the author with a claim soon after the deal. One of the characters... fell off the canvas! "Hey, it's just paper!" Turner was surprised. He himself forgot how he made a sketch of a naked man in a classroom, and found that its proportions and pose fits perfectly into an almost finished picture. So he simply pasted the figure onto the canvas. Turner intended to paint it with oil later, but forgot. "Most likely, I would not have remembered about it if it wasn’t for you!" He grumbled to the disgruntled buyer. There were no other apologies: Turner never cared to be nice.

During the restoration of the Caravaggio’s "Bacchus", on the decanter, they found a vague reflection of a man – probably a self-portrait by Caravaggio. It is interesting that the glass decanter is to the right of the young god (posed by a famous model), and he holds his glass in his left hand. Apparently, the artist used a pinhole camera when creating a picture – an optical device for transferring an image of a real object to the surface, for example, a canvas. At the same time, the artist "transferred" himself.

Old masters often portrayed brawlers and drunkards, and wine served as one of the debauchery symbols. In the painting by Jan Steen "Rascal Family", the mistress of the house tramples the Bible, the maid fills her glass with wine, holding the hand of the owner of the house. Fate hangs over these people’s heads in the form of a basket with a sword (justice and punishment), a crutch and a mug (impending poverty) and a beater (it was used by those who suffered of plague and leprosy). A brave artist! Steen himself (the father of the family), his wife Margriet van Goyen (mother) and their sons Thaddeus (behind the grandmother) and Cornelis were the models for the picture!

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.

Ilya Repin was almost painfully stingy. Having learnt that tram tickets in St. Petersburg cost five kopecks in the morning, and ten kopecks in the afternoon, the artist tried to come to the city early in the morning. And when his daughter Vera needed massage sessions, Repin said a truly "brilliant" sentence: "You call the masseuse once, remember the massage techniques, and massage yourself then!".

A lot of artists tied themselves in knots trying to emulate Kuindzhi's palette. Speaking of the painting Ukrainian Night, Kramskoy wrote in a letter to Repin: "I'm a complete fool in front of this painting. The lighting on the white hut is so realistic that it tiresome for my eyes to look at it, as if it is real..." But the secret of Kuindzhi's palette was easier than it seemed. One day Kuindzhi (who was teaching at the Academy of Arts at the time) invited his friend Dmitry Mendeleev to his class. The latter brought a device estimating the spectral sensitivity of the human eye. Kuindzhi was far ahead of his young students in this indicator. He saw in a different way. Not in terms of creativity, but in the most literal physiological sense.

4 miles of red yarn, 200 pairs of shoes and handwritten notes were used by Chiharu Shiota for her performance "Perspective", which dramatically and emotionally conveys the personal memories of the Japanese artist. The new art object is intended for the Venice Biennale-2015. Chiharu Shiota is known throughout the world for her research into the phenomenon of memory, losses and totems, in which people can turn ordinary household items such as shoes and keys.

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.

All Claude Monet's friends and relatives recalled the artist's unpredictable fits of rage. His children and wife Alice knew that it was better not to bother Monet at such moments, and even not to call him for dinner. The neighbours got used to the fact that it wasn't necessary to greet the eccentric artist on such days – he didn't respond or even hear them anyway. But there was one thing everyone was sure about – that fit of rage would end with something huge.
One morning, Monet was furious because grey road dust settled on the flowers in his garden. He slammed the door and went to the mayor: the road in Giverny had to be paved! The city hall had already considered that project more than once, but they didn't have enough money for it – they lacked 2,800 francs.
"I will give you 1,200 francs," Monet suggested.
In a few days, they started to pave the road to Rue.

In 1818, Théodore Géricault read a book about the terrible story of the raft of Méduse: the French frigate crashed, of the 147 passengers set adrift on an open raft, only 15 survived – the others had been killed or thrown overboard by their comrades; some resorted to cannibalism to survive. This terrible story delighted the artist: he finally found the plot for a big painting! Big in all senses: Géricault started working on a painting which was more than seven meters long.
But the artist was only 27. How could he keep himself from going to parties and devote all his time and effort to the painting? Géricault shaved his head bald. At that time, it was impossible to dally with ladies, drink sparkling wine and crack jokes in the salons, while having a buzz cut. He locked himself in the studio with the help of his socially unacceptable hairstyle.

When Paul Cézanne didn't like his own painting, he would just throw it out of the window. Old olives growing under the windows of the artist's studio were hung with unfinished still lifes. Sometimes Paul would think about some of his 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 from the cherry tree; I think I'll work on that study some more, " he told his son, who brought a French art dealer Ambroise Vollard to Aix-en-Provence for new paintings.