Artists' birthdays

Artists' birthdays are often accompanied by newspaper articles and exhibitions that pay tribute to the life and work of the celebrant.

But at what point is the "real" birthday of an artist? Maybe whenever the first works reach the public? That would be problematic in some cases. Nolde, for example, first published postcards, and Macke worked as a stage designer.

Is it the first exhibition? That is often unspectacular. Finally, there remains the breakthrough as an artist, in Nolde's case perhaps the exhibition at the Arnold Gallery in Dresden in 1906, where he met the artists of the "Brücke", and in the case of Macke, the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne in 1912. You can see: Artists have several "birthdays", and the biological one is certainly not the most important among them.