Artist Biography: Vincent van Gogh

 

Vincent Willem van Gogh was a Dutch post-impressionist painter whose extraordinary talent and tumultuous life have left an indelible mark on the art world and art history. Van Gogh's expressive style, characterized by bold colors, dynamic brushwork, and emotional intensity, has made him one of the most influential figures in Western art history. Despite his tragic and misunderstood existence, his artistic contributions continue to inspire and resonate with audiences worldwide.

Early Life and Background: Vincent van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853, in Groot-Zundert, a small village in the Netherlands. He came from a family of art dealers, and although he initially worked in the art trade, Van Gogh's true passion lay in creating art rather than selling it. His early works were influenced by Dutch Realism and the somber palette of artists such as Jean-François Millet.

Artistic Journey and Development: Van Gogh's artistic journey began in earnest when he decided to pursue a career as an artist in his late twenties. He studied briefly at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and later joined the artist colony in Paris, where he was exposed to various art movements, including Impressionism and Japanese prints, which greatly influenced his evolving style.

During his time in Paris, van Gogh's palette shifted to brighter and more vibrant hues, and his brushwork became increasingly expressive and energetic. His iconic works from this period, such as "The Starry Night" and "Sunflowers," showcase his unique ability to capture the emotional essence of his subjects through dynamic color combinations and vigorous brushstrokes.

Personal Struggles and Mental Health: Van Gogh's artistic brilliance was often overshadowed by his personal struggles and battles with mental health. He suffered from recurrent episodes of anxiety, depression, and psychosis, which had a profound impact on his life and art. Despite these challenges, his periods of stability were marked by immense productivity and artistic growth.

In 1888, van Gogh experienced a mental breakdown and severed his own earlobe, an event that later became the subject of much speculation and fascination. He voluntarily admitted himself to psychiatric institutions, where he continued to produce a remarkable body of work, including his introspective self-portraits and landscapes.

Legacy and Impact: Tragically, Vincent van Gogh's brilliance was not fully recognized during his lifetime. He struggled with poverty, rejection, and a lack of understanding from the art establishment. It was only after his death in 1890, at the age of 37, that his art began to gain appreciation and acclaim.

Van Gogh's legacy has since become synonymous with the power of artistic expression and the resilience of the human spirit. His art continues to inspire countless artists, art lovers, and individuals worldwide, who find solace and beauty in his vivid landscapes, poignant portraits, and heartfelt self-reflections.

Today, Van Gogh's works are celebrated in major art museums and galleries around the world, with his iconic paintings fetching record-breaking prices at auctions. His profound impact on the art world and his ability to convey profound emotion through his art have secured his position as one of the most beloved and influential artists of all time.

Vincent van Gogh's life may have been plagued by personal challenges, but his artistic genius and unique vision have transcended time and continue to touch the hearts and minds of people across the globe. His bold and evocative style, coupled with his relentless pursuit of emotional truth, have cemented his status as an icon of art history. Van Gogh's legacy serves as a reminder that true artistic expression often springs from deep wells of passion, struggle, and resilience.

A+ Art History Topics for Essay Writing

Art history essays topics that could get you that 'A+'

You should not have to cheat or hire an essay writing company in Toronto in order to get an A+ on your art history essay. There are plenty of topics that can earn you an A or A+ without having to resort to hiring someone else to write you an amazing essay. Do the honest work, put in some serious effort and your professor will know you did it yourself.

Art history is a vast and complex subject. It could take you from the architectural feats of Frank Lloyd Wright which include the Guggenheim Museum to the primitive cave drawings of Lascaux, France. This can make picking your topic a tough decision since there is so much to choose from. What should you do to ensure that you get the grade you want? Here are some tips to help you with your decision making.

Pick a topic that reflects what you have learned.

If you are in a Baroque period class don't start talking about modern architecture as that will be way off topic. Pick a style, artist or feature that fits into that particular period. So for instance you should talk about the use of movement in Baroque paintings, sculpture and architecture. Or you can talk about how Baroque artists were fascinated with the play of lights and darks in their work. If you want to reference another style or period that is not pertinent to the one you are learning ask your teaching first. Also, try to include non-relevant styles and periods so that they in contrast with the period that you are currently learning. For instance, to use the Baroque period as an example, you could contrast it with the previous Renaissance period and their different use of movement, lights and darks, realism and proportion.

Choose a topic that you like.

You will have to write a long (5-20 pages) essay so do not pick a topic you do not find interesting. Pick a topic that you feel connected to and that piques your interest. You could try to find a topic that you want to learn about beyond what you have learned in class. Or you may want to pick a topic that you already have learned about previously and you found interesting. Either way try to ensure that what you are writing about is at least somewhat interesting to you so that you do not feel like it is a chore to write.

Choose a topic that has a lot of scholarly literature about it.

Try to pick a topic that has already been well researched. If you pick an obscure topic you may find it difficult to find materials that will help you support your art history essay. Also, using 1 or 2 books in your bibliography will not make your essay very well researched and it definitely will not get you the 'A+" you want so try to find a topic that has more scholarly muscles behind it. You can use your textbook to start your search for a more prominent topic as textbook usually talk about the subjects most important topics. From there you can continue your research online or in the library where you will be sure to find more information about your chosen topic.

