Cesari, Giuseppe

Archangel St. Michael
1629
Black and red chalk Drawing
31.5x24.7 cm
Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia

In the studio of Cavaliere d'Arpino (Giuseppe Cesari), one of the most influential artist in Rome during the pontificate of  Pope Clement VIII, painters from northern Europe were numerous. From this Cavaliere d'Arpino probably derived his inclination for painting religious scenes in a landscape. He produced delicate devotional paintings on copper or panel on a very small scale. In them, his lives of the saints or biblical episodes were enriched by imaginative additions.

Giuseppe Cesari (c. 1568 - 1640) was an Italian Mannerist painter, also known as Cavaliere d'Arpino, active mainly in Rome. He was much patronized in Rome by both Pope Clement VIII and Sixtus V. He was the chief of the studio in which Caravaggio trained upon the younger painter's arrival in Rome.

He had an enormous reputation in the first two decades of the 17th century, when he gained some of the most prestigious commissions of the day, most notably the designing of the mosaics for the dome of St Peter's (1603-12). Although some of his early work is vigorous and colorful, his output is generally repetious and vacuous, untouched by the innovations of Caravaggio (who was briefly his assistant) or the Carracci. He was primarily a fresco painter, but he also did numerous cabinet pictures of religious or mythological scenes in a finicky Flemish manner.

His father had been a native of Arpino, but Giuseppe himself was born in Rome. Here, he was apprenticed to Niccolo Pomarancio. He was a man of touchy and irascible character, and rose from penury to the height of opulence. Cesari became a member of the Accademia di San Luca in 1585. In 1607, he was briefly jailed by the new papal administration. He died in 1640, at the age of seventy-two, or perhaps of eighty, at Rome.

His most notable and perhaps surprising pupil was Caravaggio. In c. 1593-94, Caravaggio held a job at Cesari's studio as a painter of flowers and fruit.
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Goes, Hugo van der

The Fall of Adam (left side of Diptych of the Fall and Salvation)
c.1468
oil on oak
33.8 x 23 cm
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria

Hugo van der Goes (c. 1430/1440 - 1482)  was, along with Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Hans Memling and Dieric Bouts, one of the most important of the Early Netherlandish painters. His strange, melancholy genius found expression in religious works of profound but often disturbing spirituality. Characteristic of his work were his monumental figures. He did not master the art of perspective but proportions and relations of figures and background far surpass that of his predecessors. Faces and hands were very expressive.

Nothing is known of his life before 1467, when he became a master in the painters' guild at Ghent. He had numerous commissions from the town of Ghent for work of a temporary nature such as processional banners, and in 1475 he became dean of the painters' guild. In 1478, he moved into the Red Cloister monastery near Brussels, presumably because he had a tendency to acute depression. In 1481 he suffered a mental breakdown and although he recovered, died the following year.

No paintings by Hugo are signed and his only securely documented work is his masterpiece, a large triptych of the Nativity known as the Portinari Altarpiece (Uffizi, Florence). This was commissioned by Tommaso Portinari, the representative of the House of Medici in Bruges, for the church of the Hospital of Sta Maria Nuova in Florence, and it exercised a strong influence on Italian painters with its masterful handling of the oil technique.
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Pseudo-Pier Francesco Fiorentino

Madonna with child and goldfinch
second half of the 15th century
tempera and oil with gold on panel
64.2 x 46.7 cm
Private Collection

The Pseudo-Pier Francesco Fiorentino is the name given to an unknown artist active in the second half of the 15th century. Previously, his work was mistaken for Pier Francesco Fiorentino, however in recent years, art historians have noted Pseudo-Pier Francesco Fiorentino's work surpasses that of his namesake in skill and mastery. The two are not to be confused. Pseudo-Pier Francesco Fiorentino primarily adapted works by Filippo Lippi and Pesellino. Works by Pseudo-Pier Francesco are all marked by a lavish, archaic use of gold leaf, and many include elaborate rose-hedge backgrounds, probably derived from Domenico Veneziano.
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Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn

Rembrandt Laughing
c. 1628
oil on copper
22.2 x 16.8 cm (8 3/4 x 6 5/8 in.) 
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Painted on copper plate, it shows Rembrandt in his early 20s in mid-laugh, with his head thrown back.
The value of this painting, once thought to be a knockoff, skyrocketed after the Rembrandt Research Project determined its true origin. “It has now been established on a range of stylistic and technical grounds that this is an authentic early work by Rembrandt dating from around 1628.” Before its discovery, Rembrandt Laughing hung quietly in the possession of an English family for more than 100 years. It first came to public attention at the English country auction in 2008, which identified it as work by “a follower of Rembrandt.” The auctioneers estimated its value at around $3,000. But scholars suspected this image was the real deal, so a bidding war erupted. The painting sold for about $5.2 million to an unidentified bidder before it was even properly authenticated.
In May, 2013, The Getty Museum has acquired this painting. The purchase price is not disclosed but it is roughly estimated at around $30,000,000 to $40,000,000.

"Choose only one master -  Nature." (Rembrandt)
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606 - 1669), born in Leiden as the eighth of nine children of a miller, was a Dutch painter and etcher. Despite the fact that he came from a family of relatively modest means, his parents took great care with his education. He was the first and the only of their sons who was sent to the school for Latin. After seven years’ schooling (1613-1620), at the age of 14, Rembrandt entered the Philosophical Faculty of Leiden University to study Classics. He is generally considered one of the greatest painters and printmakers in European art history and the most important in Dutch history. His contributions to art came in a period of great wealth and cultural achievement that historians call the Dutch Golden Age, when Dutch Golden Age painting, although in many ways antithetical to the Baroque style that dominated Europe, was extremely prolific and innovative.

Having achieved youthful success as a portrait painter, Rembrandt's later years were marked by personal tragedy and financial hardships. Between 1635 and 1641 Saskia (his wife) gave birth to four children, but only the last, Titus, survived; her own death came in 1642 - at the age of 30. Hendrickje Stoffels, engaged as his housekeeper about 1649, eventually became his common-law wife and was the model for many of his pictures. Despite Rembrandt's financial success as an artist, teacher, and art dealer, his penchant for ostentatious living forced him to declare bankruptcy in 1656. Yet these problems in no way affected Rembrandt's work. His etchings and paintings were popular throughout his lifetime, his reputation as an artist remained high. His personal life, however, continued to be marred by sorrow. His beloved Hendrickje died in 1663, and his son, Titus, in 1668 - only 27 years of age. Eleven months later, on October 4, 1669, Rembrandt died in Amsterdam.

His paintings are characterized by luxuriant brushwork, rich color, and a mastery of chiaroscuro. He was a master of light and shadow whose paintings, drawings, and etchings made him a giant in the history of art. Numerous portraits and self-portraits exhibit a profound penetration of character. His drawings constitute a vivid record of contemporary Amsterdam life. His self-portraits form a unique and intimate biography, in which the artist surveyed himself without vanity and with the utmost sincerity. Because of his renown as a teacher, his studio was filled with pupils, some of whom were already trained artists.
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Vuillard, Jean-Edouard

Foliage-Oak Tree and Fruit Seller
1918
distemper on canvas
193 x 283.2 cm
Art Institute of Chicago, IL, USA

"I don't do portraits," Vuillard said. "I paint people in their surroundings."

Jean-Edouard Vuillard (1868 - 1940) was a French painter.
He was born at Cuiseaux, Saone-et-Loire, the son of a retired army officer. His mother was a corset-maker in Paris and he grew up in the highly feminized world surrounded by women at work, surrounded by patterns and fabrics and rich colors. Living with his mother until the age of sixty, he was very familiar with interior and domestic spaces, though he did not restrict his subjects to the indoors. Much of his art reflected this influence, largely decorative and often depicting very intricate patterns. Marked by a gentle humor, they are executed in the delicate range on soft, blurred colors characteristic.

In 1886 Vuillard became a student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, later moving to the Academie Julian. There he met Bonnard and other painters with whom he founded the Nabis group in 1889. The group combines painting with decorative art and is inspired by literary symbolism, exoticism and orientalism. He later shared a studio with fellow Nabis Bonnard and Maurice Denis.

