art notes

-08-09-2015-

Portraits in the Countryside (1876)

Gustave Caillebotte



Caillebotte's style belongs to the School of Realism but was strongly influenced by his impressionist associates. In common with his precursors, Jean-François Millet and Gustav Courbet, as well as his contemporary Degas, Caillebotte aimed to paint reality as it existed and as he saw it, hoping to reduce painting's inherent theatricality. Perhaps because of his close relationship with so many of his peers, his style and technique vary considerably among his works, as if "borrowing" and experimenting, but not really sticking to any one style. The tilted ground common to these paintings is very characteristic od Caillebotte's work, which may have been strongly influenced by Japanese prints and the new technology of photography, though evidence of his actual use of photography is lacking. Cropiing and "zooing-in", techniques which were also commonly found in Caillebotte's oeuvre, may also be the result of his interest in photography, but may just as likely deprive from his intense interest in perspective effects.





-30-06-2015-


Le poker [The Poker Game] (1902)

Félix Vallotton 





"Some great news that will really surprise you: I'm going to get married. I am marrying a lady I have known and appreciated for a long time, a friend, a widow with three children. She has enough means to support herself and her children, and with what I will be able to earn, we will manage very easily. And what's more, the family will take care of the children, and I am sure will be a powerful source of help to my career. They are important art dealers". This is the somewhat cynical way that, at the beginning of 1899, Vallotton announced his marriage to Gabrielle Rodrigues-Henriques, the daughter of Alexandre Bernheim. The outcome of this rational union was not long in coming, and Vallotton soon found his work exhibited at the gallery of his brothers in law, Josse and Gaston Bernheim.


Up to 1902-1903, Vallotton did many paintings of his wife and his children, as well as of the various relations of his wife. Here, Gabrielle is playing cards with her mother and her uncle. But why, in this unusual composition, is the subject relegated to the background, into an almost inaccessible distance? The whole of the foreground is taken up by an oval table, composed using rabatment, and with a lamp of exaggerated proportions.


At this time, relations between Vallotton and his wife's family began to deteriorate. Moreover, it would not be long before the painter categorically refused to sell his paintings to his brothers in law. Assessed by the keen eye of the painter, this scene seems to justify John Klein's remark analysing the relationships between Vallotton and his wife's family: "These naïve comments about his uneasiness are crystallised in the way he distorts the space and gives special attention to the furniture and decoration" (Félix Vallotton, a retrospective, 1992).

-03-06-2015-


Mercury and Argus (1659)

Diego Velazquez






According to the myth, Argus was a prince from the Peloponnesian city of Argos who had one hundred eyes. Since fifty of them were open at any given moment, Juno ordered him to stand guard over the young Io, who had been seduced by Jupiter and then changed into a cow. Mercury, sent by Jupiter, lulled Argus to sleep with the sound of his flute, and then he cut off Argus' head (or stoned him to death). Juno scattered the eyes of the slain Argus on the tail of a peacock, after which the bird was devoted to the goddess. 


Here again, Velazquez transforms a mythological and supernatural event into a realistic scene with such overpowering truthfulness that it seems more appropriate to a picaresque novel than to a legend from antiquity. The two protagonists of this genre scene transport us directly into the world of the p'icaro of La Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, or of Cervantes' Don Quixote and Novelas ejemplares. The pauperism in Spain during the so-called Golden Age and the hunger that was a major preoccupation of the people fostered the prevalence of vagabonds who played a prominent role in everyday Spanish life. However, although "pilfering" held a special place of honor, comical pranks and abominable tricks played on blind men also frequently found their way into these picaresque novels. Like the writers and poets who were his contemporaries, Velazquez utilized his genius to become a pictorial chronicler of the times, by virtue of his incomparable brush instead of the pen. 


Justi believes that Argus' legs were inspired by the sculpture of the Dying Gaul that Velazquez may have seen in Rome, while de Tolnay sees in Argus' body a similarity in pose and execution to the nude youth at the right above Ezekiel on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. 



The extreme technical fluidity with which the work was conceived, especially the device of lighting from behind and the sensitive chiaroscuro effects, heightens its realism while, at the same time, infusing it with poetry.

-07-05-2015-





Goldfish (1912)

Henri Matisse


Henri Matisse, Goldfish, 1912, oil on canvas,
146 x 97 cm (Pushkin Museum of Art, Moscow)


Goldfish were introduced to Europe from East Asia in the 17th century. From around 1912, goldfish became a recurring subject in the work of Henri Matisse. They appear in no less than nine of his paintings, as well as in his drawings and prints. Goldfish, 1912 belongs to a series that Matisse produced between spring and early summer 1912. However, unlike the others, the focus here centers on the fish themselves.

Color

The goldfish immediately attract our attention due to their color. The bright orange strongly contrasts with the more subtle pinks and greens that surround the fish bowl and the blue-green background. Blue and orange, as well as green and red, are complementary colors and, when placed next to one another, appear even brighter. This technique was used extensively by the Fauves, and is particularly striking in Matisse’s earlier canvas Le Bonheur de vivre. Although he subsequently softened his palette, the bold orange is reminiscent of Matisse’s fauvist years, which continued to influence his use of color throughout his career.




The remarkable career of Henri Matisse, one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, whose stylistic innovations (along with those of Pablo Picasso) fundamentally altered the course of modern art and affected the art of several generations of younger painters, spanned almost six and a half decades. His vast oeuvre encompassed painting, drawing, sculpture, graphic arts (as diverse as etchings, linocuts, lithographs, and aquatints), paper cutouts, and book illustration. His varied subjects comprised landscape, still life, portraiture, domestic and studio interiors, and particularly focused on the female figure.

Initially trained as a lawyer, Matisse developed an interest in art only at age twenty-one. In 1891, he moved to Paris to study art and followed the traditional nineteenth-century academic path, first at the Académie Julian (winter 1891–92, under the conservative William-Adolphe Bouguereau), and then at the École des Beaux-Arts (1892, under the Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau). Matisse's early work, which he began exhibiting in 1895, was informed by the dry academic manner, particularly evident in his drawing. Discovering manifold artistic movements that coexisted or succeeded one another on the dynamic Parisian artistic scene, such as Neo-Classicism, Realism, Impressionism, and Neo-Impressionism, he began to experiment with a diversity of styles, employing new kinds of brushwork, light, and composition to create his own pictorial language.