The key to a great any essay is to be clear and concise and the first step to doing that is to get a firm grasp on what your topic is. Your art history essay will be greatly improved if you follow the steps listed above and get an air tight topic to writ about.

Victoria Van Dyke

Victoria Van Dyke is a lesbian feminist artist living in Canada who uses mostly photography and collage in her works.

Born in 1976, Van Dyke was raped when she was eleven years old by her foster father and foster brother. The burden of her traumatic memories has caused her to create what some might call highly disturbing art pieces. She frequently discusses the idea of cannibalism, and has openly claimed that she herself was a cannibal. She commonly uses cannibalism as a metaphor for evil within modern society, such as businessmen eating each other and eating the poor in order to make themselves fat/rich. She often titles her work with numbers and uses models, claiming she dislikes her own body.

She spent over three years in a mental asylum, where she placed herself voluntarily. She was finally released in the Spring of 2005. She currently lives in Toronto, Canada. Most recently, she made the news for chopping off her little toe, putting it in a jar and offering it to a gallery as a work of art. The gallery - which preferred to be unnamed - refused, and called the police.

She combines religion, violence, guns, sexuality and humour in images (sometimes with text) in order to poke fun at society, society's obsession with sex, and the patriarchal treatment of young underage women as sex objects.

 The artist admits a strong thirst to eat the flesh of humans, but objects to the immorality of killing.

Pablo Picasso

Pablo (Ruiz y) Picasso
Birth Year : 1881
Death Year : 1973
Country : Spain

Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain. The son of a Basque art teacher, Picasso showed a very early talent for drawing. He was fourteen when the family moved to Barcelona where his father was a professor at the School of Art. Two years later Picasso had his first exhibition of rather somber, quite classical paintings. Between 1900 and 1904 he made three trips to Paris where he studied the works of the Impressionists and of Cezanne. In 1904 he settled in France, where he has remained all his life. From 1901 onwards, Picasso's work may be divided into periods, each showing different influences and personal interests. From 1901 to 1904, the Blue Period, his paintings were melancholy in mood and subject matter, flat of form and strong contour, nearly monochromatic, and of intense blue. In some of these works, the Mannerist influence of El Greco is easily visible. The Rose Period (1905-06) offers the same flat forms but with a softer contour, a more romantic mood, and a delicate ink tonality that is often used with the blue of the earlier works. In 1906 Picasso met Matisse, with whom he shared an interest in the works of Gauguin and Cezanne. At the time he also was influenced by African primitive carvings, the result was the masterpiece Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, a huge painting of five nudes and a small still life, angularly distorted, with strong, barbaric forms that seem flat but are actually so shaded as to be three-dimensional. Called Cubism by the critics, its translucent, blocky planes led to the Analytical Cubism practiced by Braque and Picasso from 1909 to 1911 in which familiar objects such as glasses and pitchers were broken down into geometric planes. From about 1912 to 1915, the collage or paste-up method of Synthetic Cubism was developed in which bits of cloth or paper were used to build up an image. From 1915 until 1936, Picasso painted in various Cubist manners, experimented with Surrealism, and entered his classical (sometimes called white) period in the early 1920's, producing works that are sculpturesque and yet tender in mood. In the 1930's he was working in a Cubist style that is metamorphic in its visual approach. The tragic masterpiece Guernica (1937) is painted in this style. It is a work of monumental grandeur with a tragic, almost vocal effect upon the viewer. The double portraits that first appeared in 1938 are a further evolution of this metamorphic style. In 1948 Picasso returned to themes of women, children, animals, and birds, painting in various manners synthesizing all of his previous styles. He has also produced lithographs and etchings on classical and literary subjects, sculpture, murals, jewelry, and ceramic works. Picasso's palette is varied, but he may, at times, limit himself to tones of gray and black, as in Guernica, or to a favorite combination of black, white, and shades of ochre. Picasso exhibits in his work both an attachment to the past and an innovating spirit, a spontaneity and a sense of justice. His enormous talent, imagination, and vitality add up to an artistic temperament that can be called genius. Picasso's influence upon modern art has been immeasurable.

Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock
Birth Year : 1912
Death Year : 1956
Country : US

Jackson Pollock, who was born in Cody, Wyoming, lived in Arizona and California until 1929. He took his first lessons in art at the Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles. Pollock came to New York to study at the Art Students League and worked under Thomas Hart Benton during the years 1929 to 1931. He began his career as an artist during the depression years and worked for the Federal Arts Project in New York from 1938 to 1942. He then moved to Huntington, Long Island. Pollock's early painting was expressionistically realistic and then surrealistic in style. However, by the early 1940's his work had become completely abstract expressionist in character with no figuration at all. This was an expression of the isolation of the painter in the modern world: painting itself is the subject matter of these works, a concept that must be accepted by the viewer before he can begin to understand or appreciate this highly intellectual form of art. In 1951-52 Pollock reintroduced the semblance of anatomical imagery into his abstract work. Pollock's art was a violent, romantic revolt in which the artist himself was irrevocably involved, for he was completely committed to the act of painting in itself, to the possibilities inherent in paint, and to the results of the interactions between himself and his medium. When he flung his paint at the canvas, he energetically directed it, fought with it, and either won or lost the battle. The result is a painting that moves dynamically in all directions, from the inner to the outer surface. A freedom of expression resulted that revolutionized mid-twentieth-century art both in the United States and in Europe, creating a new expansion and a new impetus for the solution, through art, of modern man's struggle in the modern world. Pollock's career was tragically cut short by his death in an automobile accident.