The name Nabis derived from the Hebrew for prophet. Unlike the Impressionists, who sought to capture the fleeting effects of light in the outdoors, the Nabis used art to communicate interior feelings and to convey emotion. According to the Nabi artists, every emotion has “a plastic, decorative equivalent” that corresponds our sense of beauty -  an idea that contrasted the dominant ideas of positivism and naturalism. The non-naturalistic Nabi colors later become a source of inspiration for many artists such as the Fauve painters, including Henri Matisse. The group, influenced by Gauguin and Degas, concentrated on pattern and distortion to emphasize psychological meanings beyond appearances in ordinary domestic subjects, though Bonnard and Vuillard returned by the end of the century to a more naturalistic style.

In 1940, a week after the Germans occupied France, Vuillard died of a heart attack in La Baule, outside Paris, in the embrace of his powerful patrons. He created more than 3,000 paintings between the late 1800s and his death in 1940.

His medium here - distemper - is composed of powdered pigments and hot-glue binder mixed with water. Distemper must be used while still warm, requiring the artist to work quickly and confidently. This difficult process yields colors that are matte and vibrant, as well as permanent. He refrained from varnishing his works, in order to preserve their dry, opaque appearance.
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Braque, Georges

La Ciotat
1907
oil on canvas
71.7 x 59.4 cm
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA

Georges Braque (1882 - 1963) was a major 20th-century French painter and sculptor who, along with Pablo Picasso, developed the art style known as Cubism. He grew up in Le Havre and trained to be a house painter and decorator like his father and grandfather. However, he also studied serious painting in the evenings at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, in Le Havre. In Paris, he apprenticed with a decorator and was awarded his certificate.

His earliest works were impressionistic, but after seeing the work exhibited by the Fauves in 1905, Braque adopted a Fauvist style. The Fauves, a group that included Henri Matisse and Andre Derain, used brilliant colors and loose structures of forms to capture the most intense emotional response.

In 1907, his style began a slow evolution as he came under the strong influence of Paul Cezanne, who died in 1906. The 1907 Cezanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne greatly impacted the direction that the avant-garde in Paris took, leading to the advent of Cubism. His oil paintings began to reflect his new interest in geometry and simultaneous perspective. He conducted an intense study of the effects of light and perspective and the technical means that painters use to represent these effects, appearing to question the most standard of artistic conventions.

Beginning in 1909, he began to work closely with Picasso, who had been developing a similar approach to oil painting. The invention of Cubism was a joint effort between Picasso and Braque, then residents of Montmartre, Paris. Their productive collaboration continued and they worked closely together until the outbreak of World War I in 1914 when Braque enlisted in the French Army, leaving Paris to fight in the First World War. Braque was severely wounded in the war, and when he resumed his artistic career in 1917 he moved away from the harsher abstraction of cubism. Working alone, he developed a more personal style, characterized by brilliant color and textured surfaces and the reappearance of the human figure. He painted many still life subjects during this time, maintaining his emphasis on structure.

He continued to work throughout the remainder of his life, producing a considerable number of distinguished oil paintings, graphics, and sculptures, all imbued with a pervasive contemplative quality. He died on 31 August 1963, in Paris. He is buried in the church cemetery in Saint-Marguerite-sur-Mer, Normandy, France.
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Seurat, Georges

The Channel at Gravelines, Evening
1890 summer
oil on canvas
65.4 x 81.9 cm
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA

"Some say they see poetry in my paintings; I see only science." (Seurat)

Seurat painted pointillist fantasies in which the sun is always setting, the remaining light of the day filtered not though dust but through stippled, composited specks of unmixed color. Details explode out of details, and colors out of colors; minute reds, greens, and blues clot together, microcosms formed through mixing. Here, docks and piers extend out of view, while great anchors appear out of reds, oranges, and greens. Twin ship’s viridescent sails catch the blushing wind, while flags disappear into the dotted sky.

Georges-Pierre Seurat (1859 - 1891), Post-Impressionist painter, born into a very rich family in Paris, is one of the icons of 19th century painting. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and his teacher was a disciple of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Young Seurat was strongly influenced by Rembrandt and Francisco de Goya.

Seurat is the founder of the 19th-century French school of Neo-Impressionism whose technique for portraying the play of light using tiny brushstrokes of contrasting colors became known as Pointillism. He spent his life studying color theories and the effects of different linear structures. He is the ultimate example of the artist as scientist. Using Pointillism technique, he created huge compositions with tiny, detached strokes of pure color too small to be distinguished when looking
at the entire work but making his paintings shimmer with brilliance. In 1883, panels from his painting Bathing at Asnieres were refused by the Salon. After his painting was rejected by the Paris Salon, Seurat turned away from such establishments, instead allying himself with the independent artists of Paris. In 1884 he and other artists (including Maximilien Luce) formed the Societe des Artistes Independants. There he met and befriended fellow artist Paul Signac. Seurat shared his new ideas about pointillism with Signac, who subsequently painted in the same idiom.

Before actually painting the picture, he would sketch out parts of his artwork so that the models would not have to wait forever while he found the exact color. He took to heart the color theorists' notion of a scientific approach to painting. He believed that a painter could use color to create harmony and emotion in art in the same way that a musician uses counterpoint and variation to create harmony in music. He theorized that the scientific application of color was like any other natural law, and he was driven to prove this conjecture. He kept his private life very secret. On 29 March 1891, Seurat unexpectedly died. The cause of his death is uncertain. His last ambitious work, The Circus, was left unfinished at the time of his death.
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Bohringer, Volker

Landliche Idylle (Rural idyll) 
1935
tempera on panel
43.4 x 54.2 cm
Private collection

Volker Bohringer (1912 - 1961) was a German visual art painter and printmaker of the New Objectivity.
He began his studies in 1929 at the Wurttemberg State School of Applied Arts in Stuttgart at Ernst Schneidler.
In 1930 he moved to the Academy and continued his studies as a master student, Hans Spiegel. 
In the era of National Socialism in 1937, he refused to join the Association of German painter and graphic artist, and subsequently received an exhibition prohibition. After the Second World War, he attended the First German Art Exhibition in Dresden in part. It was followed by exhibition participation in Bern and Zurich. In 1960 he had his first solo exhibition in Esslingen.
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Picasso, Pablo

Woman Plaiting Her Hair
1906
oil on canvas
127 x 90.8 cm
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA

Fernande Olivier (1881 - 1966), French artist, the model of this painting, met Picasso at the Bateau-Lavoir in 1904, and by the next year they were living together. Their relationship lasted seven years and was characterized by its tempestuousness. Both Fernande and Picasso were jealous lovers, and their passions sometimes exploded into violence. Among his most notable works of his Cubist period, several were inspired by Fernande. Picasso painted over 60 portraits of Fernande.
When Picasso finally achieved success as an artist, he began to lose interest in Fernande, as she reminded him of more difficult times. Eventually they separated in 1912, leaving Fernande without a way to carry on living in the style to which she had become accustomed. She had no legal right to expect anything from the painter, since she was still technically married to her first husband. To survive, she took various odd jobs, from a cashier at a butcher's to an antiques saleswoman. She also supplemented her income by giving drawing lessons.

"My mother said to me, 'If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.' Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso." (Picasso)

"Pablo Diego Jose Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Maria de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santisima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso", known as Pablo Picasso, (1881 - 1973) was a Spanish painter and sculptor, born in Malaga on the southern coast of Spain. One of the greatest, dynamic and most influential artists of the 20th century, he is widely known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore.

He was exposed to art from a very young age by his father, who was a painter and art instructor. After studying at various art schools between 1892 and 1896, including academies in Barcelona and Madrid, he went on to the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid during the winter of 1896-1897. Picasso soon became bored with academics and set himself up as an independent artist. In Barcelona in 1899 Picasso’s circle of friends included young avantgarde artists and writers who traveled between Madrid, Barcelona, and Paris. Picasso also visited these cities and absorbed the local culture. His early works were influenced by old masters such as El Greco and Velazquez and by modern artists including Paul Gauguin, Edgar Degas, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Picasso moved to Paris in 1904 and settled in a dilapidated section of Montmartre, a working-class quarter. This area was home to many young artists and writers, and he was gradually assimilated into their stimulating intellectual community. Although Picasso benefited greatly from the artistic atmosphere in Paris and his circle of friends, he was often lonely, unhappy, and terribly poor.

Picasso demonstrated extraordinary artistic talent in his early years, painting in a realistic manner through his childhood and adolescence. During the first decade of the 20th century his style changed as he experimented with different theories, techniques, and ideas. His revolutionary artistic accomplishments brought him universal renown and immense fortune, making him one of the best-known figures in 20th century art. Based on sales of his works at auctions, he holds the title of top ranked artist. He was also a prolific artist with estimates of 50,000 works of art production in his lifetime, including paintings, drawings, sculptures, etc..

