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... and atmosphere. Finally, living as a solitary in Aix rather than alternating between the south and Paris, C'elaine moved into his late phase. Now he concentrated on a few basic subjects: still lifes of studio objects built around such recurring elements as apples, statuary, and tablecloths; studies of bathers, based upon the male model and drawing upon a combination of memory, earlier studies, and sources in the art of the past; and successive views of the Mont Sainte-Victoire, a nearby landmark, painted from his studio looking across the intervening valley. The landscapes of the final years, much affected by C'elaine's contemporaneous practice in watercolor, have a more transparent and unfinished look, while the last figure paintings are at once more somber and spiritual in mood.
By the time of his death on Oct. 22, 1906, C'elaine's art had begun to be shown and seen across Europe, and it became a fundamental influence on the Fauvists, the cubists, and virtually all advanced art of the early 20 th century. C'elaine is not an easy man to love, but professors and painters adore him. Art critics lavish him with superlatives, including 'a prophet of the 20 th century, ' 'the most sensitive painter of his time, ' 'the greatest artist of the 19 th century, ' and 'the father of modern art. ' But he's not quite a household name, and his posters have never been best sellers at museum shops around the world. In fact, most non-professionals wouldn't stand a chance of recognizing a C'elaine unless it was clearly labelled. Even then, there's no guarantee of appeal. Not that poster sales determine an artist's stature, but they do reveal something about the accessibility of his work.
C'elaine's pictures are restrained, impersonal and remote -- they don't have the gut-wrenching appeal of van Gogh's portraits, even before he cut off part of his ear. They can't compete with Monet's lush expanses of waterlilies or Renoir's sensuous women with their come-hither looks. And let's face it, bowls of fruit and the hills and trees of Provence, where C'elaine spent most of his life, are a hard sell against the Tahitian backdrops of Gauguin, with or without the naked women. C'elaine is an artist's artist. He was obsessed with form rather than content, so subject matter was always secondary to the act of painting itself. He wanted the methods and skills of the painter to be more important than the image.
That meant the subject of the painting couldn't be so dynamic as to overshadow the artist's act of creation. The more he concentrated on this, the less viewer-friendly his works became. But that suited his personality just fine. His goal was not to have a mass audience or sales appeal, it was to satisfy himself. C'elaine was a brooding, complex man, given to rages, grudges and depressions. He had few friends, and those he had he alienated.
Even when success finally caught up with him, he was dogged by feelings of inadequacy. The most famous of his friends was his schoolmate and writer Emile Zola, who was everything C'elaine wasn't -- charming, eloquent, sociable and successful at an early age. Zola was art critic, novelist and C'elaine's mentor. The artist looked at him for strength but gave nothing in return.
Zola got tired of placating C'elaine's ego, and in later years, when Zola wrote The Masterpiece of an unfulfilled artist who eventually killed himself, C'elaine was convinced that the author had him in mind. He was so egocentric and so paranoid, he assumed everyone would know Zola was writing about him. The reality was that no one knew about him at all, but the novel still destroyed their friendship. It's hard to imagine that the man who created such restrained, methodical, time-consuming works had a violent, volatile temper. Painting was his salvation, a way to balance the fires within.
Rather than let his personality shine in his art -- that scared him too much -- he suppressed it. In spite of his bourgeois background, he was a primitive, with rough edges and no table manners -- although he did improve somewhat after he met Hortense. He worked in virtual seclusion and seldom ventured out. He was such a recluse that one critic doubted his existence. When C'elaine finally did attend a show of his paintings, he was amazed that the gallery had bothered to frame them. Even when he finally enjoyed both success and sales he remained riddled with self-doubt.
C'elaine was versatile; in his pursuit of perfection and a unique style, he experimented a lot. Art students often copy paintings -- you still see them in museums with their sketchbooks -- and C'elaine did just that, but unlike most, he never stopped copying. To him, it was an important form of discipline and inspiration. He felt he could understand art better through copying, and whenever he came to an impasse, he went off to the nearest museum, sketchbook in hand. His earliest works, from his first days in Paris, are expressionistic, with their impasto paint surface, broad use of the palette knife, and brooding intensity.
He took out his frustrations on the canvas. In the early 1870 s, he experimented with impressionism. He tried to combine the principles of light and air-based art with a more structured pictorial style. After that, he delved into Classicism, with more balanced and formal compositions. Toward the end of his life, he was at his most daring, reducing architecture and figures to geometric forms and paving the way for Cubism. Vincent van Gogh (1853 - 1890) Vincent (Willem) van Gogh is generally considered the greatest Dutch painter after Rembrandt; he powerfully influenced the current of Expressionism in modern art.
His work, all of it produced during a period of only 10 years, hauntingly conveys through its striking colour, coarse brushwork, and contoured forms the anguish of a mental illness that eventually resulted in suicide. Among his masterpieces are numerous self-portraits and the well known The Starry Night (1889). A painter and draughtsman, van Gogh was with C'elaine and Gauguin the greatest of Post-Impressionist artists. His uncle was a partner in the international firm of picture dealers Gospel and Co. and in 1869 van Gogh went to work in the branch at The Hague.
In 1873 he was sent to the London branch and fell unsuccessfully in love with the daughter of the landlady. This was the first of several disastrous attempts to find happiness with a woman, and his unrequited passion affected him so badly that he was dismissed from his job. He returned to England in 1876 as an unpaid assistant at a school, and his experience of urban squalor awakened a religious zeal and a longing to serve his fellow men. His father was a Protestant pastor, and van Gogh first trained for the ministry, but he abandoned his studies in 1878 and went to work as a lay preacher among the impoverished miners of the grim Borinage district in Belgium. In his zeal he gave away his own worldly goods to the poor and was dismissed for his literal interpretation of Christ's teaching. He remained in the Borinage, suffering acute poverty and a spiritual crisis, until 1880, when he found that art was his vocation and the means by which he could bring consolation to humanity.
From this time he worked at his new 'mission' with single-minded frenzy, and although he often suffered from extreme poverty and undernourishment, his output in the ten remaining years of his life was prodigious: about 800 paintings and a similar number of drawings. From 1881 to 1885 van Gogh lived in the Netherlands, sometimes in lodgings, supported by his devoted brother Theo, who regularly sent him money from his own small salary. In keeping with his humanitarian outlook he painted peasants and workers, the most famous picture from this period being The Potato Eaters (1885). Of this he wrote to Theo: 'I have tried to emphasize that those people, eating their potatoes in the lamplight have dug the earth with those very hands they put in the dish, an...
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Research essay sample on 20 Th Century Van Gogh