In its palette and technique, Matisse's early work showed the influence of an older generation of his compatriots: Édouard Manet (1832–1883) and Paul Cézanne (1839–1906). In the summer of 1904, while visiting his artist friend Paul Signac at Saint-Tropez, a small fishing village in Provence, Matisse discovered the bright light of southern France, which contributed to a change to a much brighter palette. He also was exposed, through Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross (Henri-Edmond Delacroix), living in nearby Lavandou, to a Pointillist technique of small color dots (points) in complementary colors, perfected in the 1880s by Georges Seurat (1859–1891). As a result, Matisse produced his Neo-Impressionist masterpiece Luxe, calme et volupté (1904–5; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris), so titled after a poem by Charles Baudelaire, and exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris (spring 1905) to great acclaim. The next summer, in Collioure, a seaport also on the Mediterranean coast, where he vacationed in the company of André Derain (1880–1954), Matisse created brilliantly colored canvases structured by color applied in a variety of brushwork, ranging from thick impasto to flat areas of pure pigment, sometimes accompanied by a sinuous, arabesque-like line. Paintings such as Woman with a Hat (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), when exhibited at the 1905 Salon d'Automne in Paris, gave rise to the the first of the avant-garde movements (fall 1905–7), named "Fauvism" (from the French word fauves or "wild beasts") by a contemporary art critic, referring to its use of arbitrary combinations of bright colors and energetic brushwork to structure the composition. During his brief Fauvist period, Matisse produced a significant number of remarkable canvases, such as the portrait of Madame Matisse, called The Green Line (1905; Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen); Bonheur de vivre (1905–6; Barnes Collection, Merion, Pa.); Marguerite Reading (1905–6; MoMA, New York); two versions of The Young Sailor (1906), the second of which is at the Metropolitan Museum (1999.363.41); Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra (1907; Baltimore Museum of Art); and two versions of Le Luxe (1907), among others.


Subsequently, Matisse's career can be divided into several periods that changed stylistically, but his underlying aim always remained the same: to discover "the essential character of things" and to produce an art "of balance, purity, and serenity," as he himself put it in his "Notes of a Painter" in 1908. The years 1908–13 were focused on art and decoration, producing several large canvases such as Reclining Odalisque (1908; 1999.363.44); two important mural-size commissions, Dance and Music (1909–10), for the Moscow house of his Russian patron Sergei I. Shchukin; a trio of large studio interiors, exemplified by The Red Studio (1911; MoMA, New York); and a group of spectacularly colored Moroccan pictures. These were followed by four years (1913–17) of experimentation and discourse with the Cubism of Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris. The resulting compositions were much more austere, almost geometrically structured and at times close to abstraction, as shown in the View of Notre-Dame (1914; MoMA, New York), the Yellow Curtain (1915; private collection), The Piano Lesson (1916; MoMA, New York), Bathers by a River (1916; Art Institute, Chicago), and a group of portraits in which a seated figure or the sitter's head is positioned against a thinly brushed, neutral background. Yet he also created meticulously drawn portraits such as the famous Plumed Hat (1919; MoMA, New York).


In the autumn of 1917, Matisse traveled to Nice in the south of France, and eventually settled there for the rest of his life. The years 1917–30 are known as his early Nice period, when his principal subject remained the female figure or an odalisque dressed in oriental costume or in various stages of undress, depicted as standing, seated, or reclining in a luxurious, exotic interior of Matisse's own creation. These paintings are infused with southern light, bright colors, and a profusion of decorative patterns. They emanate a hothouse atmosphere suggestive of a harem.


In 1929, Matisse temporarily stopped painting easel pictures. He then traveled to America to sit on the jury of the 29th Carnegie International and, in 1930, spent some time in Tahiti and New York as well as Baltimore, Maryland and Merion, Pennsylvania. An important collector of modern art, and owner of the largest Matisse holdings in America, Dr. Albert Barnes of Merion, commissioned the artist to paint a large mural for the two-story picture gallery of his mansion. Matisse chose the subject of the dance, a theme that had preoccupied him since his early Fauve masterpiece Bonheur de vivre. The mural (in two versions due to an error in dimensions) was installed in May 1933, and remains in place at the Barnes Foundation (Merion, Pa.). The composition highlighted the simplicity of female figures in exuberant motion against an abstract, almost geometric background. In preparation for the mural, Matisse began using a new technique—that of building up the composition from cutout shapes of previously colored paper. From 1940 onward, the paper cutouts became Matisse's favored exploratory medium and, until the end of his life, the dominant medium of expression.


Another medium that Matisse explored and experimented with throughout his lifetime was drawing. As the most direct expression of the artist's thoughts, drawing often helped Matisse to work out compositional and stylistic problems or new ideas. During the mid-1930s, he created distinctive series of pen-and-ink drawings on the subject of the artist and his model, while in the early 1940s he conceived his famous sequences of Thèmes et Variations, sensitively drawn spare works in elegant, unshaded line, describing simplified forms of female figures or still lifes. In the late 1940s and early '50s, his drawings become bolder, the contour line thicker, the forms even more simplified and devoid of detail. The latest large drawings of acrobats (1951–52), executed with a thick brush placed at the end of a long stick, are made up of contour only. They are contemporaneous with a cutout series of Blue Nudes (2002.456.58), and the two mediums seem to represent two different approaches to form and space. The relationship between figure-ground becomes ambiguous and space complements the intended form. The form appears almost sculptural.


Sculpture was another medium pursued by Matisse since his early years, and although independent in expression, it was frequently used to find a solution to pictorial problems or became an inspiration to painting. More than half of Matisse's sculptures were completed between 1900 and 1910; he also frequently worked in series, manipulating the form and simplifying it over the years. Among his best-known works belong the series of four Back reliefs (1903–31), the series of five Jeannette heads (1910–16), and the Large Seated Nude (1925–29).

