Customer center

We are a boutique essay service, not a mass production custom writing factory. Let us create a perfect paper for you today!

Example research essay topic: Vincent Van Gogh Oil On Canvas - 1,980 words

NOTE: Free essay sample provided on this page should be used for references or sample purposes only. The sample essay is available to anyone, so any direct quoting without mentioning the source will be considered plagiarism by schools, colleges and universities that use plagiarism detection software. To get a completely brand-new, plagiarism-free essay, please use our essay writing service.
One click instant price quote

Running Head: Modernism Name: Course: Tutor: December 28 th 2011 Introduction In the history of art, the phrase modern normally refers to an era dating from roughly the 1860 s to 1935 and describes the ideology and style of art produced during that period. The phrase modernism is used to refer to the art of the modern era. Modernism is typified by the rejection of tradition. In the nineteenth and twentieth century, there was a predicament in art. Being able to paint convincing images of mythical goddesses leaning on broken columns did not guaranteed success for the painters. In Europe, modernism artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Eduoard Manet, Matisse, among others looked for the truth in brushstrokes, which conveyed their true emotions.

Many individuals feel at a loss as to how to approach modernism artwork: is it too strange, too abstract? For example, Manet's Le dejeuner sur liebe caused a stir because it was not acceptable to paint nudes in modern settings. In this paper, I will offer an in-depth analysis of modernism paintings such as Le Deheuner sur l Herbe by Eduoard Manet, Luxe and Bonheur de vivre by Matisse and Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh. Discussion Le dejeuner sur liebe, 1863.

Eduoard Manet In 1863, Eduoard Manet's Le dejeuner sur liebe caused quite a stir at the Salons des Refuses. At the time, it was not adequate to paint nudes in modern settings, though it was adequate to have nudes illustrated as mythological creatures such as nymphs or in allegorical settings. Manet's painting was oil on canvas, 208 x 264. 5 cm. In this painting, the female model does not conform to these conventional ideas and she is looking straight at the viewers. At the time of this painting, this was frowned upon because nude models normally averted their gaze to show their humiliation at being nude. However, Manet's painting was the first one that showed a nude female model with clothed male sitters.

This brings to mind the question, why did Manet paint Le dejeuner sur liebe? Well, the answer is: because he was very interested in exploring new spatial relationships, new subject matter and new painterly values. Another controversy linked with Manet's Le dejeuner sur liebe was its size since it was seven by eight and a half feet, it was too large to make it a genre painting. Manet painted it in a contemporary style and thus, could not be considered a pastoral piece.

Normally artists would use canvases that were large-size to illustrate significant events of religious, mythological or historical importance. But, Manet obviously ignored this tradition since he used a large canvas to illustrate his scene of ordinary life. In this painting, Manet used Victoria Meu rent as a model and his brother in law, Leenhoff is depicted as the man sitting next to the model in the foreground. Manet's younger brother, Eugene is the man sitting on the right side of this painting. The fact that the two male sitters were very recognizable brought a little controversy with the viewers at the time.

Obviously, these two men were not anonymous muses, but, real people depicted in an explicit scene. The two men appear to be engaged in a conversation, completely ignoring the nude woman sitting next to them. In the background, there is a lightly clad woman who appears to be too large when compared to the three figures in the foreground. In addition to this, the lightly clad woman appears to be floating. Given that the background of this painting is crudely painted, the viewer is under the impression that this painting was painted indoors. Manet's Le dejeuner sur liebe painting also shows a form of photographic lighting that does not cast a lot of shadow and, which also removes mid-tone colors.

In general, the lighting of the scene in this painting is unnatural and inconsistent. After reviewing Manet's Le dejeuner sur liebe, an interesting question arises: why was he exploring new painterly values, new subject matter and new spatial relationships? He obviously produced a modernist painting. Luxe, Matisse. 1904 In Luxe, Matisse stripped pastoral of almost of all its conventional imagery, now considered archaic.

