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... d so it speaks of manual labour, and how they have honestly earned their food'. In 1885 van Gogh moved to Antwerp on the advice of Antoine Mauve (a cousin by marriage), and studied for some months at the Academy there. Academic instruction had little to offer such an individualist, however, and in February 1886 he moved to Paris, where he met Pissarro, Degas, Gauguin, Seurat, and Toulouse-Lautrec.
At this time his painting underwent a violent metamorphosis under the combined influence of Impressionism and Japanese woodcuts, losing its moralistic flavour of social realism. Van Gogh became obsessed by the symbolic and expressive values of colors and began to use them for this purpose rather than, as did the Impressionists, for the reproduction of visual appearances, atmosphere, and light. 'Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, ' he wrote, 'I use color more arbitrarily so as to express myself more forcibly'. Of his Night Caf'e (1888), he said: 'I have tried to express with red and green the terrible passions of human nature. ' For a time he was influenced by Seurat's delicate pointillist manner, but he abandoned this for broad, vigorous, and swirling brush-strokes. In February 1888 van Gogh settled at Arles, where he painted more than 200 canvases in 15 months. During this time he sold no pictures, was in poverty, and suffered recurrent nervous crisis with hallucinations and depression. He became enthusiastic for the idea of founding an artists' co-operative at Arles and towards the end of the year he was joined by Gauguin.
But as a result of a quarrel between them van Gogh suffered the crisis in which occurred the famous incident when he cut off his left ear (or part of it), an event commemorated in his Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear In May 1889 he went at his own request into an asylum at St R'e, near Arles, but continued during the year he spent there a frenzied production of tumultuous pictures such as Starry Night. He did 150 paintings besides drawings in the course of this year. In 1889 Theo married and in May 1890 van Gogh moved to Fauves-sur-Oise to be near him, lodging with the patron and connoisseur Dr Paul Gather. There followed another tremendous burst of strenuous activity and during the last 70 days of his life he painted 70 canvases.
But his spiritual anguish and depression became more acute and on 29 July 1890 he died from the results of a self-inflicted bullet wound He sold only one painting during his lifetime (Red Vineyard at Arles), and was little known to the art world at the time of his death, but his fame grew rapidly thereafter. His influence on Expressionism, Fauvism and early abstraction was enormous, and it can be seen in many other aspects of 20 th-century art. His stormy and dramatic life and his unswerving devotion to his ideals have made him one of the great cultural heroes of modern times, providing the most auspicious material for the 20 th-century vogue in romanticized psychological biography. Expressionism In the north of Europe, the Fauves' celebration of color was pushed to new emotional and psychological depths.
Expressionism, as it was generally known, developed almost simultaneously in different countries from about 1905. Characterized by heightened, symbolic colors and exaggerated imagery, it was German Expressionism in particular that tended to dwell on the darker, sinister aspects of the human psyche. The term "Expressionism'' can be used to describe various art forms but, in its broadest sense, it is used to describe any art that raises subjective feelings above objective observations. The paintings aim to reflect the artist's state of mind rather than the reality of the external world. The artists of Die Br " use drew inspiration from van Gogh, Gauguin and primitive art. Munch was also a strong influence, having exhibited his art in Berlin from 1892.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880 - 1938), the leading spirit of Die Br " use, wanted German art to be a bridge to the future. He insisted that the group, which included Erich Hockey (1883 - 1970) and Karl Schmidt-Rottluf (1884 - 1976), "express inner convictions... with sincerity and spontaneity''. Even at their wildest, the Fauves had retained a sense of harmony and design, but Die Br " use abandoned such restraint. They used images of the modern city to convey a hostile, alienating world, with distorted figures and colors. Kirchner does just this in Berlin Street Scene (1913), where the shrill colors and jagged hysteria of his own vision flash forth uneasily.
There is a powerful sense of violence, contained with difficulty, in much of their art. Emil Nolde (1867 - 1956), briefly associated with Die Br " use, was a more profound Expressionist who worked in isolation for much of his career. His interest in primitive art and sensual color led him to paint some remarkable pictures with dynamic energy, simple rhythms, and visual tension. He could even illuminate the marshes of his native Germany with dramatic clashes of stunning color.
Yet Early Evening (1916) is not mere drama: light glimmers over the distance with an exhilarating sense of space. Expressionism was a movement in fine arts that emphasized the expression of inner experience rather than solely realistic portrayal, seeking to depict not objective reality but the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in the artist. Expressionism is an artistic style in which the artist seeks 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 19 th and the 20 th centuries, and its qualities of highly subjective, personal, spontaneous self-expression are typical of a wide range of modern artists and art movements. Expressionism can also be seen as a permanent tendency in Germanic and Nordic art from at least the European Middle Ages, particularly in times of social change or spiritual crisis, and in this sense it forms the converse of the rationalist and classicizing tendencies of Italy and later of France.
It was an artistic and literary movement born in the early years of the 20 th century. 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 been thought of as inheriting from certain medieval art forms and, more directly, C'elaine, Gauguin, Van Gogh and the fauvism movement.
Gustave Moreau was already saying not to believe to the reality of what he touched or saw, but instead to his own interior perception; expressionism has been holding this theory to its extreme application. The most famed 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 Kevin and the Norwegian Edvard Munch are also related to this movement. During his stay in Germany, the Russian Kandinsky was also an expressionism addict. Painters as varied as Georges Rouault, Henry de Waroquier, Marcel Gromaire, Edouard Going have also been qualified of ''French Expressionists''.
Other members were, in Belgium, James Ensor, Permecke, Van der Begun, Services were seen as disciples of J'er^ome Bosch and Blue...
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