Matisse's creativity extended into the area of graphic arts and book illustration, the latter begun when he was already in his sixties, with the illustrations to Stéphane Mallarmé's Poésies (1932), and culminated with the cutout compositions (1943–44) for his book Jazz (published in 1947). But the crowning achievement of Matisse's career was the commission for the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence (1948–51), for which he created all the wall decorations, Stations of the Cross, furniture, stained-glass windows, even the vestments and altarcloths. The beauty and simplicity of this project constituted Matisse's spiritual Gesamtkunstwerk and attested to his creative genius.





-19-04-2015-


Note in Red, The Siesta (1873)

James McNeill Whistler




Note in Red: The Siesta portrays Englishwoman Maud (Mary) Franklin, James McNeill Whistler’s model and mistress between the mid-1870s and 1888, lying on a red divan, a studio prop that appears in other works of the early 1880s. Quickly and sketchily executed in a nervous series of long brushstrokes, Maud’s recumbent form, enclosed within a voluptuous swathe of dress fabric and upholstery, suggests an unposed moment, a siesta for the weary model, whose voluminous skirt trails carelessly along the floor as she rests with her face turned from the viewer. The setting is unspecified, as if the painting is deliberately unfinished; above the back edge of the sofa, the stylized butterfly, Whistler’s idiosyncratic “signature,” asserts the reality of the flat panel surface on which the artist has pictured the scene.


The casual, even erotic intimacy of Note in Red: The Siesta, underscored by the brilliant color that dominates the painting, reflects the artist’s personal relationship with his subject, who had borne him two daughters. Maud, who called herself Mrs. Whistler, was the last in a series of women who were both Whistler’s models and his mistresses; he abruptly ended their more than decade-long affair in 1888 to marry Beatrice Birnie Philip Godwin. Maud posed for innumerable paintings, drawings, and prints (including several works in the Terra Foundation collection), but Whistler never individualized her features or allowed her name to appear in the titles of oil paintings he exhibited. As the impersonal title of this painting suggests, Whistler did not paint Maud so much as the decorative effect she occasioned, an approach consistent with his pursuit of an art defined by the harmonious arrangement of color and form rather than the illusionistic representation of subject matter. Note in Red: The Siesta was shown at a London gallery in 1884 in Whistler’s one-person exhibition significantly entitled ‘Notes’—‘Harmonies’—‘Nocturnes’, for which the artist designed the color-coordinated installation. Whistler used such titles drawn from names for musical compositions to draw an analogy between painting and music, a “pure” art form in which representation need play no part.



Throughout his career, the female figure served as a medium for the development of Whistler’s art. In images ranging from formal, full-length society portraits to such seemingly private, sketch-like works as Note in Red: The Siesta, Whistler pioneered the theme of woman as decorative object. He was deeply influenced by the stylized, languorously elegant women pictured in the Japanese woodcut prints he admired, and his treatments, in turn, set a precedent for two generations of American artists. Nude or clothed, the recumbent woman, caught in an idle moment of private rest or reverie in the private setting of the bedroom or boudoir, was a particular theme to which he repeatedly returned. Although it has precedents in Renaissance paintings of subjects from classical literature, Whistler treated the subject in a thoroughly modern manner, painting Maud in a fashionable, body-hugging dress with a rapidity and immediacy that emphasizes his presence and thus his personal relationship to the sleeping model. In both its exaltation of the quotidian, private moment and its assertion of the individual artist’s persona and process, Note in Red: The Siesta attests to Whistler’s status as a founder of artistic modernism.




One of the nineteenth century's most innovative, influential, and controversial artists, American expatriate James Abbott McNeill Whistler served as a bridge between European and American art worlds and laid the foundations for modernism in his iconoclastic art and writings. Whistler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, but spent much of his childhood in St. Petersburg, Russia, where his father was a railroad engineer. Despite his considerable talent as a draftsman, Whistler was a failure both as a student at the United States military academy at West Point and as an employee of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey. Determined to become an artist, he left for Europe in 1855, never to return to his native land, but he always considered himself an American artist.


Whistler spent his long career shuttling between the great art capitals of Paris and London. A boldly experimental artist in painting, printmaking, pastel drawing, and interior design, he became a link between several important artistic circles. In the 1860s these included the English painters known as the Pre-Raphaelites, who painted moralizing narrative works in obsessive detail, and the anti-academic French realist painters, led by Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), who looked to the inspiration of seventeenth-century Dutch and Spanish painting in their unsentimental treatments of contemporary social themes.


From the start, portraits, seascapes, and urban scenes were among Whistler's most important subjects. He broke ground not only in the modern nature of these themes but in his decorative treatments, which asserted pure surface values of composition, color, and texture as artistic ends. Inspired by the flat, reductive aesthetic of the Japanese prints that began to flood Western markets in the 1860s, Whistler argued for an analogy between painting and music, a "pure" art independent of moral themes or even subject matter: he called his works "symphonies" and "nocturnes." His doctrine of "art for art's sake" laid the foundation for such diverse developments as the so-called aesthetic movement in art and design, which glorified pure pattern and color in richly decorated objects, and impressionism, the painted rendering of forms simply in terms of their reflection of colored light.






Charming, combative, and convinced of his own genius, Whistler was a flamboyant and even outrageous personality as provocative as his art. His relations with patrons, fellow artists, and critics were often contentious. In 1877, he sued John Ruskin (1819-1900) for libel after the conservative art critic condemned the painter for "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face"--a reference to the random splatterings of one of Whistler's "nocturnes." Whistler codified his controversial aesthetics in his famous "Ten O'Clock" lecture, delivered in 1885; it was soon translated into French and then published in London in 1890 in a collection of his writings entitled The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. By that date, Whistler's reputation was secured on both sides of the Atlantic, and he was much honored and admired by patrons and fellow artists alike.