Grant Wood

Grant Wood

Birth Year : 1892
Death Year : 1942
Country : US

Grant Wood, an American painter, was a leader in the art movement known as Regionalism, which also included the artist Thomas Hart Benton. Wood was born in Iowa and lived mainly in Cedar Rapids. He visited Europe repeatedly from an early age and studied at the Academie Julian in Paris in 1933. Still, he was mainly self-taught as an artist: he worked as a camouflage painter during World War One, an interior decorator, and a metalworker. His early paintings were strongly influenced by French Impressionism. In 1928, having been commissioned to make stained-glass windows for the Cedar Rapids Veterans Memorial Building, he traveled to Munich to supervise the windows' production; there he encountered early Dutch painting, and was inspired to give up Impressionism in favor of his characteristic mature style. Under the influence of Memling and other early Netherlandish masters, Wood began painting with close attention to sharp, crisp detail. In the Regionalist aesthetic, the everyday lives of working people are the highest subjects of art; modern ideas of abstraction are often considered elitist and decadent. Wood therefore mainly depicted scenes of everyday Midwestern life in a fresh and sometimes stark manner. His best-known work, American Gothic (1930), won a bronze medal at an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, but it caused controversy among some of the very people it was intended to depict, who interpreted the painting as broad, insensitive caricature. In the decades since, however, the work has become one of the most enduring images in American art. Wood painted many landscapes, as well as other scenes and portraits, including The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere (1931) and a genuinely satirical work, Daughters of the Revolution (1932). He supervised Federal Art Projects in Iowa and was assistant professor of fine arts at the University of Iowa.

Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas
Birth Year : 1834
Death Year : 1917
Country : France

Edgar Degas, an Impressionist more interested in movement than in color, was born in Paris, the son of a banker who wished him to go into business. Degas, therefore, did not begin to study art until he was twenty-one. He studied the work of Clouet and Poussin at the Louvre, and after a year, he went to Italy and studied the art of the Middle Ages and of the Renaissance. His greatest early admiration was for Ingres and until he met Manet and the Impressionists, Degas painted quite classical historical works. Once Degas joined the Impressionists, Degas changed his subject matter, painting racetrack scenes sketched from life and finished in his studio, theatrical and ballet scenes, and many pictures of women. He worked in many different mediums and concentrated upon the portrayal of movement that hints toward the action immediately preceding and immediately following that of the moment captured by his rapid pencil or brush.

His skill as a draughtsman was extraordinary and his paintings have the feeling of immediacy that is usually associated with the camera. Degas also discarded classical rules of composition and frequently used an oblique angle with light coming from below to create a new type of theatrically focused space. In his oils, he applied his color in translucent cross-hatching and for his pastels used a technique in which color was applied in many successive layers, each layer except the last fixed to give a powdery, soft effect that was particularly effective in his ballet scenes. Stories of Degas' sharp tongue and crustiness abound-he was a solitary misogynist-but his personality is of little importance in comparison to his art. His hundreds of dancers-in oils, pastels, tempera, gouache, charcoal, pencil and bronze-are revelations of human movement; his horses seem alive; and his studies of women at work, bathing, or in cafes, have a sense of reality that is both emotional and intellectual.

Jacques-Louis David

Jacques-Louis David

Birth Year : 1748
Death Year : 1825
Country : France

Jacques Louis David was born in Paris and first studied with Francois Boucher, whose influence may be seen in his works until 1770. In 1768, however, David had begun his studies with the Neoclassicist Joseph Marie Vien. A two-time winner of the Prix de Rome, David did not go to Italy until 1775. He remained for five years, studying the works of Caravaggio and other seventeenth-century Italian Baroque artists. David attracted much attention in Rome for the realistic vigor of his series of strong portraits. He became more and more deeply involved, while in Rome, in the Neoclassical aesthetics of Vien, Anton Raphael Mengs, Johann Winckelmann, and Benjamin West. David studied antique sculpture and ancient history and began to choose his subjects from the latter. The work that became the manifesto of Neoclassicism, the "Oath of the Horatii", was painted in 1784-85, on a second visit to Rome. In this and in his next great work, "The Death of Socrates", painted in Paris with figures inspired by classical statues and compositions taken from Roman bas-reliefs, David added two Caravaggiesque touches: sharp lighting that casts clear shadows, and realistic detail. David's art, embodying the ancient civic virtues, became the symbol of the Revolution and its aesthetic doctrines.

