The Coolest People in Art

This is a short, quick, and easy read.

Most of these anecdotes are probably just OK (comedy is hard!), but there should be at least one or two that you will want to tell your friends.

• Maurice Sendak, author/illustrator of Where the Wild Things Are, was a sickly child. His father once told him that he might see an angel outside his window, and if he did see an angel, then his illness would be over quickly. However, his father also said that angels were quick and therefore were hard to see: "If you blink, you'll miss it." After his father left the room, young Maurice looked out the window. Then he started shouting, "I saw it! I saw it! I saw the angel!" Mr. Sendak says about his father, "He was as thrilled as I was."

• Musician Laurie Anderson and comedian Andy Kaufman seem like an unlikely team, but they used to do put-ons together. They would go to a place that had a Test-Your-Strength machine. Mr. Kaufman would try but fail to win a stuffed rabbit for Ms. Anderson. Then Mr. Kaufman would angrily denounce the machine, yelling that it was rigged, and Ms. Anderson would angrily demand the stuffed rabbit that Mr. Kaufman would have won for her if the machine had not been rigged. By the way, Ms. Anderson has some advice for people who would like to be creative: "My approach as an artist has been to always remember that I'm free. That's what I tell young artists. You hear them say, 'I can't be an artist! Michelangelo was an artist! What would people say?' Well, most people don't care about what you do. So knock yourself out. You're free."

• When the marriage of Emerald, the younger sister of African-American artist Ashley Bryan, ended, she had five children to provide for. Her parents took her and her family in, and Ashley helped her out financially. Some of his salary as an art teacher and his income as an artist went to raise her children until they were grown. The children helped him out by posing for him, although since they were young, occasionally he had trouble getting them to stand still for the pose: "Come back! Come back! Come back to the pose!" In his life, Mr. Bryan has tried to do what the members of his church told him when they gave him a room and art supplies so he could teach art to children: "You have a talent. Share your gifts with others." By the way, children sometimes ask him if he is rich. He replies, "Am I rich? Oh, I am SO rich! I have the blue sky overhead, the green grass underfoot, the clouds, the trees, the flowers!" African-American author Walter Dean Myers learned from Mr. Bryan, "It's about the art."

• Before World War II, Lucy Carrington Wertheimer ran an art gallery that championed the work of modern artists; however, earlier in her life, she knew little about the work of modern artists. In her home, she owned and hung paintings by such artists as Zoffaney, Géricault, and Sickert. Her younger sister, Fanny Wadsworth, who was married to a cousin of modern artist Edward Wadsworth, looked at her collection, then asked, "Lucy, have you never heard of Picasso?"