-15-04-2015-


The Tribute to Picasso

Antoni Tàpies




The Tribute to Picasso, 1981-3, by Antoni Tàpies in the Paseo Picasso in Barcelona, Spain. Commissioned by Barcelona city council in 1981, the Tribute is an assemblage of modernista furniture evocative of the period in which Picasso lived in Barcelona, pierced by iron bars and tied together with ropes and sheets, on some of which are written statements by Picasso. It is protected from the elements by a 4m-square glass cube standing in an 11m-square pool. Water emerges from the top of the cube and runs down the sides.





Spanish Catalan painter, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor. He was encouraged by his home environment to form an early interest in cultural and intellectual matters, especially in music and literature; his father was a lawyer and his mother came from a family of booksellers. He first came into contact with contemporary art as a teenager through the magazine D’Ací i D’Allà, published in Barcelona, and during the Spanish Civil War (1936–9), while he was still at school, he taught himself to draw and paint. As early as 1942, when he was recovering from a lung infection, he produced pictures clearly influenced by van Gogh and Picasso; during this period of enforced rest and tranquillity he dedicated most of his time to reading French and Russian novels. In 1944 he began studying law at Barcelona University while also attending evening classes in drawing at the Academia Valls.




Tàpies produced his first works in thick impasto in 1945, and in 1946 he decided to abandon his studies in order to devote himself entirely to his art. Initially he produced both figurative and abstract works. In the former he concentrated on strangely proportioned human figures, with the face completely dominating the composition, as in the van Gogh-influenced Zoom (1946; Barcelona, Sala Gaspar) in which an inverted face can be discerned in the centre of the composition. Wishing to bring out the textural qualities of paint, Tàpies mixed ground white chalk and pigment into the oil medium and used a grattage technique to scratch the surface of the paint, creating striking contrasts between sunken and raised areas. His early abstract works were generally collage-based paintings on cardboard, often incorporating fragments of newspaper, as in Newsprint Figure and Son (1946–7). In other such works, for example Collage of Strings and Rice (1947), he introduced a variety of materials generally considered outside the realm of painting. It was with works of this type that Tàpies established his international reputation in the late 1950s as one of the most innovative painters associated with European developments such as Art informel and Matter painting.


Tàpies was one of the founders in September 1948 of Dau al set, a group influenced by Surrealism and in particular by its dream imagery and automatism. During this period, which for Tàpies lasted until 1951, he pictured monstrous, deformed beings in erotic situations or betraying an ironic attitude towards religion, with colour, light and shadow all directed towards the creation of magical atmospheres. Cat (1951; Barcelona) is typical of these paintings. Tàpies soon abandoned this vein of fantasy and from 1953 dedicated himself completely to the exploration of materials within the general terms of Art informel. In increasingly austere mixed-media paintings such as Big Grey Painting (1.95×1.70 m, 1955; Düsseldorf, Kstmus.) he severely restricted his range of colour while mixing materials such as crushed marble into his paints to achieve an extraordinary texture and thickness. There are a number of constant factors during this period of his work, which lasted until 1968: a sense of compositional order; a reliance on a variety of techniques to obtain a material density and coarseness of texture; a sober and sparing use of colour, usually no more than two or three in a single work and during the late 1950s with a preference for neutral hues such as white, black and grey. One of the most impressive works of this period, because of its extreme simplicity, is White Oval (1957; Krefeld, Kaiser Wilhelm Mus.), a virtually monochrome painting almost completely filled by an oval of cracked and crusty paint.









In the late 1960s Tàpies was influenced by Pop art to incorporate objects from his immediate surroundings into his paintings. He often chose these elements for their anthropomorphic connotations, as in Sock (1971; Paris). His subsequent interest in Zen philosophy and in the idea of the void led him to produce conceptual installations and objects such as Piece of Cloth (assemblage, 1010×590×120 mm, 1973), a roll of material held together by the string from which it is hung. In their humbleness of material and simplicity of construction such works bear comparison with those produced during the same period by the Arte Povera artists.



The paintings produced by Tàpies later in the 1970s and in the 1980s reveal his application of this aesthetic of meditative emptiness, for example in spray-painted canvases with linear elements suggestive of Oriental calligraphy, in mixed-media paintings that extended the vocabulary of Art informel, and in his oblique allusions to imagery within a fundamentally abstract idiom, as in Imprint of a Basket on Cloth (1980; San Sebastián). His extreme sensitivity towards the qualities of different materials was also put to remarkable use in his extensive production as a printmaker, particularly in etchings and aquatints that stressed the physicality of the inked lines and surfaces. He also produced free-standing sculptures and monumental reliefs such as Monument to Picasso (1983; Barcelona, Paseo del Borne).




-14-04-2015-


The Millinery Shop (1879/86)

Edgar Degas




With its unusual cropping and tilted perspective, this painting seems to depict an unedited glimpse of the interior of a small, 19th-century millinery shop, a quick view one might while window shopping. The young shop girl leans back to examine her creation, her mouth pursed around a pin and her hands gloved to protect the delicate fabric of the hat. Totally absorbed, she seems absolutely unaware of the viewer. Edgar Degas scraped and repainted both the milliner’s hands and her hat-in-progress so that both appear to be moving—an intended contrast with the finished hats on display to her left.



When Degas made this painting, private milliner’s shops were rapidly becoming obsolete. Factories were increasingly producing consumer goods for new department stores. The artist’s sensitive rendering of the milliner suggests his respect for the artistry of her handmade work. To a greater extent than his colleagues, Degas used calculation, revision, and technical experimentation to depict private activity in interior spaces. Examinations of the canvas and preliminary drawings show that Degas originally planned to depict a customer trying on a finished hat. While executing this idea, however, he became interested in the act of making and chose to depict the milliner instead. Thus, what began as a painting about vanity and fashion became a metaphor of artistic creation and a tribute to a fading occupation.