David was also active in the political side of the French Revolution where, from about 1787, he was the arbiter of taste and design in furniture, clothing, and the stage, as actors began to pose in groups similar to those in his paintings. He brought about the downfall of the French Royal Academy, thus freeing artists from its narrow tradition. He taught more than sixty pupils and was imitated by scores of artists. In 1793 David painted the realistic "Death of Marat", a powerful painting closer to the sensibilities of a Caravaggio than to those of antique sculpture. In 1794, while briefly imprisoned, he did a naturalistic landscape view of the Luxembourg Gardens. An enthusiastic Bonapartist, David became the first painter to the Emperor, an officer in the Legion of Honor, and a member of the Institute. With the restoration of the Bourbons, however, he was banished to Belgium for having voted for the death of Louis XVI and it was there that he died. David's strong sculptural painting had replaced the delicate and artificial style of the eighteenth century. Although his strict classicism held back the rise of the Romantic School, he stimulated such artists as Gros and Géricault in their free choice of subjects and in their passionate seriousness. He was thus an important force in the evolution of modern painting.

Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali
Birth Year : 1904
Death Year : 1989
Country : Spain

Salvador Dali was born in Figueras, Spain, the son of a notary whose family came from Cadaques on the Costa Brava. The Dali family spent their summers in Cadaques, and it is this landscape that appears over and over in the artist's work, either as background or as an integral part of the composition. Dali began his career as an enfant terrible in the schools of Figueras and then went to the School of Fine Arts in Madrid where he quickly learned the fundamentals of drawing. At this time, however, he was more interested in studying Freud and art magazines that specialized in Cubism, Futurism, and metaphysical art. In about 1928, he went to Paris, attached himself with passionate conviction to the French Surrealists and soon married Gala Eluard, former wife of the poet Paul Eluard, one of the founders of the movement. However, as Dali became absorbed in the study of Italian Renaissance painters, the French Surrealists rejected his style as too academic in technique and, thus, he left France for New York.

Dali's work is distinguished by precise and finely executed draughtsmanship of almost photographic exactitude. Paint is applied smoothly and evenly in a varied and generally muted palette that occasionally breaks out into glaring color. His subject matter is that of the Freudian dream world and of metamorphosis of objects, people, and animals, arranged in unexpected and often inexplicable combinations. A prodigious worker, Dali has produced large quantities of paintings that include portraits, landscapes with figures, figures seemingly superimposed on landscapes, and, more recently, religious subjects. He has also done illustrations for books, lithographs and etchings, and jewelry designs.

Gustave Courbet

Gustave Courbet
Birth Year : 1819
Death Year : 1877
Country : France

Gustave Courbet was born in Ornans in the Franche-Comté, the son of a comfortable family that was half peasant, half bourgeois, and very proud of its revolutionary ancestry. Courbet, a handsome young man, went to Paris in 1840 to study art, taking almost no instruction but working in the Louvre and from models. He began as a Romantic, seeing himself in early self-portraits as a rather Byronic figure. The Revolution of 1848 swept away the last vestiges of Courbet's romantic tendencies and he became a realist. As such, he was able to paint only what he saw in the world around him and the simple life of plain people. By 1849 such naturalistic works as The Stone Breakers (destroyed in 1945 in the bombing of Dresden) indicated by their subject matter and treatment that he had answered Baudelaire's plea for paintings that expressed "the heroism of modern life."

Courbet's own life was fairly heroic: as an artist, he was both greatly admired and greatly detested. As a man, he was imprisoned for his part in the Commune uprising of 1871, spent six months in prison, and then went to live in exile in Switzerland where he died, still owing the French government a large sum charged to him for the destruction of the Vendome column. Throughout his life he fought with both government authorities and public taste but continued to paint as he pleased, for as Ingres said of him in 1849 "he is an eye."

Courbet responded in his paintings to the world in which he was brought up: people, animals both wild and tame, fruits and flowers, landscapes, and seascapes. His palette, at first dark or restrained, became warmer and brighter as he grew older. A master of technique, he could apply paint as smoothly as enamel or in thick corrugations. His ability to paint texture, particularly that of animal pelts, was matchless. His fruits are round and full, bursting with sweetness; his flowers delicately differentiated; his landscapes forceful. Courbet brought life to inanimate objects, love and understanding to human beings.

John Constable

John Constable
Birth Year : 1776
Death Year : 1837
Country : United Kingdom

John Constable was the son of a miller in Suffolk, England. Though Sir George Beaumont introduced him to the work of Claude Lorrain, Constable painted sketched by himself until he was twenty-four, when he entered the Royal Academy School in London. Constable believed that landscape painting must strive to include "a pure apprehension of natural effect" and he painted typical scenes from the southern English countryside. He worked with watercolors and directly from the motif while outdoors, then enlarged his sketches in oil once indoors. These landscapes differ from those of his predecessors because of Constable's primary concern with light, air, and sky rather than with exact landscape details. He considered the sky "the key-note ... and chief organ of sentiment," and delighted in registering its changes and in using it as a foil for the more stable land. As a result, he developed a broad, free technique that gives his work a particularly romantic softness.

Although he was the first to treat landscapes with spontaneity and emotion, his first exhibition in 1802 passed almost unnoticed since the demand in England was for portraits. In fact, for years, Constable painted portraits, for which he cared little, in order to earn his meager living, while he continued to paint the landscapes in which his real interest lay. When he was forty-eight, he sent several landscapes to the Paris Salon. The French were highly impressed and awarded him the Gold Medal (1824) for "The Hay Wain". Even so, it was only five years later that Constable was elected, with full membership, to the Royal Academy. Nevertheless, Constable considered this honor as having come too late, and he lived out his last years lonely and embittered. Complete recognition of his talents and his technique of using broken touches of color to convey movement and light did not come until after his death.