For the last three decades of his long life Picasso lived mostly in south of France. He worked up until the day he died at age 91; literally painting till 3 am on Sunday, April 8th, which was just hours before his death. He died while he and his wife Jacqueline Roque entertained friends for dinner. Jacqueline prevented his children Claude and Paloma from attending the funeral. Picasso was interred at the Chateau of Vauvenargues near Aix-en-Provence, a property he had acquired in 1958 and occupied with Jacqueline between 1959 and 1962.
Devastated and lonely after the death of Picasso, Jacqueline took her own life by gunshot in 1986 when she was 59 years old.
Pablo Picasso's final words were “Drink to me, drink to my health, you know I can’t drink any more.”
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Macke, August

Nude with coral nacklace
1910
oil on canvas
83 x 60 cm
Sprengel Museum, Hanover, Germany

August Macke (1887 - 1914) was one of the leading members of the German Expressionist group The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter). He was born in Westphalia. His father was a building contractor and his mother came from a farming family in  Westphalia. He lived during a particularly innovative time for German art which saw the development of the main German Expressionist movements as well as the arrival of the successive Avant-garde movements which were forming in the rest of Europe.

His style was formed within the mode of French Impressionism and Post-impressionism and later went through a Fauve period. In 1910, through his friendship with Franz Marc, he met Kandinsky and for a while shared the non-objective aesthetic and the mystical and symbolic interests of Der Blaue Reiter. Macke's meeting with Robert Delaunay in Paris in 1912 was to be a sort of revelation for him. Delaunay's chromatic Cubism, which Apollinaire had called Orphism, influenced Macke's art from that point onwards. His Shops Windows can be considered a personal interpretation of Delaunay's Windows, combined with the simultaneity of images found in Italian Futurism. The exotic atmosphere of Tunisia, where Macke traveled in 1914 with Paul Klee and Louis Moilliet was fundamental for the creation of the luminist approach of his final period, during which he produced a series of works now considered masterpieces. The paintings concentrate primarily on expressing feelings and moods rather than reproducing objective reality, usually distorting color and form.

Macke's career was cut short by his early death in September 1914, the second month of World War I. His final painting depicts the mood of gloom that settled after the outbreak of war.
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Clausen, Sir George

Apple Blossom
1899
oil on canvas
size unknown
private Collection

Sir George Clausen RA (1852 -1944), was an English artist working in oil and watercolor. He was born in London, the son of a decorative painter of Danish descent. He attended the design classes at the South Kensington School of Art in London with great success, from 1867 to 1873. After studying there on a two-year scholarship, he decided to further his training at the Antwerp Academy. Whilst in the Netherlands he travelled along the coast, making studies in the fishing villages on his way. At this time he also embarked on his first forays to Paris and the influence of French art took root in his practice.

Clausen became one of the foremost modern painters of landscape and of peasant life, influenced to a certain extent by the impressionists, with whom he shared the view that light is the real subject of landscape art. His pictures excel in rendering the appearance of things under flecking outdoor sunlight, or in the shady shelter of a barn or stable.

In 1895 he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy, and a full Academician in 1906. As Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy he gave a memorable series of lectures to the students of the Schools, published as Six Lectures on Painting and Aims and Ideals in Art.

Clausen was an official war artist during World War I. In the war his daughter's fiance was killed. During the 1920s he painted numerous landscapes around his country cottage on Dutton Hill, Essex. The success of his war commission led to several invitations to paint murals, notably Wycliffe's English Bible for the Houses of Parliament, and upon completion of this project he was knighted for his services to the arts in 1927.

Clausen’s best paintings were always the fruit of a profound study of country life, of landscapes in sun and shade, of flowers, of work on the farm. His most remarkable characteristic was his power of growth. No other painter of his age responded so freely to the spirit of the times - and that without injury to the strongly personal character of his work. He was concerned with conditions of light, a favorite of his being the prismatic play of color when objects are seen against the sun. He, however, differed from the French Impressionists by retaining integrity of form. Nobody excelled him in the capacity to suggest bulk and solidity in conditions when the actual features of landscapes were almost obliterated. In all his work he showed a poetical appreciation akin to that of Thomas Hardy, but without the abiding sense of tragedy of the relation of man to nature. His portraits were distinguished by a peculiar gravity.
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Repin, Ilya

A Belorussian (Portrait of Sidor Shavrov)
1892
oil on canvas
size unknown
The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

Ilya Yefimovich Repin (1844 - 1930) was a leading Russian painter and sculptor of the Peredvizhniki artistic school. An important part of his work is dedicated to his native country, Ukraine. His realistic works often expressed great psychological depth and exposed the tensions within the existing social order. Beginning in the late 1920s, detailed works on him were published in the Soviet Union, where a Repin cult developed about a decade later. He was held up as a model "progressive" and "realist" to be imitated by "Socialist Realist" artists in the USSR.

Repin was born in the heart of the historical region called Sloboda Ukraine. His parents were Russian military settlers. In 1866, after apprenticeship with a local icon painter and preliminary study of portrait painting, he went to Saint Petersburg and was shortly admitted to the Imperial Academy of Arts as a student. From 1873 to 1876 on the Academy's allowance, Repin sojourned in Italy and lived in Paris, where he was exposed to French Impressionist painting, which had a lasting effect upon his use of light and color. His style was to remain closer to that of the old European masters, especially Rembrandt, and he never embraced Impressionism.

Many of the subjects Repin painted were common people, like himself, although he did on many occasions paint the Russian elite, intelligentsia, and Tsar Nicholas II. He also painted many of his contemporary compatriots, including novelist Leo Tolstoy, composer Modest Mussorgsky and  scientist Dmitri Mendeleev. A common recurring theme in his paintings was the Russian Revolutionary Movement, and as a result his works are often classified as a “Russian national style.”

In his later life, he lived in a house in Kuokkala, Finland, called the Penates, which he designed and built himself. After the October Revolution of 1917, Finland declared Independence, and Repin was invited to return to the Soviet Union. He refused, saying that he was too old to make the journey, and remained in Finland until his death thirteen years later. In 1940, the Penates house was opened to the public as a museum.
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Manet, Edouard

Bunch of Asparargus
1880
oil on canvas
46 × 55 cm
Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Koln, Germany

"There are no lines in nature, only areas of color, one against another." (Manet)

Edouard Manet (1832 - 1883) was a French painter. One of the first 19th-century artists to approach modern-life subjects, he was a pivotal figure in the transition from the realism of Gustave Courbet to Impressionism. His early masterworks, The Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia, engendered great controversy and served as rallying points for the young painters who would create Impressionism. Today, these are considered watershed paintings that mark the genesis of modern art.

His mother was a woman of refinement and god daughter of Charles Bernadotte, the Crown Prince of Sweden. His father was a magistrate and judge who hoped that Manet would someday follow in his footsteps, but Manet was destined to follow another path. Born into the ranks of the Parisian bourgeoisie with strong political connections, Manet rejected the future originally envisioned for him, and became engrossed in the world of painting. The last 20 years of Manet's life saw him form bonds with other great artists of the time, and develop his own style that would be heralded as innovative and serve as a major influence for future painters. Manet broke new ground in choosing subjects from the events and appearances of his own time and in stressing the definition of painting as the arrangement of paint areas on a canvas over and above its function as representation.

Although Manet was frequently in the company of members of the Impressionist group - Berthe Morisot, his sister-in-law since December 1874, Degas, and Monet in particular, and they regarded him as a leader, he had no wish to join their group. He was naturally irritated by the critics’ tendency to confuse him with Monet. Manet’s stylistic discoveries, such as "there are no lines in nature", which led to his abandoning of the conventional outline and his shaping the forms by means of color and subtle gradation of tints, decisively influenced the Impressionists, but their representation of light and optical reactions to color were different. Manet never painted what could be called a truly Impressionist picture.
During the Franco-Prussian War he joined National Guard. In 1881 he was received into the Legion of Honor. After a long illness, which had been exhausting him for about 5 years, he died on April 30, 1883.
"You would hardly believe how difficult it is to place a figure alone on a canvas, and to concentrate all the interest on this single and universal figure and still keep it living and real." "When you've got it, you've got it. When you haven't, you begin again. All the rest is humbug." (Manet)
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Monet, Claude

The Basin at Argenteuil
1872
oil on canvas
60 × 80.5 cm (23.6 × 31.7 in.)
Musee d’Orsay, Paris, France

Fascinated by water, by its transparency and its reflects, Monet always lived close to the Seine River.
"I'm never finished with my paintings; the further I get, the more I seek the impossible and the more powerless I feel." (Monet)

Claude Monet (1840 - 1926) was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. Monet found subjects in his immediate surroundings, as he painted the people and places he knew best. He rejected the traditional approach to landscape painting and instead of copying old masters he had been learning from his friends and the nature itself. He observed variations of color and light caused by the daily or seasonal changes.