Edgar Degas (19 July 1834 – 27 September 1917), born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas, was a French artist famous for his work in painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing. He is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism although he rejected the term, and preferred to be called a realist. A superb draughtsman, he is especially identified with the subject of the dance, and over half his works depict dancers. These display his mastery in the depiction of movement, as do his racecourse subjects and female nudes. His portraits are considered to be among the finest in the history of art.



Early in his career, his ambition was to be a history painter, a calling for which he was well prepared by his rigorous academic training and close study of classic art. In his early thirties he changed course, and by bringing the traditional methods of a history painter to bear on contemporary subject matter, he became a classical painter of modern life.

for more information on Degas: click


-13-04-2015-




The Dining Room (1886-87)

Paul Signac




Oil on white primed canvas (230 Kb), 89 x 115 cm (35 x 45 1/4 in)



In Signac's Dining Room, the scene is backlit from a window, giving a dramatic light creating silhouettes and strong contrasts of light and shade. This type of lighting was used occasionally by Degas, but not by the Impressionists, who avoided such extremes of contrast. When sunsets were painted by them, for example certain of Monet's haystack series from 1890-1891, any shadows were brilliant with colored light, reflected from surrounding objects and the sky. In Signac's picture, the back lighting creates a strong sense of form and structure in the composition, a frozen solemnity which may be an ironic criticism of the formal, ritualistic quality of the middle-class life depicted. Form is created by gradations of color from pale tints to full saturation. Thus, the highlighted areas are shown as barely tinted or yellowish whites. These then pass through a series of minute gradations in which increasing amounts of local color are added until, in the darkest parts, almost pure saturation of the tube colors is reached. To darken the shadow hues without adding sullying black or earth colors, green and blue are mixed on the palette and juxtaposed next to purer blues. Effects of reflected color among the local colors are represented by additional dots of the appropriate hues. The careful gradation of tones applied in small dots gives a stiff, sculptural artificiality to the composition, whose color scheme is dominated by the complementary colors orange-yellow to blue-violet.





French artist Paul Signac was born in Paris on November 11, 1863. He began his artistic career in 1880 after viewing an exhibition of Monet's work. A friendship with Neo-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat led him to adopt the new Divisionist style in such works as "The Dining Room," "Women at the Well" and many seascapes of the French coast. Signac was committed to anarchist politics and was a mentor to younger avant-garde artists, including Henri Matisse. He died in Paris on August 15, 1935.


Paul Signac was born in Paris, France, on November 11, 1863. His family, who were prosperous shopkeepers, encouraged him to study architecture. However, his early interest in painting continued into his young adulthood, and he left school in 1880 after seeing an exhibition of Claude Monet's work.



Dedicating himself to an artistic career, Signac took lessons with artist Emile Bin in the bohemian Paris neighborhood of Montmartre. His first painting was dated 1881. His early works were colorful landscapes of the Paris suburbs, painted outdoors; they showed the influence of Monet, Sisley and other Impressionist artists.

Signac's career took a turning point in 1884, when he met artist Georges Seurat. He greatly admired Seurat's painting "Bathers at Asnières" (1884), and began to share Seurat's interest in new painting methods that advanced the principles of Impressionism.


Signac shared Seurat's interest in the science behind color and perception, and he worked with Seurat to refine a painting style that used optical effects. Both artists painted with a method that came to be called Divisionism or Pointillism: They applied small dabs of intense color closely together on the canvas, using contrasting shades that appeared to merge and shimmer when viewed from a distance.


Two of Signac's most significant paintings in the Divisionist style are "The Dining Room" (1886-87) and his portrait of Félix Fénéon (1890), which placed the art critic and dealer against an abstract background of swirling patterns.



From 1884 to 1895, Signac was included in the annual group exhibition of the Salon des Artistes Indépendants. In 1886, he showed his work in the last Impressionist exhibition, alongside works by Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Camille Pissarro and close friend Seurat. He made another important friendship around this same time, with Post-Impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh.

In his late career, Signac began working from memory and from his imagination rather than from direct observation. He used looser brushwork and broader touches of paint, and he began to produce numerous watercolors and drawings.


As an older artist, Signac guided younger painters who were beginning their careers. He was a friend and mentor to Henri Matisse, who visited him in Saint-Tropez on the French Riviera in 1904. He also became an art collector, amassing a collection of some 250 works.


Although Signac had been supported by several important art critics since the 1880s, he did not receive acceptance from the larger art world or the public until the turn of the century. His first one-man exhibition was held at a gallery in Paris in 1901.


In 1913, Signac separated from his wife, Berthe (Roblès) Signac, and moved to Antibes with his mistress, Jeanne Selmershein-Desgranges, and their daughter, Ginette.



Signac died in Paris on August 15, 1935. His paintings are now owned by major museums, galleries and private art collections around the world.




-12-04-2015-



Simultaneous Contrasts: Sun and Moon (1913)

Robert Delaunay



Delaunay was fascinated by how the interaction of colors produces sensations of depth and movement, without reference to the natural world. In Simultaneous Contrasts that movement is the rhythm of the cosmos, for the painting's circular frame is a sign for the universe, and its flux of reds and oranges, greens and blues, is attuned to the sun and the moon, the rotation of day and night. But the star and planet, refracted by light, go undescribed in any literal way. "The breaking up of form by light creates colored planes," Delaunay said. "These colored planes are the structure of the picture, and nature is no longer a subject for description but a pretext." Indeed, he had decided to abandon "images or reality that come to corrupt the order of color."


The poet Guillaume Apollinaire christened Delaunay's style "Orphism," after Orpheus, the musician of Greek legend whose eloquence on the lyre is a mythic archetype for the power of art. The musicality of Delaunay's work lay in color, which he studied closely. In fact, he derived the phrase "Simultaneous Contrasts" from the treatise On the Law of the Simultaneous Contrast of Colors, published in 1839 by Michel-Eugène Chevreul. Absorbing Chevreul's scientific analyses, Delaunay has here gone beyond them into a mystical belief in color, its fusion into unity symbolizing the possibility for harmony in the chaos of the modern world.






Robert Delaunay (1885-1941) was a French painter often credited with painting the first abstract canvases based on theories of pure color around the year 1913.


