Starry Night over the Rhone - van Gogh!

Starry Night over the Rhone (September 1888) is one of Vincent van Gogh's paintings of Arles at night; it was painted at a spot on the banks of river which was only a minute or two's walk from the Yellow House on the Place Lamartine which Van Gogh was renting at the time. The night sky and the effects of light at night provided the subject for some of his more famous paintings, including Cafe Terrace at Night (painted earlier the same month) and the later canvas from Saint-Rémy, The Starry Night.

The challenge of painting at night intrigued Van Gogh. The vantage point he chose for Starry Night Over the Rhone allowed him to capture the reflections of the gas lighting in Arles across the glimmering blue water of the Rhône. The sky is illuminated by the constellation Ursa Major (the Great Bear). In the foreground, two lovers stroll by the banks of the river.

Depicting color was of great importance to Van Gogh. In letters to his brother, Theo van Gogh, he often described objects in his paintings in terms of color. His night paintings, including Starry Night over the Rhone, emphasize the importance he placed in capturing the sparkling colors of the night sky and the artificial lighting that was new to this period.
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van Gogh - Irises

Irises is a painting by the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh. It was one of his first works while he was at the asylum at Saint Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France in the last year before his death in 1890.
It was painted before his first attack at the asylum. There is a lack of the high tension which is seen in his later works. He called the painting "the lightning conductor for my illness", because he felt that he could keep himself from going insane by continuing to paint.
The painting was influenced by Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints, like many of his works and those by other artists of the time. The similarities occur with strong outlines, unusual angles, including close-up views and also flattish local colour (not modelled according to the fall of light).
He considered this painting a study, which is probably why there are no known drawings for it, although Theo, Van Gogh's brother, thought better of it and quickly submitted it to the annual exhibition of the Société des Artistes Indépendants in September 1889, together with Starry Night over the Rhone. He wrote to Vincent of the exhibition: "[It] strikes the eye from afar. The Irises are a beautiful study full of air and life."
[edit]Ownership history

Its first owner was the French art critic and anarchist Octave Mirbeau, who was also one of Van Gogh's first supporters: he paid 300 francs for it.
In 1987, it became the most expensive painting ever sold, setting a record which stood for two and a half years.[1] Then it was sold for US$ 54,000,000 to Alan Bond, but he did not have enough money to pay for it and it had to be re-sold. Irises is currently (as of 2008) seventh on the inflation-adjusted list of most expensive paintings ever sold, and in 18th place if the effects of inflation are ignored.
Irises is now owned by the J. Paul Getty Trust and is on display at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, USA.
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van Gogh - Sunflowers!

Vincent van Gogh painted these sunflowers after leaving his native Holland for the south of France with the dream of starting an artistic community. He began to paint sunflowers to decorate a bedroom for his friend Paul Gauguin.

The series of paintings was made possible by the innovations in manufactured pigments in the 19th Century. Without the vibrancy of the new colours, such as chrome yellow, Van Gogh may never have achieved the intensity of Sunflowers.

These most famous of all sunflowers in art hold at their heart a simple parable about the brevity of life; they are at varying stages in the life cycle, from withered and wilting to vibrant full bloom.
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Danae by Klimt - Symbol of divine love!

Danaë is an oil painting by Gustav Klimt, created in 1907. The canvas measures 77 x 83 cm, is cataloged as Symbolism; and is currently housed within the Galerie Würthle, in Vienna, Austria. Danaë was a popular subject in the early 1900’s for many artists; she was used as the quintessential symbol of divine love, and transcendence. While imprisoned by her father, King of Argos in a tower of bronze, she was visited by Zeus, symbolized here as the golden rain flowing between her legs, apparent from the subject's face, she is very aroused by the golden stream. She is curled in a sumptuous royal purple veil which refers to her imperial lineage. Sometime after her celestial visitation she gave birth to a son, Perseus, who is cited later in Greek mythology for slaying the Gorgon Medusa and rescuing Andromeda. Many other early portrayals of Danaë were often erotic; other paintings completed in similar style are Klimt’s Hygeia (1900- 1907), and Water Snakes (1904 – 1907)
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Vincent van Gogh - Starry Night

We've all heard this sad story. Vincent van Gogh lived a short, deeply tormented life, throughout which he sought (in vain) his place in the world. He died, by his own hand, feeling his life was a miserable failure. Unbeknownst to Vincent, the work he did pioneered the Expressionistic style and, 150 years after his birth, his name would be world famous.

