There’s pop art, and then there’s poop art.
While Chris Ofili caused a spit-storm by using elephant dung in his 1996 painting “The Holy Virgin Mary,” the new book “100 Secrets of the Art World” reveals that Pablo Picasso used feces to paint with as far back as 1938.
Divulging “a family secret,” Diana Widmaier Picasso states that her grandfather used excrement produced by his then-3-year-old daughter Maya (Diana’s mother) to paint an apple in a 1938 still life.
“According to him, excrement from an infant breast-fed by its mother had a unique texture and ocher color,” Diana says in the book by Thomas Girst and Magnus Resch, which includes other secrets from Jeff Koons, Marina Abramovic, Larry Gagosian and Zaha Hadid. “The revulsion that this material might provoke is instead transformed into amazement as we grasp the full imagination of the artist.”