His pastoral is no longer marked by wealth, class, history, politics and morality. Gone are the pastoral conventions illustrated in his earlier works, specifically in Claude. In his painting, Luxe the viewer does not see courtly fantasies of shepherds, no nostalgic echoes of ancient Roman glory in ruined temples, no feudal estates, no glorification's of hierarchical social orders, no tedious moralizing against the aristocratic and no pretentious displays of high villa culture. In this painting, Matisse incorporates a few traditional aspects from pastoral.

He still paints nature as the conventional moment of sunset when it reaches a peak of colorist radiance. More significantly, in Luxe, Matisse defines nature as an area of unhurried sensual pleasure realized in sensual nudity, banqueting and lovemaking. Just like Manet in Le dejeuner sur liebe, Matisse uses nudity. In Luxe, young and naked women twisted into sensual odalisques are used to characterize nature and body.

However, the abstraction of his brushwork greatly eases the conventional objectifying depictions of women seen in late 19 th century French pastoral. The transformation of nubile female bodies into a fest of sparkling patches of pure color implies that the main pleasure of modern pastoral will be visual. In this painting by Matisse, the self-referential abstraction gives the fundamental means by which contemporary pleasure retreats into itself, struggles to find an undisturbed, safe, self-enclosed and radical private world. One might view this as a sign of contemporary pleasures alienation from larger histories, connections and communities.

However, this alienation permitted a zone of bodily pleasures to be secured and salvaged in an abstracting artistic form for momentary private experiences. It allowed Matisse to escape the harsh disputes about sexual liberation, new woman and the suffrage movement. In positioning pleasure in nature, Matisse's art divulges the prevalent nostalgia that informs a lot of early modernist culture and the apprehensive search for constant zones of spirituality, pleasure, modernity and so forth, located in an unclear but decidedly pre-urban or pre-modern world. Most viewers are likely to view this painting as capturing the simplest and truest qualities of natures and this is probably because they share Matisse's modern views of the body and nature and cannot view them as historically contingent. Bonheur de vivre, 1906.

Matisse Matisse painted Bonheur de vivre in 1906 and this painting illustrated a careful harnessing of the more vibrant aspects seen in the Luxe painting. In Bonheur de vivre, the composition comprised of simple, large, more harmonious areas of flat, decorative color shaped in curving arabesques as if the sensuality projected into the female body had been changed into a more abstract and larger formal principle. The result was a more accessible, pleasing, modernist aesthetic. The painting is an idyllic scene of embracing lovers, reclining nudes and carefree dancers.

The colors are rather flat, the figures are sketched in. This painting also exhibited a more aesthetically reassuring compositional simplicity. In this manner, The Bonheur harked back to an earlier classical tradition of landscapes with heroic nude characters. In this painting, Matisse transformed fauvism from an aesthetic initially viewed as violently hostile to artistic tradition into one that explicitly connected with the tradition in a general sense. Matisse borrowed two motifs from conventional pastoral imagery, a shepherd playing a rustic pipe and a circular dance, a motif whimsically inserted into a landscape that is otherwise not at all tied to shepherds lives. The result of this is a much more pleasant, appealing, accessible and modernist painting deliberately turned classical in numerous ways while simultaneously becoming even more resolutely modern in its flatness.

In this case, flatness works well to evoke both modern and traditional aesthetic qualities. Matisse gave this painting some sense of history, though minimal, self-referential and wholly artistic by allowing modernism to refer back to former artistic traditions. By doing so, in this painting, he healed some of modernism's troubling rupture with the past. The choice for the title of a familiar French phrase for this painting tied to self-consciously and distinctly French attitude towards pleasure was another strategy that Matisse inserted his potentially radical art into a French cultural mainstream. Just like the erratic inclusion of a pastoral motif that invoked a traditional and conservative high culture within his modernism, the misuse of a mainstream French term as title helped Matisse remake modernist pictorial pleasure as something respectable, legitimate, progressive and even refined. So did the retention of a conventional aspect of male titillation seen earlier in his other painting, the Luxe and present in most early modernist painting as a relic from Western artistic tradition.