1840: birth of Claude Oscar MONET on November 14th in Paris.
1845: family moves to Le Havre.
1857: death of his mother Louise Monet.
1858: meets Eugene Boudin who encourages him to paint out of doors.
1859: comes to Paris and enters the Swiss Academy.
1860: meets Pissaro and Courbet.
1863: discovers Manet's painting and paints "en plein air" in the Fontainebleau forest.
1864: stays in Honfleur with Boudin, Bazille, Jondkind. He meets his first art lover : Gaudibert.
1865: his paintings are submitted for the first time to the official Salon.
1867: birth of his first son Jean Monet while Claude Monet is in Sainte-Adresse.
1868: tries to commit suicide. He receives a pension from Mr Gaudibert. He paints in Fecamp and Etretat.
1869: settles in the village of Saint-Michel near Bougival where he paints in company of Renoir.
1870: marries Camille, Courbet is his witness. They take refuge in London when the war begins.
1871: meets Durand-Ruel in London with Pissaro and Daubigny. Death of his father. Monet settles at Argenteuil after visiting the Netherlands.
1873: meets Caillebotte.
1874: exhibits "Impression Sunrise" at the first Impressionist exhibition in the studio of Nadar.
1876: meets Ernest and Alice Hoschede.
1877: bankruptcy of Ernest Hoschede. Monet paints the Saint-Lazare train station.
1878: birth of Michel Monet, his second son. Monet and his family settle at Vetheuil in compagny of the family Hoschede.
1879: death of Camille.
1881: family moves to Poissy.
1883: rents a house at Giverny. He will stay there for 43 years.
1887: exhibits in New-York thanks to Durand-Ruel.
1889: exhibits with Rodin.
1890: purchases the house in Giverny and begins the digging for the Water-Lily pond.
1891: death of Ernest Hoschede. Monet paints the series of Meules (Haystacks) and of Peupliers (Poplars)
1892: paints the Rouen Cathedrals series. He marries Alice in July.
1894: visit of Mary Cassatt and of Cezanne at Giverny. Rodin, Clemenceau and Geffroy are present.
1900: paints several views of the Japanese bridge. He takes several trips to London and paints views of the Thames.
1904: travels to Madrid and admires the paintings of Velasquez.
1907: first problems with his eyesight. Monet discovers Venice.
1911: death of Alice.
1914: death of Jean, Monet's eldest son. Blanche moves to live near Claude Monet.
1916: decides to build a large studio of 23 m x 12m at Giverny.
1916 - 1926: works on twelve large canvas, The Water Lilies. Following the signing of the Armistice, Monet offers to donate them to France. Theses paintings will be installed in an architectural space designed specifically for them at the museum of the Orangerie in Paris.
1923: is nearly blind. He has an operation from the cataract in one eye. His sight improves.
1926: In February Monet is still painting. But he suffers from lung cancer. He dies on December 5th. He is buried in a simple ceremony at Giverny. His friend Georges Clemenceau attends the ceremony.

One day in 1871, legend says, Claude Monet walked into a food shop in Amsterdam, where he had gone to escape the Prussian siege of Paris. There he spotted some Japanese Ukiyo-e prints being used as wrapping paper. He was so taken by the engravings that he bought one on the spot. The purchase changed his life - and the history of Western art. Monet went on to collect 231 Japanese prints, which greatly influenced his work and that of other practitioners of Impressionism, the movement he helped create. Under the new Meiji Emperor, Japan in the 1870s was just opening to the outside world after centuries of isolation. Japanese handicrafts were flooding into European department stores and art galleries. Japonism, a fascination with all things Japanese, was soon the rage among French intellectuals and artists, among them Vincent van Gogh, Edouard Manet, Camille Pissarro and the young Monet.

Perhaps the greatest gift Japan gave Monet, and Impressionism, was an incandescent obsession with getting the play of light and shadow, the balance of colors and the curve of a line, just right - not the way it is in reality, but the way it looks in the artist's imagination, like Hokusai's Ukiyo-e. At Giverny where Monet built a Japanese bridge over a Japanese pond in a Japanese garden, he spent the rest of his life painting the private paradise, his water lilies of the pond, again and again, until he lost his eyesight in quest of an elusive, transcendent perfection that might best be called Japanese.

"I have slowly learned about the pattern of the grass, the trees, the structure of birds and other animals like insects and fish, so that when I am 80, I hope to be better," Hokusai wrote 16 years before his death at age 89. "At 90, I hope to have caught the very essence of things, so that at 100 I will have reached heavenly mysteries. At 110, every point and line will be living."
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Gogh, Vincent van

Summer's evening
1888
oil on canvas.
73.5 × 92 cm
The Winterthur Museum of Art, Winterthur, Switzerland

"I have sometimes worked excessively fast. Is it a fault? I can't help it. For instance, I painted a size 30 canvas, the “Summer's Evening” at a single sitting. Take it up again? - impossible; destroy it? - why should I! You see, I went out to do it expressly while the mistral was raging. Aren't we seeking intensity of thought rather than tranquillity of touch? But under the given conditions of working spontaneously, on the spot, and given the character of it, is a calm, well-regulated touch always possible? Goodness gracious - as little, it seems to me, as during an assault in a fencing match." (Gogh to Emile Bernard. Arles. Jun 24, 1888.)

Vincent Willem van Gogh (1853 -1890) was a Dutch post-Impressionist painter whose work, notable for its rough beauty, emotional honesty, and bold color, had a far-reaching influence on 20th-century art. He spent his early adulthood working for a firm of art dealers, traveling between The Hague, London and Paris, after which he taught for a time in England. One of his early aspirations was to become a pastor and from 1879 he worked as a missionary in a mining region in Belgium where he began to sketch people from the local community.

In 1885, he painted his first major work The Potato Eaters. His palette at the time consisted mainly of somber earth tones and showed no sign of the vivid coloration that distinguished his later work. In 1886, he moved to Paris and discovered the French Impressionists. Later, he moved to the south of France and was influenced by the strong sunlight he found there. His work grew brighter in color, and he developed the unique and highly recognizable style that became fully realized during his stay in Arles in 1888. After years of painful anxiety and frequent bouts of mental illness, he died at the age of 37 in 1890 from a gunshot wound, generally accepted to be self-inflicted (although no gun was ever found). His work was then known to only a handful of people and appreciated by fewer still.

Gogh did not begin painting until his late twenties. He completed many of his best-known works during his last two years. In just over a decade, he produced more than 2,100 artworks, consisting of 860 oil paintings and more than 1,300 watercolors, drawings, sketches and prints. His work included self portraits, landscapes, still lifes of flowers, portraits and paintings of cypresses, wheat fields and sunflowers. The extent to which his mental health affected his painting has been a subject of speculation since his death. According to an art critic, his late works show an artist at the height of his ability, completely in control and "longing for concision and grace". "I dream of painting and then I paint my dream." (Gogh)
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Beckmann, Max

Double Portrait of Frau Swarzenski and Calora Netter
1923
oil on canvas
65 x 80 cm
Stadel Museum, Frankfurt, Germany

Originally intended to be a portrait of the wife of Stadel director Georg Swarzenski, Beckmann decided to ask Swarzenski’s mistress, Carola Netter, to pose separately for him as well. Beckmann gave the resulting “double portrait” of both wife and mistress to the Stadel collection, and Swarzenski was forced to accept, primarily to keep the painting out of circulation and away from the eyes of his wife.