Thomas Cole

Thomas Cole
Birth Year : 1801
Death Year : 1848
Country : US

Thomas Cole, outstanding Hudson River landscapist, was born in Lancashire, England. He was apprenticed to a textile designer and engraver before immigrating, with this family, to Philadelphia in 1819. In Philadelphia, he added the technique of wood engraving to his repetoire. When the Cole family moved to Stuebenville, Ohio Thomas made a short voyage to the West Indies before joining them. In Ohio, he became an itinerant portrait painter for some years and then returned to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts where he was most influenced by the landscapes of Thomas Birch and Thomas Doughty. In 1825 Cole moved to New York City, spent a summer roaming around the Catskills, and made his debut as a landscapist. His work was markedly romantic yet minutely exact, dramatic yet scrupulously naturalistic in composition and leaned heavily toward the unspoiled, primeval aspects of nature. Three of his first paintings were purchased by well-known artists, which helped establish his reputation rapidly. Cole began to spend more and more time in the mountains and along the shores of the Hudson River, but when he decided to go to Europe in 1829, the poet William Cullen Bryant exhorted him in a sonnet to "keep that earlier, wilder image bright."

In Europe, Cole discovered J.M.W. Turner, Raphael, and Claude Lorrain during his visit to London, Paris, Florence and Rome. After his return to America in 1832 he began to combine his knowledge of European art with his natural impulse to portray nature as he saw it. He painted series of enormous allegorical significance: "The Course of Empire" (1836) and "The Voyage of Life" (1839), are good examples of these. They were reproduced as engravings and they sold very well, providing him with the means to return to Rome in 1841 where he closed himself off from the world to paint a second version of "The Voyage of Life". The work was badly received in Rome and Cole returned to his family, to the home he had established in Catskill-on-Hudson, and to his beloved mountains. He was ill, depressed, and tortured, and spent the remainder of his life painting the romantic, realistic landscapes that are his greatest works. With their striking contrasts of light and shade, their inherent feeling of God's presence in nature, their exquisitely fine detail and warm color, they are the keystone of American landscape painting-honest, moving, and beautiful.

Judy Chicago

Judy Chicago
Birth Year : 1939
Death Year :
Country : US

Born Judy Cohen in Chicago, Illinois, Judy Chicago is a sculptor, painter, and multimedia artist who has worked mainly in California. Her work has been closely associated with a phase of the feminist movement that began having a powerful impact on both American and global culture in the 1970's. From 1960 to 1964, she studied at the University of California at Los Angeles. At Fresno, she helped launch the first feminist art course in the United States. Along with Miriam Schapiro, Chicago co-founded the influential Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts at Valencia. Chicago has been interested in revisiting the aesthetic and practical techniques with which women have traditionally been associated - weaving, quilting, needlework, etc. - with the intention of freeing these from such dismissive categories as "folk art" and "craft," which diminish their power and importance.

"Collaboration" is an essential element in many such traditionally feminine arts, and it has played an important role in Chicago's work. For example, her "The Dinner Party" installation (1974-1979) of a triangular banquet table, 48 feet long on each side, with 39 place settings, invited the contribution of many women artists. Each of these settings represented the contributions to the history of Western civilization of a number of important women, either historical or mythical. The table, moreover, stood on a large tile floor, and inscribed on each tile were the names of other important women. The installation traveled widely, sparking lively debate about feminist art. In more recent works, Chicago has explored similar feminist issues, and in 1980, in collaboration with her husband Donald Woodman, she began working on "The Holocaust Project", completed in 1993, which featured a collection of art objects exploring the significance of the Holocaust in the context of the traditionally feminine sensibilities of compassion and care. Other works include "The Birth Project" (1985) and "Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist" (1975).

Paul Cezanne

Paul Cezanne
Birth Year : 1839
Death Year : 1906
Country : France

Paul Cezanne, the greatest Post-Impressionist master, was born in Aix-en Provence where he received his formal education as a classmate of Emile Zola. Cezanne, whose banker father wished him to study law, did not arrive in Paris until 1861 although he had studied drawing in Aix and showed considerable ability. While studying at the Académie Suisse, Cezanne met Pissarro who was to influence him greatly. When he failed the entrance examinations for the Beaux-Arts, however, he returned to Aix. After working for a year in his father's bank and painting only in his spare time, he returned to Paris (1862-64). Zola introduced him to Manet, Renoir, Bazille and Degas, and Cezanne worked fairly loosely with these artists. Between 1864 and 1890 Cezanne lived in Paris, its environs and in the region around Aix until diabetes forced him to retire permanently to Aix. Early in his career, Cezanne admired Caravaggio, Courbet, and Delacroix, and his paintings until 1868 were romantic or baroque in style, dark in color, and classical in subject. During the period 1868-72 Manet's influence may be noted in added clarity and solidity of form. During his Impressionist period (1872-79) his palette lightened and, following Pissarro's example, he approached nature with greater simplicity.