At least, for the male views, the continued pleasure derived from gazing at young, passive, voluptuous, body-displaying women stripped of both consciousness and clothing and served up as luscious objects must have provided an element that was deeply reassuring within a modernist art that otherwise appeared hostile to social and esthetic norms. The Starry night, 1889. Vincent Van Gogh. The Starry night is oil on canvas measuring 73. 7 x 92. 1 cm and it was painted in 1889. At first glance, it appears to be extremely chaotic and everything is moving. This painting is often described as a morbid work that announces the suicide of Van Gogh in the following year.

Van Gogh uses the tension fields to define pictorial space. The village in the painting occupies the lower sky and a star and the point of meeting between two spirals is on the natural points of interest superiors. In addition to this, Van Gogh uses sinuous lines, arabesques, spirals of rolling up and convolutions to seek the glance of the viewer to deepest of nature. The enormous central spiral in this painting has the effect of an ocean wave and it is divided into two parts and it induces the whirling movement. The church and bell tower appear to be deformed. The starts and the moon in this painting illuminate the sky but do not disseminate alight a light towards the ground.

The light only remains in the sky. With regard to the colors used, the landscape and the sky bathe in multiples tones, the blue tones contrast with the gilded yellow tones of the stars and moon. Blue is a spiritual color that signifies the force of the spirit. It is a cold color but higher one that indicates temperance and serenity. The yellow color in this painting is a hot color that contains a penetrating and vivifying solar heat. The colors Van Gogh uses to paint the picture on the chromatic circle shows a harmony between cold colors and a contrast between complementary colors.

Conclusion In conclusions, paintings such as The Starry night, Bonheur de vivre, Luxe and Le dejeuner sur liebe had a common factor; they were modern pieces of work. The painters of these paintings strived to do something different from the norm. For instance, in the Le dejeuner sur liebe, Manet caused a stir by painting a nude woman. All in all, these paintings are a perfect embodiment of modernism. Bibliography Bocola, Sandro. The art of modernism: art, culture, and society from Goya to the present day.

Munich: Prestel. 1999 Childs, Peter. Modernism. London: Routledge. 2000 Foster, Hal. Art since 1900: modernism, anti-modernism, postmodernism. New York: Thames & Hudson. 2004 Frascina, Francis. Modern art and modernism: a critical anthology.

New York: Harper & Row. 1982 Harrison, Charles. Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1997 Joachimides, Christos. The age of modernism: art in the 20 th century. Stuttgart: Have Verlag. 1997. McBride, Patrizia.

Legacies of modernism: art and politics in northern Europe, 1890 - 1950. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2007 Troy, Nancy. Modernism and the decorative arts in France: art Nouveau to Le Corbusier. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1991


Free research essays on topics related to: starry night, subject matter, vincent van gogh, manet painting, oil on canvas

Research essay sample on Vincent Van Gogh Oil On Canvas

Writing service prices per page

  • $18.85 - in 14 days
  • $19.95 - in 3 days
  • $23.95 - within 48 hours
  • $26.95 - within 24 hours
  • $29.95 - within 12 hours
  • $34.95 - within 6 hours
  • $39.95 - within 3 hours
  • Calculate total price

Our guarantee

  • 100% money back guarantee
  • plagiarism-free authentic works
  • completely confidential service
  • timely revisions until completely satisfied
  • 24/7 customer support
  • payments protected by PayPal

Secure payment

With EssayChief you get

  • Strict plagiarism detection regulations
  • 300+ words per page
  • Times New Roman font 12 pts, double-spaced
  • FREE abstract, outline, bibliography
  • Money back guarantee for missed deadline
  • Round-the-clock customer support
  • Complete anonymity of all our clients
  • Custom essays
  • Writing service

EssayChief can handle your

  • essays, term papers
  • book and movie reports
  • Power Point presentations
  • annotated bibliographies
  • theses, dissertations
  • exam preparations
  • editing and proofreading of your texts
  • academic ghostwriting of any kind

Free essay samples

Browse essays by topic:

Stay with EssayChief! We offer 10% discount to all our return customers. Once you place your order you will receive an email with the password. You can use this password for unlimited period and you can share it with your friends!

Academic ghostwriting

About us

© 2002-2024 EssayChief.com