Welcome to our website on various forms of art. Please click on the words in the right column to navigate through our site.
Theme of our siteThe theme of our site is the painting Starry Night By Vincent Van Gogh.
Starry Night is probably Vincent van Gogh's most famous painting. Instantly recognizable because of its unique style, this work has been the subject of poetry, fiction, CD-ROMs as well as the well known song "Vincent" or "Starry, Starry Night" by Don McLean.
Starry Night was painted while Vincent was in the asylum at Saint-Remy and his behaviour was very erratic at the time, due to the severity of his attacks. Unlike most of Van Gogh's works, Starry Night was painted from memory and not outdoors as was Vincent's preference. This may, in part, explain why the emotional impact of the work is so much more powerful than many of Van Gogh's other works from the same period.
Some people have speculated about the eleven stars in the painting. While it's true that Vincent didn't have the same religious fervour in 1889, when he painted the work, as he did in his earlier years, there is a possibility that the story of Joseph in the Old Testament may have had an influence on the composition of the work.
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Expressionism is a style in which the intention is not to reproduce a subject accurately, but instead to portray it in such a way as to express the inner state of the artist. The movement is especially associated with Germany, and was influenced by such emotionally-charged styles as Symbolism, Fauvism, and Cubism.
There are several different and somewhat overlapping groups of Expressionist artists, including Der Blaue Reiter ("The Blue Rider"), Die Brucke ("The Bridge"), Die Neue Sachlichkeit ("The New Objectivity") and the Bauhaus School.
Leading Expressionists included Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, George Grosz and Amadeo Modigliani.
In the mid-20th century, Abstract Expressionism (in which there is no subject at all, but instead pure abstract form) developed into an extremely influential style in the United States.
An example of a popular expressionist is Franz Marc. Franz Marc was born in Munich in February 1880. His career was cruelly cut short by the First World War, has in recent years been the most popular of all the German Expressionists. One reason for this is supplied by his eloquent and touching letters. Another may be the fact that his work is not very typical of Expressionism as it is generally understood.
Below is an example of one of Franz Marc's popular paintings, Dog Lying in the Snow :
Impressionism
Impressionism is a movement in French painting, sometimes called optical realism because of its almost scientific interest in the actual visual experience and effect of light and movement on appearance of objects.
Impressionism was not always as widely known and loved as it is today. Initially, viewers found Impressionist paintings radical, even laughable. It was only through the efforts of a few visionary individuals-collectors, dealers, artists, and museum professionals that Impressionist paintings began to find their way into European museums around the turn of the twentieth century.
Impressionist motto - human eye is a marvelous instrument. Impact worldwide was lasting and huge. The name 'Impressionists' came as artists embraced the nickname a conservative critic used to ridicule the whole movement.
Impressionist fascination with light and movement was at the core of their art. Exposure to light and / or movement was enough to create a justifiable and fit artistic subject out of literally anything. Impressionists learned how to transcribe directly their visual sensations of nature, unconcerned with the actual depiction of physical objects in front of them.
An example of a well known impressionist is Claude Monet. He lived from 1840 - 1926 in France. A few of his famous works are: The Rouen Cathedral at noon 1894,
Water Lilies and The Japanese Bridge. He is often referred to as the father of Impressionism and has produced various Parisian scenes, seascapes, landscapes, and his beloved garden in Giverny.
Fauvism was a short-lived movement, lasting only as long as its originator, Henri Matisse (1869-1954), fought to find the artistic freedom he needed. Matisse had to make color serve his art, rather as Gauguin needed to paint the sand pink to express an emotion.
The Fauvists believed absolutely in color as an emotional force. With Matisse and his friends, Maurice de Vlaminck (1876-1958) and Andre Derain (1880-1954), color lost its descriptive qualities and became luminous, creating light rather than imitating it. They astonished viewers at the 1905 Salon d'Automne: the art critic Louis Vauxcelles saw their bold paintings surrounding a conventional sculpture of a young boy, and remarked that it was like a Donatello "parmi les fauves" (among the wild beasts).