Robert Delaunay was born in Paris on April 12, 1885, into a prominent family descended from French aristocracy; his mother used the title "Countess." His parents divorced when he was four years old, and he was subsequently raised by an aunt and uncle. An uninspired student, Delaunay did not pursue an education and instead apprenticed himself to a theater designer. Unlike most of the young painters of his generation, he had no formal art training. In 1910 he married Sonia Terk, a Russian painter who became a life-long collaborator and continued to work on shared ideas long after his death from cancer in 1941.


A prolific painter at an early age, Delaunay showed in the Salon exhibitions, the most important official shows in France, in his early 20s. He incorporated much of the restlessness of art during the first decade of the 20th century in his early work, passing through a Pointillist, a Nabi, then a Fauve phase. It was around 1912 that Delaunay came to believe that light could be expressed as pure color independent of any objective content. He declared that "color alone is form and content."


This idea ran counter to the Cubist ideas of Picasso and Braque, who were more interested in the analysis of physical form than in light. Cubist paintings between 1907 and 1913 are static and sculptural without emphatic color, whereas Delaunay's paintings of the same period are fluid and multi-chromatic. He began a series of paintings of the Eiffel Tower rendered in swinging arcs of color that suggest movement. The Cubists accused Delaunay of reverting to the optical effects of Cezanne, while Delaunay maintained that he was doing "pure" paintings that expressed the dynamism of the 20th century.





In 1913 he began a series of paintings of colored discs that have no reference to any object and are considered hallmark paintings in the evolution of abstract or nonobjective art. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire called Delaunay's new style of abstract work "Orphism" in reference to the musician Orpheus in Greek mythology whose music had magical powers. Early abstract artists found strong connections between their work and music because neither depended on the imitation of phenomena found in the natural world.

Delaunay's belief in the primacy of color over form placed him closer in temperment to the German Expressionist painters than to Cubists working in France. In 1911 he exhibited with the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) group organized around Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky and he also showed in the Der Sturm Gallery in Berlin. He was caught in Spain at the outbreak of World War I in 1914, and he stayed there and in Portugal with his wife and their son until 1921.


During this time he met Russian exiles Sergei Diaghilev, producer and choreographer of the famed Ballets/Russes, and the composer Igor Stravinsky. In 1918 the Delaunays designed costumes and decor for a Diaghilev production of Cleopatra. His wife worked along lines similar to her husband, applying their theories of color simultaneity—the interaction of colors in relationship to one another—to design as well as painting. She made clothing, fabric, wall-covering, upholstery, and furniture covered with patches of color. She had an automobile painted in this manner which was considered a shocking and innovative extension of an idea from the avant-garde into the world-at-large.


Back in Paris after the war Delaunay resumed painting in a semi-figurative manner somewhat in contradiction to his early theories of nonobjective art. He exhibited little during this time, and it is considered a period of regression in his work. He also painted frescos for which he invented new techniques for mixing additives to paint to create unusual textures and colors. He worked with painter Fernand Leger on murals for the International Exposition of Decorative Arts and he designed film and stage sets. He became friendly with artist Jean Arp and poet Tristan Tzara. In his 30s he continued to do commissioned wall paintings, completing a mural at the Palais des Chemin de Fer and at the Salon des Tuileries.



Delaunay's career as a painter was meteoric. He was a prominent spokesperson for a specific point of view at a time of much artistic fermentation in the years preceding World War I. Unlike such other highly regarded artists of that period as Picasso, Matisse, and Kandinsky, he did not sustain the innovations that propelled him into the limelight in his youth into his later work. As a result, his painting seems uneven after 1920 and his most significant work in the 1930s was murals and public commissions, an extension of his wife's early experiments. After his death in 1941 she continued to work prodigiously, designing books, tapestries, and fabrics, as well as interior decors and murals. Her work, as an extension of her husband's theories and early discoveries, helped to establish his reputation as a significant painter of the 20th century.



-11-04-2015-


Summer Evening Wheatfield with setting sun (1888)

Vincent van Gogh





The painting Summer Evening Wheatfield with Setting Sun is one of Vincent van Gogh’s many Wheat Fields works. He painted it in 1888, with previous paintings reflecting the nature’s natural cycle of life he found engrained in the subject matter. van Gogh’s earlier Wheatfields work had progressed from the drab wheat sheaves depicted in his 1885 to the colorful and dramatic scene captured by his increasing talent below. Vincent, had as a young man pursued a religious calling in Isleworth, England, and found wheatfields a metaphor for man’s cycle of life as they are labored by man harnessing nature though the seasonal cycle for a productive end.





Vincent van Gogh, one of the most well-known post-impressionist artists, for whom color was the chief symbol of expression, was born in Groot-Zundert, Holland on March 30, 1853.

The son of a pastor, brought up in a religious and cultured atmosphere, Vincent was highly emotional, lacked self-confidence and struggled with his identity and with direction. He believed that his true calling was to preach the gospel; however, it took years for him to discover his calling as an artist. Between 1860 and 1880, when he finally decided to become an artist, van Gogh had already experienced two unsuitable and unhappy romances and had worked unsuccessfully as a clerk in a bookstore, an art salesman, and a preacher in the Borinage (a dreary mining district in Belgium) where he was dismissed for overzealousness.


He remained in Belgium to study art, determined to give happiness by creating beauty. The works of his early Dutch period are somber-toned, sharply lit, genre paintings of which the most famous is "The Potato Eaters" (1885). In that year van Gogh went to Antwerp where he discovered the works of Rubens and purchased many Japanese prints.


In 1886, he went to Paris to join his brother Théo, the manager of Goupil's gallery. In Paris, van Gogh studied with Cormon, inevitably met Pissarro, Monet, and Gauguin. Having met the new Impressionist painters, he tried to imitate their techniques; he began to lighten his very dark palette and to paint in the short brushstrokes of the Impressionists’ style. Unable to successfully copy the style, he developed his own more bold and unconventional style.