“… I have never been politically active in any way. I have tried only to realize my conception of the world as intensely as possible… My aim is to transfer this reality into painting ? to make the visible invisible through reality… In my opinion all important things in art since Ur of Chaldees, since Tell Halaf and Crete have always originated from the deepest feeling about the mystery of Being. Self-realization is the urge of all objective spirits. It is this self that I am searching in my life and in my art … The greatest danger that threatens humanity is collectivism. Everywhere attempts are being made to lower the happiness and the way of living of mankind to the level of termites. I am against these attempts with all the strength of my being .. I am immersed in the phenomenon of the individual, the so called whole Individual, and I try in every way to explain and present it. What are you? What am I? Those are the questions that constantly persecute and torment me and perhaps also play some part in  my art.” (Beckmann)

Max Beckmann (1884 - 1950) is widely acknowledged as one of Germany’s leading twentieth-century artists. He was born into a middle-class family in Leipzig, Germany. He enrolled at the Weimar Academy of Arts in 1899. From his youth he pitted himself against the old masters. Before the age of thirty, he was successful as an artist and financially secure. His paintings of the time, inspired by Impressionism, attracted clients, and he exhibited widely in Europe during the teens and 1920s.
Beckmann is a figurative painter throughout his career. He depicted the world around him with an unparalleled intensity. His work emerges directly from his experiences of the First and Second World Wars, the political upheavals of the 1920s and 1930s, the rise of Nazism, exile in Amsterdam and his final emigration to the United States. By capturing the objects and events that surrounded him, Beckmann hoped to grasp the deeper mysteries underlying human existence. He perceived and painted the world as a vast stage, at once real and magical, upon which his own life and the traumas of contemporary history were closely intertwined.
Beckmann continuously engaged with new artistic developments and was eager to compete with his peers. However, he refused to join any movement or group, cultivating the image of an isolated figure within the history of modern art. Nevertheless, his work after the First World War had strong affinities with German Expressionism and Cubism. During the 1920s he was regarded as a forerunner of New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), and a decade later incorporated abstract elements in his paintings. His ability to respond to artistic challenges ensured the continuing vitality of his art.

Beckmann's fortunes changed with the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, whose dislike of Modern Art quickly led to its suppression by the state. Under the Nazi regime he was classified and persecuted as a ‘degenerate’ artist, and fled to Amsterdam in 1937. Even though this was a time of privation, isolation and anxiety, it was one of Beckmann’s most productive periods.

After the war, Beckmann moved to the United States, and during the last three years of his life, he once again achieved widespread recognition as a major force in modern art. He taught at the art schools of Washington University in St. Louis and the Brooklyn Museum.
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Hopper, Edward

Hill and Houses, Cape Elizabeth, Maine
1927
Watercolor over graphite pencil on paper
34.4 x 49.5 cm (13 9/16 x 19 1/2 in.)
Museum of Fine Arts Boston, MA, USA

In this painting you can see the lighthouse on the hill and the keeper's house beside it. Another white house sits lower down the hill in the foreground, sitting on the green and brown fields next to the ocean.

"Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world." "I don't think I ever tried to paint the American scene; I'm trying to paint myself." (Hopper)

Edward Hopper (1882 - 1967) was a prominent American realist painter. He painted American landscapes and cityscapes with a disturbing truth, expressing the world around him as a chilling, alienating, and often vacuous place. Everybody in a Hopper picture appears terribly alone. Hopper gained a widespread reputation as the artist who gave visual form to the loneliness and boredom of life in the big city. This was something new in art.

He showed the modern world unflinchingly; even its gaieties are gently mournful, echoing the disillusionment and the sense of human hopelessness that swept across the country after the start of the Great Depression in 1929.

He painted hotels, motels, trains and highways, and also liked to paint the public and semi-public places where people gathered: restaurants, theaters, cinemas and offices. But even in these paintings he stressed the theme of loneliness - his theaters are often semideserted, with a few patrons waiting for the curtain to go up or the performers isolated in the fierce light of the stage. Hopper was a frequent movie-goer, and there is often a cinematic quality in his work.

As the years went on, however, he found suitable subjects increasingly difficult to discover, and often felt blocked and unable to paint. With Hopper the whole fabric of his art seemed to be interwoven with his personal character and manner of living. When the link between the outer world he observed and the inner world of feeling and fantasy broke, Hopper found he was unable to create. In particular, the rise of Abstract Expressionism left him marooned artistically, for he disapproved of many aspects of the new art.
He died in 1967, isolated if not forgotten. His true importance has only been fully realized in the years since his death.
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Keith, William

Spring Landscape (Spring in Marin County)
1893
oil on Canvas
size unknown
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA, USA

"What I want to do is to study nature. The best way to do that is to be near her, and I have vague ideas about living in such close communion with her that she may adopt me and show me things hidden to every eye but that which loves her sincerely." (Keith)

William Keith (1838 - 1911) was a Scottish-American painter famous for his California landscapes. He is associated with Tonalism and the American Barbizon school. Keith was born in Scotland, and emigrated to the United States in 1850. He lived in New York City, and became an apprentice wood engraver in 1856. He first traveled to the American West in 1858, after being assigned to do illustrations for Harper's Magazine. He moved to England briefly, working for the London Daily News.

Most of his career was spent in California. In 1885 he bought a house in Berkeley and would commute to his studio in San Francisco each day. Keith enjoyed giving painting lessons on top of selling his own pieces because he liked to make sure he had a steady income. He mostly gave lessons to women, and rarely gave them to men however, because he enjoyed the company of women more.

"My subjective pictures are the ones that come from the inside. I feel some emotion and I immediately paint a picture that expresses it. The sentiment is the only thing of real value in my pictures, and only a few people understand that. Suppose I want to paint something recalling meditation or repose. If people do not feel that sensation when my work is completed, they do not appreciate nor realize the picture. The fact that they like it means nothing. Any one who can use paint and brushes can paint a true scene of nature - that is an objective picture. The artist must not depend on extraneous things. There is no reality in his art if he must depend on outside influences - it must come from within." (Keith)
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Modigliani, Amedeo

Portrait of Maud Abrantes
1907
oil on canvas
81.3 x 53.3 cm (32 x 21 in.)
Hecht Museum, Haifa, Israel

This painting is one of Modigliani’s earlier works, and as such has much more of a traditional look. This painting is also indicative of the artist’s later style in the figure’s elongated neck and the still, somber emotion on her face. There is also much more detail in her clothing and her face than in Modigliani’s later works, which are characterized by simple lines and few discernable features. Early on as an artist, Modigliani preferred life-drawn women subjects, many of whom engaged in love affairs with the handsome painter.

 “What I am seeking is not the real and not the unreal but rather the unconscious, the mystery of the instinctive in the human race.” (Modigliani)

Amedeo Clemente Modigliani (1884 - 1920) was an Italian painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. He was born as the forth and the youngest child in the family, which belonged to the secularized Jewish bourgeoisie. Today, he is known for his paintings and sculptures in a modern style characterized by mask-like faces and elongation of form but during his brief career few apart from his fellow artists were aware of his gifts. He had to struggle against poverty and chronic ill health.

He met the first serious love of his life, Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, when he was 26. Anna was tall with dark hair, pale skin and grey-green eyes, she embodied Modigliani's aesthetic ideal and the pair became engrossed in each other, although in later years they became apart. In 1914, the First World War broke out and he wanted to enlist but was exempted from military service for health reasons. In 1917, he met the 19-year old Jeanne Hebuterne (1898-1920), student of the academy and started to live together. "She was gentle, shy, quiet and delicate. A little bit depressive". She became his major model until his death, he painted her no less than 25 times. In 1918, Modigliani and Jeanne left Paris, which was under the threat of occupation by Germans, and went for the southern coast. In Nice and its environments he produced most of the paintings that would later become his most popular and highest-priced works. In November, 1918 in Nice, Jeanne  gave birth to a girl.

After returning to Paris, by the end of 1919, he became seriously ill with tubercular meningitis, exacerbated by poverty, overwork and addiction to alcohol and narcotics, and he died on January 24, 1920, at the age of 35. When he died, his pregnant wife of nearly nine months was emotionally destroyed by his death. Two days after his death, she jumped out of a 5th storey window and killed herself and her unborn child. They were buried together in the Pere Lachaise cemetery. Their orphan daughter was adopted by Modigliani’s sister in Florence; later she would write an important biography of her father Modigliani : Man and Myth.
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Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de

The Hangover (Suzanne Valadon)
1889
oil on canvas
45.09 x 53.34 cm (17 3/4 x 21 in.)
Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

Suzanne Valadon (1865 - 1938) was a French painter. In 1894, Valadon became the first woman painter admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. She was also the mother of painter Maurice Utrillo.
The daughter of an unmarried laundress, she became a circus acrobat at the age of fifteen, but a year later, a fall from a trapeze ended that career. In the Montmartre quarter of Paris, she pursued her interest in art, first working as a model for artists, observing and learning their techniques, before becoming a noted painter herself.
She modelled for Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (who gave her painting lessons), Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Pierre-Cécile Puvis de Chavannes, and is known to have had affairs with the latter two. In the early 1890s she befriended Edgar Degas who, impressed with her bold line drawings and fine paintings, purchased her work and encouraged her efforts. She remained one of Degas' closest friends until his death.

