Gossip about Artists. How Dali Sold His Mustache and Other Stories from the Lives of Geniuses

This vivid book is your ticket backstage to the world of art, where creative insights were born in the whirlpool of personal dramas, scandals, and genius eccentricities. Discover great masters from an unexpected perspective: through their fears, obsessions, and hidden secrets. You will learn what tragedies lie behind the cheerful scenes from cabarets and cafés depicted in the paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec; how the insufferable child Salvador Dali grew into an insufferable adult and what grasshoppers, melting clocks, and burning giraffes symbolize in his paintings; which paintings of Russian artists the superstitious Pavel Tretyakov was afraid to buy for his collection; what eccentricities and antics made Mikhail Vrubel famous, and who is the Vrubel’s Demon. You will witness human destinies full of paradoxes: geniuses and tyrants, Don Juans and touching husbands, singers of joy with a sad soul. “Gossip about Artists” is not just a collection of curious facts, but a mesmerizing plunge into the abyss of genius.