In 1888, Van Gogh decided to go south to Arles where he hoped his friends would join him and help found a school of art. At The Yellow House, van Gogh hoped like-minded artists could create together. Gauguin did join him but with disastrous results. Van Gogh’s nervous temperament made him a difficult companion and night-long discussions combined with painting all day undermined his health. Near the end of 1888, an incident led Gauguin to ultimately leave Arles. Van Gogh pursued him with an open razor, was stopped by Gauguin, but ended up cutting a portion of his own ear lobe off. Van Gogh then began to alternate between fits of madness and lucidity and was sent to the asylum in Saint-Remy for treatment.





In May of 1890, after a couple of years at the asylum, he seemed much better and went to live in Auvers-sur-Oise under the watchful eye of Dr. Gachet. Two months later, he died from what is believed to have been a self-inflicted gunshot wound "for the good of all." During his brief career, he did not experience much success, he sold only one painting, lived in poverty, malnourished and overworked. The money he had was supplied by his brother, Theo, and was used primarily for art supplies, coffee and cigarettes.


Van Gogh's finest works were produced in less than three years in a technique that grew more and more impassioned in brushstroke, in symbolic and intense color, in surface tension, and in the movement and vibration of form and line. Van Gogh's inimitable fusion of form and content is powerful; dramatic, lyrically rhythmic, imaginative, and emotional, for the artist was completely absorbed in the effort to explain either his struggle against madness or his comprehension of the spiritual essence of man and nature.


In spite of his lack of success during his lifetime, van Gogh’s legacy lives on having left a lasting impact on the world of art. Van Gogh is now viewed as one of the most influential artists having helped lay the foundations of modern art.


Birth Year : 1853 

Death Year : 1890 

Country : Netherlands


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-08-04-2015-


Femmes de Tahiti [Tahitian Women] (1891)

Paul Gaugin




In 1891, Gauguin went to Tahiti, an island he imagined to be a primitive paradise. The artist wanted "to live there in ecstasy, calm and art". His financial difficulties, his aesthetic concerns and this very Baudelairian "invitation au voyage" drove him to that distant land to escape "the European struggle for money" - to be "free at last".


This composition is typical of his paintings during the early part of his first stay in the Pacific, paintings often depicting Tahitian women busy with simple daily tasks. Here, the heavy, hieratic figures have their own space, creating a series of arabesques in a perfectly orchestrated harmony. The faces are rendered as a mask or a profile, rather indeterminate, but full of melancholy. Gauguin's wonderfully confident handling of the line makes it both elegant and decorative. By choosing somewhat rigid poses, he introduces a rhythm into the painting through a mysterious, harmonious geometry, thus producing what looks more like a genre scene than a genuine double portrait. The painting is lightly animated both by the discreet, almost monochrome, still life in the foreground, and by the rollers breaking on the lagoon in the background, suggested by a few white highlights.


The painter regarded this painting as significant enough to produce a variant of it in 1892, Parau Api (Dresden, Staatliche Kunstammlungen), in which the floral sarong replaces the sensible mission clothes of the woman on the right. The synthetic lines and simplified shapes of Manet, whom Gauguin admired greatly, influenced these contrasting outlines of the women. But above all, these characters herald the coloured effects of Matisse with their powerful graphic style and vivid colours.




-07-04-2015-


Greifswald in Moonlight (1817)

Caspar David Friedrich





‘Greifswald in Moonlight’ depicts the Friedrich’s birthplace in Pomerania, on the Baltic coast: bathed in an even, gauzy moonlight, the ancient university town assumes an almost ethereal appearance. Nearly the same year, the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, wrote, ‘The moon is sublime and moves us… because it stays aloof from all our earthly activities, seeing all, yet taking no part in it’, he was attempting to define why the earth’s silvery night-time companion has held such enigma and allure for mankind, and above all for painters.




Friedrich was a prolific artist who produced over 500 attributed works; however, he is generally known for only a small number of works seen as emblems of Romanticism. 

 In line with Romantic ideals of the time, Friedrich intended that his paintings would function visually only, and thus he was cautious that the titles given to his work were not overly descriptive or evocative. It is likely that some of today's relatively literal titles, such as The Stages of Life, were not given by the artist himself, but were instead adopted during one of the revivals of interest in the artist during the late 19th or early 20th century.
Complications arise when dating Friedrich's work, mainly because he often did not directly name or date his canvases. However, he kept a carefully detailed notebook on his output, which has been used by scholars to tie paintings to their completion dates.


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-03-04-2015-


Kneeling Girl in Orange- Red Dress (1910)

Egon Schiele




This mysterious girl, staring at you with an intense, piercing gaze and a smile that makes you wonder whether it’s only flirty or at worst scornful, is Egon Schiele’s sister Gertrude. The Austrian artist painted this portrait when he was only 20 years old and already displayed consciousness of good composition. Gertrude is leaning on the edges of the canvas, allowing her to remain stably in her pose. The line which joins her wrists with her knee is a geometrical suggestion that her posture is not accidental. The resulting trapeze-like form has its narrower part (the one which is easier to embrace with your sight) leveled around her face and the wider part enclosed within her feet. Shiele combined this cleverly with the darker and more intense colours that are cumulated in proximity to the piercing eye of the “Kneeling Girl in Orange-Red Dress” to direct your sight to what he rendered the central part of this painting – Gertrude’s face. So, do you reckon she likes you or holds you in contempt?





When Egon Schiele was 15 years old, his father died from syphilis, and he became a ward of his maternal uncle, Leopold Czihaczec, who became distressed by Schiele's lack of interest in academic studies, yet recognized his passion and talent for art.


In 1906 Schiele applied at Kunstgewerbeschule (the School of Arts and Crafts) in Vienna, where Gustav Klimt had once studied. Within his first year there, Schiele was sent, at the insistence of several faculty members, to the more traditional Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna in 1906. There, he studied painting and drawing, but was frustrated by the school’s conservatism. Records show that Adolf Hitler was rejected by the Akademie in 1907; this has led to a misconception that Schiele and Hitler knew each other in Vienna.