"I paint things as they are. I don't comment." "I have tried to do what is true and not ideal." (Toulouse-Lautrec)

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864 - 1901) ,an aristocrat, was born in southern France. The son and heir of Comte Alphonse-Charles de Toulouse, he was the last in the line of an aristocratic family that dated back a thousand years. Today, the family estate houses the Musee Toulouse-Lautrec.

He is a painter and illustrator, whose immersion in the colorful and theatrical life yielded an oeuvre of exciting, elegant and provocative images of the modern and sometimes decadent life of those times. He is known, along with Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin, as one of the greatest painters of the Post-Impressionist period. He observed and captured in his art the Parisian nightlife of the period.

Henri's father was rich, handsome, and eccentric. His mother was overly devoted to her only living child. They themselves were first cousins, and Henri suffered from a number of congenital health conditions attributed to this inbreeding. As a child, Henri was weak and often sick. But by the time he was 10 years old he had begun to draw and paint. At 12 young, he broke his left leg and at 14 his right leg. The bones failed to heal properly, and his legs stopped growing. He reached young adulthood with a body trunk of normal size but with abnormally short legs. He was only 4 1/2 feet (1.5 meters) tall.

Deprived of the physical life that a normal body would have permitted, Toulouse-Lautrec lived completely for his art. He dwelt in the Montmartre section of Paris, the center of the cabaret entertainment and bohemian life that he loved to depict in his work. Dance halls and nightclubs, racetracks, prostitutes - all these were memorialized on canvas or made into lithographs. He was very much an active part of this community. He would sit at a crowded nightclub table, laughing and drinking, meanwhile making swift sketches. The next morning in his studio he would expand the sketches into brightly colored paintings.

In order to join in the Montmartre life - as well as to fortify himself against the crowd's ridicule of his appearance - he began to drink heavily. By the 1890s the drinking was affecting his health. He was confined first to a sanatorium and then to his mother's care at home, but he could not stay away from alcohol. He died from complications due to alcoholism and syphilis at the age of 36, at the family chateau of Malrome. His last words were: "Le vieux con!" ("The old fool!", although the word "con" can be meant in both simple and vulgar terms). This was his goodbye to his father. Since after his death, his paintings and posters - particularly the Moulin Rouge group - have been in great demand and bring high prices at auctions and art sales. His mother contributed funds for a museum to be created in Albi, his birthplace, to house her deceased son's works. The Toulouse-Lautrec Museum now owns the world's largest collection of works by the painter.
His debt to the Impressionists, in particular the more figurative painters Manet and Degas, is apparent. His style was also influenced by the classical Japanese woodblock prints which became popular in art circles in Paris.
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Renoir, Pierre-Auguste

Algerian Girl
1881
oil on canvas
50.8 x 40.6 cm (20 x 16 in.)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, USA

"He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine." (Renoir -on Leonardo da Vinci...)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841 - 1919) was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. As a celebrator of beauty, and especially feminine sensuality, it has been said that Renoir is the final representative of a tradition which runs directly from Rubens to Watteau.

He was born in Limoges and brought up in Paris, where his father, a tailor with a large family, settled in 1845. From the age of thirteen he worked as an apprentice painter, painting flowers on porcelain plates. This early apprenticeship left a certain trace on his art, which was always decorative in spite of its later realism. After machines for coloring ceramics had been introduced, he had to switch to decorating fans and screens. Having saved some money, in 1862 Renoir entered the Atelier Gleyre and there made friends with Monet, Sisley and Bazille; some time later he met Pissarro and Cezanne.

Renoir's work is characterized by a richness of feeling and a warmth of response to the world and to the people in it. His early works were typically Impressionist snapshots of real life, full of sparkling color and light. By the mid-1880s, however, he had broken with the movement to apply a more disciplined, formal technique to portraits and figure paintings, particularly of women.

Renoir is perhaps the best-loved of all the Impressionists, for his subjects - pretty children, flowers, beautiful scenes, above all lovely women - have instant appeal. His paintings present a vision of a forgotten world, full of sparkling color and light. He was so passionate about painting that he even continued when he was old and suffering from severe arthritis. He then painted with the brush tied to his wrists. He died in the village of Cagnes-sur-Mer, Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur on 3 December 1919 and was buried in Essoyes, next to his wife Aline.

Claude Renoir (1913 - 1993) was a French cinematographer. He was the son of actor Pierre Renoir and nephew of director Jean Renoir. He was also the grandson of painter Pierre Auguste Renoir. He is the father of actress Sophie Renoir.

"Shall I tell you what I think are the two qualities of a work of art? First, it must be indescribable, and, second, it must be inimitable." "With a limited palette, the older painters could do just as well as today... what they did was sounder." "Go and see what others have produced, but never copy anything except nature. You would be trying to enter into a temperament that is not yours and nothing that you would do would have any character."  (Renoir)
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Picasso, Pablo

Girl before a Mirror
1932
oil on canvas
162.3 x 130.2 cm
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, NY, USA

Girl Before a Mirror shows Picasso's young mistress Marie-Therese Walter, one of his favorite subjects in the early 1930s. Her white-haloed profile, rendered in a smooth lavender pink, appears serene. But it merges with a more roughly painted, frontal view of her face - a crescent, like the moon, yet intensely yellow, like the sun, and "made up" with a gilding of rouge, lipstick, and green eye-shadow. Perhaps the painting suggests both Walter's day-self and her night-self, both her tranquility and her vitality, but also the transition from an innocent girl to a worldly woman aware of her own sexuality.
It is also a complex variant on the traditional Vanity - the image of a woman confronting her mortality in a mirror, which reflects her as a death's head. On the right, the mirror reflection suggests a supernatural x-ray of the girl's soul, her future, her fate. Her face is darkened, her eyes are round and hollow, and her intensely feminine body is twisted and contorted. She seems older and more anxious. The girl reaches out to the reflection, as if trying to unite her different "selves." The diamond-patterned wallpaper recalls the costume of the Harlequin, the comic character from the commedia dell'arte with whom Picasso often identified himself - here a silent witness to the girl's psychic and physical transformations.  (MoMA)

"My mother said to me, 'If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.' Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso." (Picasso)

"Pablo Diego Jose Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Maria de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santisima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso", known as Pablo Picasso, (1881 - 1973) was a Spanish painter and sculptor, born in Malaga on the southern coast of Spain. One of the greatest, dynamic and most influential artists of the 20th century, he is widely known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore.

He was exposed to art from a very young age by his father, who was a painter and art instructor. After studying at various art schools between 1892 and 1896, including academies in Barcelona and Madrid, he went on to the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid during the winter of 1896-1897. Picasso soon became bored with academics and set himself up as an independent artist. In Barcelona in 1899 Picasso’s circle of friends included young avantgarde artists and writers who traveled between Madrid, Barcelona, and Paris. Picasso also visited these cities and absorbed the local culture. His early works were influenced by old masters such as El Greco and Velazquez and by modern artists including Paul Gauguin, Edgar Degas, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Picasso moved to Paris in 1904 and settled in a dilapidated section of Montmartre, a working-class quarter. This area was home to many young artists and writers, and he was gradually assimilated into their stimulating intellectual community. Although Picasso benefited greatly from the artistic atmosphere in Paris and his circle of friends, he was often lonely, unhappy, and terribly poor.

Picasso demonstrated extraordinary artistic talent in his early years, painting in a realistic manner through his childhood and adolescence. During the first decade of the 20th century his style changed as he experimented with different theories, techniques, and ideas. His revolutionary artistic accomplishments brought him universal renown and immense fortune, making him one of the best-known figures in 20th century art. Based on sales of his works at auctions, he holds the title of top ranked artist. He was also a prolific artist with estimates of 50,000 works of art production in his lifetime, including paintings, drawings, sculptures, etc..