Movement, Style, School or Period:

Post-impressionism > Expressionism

Date and Place of Birth:

March 30, 1853, Groot-Zundert, Netherlands

Early Life:

Vincent was the son of a Dutch Protestant minister, and grew up believing that his calling, too, lay in serving his fellow man. Unfortunately, his nature was such that anything he attempted was doomed to failure. He wasn't inattentive to career moves but, rather, threw himself into endeavors with such ferocity that he quickly exhausted his body, followed by his mind. By the time he was 27, van Gogh had been a theology student, a semi-trained evangelist in the slums of London and the mines of Wasmes (in Belgium), a French tutor, an unsuccessful art salesman and spurned by love.

Body of Work:

During his time with the miners, van Gogh painted the rough, miserable lives of the peasants with which he lived. One of these works, The Potato Eaters (1885), is acknowledged as his early masterpiece.

In 1886, Vincent moved to Paris, where his devoted brother, Theo, was an art dealer. He quickly launched himself into study of the Impressionists and Japanese prints and emerged, after two years, with a highly original palette. He relocated himself to Arles, in Provence, where he began a frenzy of painting (sometimes going through a canvas per day) that showed his love for the town, countryside and sunlight of the area. Better known works from his time in Arles include Bedroom at Arles (1888), The Night Café (1888) and Starry Night (1889). His painting increasingly showed a lack of brushwork as he, in his haste to capture it, spread the color he saw in life thickly on to the canvas with his palette knife - and even straight from the tube.

In the last two years of his life, van Gogh also executed a number of self-portraits, had a brief, turbulent friendship with Gauguin (they were roommates until one final argument took place), veered in and out of madness (institutionalizing himself from time to time) and continued to have a disastrous love life. In a bungled suicide attempt, he shot himself on July 27th, 1890, but didn't die until two days later. Vincent van Gogh died having sold one painting in his lifetime.

Date and Place of Death:

July 29, 1890, Auvers-sur-Oise, France

Quote:

"I want to get to the point where people say of my work that man feels deeply."

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Klimt - The Kiss, Most expensive painting in the world!

Gustav Klimt 'The Kiss', Painted 1907-08 (100 Kb); 180 x 180 cm (71 x 71 in); Galerie Wien, Vienna
Man leaning over and kissing kneeling woman. All shrouded in symbolically patterned gold. A bed of flowers below them.

Just as Munch can be associated with both Symbolism and Expressionism, so the art of the Austrian painter, Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), is a curious and elegant synthesis of Symbolism and Art Nouveau. The Austrians responded enthusiastically to the decorative artifice of Art Nouveau, and Klimt is almost artifice incarnate. He painted large ornamental friezes of allegorical scenes, and produced fashionable portraits, uniting the stylized shapes and unnatural colors of Symbolism with his own essentially harmonious concept of beauty.

The Kiss is a fascinating icon of the loss of self that lovers experience. Only the faces and hands of this couple are visible; all the rest is great swirl of gold, studded with colored rectangles as if to express visually the emotional and physical explosion of erotic love.
It is one of the most expensive paintings to date, Klimt used actual pure gold flakes mixed with oil paint on the painting !
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William Bouguereau

The Art Renewal Center announced on October 17, 2008 that the William Bouguereau Catalog has finally been translated, and is expected to be available in the Spring of 2009. The book will contain information on all 826 known paintings by Bouguereau, a 600 page biography on the artist by Damien Bartoli, 400+ B&W images, and 250-300 color images, at least 50 of which will be full-page. The price tag is a hefty $370.00, but it does promise to be quite a large book.

The art of Expressionism - It started in Germany!