Throughout the years that he exhibited with the Impressionists Cézanne held the unhappy distinction of being the most derided member of the group. He liked his own work no better than the critics and public did, however, but in 1880 he began to develop his own theory of painting and his own style. It is a style characterized by unemotional, non-narrative, closed compositions that are based on the reduction of every object in nature to the cone, the cylinder, or the cube - those permanent qualities, which he believed were beneath all accidental external variations. He achieved a three-dimensional architectural effect by deliberately alternating warm and cool tones, by using a dark outline around objects and forms, and by an intensely dynamic balancing of shapes. None of Cézanne's works are the result of accident. He painted and repainted, altered brushstrokes attacked his subjects from different angles, and deliberately falsified perspective to achieve a timeless landscape, an orderly intelligence, and a solidity of form.

All modern art can be said to stem, either directly or indirectly, from Cézanne: Symbolism, Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, and Abstract Expressionism. He immediately affected the work of Gauguin, van Gogh, Picasso, and Braque who, in turn, have influenced countless others. Cézanne finally began to receive some public recognition in 1895 and for the remaining eleven years of his life he enjoyed both public and private attention. He continued to paint until six days before he died of pneumonia on October 22, 1906.

Mary Cassatt

Mary Cassatt
Birth Year : 1845
Death Year : 1927
Country : US

Mary Cassatt, one of the two women and the only American to show with the Impressionists, was born in Pittsburgh. She was the daughter of a millionaire and spent her childhood in Europe with her family. When the Cassatt's returned to live in Philadelphia, Mary studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art until she was twenty-three. Then, against her father's wishes, she left for Europe to study further and visit Italy, Spain, and Belgium before going to Paris where, as she said, the sight of a pastel by Degas changed her life. It was through Degas, who was more her sponsor than her teacher, that she delighted to be relieved of the arbitrary standards established for acceptance at the official Salons. Cassatt scrupulously separated her social life from her artistic one and was in some ways aloof from the relaxed artistic atmosphere around her.

Her subject matter was thus restricted to the ladylike pastimes and scenes with which she was generally surrounded, but her technique and power were by no means limited. She was a fine artist in her favorite mediums: oil, pastel, etching, and lithography. Her work has the intellectualized emotion of Degas; the soft contours of Renoir, (particularly in her many renderings of children and mothers), and the flat surface of Manet. In addition, she was strongly influenced by Japanese prints and she was extremely adept at handling large color masses while she achieved the Oriental quality of cleanliness with a sure and incisive draughtsmanship. By far the wealthiest and the most financially influential of the Impressionists, Cassett did a great deal, unobtrusively, to help her associates. Not only did she purchase many of their works for herself, but she also encouraged her friends, the Havemeyers and the Stillmans, to collect Impressionist art and, when conditions were desperate, she even loaned money to the Durand-Ruel Gallery to promote an exhibition. Cassatt, who received very little recognition in her own country until long after her death, lived and worked in France throughout her life and was awarded the French Legion of Honor in 1904.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio
Birth Year : 1573
Death Year : 1609
Country : Italy

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, revolutionary naturalist painter, was born in Caravaggio near Milan, the son of a mason. He showed his talent early and at the age of sixteen, after a brief apprenticeship in Milan, he was studying with d'Arpino in Rome.

During the period 1592-98 Caravaggio's work was precise in contour, brightly colored, and sculpturesque in form, like the Mannerists, but with an added social and moral consciousness. By 1600 when he had completed his first public commission the St. Matthew paintings for the church of San Luigi dei Francesi, he had established himself as an opponent of both classicism and intellectual Mannerism.

Caravaggio chose his models from the common people and set them in ordinary surroundings, yet managed to lose neither poetry nor deep spiritual feeling. His use of chiaroscuro - the contrast of light and dark to create atmosphere, drama, and emotion - was revolutionary. His light is unreal, comes from outside the painting, and creates deep relief and dark shadow. The resulting paintings are as exciting in their effect upon the senses as on the intellect.

Caravaggio's art, strangely enough, was not popular with ordinary people who saw in it a lack of reverence. It was highly appreciated by artists of his time and has become recognized through the centuries for its profoundly religious nature as well as for the new techniques that had changed the art of painting.

Though Caravaggio received many commissions for religious paintings during his short life, he led a wild and bohemian existence. In 1606, after killing a man in a fight, he fled to Naples. Unfortunately, he was soon in trouble again, and so was forced to flee to Malta where, finally, after a series of precipitous adventures, died of malaria at the age of thirty-six. His influence, which was first seen in early seventeenth-century Italian art, eventually spread to France, England, Spain and the Netherlands.

Adolphe William Bouguereau

Adolphe William Bouguereau

Birth Year : 1825
Death Year : 1905
Country : France

Adolphe-William Bouguereau was a French painter who upheld standards of academic conservatism during a revolutionary era in modern painting. His work falls roughly into three categories: portraits, religious works, and nudes. Winning the coveted Prix de Rome in 1850 allowed Bouguereau to leave Paris and study for four years in Rome. Upon his return to Paris, prestige and influence allowed him to wage war against the modernist tendencies of French art. His portraits and religious works evince a photographic quality, highly prized by the academic painters of his period, in which brushstrokes are strictly concealed and a sense of three-dimensionality is achieved - though possibly at the expense of expression and personality. The broad sentimentality from which his progressive contemporaries were strongly dissenting is at a premium in Bouguereau's work, and his nudes possess a flirtatious sensuality that made them highly accessible to conservative viewers of the time.