For the last three decades of his long life Picasso lived mostly in south of France. He worked up until the day he died at age 91; literally painting till 3 am on Sunday, April 8th, which was just hours before his death. He died while he and his wife Jacqueline Roque entertained friends for dinner. Jacqueline prevented his children Claude and Paloma from attending the funeral. Picasso was interred at the Chateau of Vauvenargues near Aix-en-Provence, a property he had acquired in 1958 and occupied with Jacqueline between 1959 and 1962.
Devastated and lonely after the death of Picasso, Jacqueline took her own life by gunshot in 1986 when she was 59 years old.
Pablo Picasso's final words were “Drink to me, drink to my health, you know I can’t drink any more.”
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Kahlo, Frida

Self Portrait dedicated to Dr. Eloesser
1940
oil on masonite
59.5 x 40 cm
Private Collection, USA

Towards the end of 1939, Frida began to suffer increased back pain and developed an acute fungal infection in her right hand. At the recommendation of Dr. Eloesser, her long-time friend and doctor, she traveled to San Francisco to see him for treatment. In thanks for the treatment that stabilized her condition, she painted this self-portrait for him. The dedication inscribed on the banderole at the bottom reads: "I painted my portrait in the year 1940 for Doctor Leo Eloesser, my doctor and my best friend. With all my love. Frida Kahlo."

The earrings she is wearing were a gift from Pablo Picasso whom she met while in Paris. The hand on the banderole as well as on the earrings, makes reference at what is called in Mexico "milagros". Milagros are pieces made of wax or ivory shaped in the form of the part of the human body that the person wants to be healed, and left on the altar of the Saint they pray to. The necklace of thorns around her neck is a reminder of the pain from which Dr. Eloesser freed her. It was Dr. Eloesser who later convinced Diego Rivera to reconcile and marry Frida for a second time. This painting may have been a "Thank You" gift for Dr. Eloesser's efforts.

When Dr. Eloesser died in 1994, he willed the painting to his long time companion Joyce Campbell. Campbell didn't really like the painting and described it as "...a garish, unlikable, unsettling painting...I could never have lived with it." Not long after she received the painting she sold it.

"I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best." "My painting carries with it the message of pain." (Frida)

Frida Kahlo de Rivera (1907 - 1954) 's life began and ended in Mexico City, in her home known as the Blue House. The iconic Mexican painter's biography is riddled with sadness. At the age of six, she developed polio, leaving her right leg thinner than the left, which she disguised by wearing long, colorful skirts. Following a traffic accident in her teenage years, Frida went on to suffer further health problems until her death in 1954. Her traffic accident was life changing. She suffered a broken spinal column, a broken collarbone, broken ribs, a broken pelvis, eleven fractures in her right leg, a crushed and dislocated right foot, a dislocated shoulder and other complications which affected her reproductive ability. During three months recovering in a full body cast, Frida studied the natural sciences, with the eventual aim of becoming a medical doctor... and began to paint, encouraged by her mother. Frida later stated, "I was born a bitch. I was born a painter". She channeled her energy and emotion into her artworks and her many pets - Amazon parrots, spider monkeys, Aztecs dogs, hens, sparrows and a fawn - which lived at her home.

Mexican culture and Amerindian cultural tradition are important in her work, which has been sometimes characterized as Naive art or folk art. Her work has also been described as "surrealist", and in 1938 Andre Breton, principal initiator of the surrealist movement, described Frida's art as a "ribbon around a bomb".

Frida's health deteriorated steadily during the 1950s. She went through a series of operations on her spine, all to no avail. Eventually, she was confined to a wheel chair, then permanently consigned to bed. She was forced to take painkillers almost constantly, and the technical execution of her work deteriorated visibly. In the summer of 1954, she contracted pneumonia and died soon after turning 47, in the Blue House, the place where she had been born. A few days before her death she wrote in her diary, "I hope the exit is joyful ... and I hope never to return ... Frida".

In accordance with Frida's wishes, her body was cremated. The urn was placed in the Blue House, which was converted into a gallery of her work.
"I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration."
Frida produced only about 200 paintings - primarily still life and portrait of herself, family and friends.
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Millais, John Everett

The Vale of Rest
1859
oil on canvas
102.9 x 172.7 cm
Tate Gallery, London, UK

Of all the pictures that Millais created, this was his favorite. The title and subtitle, 'Where the weary find repose', both come from Mendelssohn's part-song 'Ruhetal' from Sechs Lieder, Opus 59, no.5. Millais heard his brother William singing the song and felt it suited the picture perfectly.

The nun on the left is digging a grave, which is positioned in such as way that the viewer appears to be in it alongside her. The second nun's rosary has a skull attached to it. In the background a coffin-shaped cloud - a harbinger of death, according to Scots legend - appears in the evening sky.
According to Millais' wife, Effie, 'It had long been Millais' intention to paint a picture with nuns in it'. The idea for the picture occurred to him on honeymoon in Scotland in 1855. As Effie explains, 'On descending a hill, he was extremely struck with its beauty, and the coachman told us that on one of the islands were the ruins of a monastery. We imagined to ourselves the beauty of the picturesque features of the Roman Catholic religion'.
The setting - excluding the tombstones, but including the terrace, shrubs and the wall in the background, with poplars and oak trees behind it - was Effie's family's garden in Perth. Effie recalled, 'The sunsets were lovely for two or three nights, and he dashed the work in, softening it afterwards in the house, making it, I thought, even less purple and gold than when he saw it in the sky. The effect lasted so short a time that he had to paint like lightning' . The grave and gravestones were painted some months later in an old churchyard in Perth.

Sir John Everett Millais (1829 - 1896) was born in Southampton, England. His family was of French descent. In 1838 he attended Henry Sass' Drawing School and the Royal Academy in 1840. While still a youth, he won various medals for his drawings. With Rossetti and Hunt, he founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. Ophelia,  exhibited in 1852 at the Royal Academy, marks the culmination of Millais' youthful period.

Endowed with a virtuoso technical skill, he rapidly outstripped his colleagues and won lasting fame. He was elected a member of the Royal Academy and served as President in 1896. Millais' works never failed to elicit praise. His remarkable technique lent his canvases a unique distinction, particularly in his last paintings, long after the exhilaration of the radiant Pre-Raphaelite period had died away. Towards the end of his life, he turned to portraiture. He was also a fine illustrator.
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Leighton, Frederic

Portrait of May Sartoris
c.1860
oil on canvas
152.1 x 90.2 cm
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX, USA

This painting is an expression of Leighton's remarkable friendship with May’s mother, celebrated opera singer Adelaide Sartoris. The young Leighton frequented Adelaide’s artistic and literary salon in Rome in the early 1850s, and was on intimate terms with her by the time he painted her daughter’s likeness around 1860. By her marriage to the banker Edward Sartoris, Adelaide had three children, Greville, Mary Theodosia (May) and Algernon. May Sartoris was only nine years old when Leighton produced this wistful likeness of her.

Sir Frederic Leighton (1830 - 1896) was an English painter and sculptor who was President of the Royal Academy for almost two decades. The leading establishment figure in Victorian art, was the first artist to be ennobled. He was a classical painter producing highly finished pictures, and was also an excellent portraitist. He was a sophisticated, cosmopolitan figure, much of his early life having been spent in Germany and Italy. Throughout his life he was energetic, and hardworking, and his inability to take life more easily when in his sixties accelerated his death.  His funeral was at St. Paul's Cathedral. Leighton's magnificent home Leighton House, is now a museum.

Leighton was a lifelong bachelor. In later life his favorite model was Ada Alice Pullen, known as Dorothy Dene. George Bernard Shaw knew them both, and it is likely that they were the models for Professor Higgins and Eliza Doolitlle in Pygmalion.
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Riviere, Briton

Sympathy
1877
oil on canvas
102 x 122 cm (39,9 x 47,9 inches)
Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, Surrey, UK

This painting shows a little girl who has been sent to bed early as a punishment sitting on the stairs being comforted by a dog. Riviere recorded that he painted the little girl from his daughter.

Briton Riviere (1840 - 1920) was a genre and animal painter, etcher and sculptor born in London, England, of Huguenot descent. His father was an art teacher at Oxford University. He was educated at Oxford, where he took his degree. For his art training he was indebted almost entirely to his father, and early in life made for himself a place of importance among the artists of his time.