A term used to denote the use of distortion and exaggeration for emotional effect, which first surfaced in the art literature of the early twentieth century. When applied in a stylistic sense, with reference in particular to the use of intense colour, agitated brushstrokes, and disjointed space. Rather than a single style, it was a climate that affected not only the fine arts but also dance, cinema, literature and the theatre.
Expressionism is an artistic style in which the artist attempts to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in him. He accomplishes his aim through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements. In a broader sense Expressionism is one of the main currents of art in the later 19th and the 20th centuries, and its qualities of highly subjective, personal, spontaneous self-expression are typical of a wide range of modern artists and art movements.
Unlike Impressionism, its goals were not to reproduce the impression suggested by the surrounding world, but to strongly impose the artist's own sensibility to the world's representation. The expressionist artist substitutes to the visual object reality his own image of this object, which he feels as an accurate representation of its real meaning. The search of harmony and forms is not as important as trying to achieve the highest expression intensity, both from the aesthetic point of view and according to idea and human critics.
Expressionism assessed itself mostly in Germany, in 1910. As an international movement, expressionism has also been thought of as inheriting from certain medieval artforms and, more directly, Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and the fauvism movement.
The most well known German expressionists are Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Lionel Feininger, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein; the Austrian Oskar Kokoschka, the Czech Alfred Kubin and the Norvegian Edvard Munch are also related to this movement. During his stay in Germany, the Russian Kandinsky was also an expressionism addict.
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Paul Gauguin - Painter of Tahiti!

Gauguin, (Eugène-Henri-) Paul (b. June 7, 1848, Paris, Fr.--d. May 8, 1903, Atuona, Hiva Oa, Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia), one of the leading French painters of the Postimpressionist period, whose development of a conceptual method of representation was a decisive step for 20th-century art. After spending a short period with Vincent van Gogh in Arles (1888), Gauguin increasingly abandoned imitative art for expressiveness through colour. From 1891 he lived and worked in Tahiti and elsewhere in the South Pacific. His masterpieces include the early Vision After the Sermon (1888) and Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897-98). Although his main achievements were to lie elsewhere, Gauguin was, to use a fanciful metaphor, nursed in the bosom of Impressionism. His attitudes to art were deeply influenced by his experience of its first exhibition, and he himself participated in those of 1880, 1881 and 1882. The son of a French journalist and a Peruvian Creole, whose mother had been a writer and a follower of Saint-Simon, he was brought up in Lima, joined the merchant navy in 1865, and in 1872 began a successful career as a stockbroker in Paris. In 1874 he saw the first Impressionist exhibition, which completely entranced him and confirmed his desire to become a painter. He spent some 17,000 francs on works by Manet, Monet, Sisley, Pissarro, Renoir and Guillaumin. Pissarro took a special interest in his attempts at painting, emphasizing that he should `look for the nature that suits your temperament', and in 1876 Gauguin had a landscape in the style of Pissarro accepted at the Salon. In the meantime Pissarro had introduced him to Cézanne, for whose works he conceived a great respect---so much so that the older man began to fear that he would steal his `sensations'. All three worked together for some time at Pontoise, where Pissarro and Gauguin drew pencil sketches of each other (Cabinet des Dessins, Louvre). In 1883-84 the bank that employed him got into difficulties and Gauguin was able to paint every day. He settled for a while in Rouen, partly because Paris was too expensive for a man with five children, partly because he thought it would be full of wealthy patrons who might buy his works. Rouen proved a disappointment, and he joined his wife Mette and children, who had gone back to Denmark, where she had been born. His experience of Denmark was not a happy one and, having returned to Paris, he went to paint in Pont-Aven, a well-known resort for artists.
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Mary Cassatt - American Impressionist!

Mary Stevenson Cassatt (May 22, 1844 – June 14, 1926) was an American painter and printmaker. She lived much of her adult life in France, where she first befriended Edgar Degas and later exhibited among the Impressionists.
Cassatt often created images of the social and private lives of women, with particular emphasis on the intimate bonds between mothers and children.
Cassatt was born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, which is now part of Pittsburgh. She was born into favorable circumstances: her father, Robert Simpson Cassat (later Cassatt), was a successful stockbroker and land speculator, and her mother, Katherine Kelso Johnston, came from a banking family. The ancestral name had been Cossart, Cassatt was a distant cousin of artist Robert Henri. Cassatt was one of seven children, of which two died in infancy. Her family moved eastward, first to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, then to the Philadelphia area, where she began schooling at age six.
Cassatt grew up in an environment that viewed travel as integral to education; she spent 5 years in Europe and visited many of the capitals, including London, Paris, and Berlin. While abroad she learned German and French and had her 1'st lessons in drawing and music. Her first exposure to French artists Ingres, Delacroix, Corot, and Courbet was likely at the Paris World’s Fair of 1855. Also exhibited at the exhibition were Degas and Pissarro, both of whom would be her future colleagues and mentors.

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