Vincent van Gogh’s life and work are so intertwined that it is hardly possible to observe one without thinking of the other. Van Gogh has indeed become the incarnation of the suffering, misunderstood martyr of modern art, the emblem of the artist as an outsider. An article, published in 1890, gave details about van Gogh’s illness. The author of the article saw the painter as “a terrible and demented genius, often sublime, sometimes grotesque, always at the brink of the pathological.” Very little is known about Vincent’s childhood. At the age of eleven he had to leave “the human nest”, …

The seascapes of Ivan Aivazovsky (1817-1900) made his name in Russia, his native country where he was a painter of the court of Nicholas I, yet his fame barely extended beyond these borders. Master of the Sublime, he made the ocean the principal subject of his work. Sometimes wild and raging, sometimes calm and peaceful, the life of the ocean is composed of as many allegories as the human condition. Like Turner, whom he knew and whose art he admired, he never painted outside in nature, nor did he make preliminary sketches; hispaintings were the fruit of his exceptional memory. …

« À travers la forêt vierge des énigmes, Dalí, lui, est parti à la conquête du monde de la peinture et, mieux que de l’or, il nous en a ramené, pour les offrir à notre mémoire, non seulement des horizons nouveaux, mais quelqu’un : Salvador Dalí. » Julien Green Salvador Dalí était un peintre surréaliste. Il est né et mort à Figueras en Catalogne (Espagne). À sept ans, il peint son premier tableau. En 1918, après un bac obtenu facilement, Dalí entre à l'École des beaux-arts de San Fernando, à Madrid. Il se lie d'amitié avec Federico García Lorca et …

Francisco Goya werd tweeëntachtig jaar (1746-1828) en gedurende die tijd produceerde hij eengeweldige hoeveelheid werk – ongeveer 500 olieverfschilderijen en wandschilderingen, bijna 300 etsen en steendrukplaten, en een paar honderd tekeningen. Hij was zowel een bekwaam schilder als tekenaar en hij experimenteerde met tal van technieken; zelfs aan het einde van zijn leven was hij een pionier in de nieuwe drukmethode van de lithografie. Goya was in wezen een figuratieve schilder en hij behandelde heel veel verschillende onderwerpen. Hij ontwikkelde zich tot de toonaangevende portretschilder van Spanje, verfraaide kerken in Saragossa en Madrid met altaarstukken en wandschilderingen en ontwierp wandtapijten …

Más allá de los girasoles, los lirios y el retrato del Doctor Gachet, está el hombre, Van Gogh, con su fragilidad y su talento. Van Gogh, el post-impresionista que nació en 1853 y murió en 1890, dio forma a los conceptos de la pintura del siglo XIX con su creatividad y su técnica en el transcurso de varios años. Se convirtió en un precursor de los expresionistas, los fovistas y el arte moderno. Hoy, sin embargo, Van Gogh sigue siendo el símbolo de un pintor torturado por las enfermedades, por sus congéneres y en especial por sí mismo. En esta …

John Constable was the first English landscape painter to take no lessons from the Dutch. He is rather indebted to the landscapes of Rubens, but his real model was Gainsborough, whose landscapes, with great trees planted in well-balanced masses on land sloping upwards towards the frame, have a rhythm often found in Rubens. Constable’s originality does not lie in his choice of subjects, which frequently repeated themes beloved by Gainsborough. Nevertheless, Constable seems to belong to a new century; he ushered in a new era. The difference in his approach results both from technique and feeling. Excepting the French, Constable …

A symbol of modernity, the Viennese Secession was defined by the rebellion of twenty artists who were against the conservative Vienna Künstlerhaus' oppressive influence over the city, the epoch, and the whole Austro-Hungarian Empire. Influenced by Art Nouveau, this movement (created in 1897 by Gustav Klimt, Carl Moll, and Josef Hoffmann) was not an anonymous artistic revolution. Defining itself as a “total art”, without any political or commercial constraint, the Viennese Secession represented the ideological turmoil that affected craftsmen, architects, graphic artists, and designers from this period. Turning away from an established art and immersing themselves in organic, voluptuous, and …

Vincent van Gogh’s life and work are so intertwined that it is hardly possible to see his pictures without reading in them the story of his life, a life which has been described so many times that it is by now the stuff of legend. Van Gogh is the incarnation of the suffering, the misunderstood martyr of modern art, the emblem of the artist as an outsider. “When one lives with others and is bound by feelings of affection, then one realises that one has a reason for living, that one may not be utterly worthless and expendable, but is …

Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) is widely regarded as one of the most significant artists of the Northern Renaissance. Born in Nuremberg, Germany, Dürer became renowned for his mastery of various mediums, including painting, printmaking, and wood-cutting. Throughout his life, Dürer produced a vast array of works that demonstrated his technical skill and innovative vision. His art often incorporated religious and classical themes, and his use of perspective and realism helped to establish new standards in European art. Beyond his artistic achievements, Dürer was also a prolific writer and thinker. His treatises on geometry, human proportion, and the theory of perspective remain …

From the early Renaissance through Baroque and Romanticism to Cubism, Surrealism, and Pop, these canonical works of Western Art span eight centuries and a vast range of subjects. Here are the sacred and the scandalous, the minimalist and the opulent, the groundbreaking and the conventional. There are paintings that captured the feeling of an era and those that signaled the beginning of a new one. Works of art that were immediately recognised for their genius, and others that were at first met with resistance. All have stood the test of time and in their own ways contribute to the dialectic …