The painterly freedom of the Fauves and their expressive use of color gave splendid proof of their intelligent study of Van Gogh's art. But their art seemed brasher than anything seen before.
One of the famous Fauvism artists is Henry Matisse. Matisse was the artist often regarded as the most important French painter of the 20th century. The leader of the Fauvist movement around 1900, Matisse pursued the expressiveness of colour throughout his career. His subjects were largely domestic or figurative, and a distinct Mediterranean verve presides in the treatment.
This is one of Matisse's famous artwork, "Flowers in a Pitcher" :
Cubism was developed between about 1908 and 1912. The movement itself was not long-lived or widespread, but it began an immense creative explosion which resonated through all of 20th century art.
The key concept of Cubism is that the essence of an object can only be captured by showing it from multiple points of view simultaneously.
Cubism is a modern art movement in which forms are abstracted by using an analytical approach to the object and painting the basic geometric solid of the subject. It is a backlash to the impressionist period in which there is more of an emphasis of light and color.
Cubism itself follows Paul Cezanne statement that "Everything in nature takes its form from the sphere, the cone, and the cylinder." in which these 3 shapes are used to depict the object of the painting.
Cubists also expressed their painting by showing different views of an object put together in such a way that you can not actually see in real life.
The leaders in the cubist era were Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Fernand Leger, Francis Picabia, and Roger De La Fresnaye were also cubists.
An example of a cubist is Pablo Picasso:
Pablo Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain, on October 2, 1881 of Jose Ruiz Blasco Picasso and Maria Picasso y Lopez. He had always been an art genius and had been painting since he was ten.
Picasso made three trips to Paris between 1900 and 1902. He moved there in 1904. This is where he went through his blue period.
After moving to Paris, he met Fernande Oliver who influenced the mood of his work from dark and gloomy blues to light and happy reds and pinks. This period was called the rose period.
Surrealism is a style in which fantastical visual imagery from the subconscious mind is used with no intention of making the work logically comprehensible. Founded by Andre Breton in 1924, it was a primarily European movement that attracted many members of the chaotic Dada movement. It was similar in some elements to the mystical 19th-century Symbolist movement, but was deeply influenced by the psychoanalytic work of Freud and Jung.
The Surrealist circle was made up of many of the great artists of the 20th century, including Max Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico, Jean Arp, Man Ray, Joan Miro, and Rene Magritte. Salvador Dali, probably the single best-known Surrealist artist, broke with the group due to his right-wing politics (during this period, Leftism was the fashion among Surrealists, and in fact in almost all intellectual circles).
An example of a famous surrealist is Salvador Dali. To bring up images from his subconscious mind, Dali began to induce hallucinatory states in himself by a process he described as "paranoiac critical". Once Dali hit on this method, his painting style matured with extraordinary rapidity, and from 1929 to 1937 he produced the paintings that made him the world's best-known Surrealist artist.
He depicted a dream world in which commonplace objects are juxtaposed, deformed, or otherwise metamorphosed in a bizarre and irrational fashion. Dali portrayed these objects in meticulous, almost painfully realistic detail and usually placed them within bleak, sunlit landscapes that were reminiscent of his Catalonian homeland.
One of Salvador Dali's famous paintings is the "Persistence of Memory" :
Pop Art emerged in the mid 1950s in England, but realized its fullest potential in New York in the '60s where it shared, with Minimalism, the attentions of the art world. In Pop Art, the epic was replaced with the everyday and the mass-produced awarded the same significance as the unique; the gulf between high art and low art was eroding away. The media and advertising were favorite subjects for Pop Art's often witty celebrations of consumer society. Perhaps the greatest Pop artist, whose innovations have affected so much subsequent art, was the American artist, Andy Warhol (1928-87).
The term "Pop Art" was first used by the English critic Lawrence Alloway in a 1958 issue of Architectural Digest to describe those paintings that celebrate post-war consumerism, defy the psychology of Abstract Expressionism, and worship the god of materialism. The most famous of the Pop artists, the cult figure Andy Warhol, recreated quasi-photographic paintings of people or everyday objects.
This is an example of a pop art painting:
