10 Fun Art Facts to Drop at Your Next Dinner #3
What is the link between Van Gogh and Nintendo? Why did the CIA secretly fund modern art? Discover 10 mind-blowing facts to impress your friends.
[ FUN FACT #1] 🌜Vincent van Gogh a ‘Starry Night” was painted the same year Nintendo was founded
In 1889, while Van Gogh was creating his swirling masterpiece from his asylum window in Saint-Rémy, a Japanese craftsman named Fusajiro Yamauchi founded a small playing card company in Kyoto. That company would become Nintendo.
[ FUN FACT #2] 🕵️♂️ The CIA had a secret artistic weapon.
During the Cold War, the CIA secretly deployed a radical new art movement called Abstract Expressionism as an ideological weapon. This style was everything Soviet art was not: chaotic, intensely personal, and free from recognizable propaganda.
Through covertly funded exhibitions, the agency toured these massive, emotional paintings across Europe, presenting them as undeniable proof of American creative freedom. The artists, like Jackson Pollock, had no idea their deeply personal work was being used as American propaganda.
[ FUN FACT #3] 📜 Some of Delacroix's paintings contain human remains.
For masterpieces like "Liberty Leading the People," he used a popular 19th-century pigment called "Mummy Brown."
This rich brown color was made from the ground-up remains of ancient Egyptian mummies, which were imported to Europe and pulverized for artists' palettes.