As a powerful member of the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, Bouguereau prevented avant-garde works from being shown at the Salon, the Academy's official exhibition. Artists who believed themselves to have been rejected by the Salon because of Bouguereau's efforts include the post-Impressionist Paul Cezanne, who referred to "the Salon de Monsieur de Bouguereau." With the triumph of the avant-garde in the twentieth century, Bouguereau's reputation quickly declined. While his hostility toward new ideas have made him a natural enemy for some progressive artists and historians, in the present post-modernist era, interest in his work has once again begun to accelerate.

Francois Boucher

Francois Boucher

Birth Year : 1703
Death Year : 1770
Country : France

Francois Boucher was born in Paris, the son of a lace designer who first taught him to draw. He studied with Francois Le Moyne for a short while in 1720, worked with an engraver for whom he drew book illustrations, and won the Prix de Rome in 1924. He did not leave for the usual four-year sojourn in Italy until 1727. In Italy, he studied the work of Northern Italian painters, especially those of the Venetian school led by Tiepolo. The greatest influences on Boucher's style were Le Moyne (who painted in the manner of Tiepolo), the late Baroque and early Rococo Venetians, and Watteau, from whose paintings and drawings Boucher made engravings. After his return to Paris and his subsequent election to the Academy in 1734, Boucher moved almost exclusively in the world of the French Court, where he was first patronized by the Queen and then by Madame de Pompadour, whose friend, teacher, and protégé he remained. Boucher decorated many royal buildings and chateaux and in 1756, at the instigation of Madame de Pompadour, he received from King Louis XVI the important position of director of the Gobelins tapestry factory. Nine years later he was named "first painter to the King" and Director of the Royal Academy.

The most popular and fashionable painter of his period, Boucher was the final arbiter of taste in all forms of decorative art as Simon Vouet had been under Louis XIII and Le Brun under Louis XIV. His influence extended not only to painting but also to interior decoration, tapestries (made both at Gobelins and at Beauvais), porcelain (from Vincennes and Sevres), and to the often elaborate settings for public festivities. Boucher painted historical and mythological paintings, fine portraits, and the pastoral scenes for which he is most famous. In the latter, well-dressed and delicate peasants play games in the fantastic formal landscapes of the time. Boucher's extremely decorative work is cool and translucent in color, softly rounded in form, and harmonious and refined in effect. He had many imitators, and in his final years his large workshop turned out many works that he merely supervised. His influence continued even into the next generation through its finest painter, Jean Honoré Fragonard.

Thomas Hart Benton

Thomas Hart Benton

Birth Year : 1889
Death Year : 1975
Country : US

Thomas Hart Benton was born in Neosha, Missouri, the great-nephew of the American politician and statesman after whom he was named. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1907 to 1908; and he then went to Paris, where he studied at the Academie Julian until 1911. While in Paris, through his friendship with the painter Stanton Macdonald-Wright, he became strongly influence by the "Synchronist" school of painting. The Synchromists took an abstract approach to color, which they used to express emotion and mood rather than to depict reality. He continued to work in the Synchromist manner, even after his return to the United States in 1912. Despite having participated in the Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters in 1916, he broke with modernism and with the avant-garde in the early 1920's, and adopted an approach that he, and others, called "Regionalism", in which familiar scenes and characters from small-town life in the American Midwest are painted in a popular (even nostalgic), yet neither slick nor pandering, style.

The approach had roots in the populist socialism that had gained many adherents among idealistic young people in the late 1920's and early 1930's. Benton's figure drawing was accessible, often cartoon-like; his compositions were energetic and active; and his colors were rich. He painted mural scenes of American life in the early 1930's, including a well-known work for the New School for Social Research in New York City. He taught at the Art Students League of New York, where his students included Jackson Pollack, who would later become an important abstract expressionist. In 1934, when a Benton portrait was featured on the cover of "Time" magazine, both Benton and his Regionalism started catching the attention of a much larger public. In 1935, he became the director of the City Art Institute and School of Design in Kansas City, Missouri, where he lived for the rest of his life.

Throughout his career, Benton continued to reject the orthodoxies of modernism, which he saw as elitist, neurotic, and obscurantist. He hoped to produce a particularly American visual art, steeped in North American folk traditions and free of what he saw as the decadence of European high culture. One of his innovations was the representation of Mythological and Biblical narratives in American types. He worked in both mural and easel forms and wrote many articles on art, as well as two autobiographies.

Max Beckmann

Max Beckmann
Birth Year : 1884
Death Year : 1950
Country : Germany

Max Beckmann was an expressionist painter and graphic artist, born in Leipzig, East Germany. He studied at the Weimar School of Art for three years, before traveling to Florence and to Paris. He was especially impressed by Piero della Francesca, the French primitives, Cezanne, and van Gogh. From 1906 to 1914, Beckmann was associated with the "Berlin Secession" movement, while painting in a distinctively impressionistic manner. His experiences as a medical corpsman in 1914-15 were such a shock to his sensibilities that when, after a severe illness, he began to paint again, in 1917, his work became infused with the icy bitterness of a reaction to the horrors of war and to the depression of the postwar years in Germany.

