art
Painters, sculptors, and the ones who chased chickens across canvas.
The Guest of Honor
What does it take for a toll collector who painted tigers in his off-hours to end up enthroned on a packing crate at a banquet thrown by Picasso?
The Necessary Jew
A terrified little man taught crafts to bored teenagers in Drohobycz and wrote two of the strangest books of the twentieth century, until the SS officer next door decided he wanted a Jew of his own.
The Butterflies of the Soul
He won the 1906 Nobel Prize for proving the brain is built from separate cells. He found out by drawing them, on an ink-stained tablecloth, for fifty years.
The Accountant of Skt.-Adolf-Wald
Issued one pencil a week, he spent thirty-five years balancing the ledgers of a universe he'd crowned himself emperor of.
The Man Who Knew Paris
He kept a shoebox labeled Mouse Material; the archivist who finally opened it found the contents of a vacuum cleaner.
Hugo Ball and the Lobster Bishop
What happens when a man in a cardboard lobster suit accidentally starts chanting Catholic mass?
Lord Berners and the Elephant Problem
What happens when a man Stravinsky called Britain's best composer places a classified ad selling elephants he doesn't own — and names the buyers?
The Giggling Mycologist
What kind of person gets laughed out of the British scientific establishment and leaves giggling?
The Woman Who Covered the World in Polka Dots
She sent fourteen unsolicited watercolors to a stranger in rural Japan. That stranger was Georgia O'Keeffe, and she wrote back.
The Old Man Mad About Painting
The most quintessentially Japanese artwork ever made was painted with a color Japan had banned.
The Queen Who Took the Art
She quit the throne, converted to the religion that was illegal for her to hold, and left Sweden in men's clothing — but she didn't leave empty-handed.