In 1907, Schiele sought out Gustav Klimt. Klimt generously mentored younger artists, and he took a particular interest in the gifted young Schiele, buying his drawings, offering to exchange them for some of his own, arranging models for him and introducing him to potential patrons. He also introduced Schiele to the Wiener Werkstätte, the arts and crafts workshop connected with the Secession. In 1908 Schiele had his first exhibition, in Klosterneuburg. Schiele left the Academy in 1909, after completing his third year, and founded the Neukunstgruppe ("New Art Group") with other dissatisfied students.


Klimt invited Schiele to exhibit some of his work at the 1909 Vienna Kunstschau, where he encountered the work of Edvard Munch, Jan Toorop, and Vincent van Gogh among others. Once free of the constraints of the Academy's conventions, Schiele began to explore not only the human form, but also human sexuality. At the time, many found the explicitness of his works disturbing.

Egon Scheile is known for being grotesque, erotic, pornographic, and disturbing, focusing on sex, death, and discovery. He focused on portraits of others as well as himself. In his later years, while he still worked often with nudes, they were done in a more realist fashion. He also painted tributes to Van Gogh's Sunflowers as well as landscapes and still lifes.


Schiele participated in numerous group exhibitions, including those of the Neukunstgruppe in Prague in 1910 and Budapest in 1912; the Sonderbund, Cologne, in 1912; and several Secessionist shows in Munich, beginning in 1911. In 1913, the Galerie Hans Goltz, Munich, mounted Schiele's first solo show. A solo exhibition of his work took place in Paris in 1914.


In the autumn of 1918, the Spanish flu epidemic that claimed more than 20,000,000 lives in Europe reached Vienna. Edith, who was six months pregnant, succumbed to the disease on 28 October. Schiele died only three days after his wife. He was 28 years old. During the three days between their deaths, Schiele drew a few sketches of Edith; these were his last works.



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-02-03-2015-




Albaydé (1848)

Alexandre Canabel



1848 Painting Oil on canvas


Its pristine finish, sharp lines and sober palette place Alexandre Cabanel’s Albaydé at the heart of academic excellence. Indeed, the Montpellier-born Cabanel – a Prix de Rome winner in 1845 – was one of the last ardent academicians, determined to maintain the Académie’s strictures and hierarchies in the face of the radical challenges to it posed by, among others, Gustave Courbet.



The subject is drawn from Victor Hugo’s Orientalist poem ‘Fragments of a Serpent’, where the poet lusts for ‘the lovely doe-like eyes of Albaydé’. In a manner that owes much to Ingres’s languid nudes, Cabanel has depicted the lethargic figure of Albaydé as an object of visual pleasure, and also as an allegory. Albaydé was prepared as part of a triptych, the theme of which was the precariousness of the passage from youth to adulthood. Albaydé represented youthful innocence gone askew. It is compelling that she is depicted as a seductive, if dishevelled Oriental courtesan, in a space suggestive of the Islamic lounge, a harem and an opium den.


self-portrait

French painter and teacher. His skill in drawing was apparently evident by the age of 11. His father could not afford his training, but in 1839 his département gave him a grant to go to Paris. This enabled him to register at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts the following October as a pupil of François-Edouard Picot. At his first Salon in 1843 he presented Agony in the Garden (Valenciennes, Mus. B.-A.) and won second place in the Prix de Rome competition (after Léon Bénouville, also a pupil of Picot) in 1845 with Christ at the Praetorium (Paris, Ecole N. Sup. B.-A.). Both Cabanel and Bénouville were able to go to Rome, as there was a vacancy from the previous year. Cabanel's Death of Moses (untraced), an academic composition, painted to comply with the regulations of the Ecole de Rome, was exhibited at the Salon of 1852. The pictures he painted for Alfred Bruyas, his chief patron at this time (and, like Cabanel, a native of Montpellier), showed more clearly the direction his art had taken during his stay in Italy. Albaydé, Angel of the Evening, Chiarruccia and Velleda (all in Montpellier, Mus. Fabre) were the first of many mysterious or tragic heroines painted by Cabanel and show his taste for the elegiac types and suave finish of the Florentine Mannerists


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-01-03-2015-

"The imagination is the vehicle of sensibility. Transported by the imagination, we attain life, life itself, which is absolute art."



Blue Monochrome (1957)

Yves Klein




This is one of Klein's first monochromes featuring International Klein Blue. He reported that, at the age of nineteen, he looked up at the sky and realized the infinite, immaterial space surrounding the universe. To depict his vision, he chose to use only one color, a vibrant shade of ultramarine, which he later perfected for use with the aid of chemists. The painting contains no trace of line or imagery, encouraging the viewer to immerse herself in the color alone and to experience its evocations. Symbolic, perhaps, of the sky and the sea, it also had resonances in Klein's own religion, Catholicism, as not only a symbol of the Holy Ghost, but also as the shade traditionally used in the depiction of the Virgin Mary's robes in Renaissance paintings.


Dry pigment in synthetic polymer medium on cotton over plywood - Museum of Modern Art, New York





Yves Klein was a French artist considered an an important figure in post-war European art. Among many thing he was famous of “inventing” International Klein Blue (or IKB as it is known in art circles) – the colour you see above. The uniqueness of IKB does not derive from the ultramarine pigment, but rather from the matte, synthetic resin binder in which the colour is suspended, and which allows the pigment to maintain as much of its original qualities and intensity of colour as possible. The synthetic resin used in the binder is polyvinyl acetate developed and marketed at the time under the name Rhodopas M or M60A by French pharmaceutical company Rhone Poulenc.

In May 1960, Klein deposited a Soleau envelope, registering the paint formula under the name International Klein Blue (IKB) at the Institut national de la propriété industrielle (INPI). Contrary to popular belief, Klein never patented IKB. Only valid under French law, a soleau envelope merely registers the date of invention, according to the depositor, prior to any legal patent application. The copy held by the INPI was destroyed in 1965. Klein’s own copy, which the INPI returned to him duly stamped is still extant.

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