His compositions, in 1920, were strongly defined within spaces confined by harsh lines of contour. His color was limited, symbolic in tonality, and quite cold. His principal subject, the human being, "the monster of vitality," was presented in nightmarish scenes of brutally raw living. As the memories of war and and postwar began to fade, this nightmarish quality changed to one of dreamlike disillusion in his landscapes, his still lives, and in his portraits of bold or occasionally tender women. His enigmatic portraits of men, or of himself are equally inscrutable.

In 1933 he left Frankfurt for political reasons and went to Berlin where he stayed until 1936. He then went to Amsterdam and finally, in 1940, to New York where he died ten years later. The paintings from this final phase are freer and broader in style, simpler in expression, and more varied in their use of color. His subjects are mythical or allegorical and his motifs are symbolic. He expresses, with a force that is almost physical in impact, the problems of man's existence in a difficult world.

Hans Arp

Jean (Hans) Arp

Birth Year : 1887
Death Year : 1966
Country : France

Jean Arp was born in Strasbourg, France. He began drawing at a very early age but soon tired of "the everlasting copying of stuffed birds and withered flowers," and turned to poetry for relief, leaving the Strasbourg School of Applied Art to read avidly the poetry of the members of the Sturmer group. On a visit to Paris in 1904 he came into contact with Modern painting. Within a few years, Arp had returned to the life of an art student, first at the Weimer Art School, and later (in 1908) at the Académie Julian in Paris. In 1911 he helped organize an exhibition in Lucerne under the title "Moderne Bund" which showed his works and those of Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, and others. The same year he visited Kandinsky, met the artists of the Blaue Reiter, and was soon contributing to their exhibitions and publications.

And so, Arp started making his first experiments with free forms. By the time he was twenty-five, Arp had emerged as a poet and painter of great distinction. In 1914, Arp lived in Paris where he became a friends with Picasso, Apollinaire, Modigliani and Delaunay. The following year he moved to Zurich and exhibited his first mature collages and tapestries.

While in Zurich, Arp became active in the Dada movement, collaborating with Max Ernst. The playfulness of Dada appealed to him and aided the development of his unique symbolic pictographs. As the Dada movement waned, Arp (like many of his colleagues) gravitated toward Surrealism, and in 1925 he took part in the first group exhibition of Surrealist artists at the Galerie Pierre in Paris. His work at this time derived its composition from the "laws of chance" as much as from the workings of the unconscious - the cardinal principles underlying early Surrealism. Gradually Arp abandoned the earlier Dada-like forms, which were meant to shock, and began to emphasize organic growth and structure. Arp's Surrealist work is of the abstract or "automatic" variety practiced by Joan Miro, in which lines and forms of half-consciously perceived inner impulses suggested themselves on the surface of the canvas.

During World War II, Arp took refuge in Switzerland where he continued to work in the many media, which made him one of the most versatile of contemporary artists. In 1949, and again in 1950, he came to America and on the second of these journeys completed a monumental wood relief at Harvard University's Graduate Center at Cambridge, Mass.

Georges Braque

Georges Braque
Birth Year : 1882
Death Year : 1963
Country : France

Georges Braque, the most representatively French of this century's painters, was born in Argenteuil. He was the son of a painting contractor who was also a Sunday painter. He had his first art lessons from his father, from whom he learned to imitate marble, wood and gilt surfaces in his paintings. Braque then studied at the school of Fine Arts in Le Havre before going to Paris, where he studied with Bonnat and discovered African, Egyptian, and Greek sculpture at the Louvre. Braque was also influenced by the Impressionists and by his contemporaries, Matisse and Derain, whose Fauve movement he joined in about 1905. Even in this period, his works showed characteristics of his later styles, for he painted some works in monochrome, using angles as well as curves, with a flatter, more transparent pigment than that of his colleagues. By 1907, the architectural influence of Cezanne had asserted itself and Braque, with Picasso, founded the Cubist movement. He began to paint in muted colors and in the geometrical patterns, inverted perspective, and overlapping volumes associated with Cubism. Picasso and Braque worked closely together, until the outbreak of World War I, sometimes producing works so similar that the two artists themselves could not tell which one had painted a given picture if it had not been immediately signed. They also cooperated on both the analytical and synthetic stages of Cubism and on the collages that prevented Cubism from becoming overly formal: the glued-on material necessitated simplification of style.

Braque was mobilized into the French Army in 1914, and a head wound he received in 1915 made him temporarily blind so that he could not paint again until 1917. He began to develop a new and more personal style, using a brighter palette and freer manner that is less angular and more luminous. By 1931 he had found a marvelous balance between intelligence and sensitivity, technique and inspiration. Braque painted a world that combines harmonious shadings of color, sinuous line, and more rounded form, with the multiple points of view and inverted space of Cubism. The most ordinary dull colors became resonant on his canvases: white is translucent; black, full of light. The resulting landscapes, figure paintings, and still lives, display lucidity, intellectuality, and restrained emotion. These qualities, as natural to Braque as his quiet manner, prompted the French government to proclaim him the "most French of all French artists of his generation."

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This blog will be for biographies of famous artists.