Know it all

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A piece of art by French artist Henri Matisse (1869-1954) hung upside down in a museum without anyone noticing. In 1961, the color lithograph "Le Bateau” (The Sailboat) (1958) hung upside down for 46 days at the Museum of Modern Art in New York until it was corrected.

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The full name of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) is Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Clito Ruiz y Picasso.

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Picasso painted a mural for the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 World Fair in Paris. The 11-foot-high and 25-foot-wide mural, titled Guernica, depicts the horrors an misery of war. The painting is based on the bombing raid of the village of Guernica in northern Spain during the Spanish Civil War.

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The photographs of San Francisco-born Ansel Adams (1902-1984) were inspired by a trip he took to Yosemite as a boy. Adams won Guggenheim grants to photograph national parks in the 1940s and ’50s.

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Impressionist artist Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) taught his pet parrot to say "Cézanne is a great painter!”

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The most famous painting by surrealist painter Salvador Dali (1904-1989) is "The Persistence of Memory” (1931). The painting is also known as "Melting Clocks.” The painting has been at New York’s Museum of Modern Art since 1934.

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Pop artist Andy Warhol (1928-1987) died after having routine gallbladder surgery. His funeral had an open coffin. Warhol wore a black cashmere suit, a paisley tie, a platinum wig and sunglasses.

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The chubby, naked babies popular in Italian Renaissance art are called "Putto,” an Italian word that means "little boy.”

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Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) mastered the painting technique called sfumato in his portrait of Mona Lisa. Derived from the Italian word "sfumare,” which means "smoke,” sfumato is a gradation of tone and color that blend into each other to create soft blurred lines.

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Artists Pierre Renoir (1841-1919) and Claude Monet (1840-1926) used to paint together in France during the late 1860s. It was the beginning of the impressionist period in art.

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After the death of his wife, the Dutch painter Rembrandt (1606-1669) hired a housekeeper that eventually became his common-law wife. She modeled for many of his pictures.

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Life Magazine ran a headline in 1949 that read "Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” At the time Pollock (1912-1956), a New York native, was becoming famous throughout the country for his expressionist paintings created with the unique technique of dripping and splashing paint onto canvas.

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American folk artist Anna Mary Robertson "Grandma” Moses (1860-1961) had 11 grandchildren.

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Answer: A- The Kiss, c.1907, by Gustav Klimt (1862-1918); B- The Scream, 1893, by Edvard Munch (1863-1944); C- The Birth of Venus, c. 1485, by Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510), D- Christina’s World, 1948, by Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009); E- The Dream, 1932, by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973).

Know It All is by Kerry McArdle. It runs in the weekend and Wednesday editions of the Daily Journal. Questions? Comments?

E-mail knowitall@smdailyjournal.com or call 344-5200 x114.