His early works, titled as The eve of the Spanish Armada and a Romeo and Juliet, were influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite painters. However, subjects of this kind did not attract him long, for in 1865 he began a series of paintings of animal-subjects. He made his reputation with a painting that portrayed pigs, and indeed his most well known pictures were of animals-subjects which  occupied him almost exclusively for the rest of his life. His pictures of dogs were sentimental and extremely popular. He was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1875, becoming a full member in 1880.
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Landseer, Edwin Henry

A Naughty Child
1834
oil on millboard
size unknown
Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington, London, UK

Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, RA (1802 - 1873) was a notable English painter and sculptor, well known for his animal subjects. Apart from animal subjects, he also painted portraits and historical scenes. The best known of his works, however, are sculptures: the lions in Trafalgar Square, London. Although he had no previous experience as a sculptor, in 1858 he was commissioned to make four huge bronze lions for the base of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square, London.

His career was a story of remarkable social as well as professional success: he was the favorite painter of Queen Victoria (who considered him ‘very good looking although rather short’) and his friends included Dickens and Thackeray. Queen Victoria commissioned numerous pictures from him. Initially asked to paint various royal pets, then, in the year before her marriage, the queen commissioned a portrait of herself, as a present for Prince Albert. His appeal crossed class boundaries: reproductions of his works were common in middle-class homes, while he was also popular with the aristocracy.

He was born in London, the son of the engraver and writer. He was something of a prodigy whose artistic talents were recognized early on. His life was entwined with the Royal Academy. At the age of just 13, he exhibited works there. He was elected an Associate at the age of 24, and an Academician five years later. He was knighted in 1850, and although elected President in 1866 he declined the invitation.  By this time his health had broken down and, for this reason, he declined the presidency of the Royal Academy.

In his late 30s he suffered what is now believed to be a substantial nervous breakdown, and for the rest of his life was troubled by recurring bouts of melancholy, hypochondria, and depression, often aggravated by alcohol and drug use, although he continued to paint brilliantly almost until the end of his life. In the last few years of his life his mental stability was problematic, and after 1870 sank slowly into madness.

Landseer was the most famous English artist of his generation, and he was mourned throughout the nation. He was accorded the honor of public funeral, and he was buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral alongside Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sir Thomas Lawrence, and J.M.W. Turner.
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Degas, Edgar

Woman Combing Her Hair
1894
oil on canvas
54 × 40cm
Ordrupgaard Collection, Denmark

"In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false." "Art is vice. You don't marry it legitimately, you rape it." (Degas)

Edgar Degas (1834 - 1917) was a French artist famous for his work in painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing. He is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism although he rejected the term, and preferred to be called a realist. A superb draughtsman, he is especially identified with the subject of the dance, and over half his works depict dancers. These display his mastery in the depiction of movement, as do his racecourse subjects and female nudes. His portraits are considered to be among the finest in the history of art.

Early in his career, his ambition was to be a history painter, a calling for which he was well prepared by his rigorous academic training and close study of classic art. In his early thirties he changed course, and by bringing the traditional methods of a history painter to bear on contemporary subject matter, he became a classical painter of modern life.

Certain features of his work remained the same throughout his life. He always painted indoors, preferring to work in his studio, either from memory or using models. The figure remained his primary subject; his few landscapes were produced from memory or imagination. It was not unusual for him to repeat a subject many times, varying the composition or treatment. He was a deliberative artist whose works were prepared, calculated, practiced, developed in stages. They were made up of parts. The adjustment of each part to the whole, their linear arrangement, was the occasion for infinite reflection and experiment.  "In art, nothing should look like chance, not even movement." (Degas)

In company he was known for his wit, which could often be cruel. He was characterized as an "old curmudgeon", and he deliberately cultivated his reputation as a misanthropic bachelor. Profoundly conservative in his political opinions, he opposed all social reforms and found little to admire in such technological advances as the telephone. He fired a model upon learning she was Protestant. "The artist must live alone, and his private life must remain unknown." (Degas)
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Monet, Claude

The Bend of the Seine at Lavacourt, Winter
1879
oil on canvas
54 x 65 cm
Private collection

"I'm never finished with my paintings; the further I get, the more I seek the impossible and the more powerless I feel." (Monet)

Claude Monet (1840 - 1926) was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. Monet found subjects in his immediate surroundings, as he painted the people and places he knew best. He rejected the traditional approach to landscape painting and instead of copying old masters he had been learning from his friends and the nature itself. He observed variations of color and light caused by the daily or seasonal changes.

One day in 1871, legend says, Claude Monet walked into a food shop in Amsterdam, where he had gone to escape the Prussian siege of Paris. There he spotted some Japanese Ukiyo-e prints being used as wrapping paper. He was so taken by the engravings that he bought one on the spot. The purchase changed his life - and the history of Western art. Monet went on to collect 231 Japanese prints, which greatly influenced his work and that of other practitioners of Impressionism, the movement he helped create. Under the new Meiji Emperor, Japan in the 1870s was just opening to the outside world after centuries of isolation. Japanese handicrafts were flooding into European department stores and art galleries. Japonism, a fascination with all things Japanese, was soon the rage among French intellectuals and artists, among them Vincent van Gogh, Edouard Manet, Camille Pissarro and the young Monet.

Perhaps the greatest gift Japan gave Monet, and Impressionism, was an incandescent obsession with getting the play of light and shadow, the balance of colors and the curve of a line, just right - not the way it is in reality, but the way it looks in the artist's imagination, like Hokusai's Ukiyo-e. At Giverny where Monet built a Japanese bridge over a Japanese pond in a Japanese garden, he spent the rest of his life painting the private paradise, his water lilies of the pond, again and again, until he lost his eyesight in quest of an elusive, transcendent perfection that might best be called Japanese. "I have slowly learned about the pattern of the grass, the trees, the structure of birds and other animals like insects and fish, so that when I am 80, I hope to be better," Hokusai wrote 16 years before his death at age 89. "At 90, I hope to have caught the very essence of things, so that at 100 I will have reached heavenly mysteries. At 110, every point and line will be living."
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Redon, Odilon

Woman with a Yellow Bodice
c.1899
Pastel on paper
66 x 50 cm
Museum Kroller-Mueller, Otterlo, The Netherlands

"My drawings inspire and are not to be defined. They determine nothing. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous world of the undetermined. They are a kind of metaphor." (Redon)

Bertrand-Jean Redon, better known as Odilon Redon (1840 - 1916), French, was one of the outstanding figures of Symbolism. He studied under Jean-Leon Gerome; mastered engraving from Rodolphe Bresdin, who exerted an important influence; and learned lithography under Henri Fantin-Latour.
Redon's aesthetic was one of imagination rather than visual perception. His imagination found an intellectual catalyst in his close friend, the Symbolist poet Stephane Mallarme. He had a retiring life, first in his native Bordeaux, then in Paris, and until he was in his fifties he worked almost exclusively in black and white, in charcoal drawings and lithographs. There is an evident link to Goya in Redon’s imagery of winged demons and menacing shapes.

Redon produced nearly 200 prints, beginning in 1879 with the lithographs collectively titled In the Dream. He completed another series dedicated to Edgar Allan Poe, whose poems had been translated into French with great success by Mallarme and Charles Baudelaire. Rather than illustrating Poe, Redon’s lithographs are poems in visual terms, themselves evoking the poet’s world of private torment.
Redon remained virtually unknown to the public until the publication of J.K. Huysmans's novel A Rebours in 1884; the book's hero who lives in a private world of perverse delights, collects Redon's drawings, and with his mention in this classic expression of decadence, Redon too became associated with the movement.

Redon's aim was to represent pictorially the ghosts of his own mind. His work represents an exploration of his internal feelings and psyche. He himself wanted to place the visible at the service of the invisible. Well before the Surrealists, he focused on his inner world, on the fantastic, some-times frightening, and always mysterious creatures of his imagination, to evoke a realm of dreams, distant memories, and indefinable emotions.
Much of his early life had been unhappy, but after undergoing a religious crisis and a serious illness, he was transformed into a much more buoyant and cheerful personality, expressing himself in radiant colors in mythological scenes and flower paintings. The flower pieces, in particular, were much admired by Matisse, and the Surrealists regarded Redon as one of their precursors. He was a distinguished figure by the end of his life, although still a very private person.
Redon occupies a major place in the history of modern art, not only for the intrinsic beauty of his works, but also and perhaps most importantly for the daring quality of his imagination.
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