It is a landscape in which the painter’s perceptions of nature and his intensity of feeling are equally pronounced. The glowing wheat field, the olive trees of subtle gray in which all the colors of the picture seem to be mingled, the shaggy wavering cypresses, and the turbulent mountains have been wonderfully observed, and the light that fills this space has a vivid actuality for our eyes. The brightness emanating from the cold sky and the warm earth is realized as much through the local colors as through the play of light and shadow – Van Gogh is free with latter, and hardly aims at consistency on this point.

The duality of sky and earth remains – the first light, soft, rounded, filled with fantasy and suggestions of animal forms, the earth firmer, harder, more intense in color, with stronger contrasts, of more distinct parts, perhaps masculine. Or one might interpret the duality as the real and of the vaguely desired and imagined. Connecting them is the single vertical, the cypress trees, as in The Starry Night, of which this painting is in other ways the diurnal counterpart.

L’article Wheat Field With Cypresses est apparu en premier sur Lemoineau.

This stunning painting by 19th century American artist John White Alexander — who focused on paintings of well-attired young women in luxurious settings — combines the fluid brushwork of fin-de-siécle portrait masters like John Singer Sargent, Cecilia Beaux and William Merritt Chase, with an Art Nouveau compositional sensibility.

The sweeping movement of the gown, the woman’s languorous pose, and the curved forms of the divan and pillows become swirling design elements. Combined with Alexander’s subtly rich color and mastery of value, they lead your eye inexorably through the composition — grabbing your attention with the bright folds of the gown in the foreground, leading you back through the darker area of the woman’s torso and the shadows that envelop it, to the highlight of her gently lit face and forearm — drawing you back into the painting almost like a well-composed landscape.

There are only a few passages in the painting with hard edges, notably the edge of the sleeve in front of the young woman’s mouth — accenting the bottom of her lip; the key folds of her gown where it arcs along the back of her legs, bunches under her hip and just reaches the floor — emphasizing the flow of movement in the composition; and the edges of shadows in the decorative fabrics behind her.

L’article Repose By American Artist est apparu en premier sur Lemoineau.

In the fall of 1880, van Gogh decided to move to Brussels and become an artist. Though he had no formal art training, his brother Theo offered to support van Gogh financially.He began taking lessons on his own, studying books like Travaux des champs by Jean-François Millet and Cours de dessin by Charles Bargue.Van Gogh’s art helped him stay emotionally balanced. In 1885, he began work on what is considered to be his first masterpiece, “Potato Eaters.” Theo, who by this time living in Paris, believed the painting would not be well-received in the French capital, where Impressionism had become the trend.

Nevertheless, van Gogh decided to move to Paris, and showed up at Theo’s house uninvited. In March 1886, Theo welcomed his brother into his small apartment. In Paris, van Gogh first saw Impressionist art, and he was inspired by the color and light. He began studying with Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Camille Pissarro and others. To save money, he and his friends posed for each other instead of hiring models. Van Gogh was passionate, and he argued with other painters about their works, alienating those who became tired of his bickering.

Vincent van Gogh completed more than 2,100 works, consisting of 860 oil paintings and more than 1,300 watercolors, drawings and sketches.Several of his paintings now rank among the most expensive in the world; “Irises” sold for a record $53.9 million, and his “Portrait of Dr. Gachet” sold for $82.5 million.

Van Gogh firmly believed that to be a great painter you had to first master drawing before adding color. Over the years Van Gogh clearly mastered drawing and began to use more color. In time, one of the most recognizable aspects of Van Gogh’s paintings became his bold use of color. This is evident in both Van Gogh’s landscapes and his still life paintings

L’article Farm in Provence est apparu en premier sur Lemoineau.

In the summer of 1888 Gauguin returned to Pont-Aven, searching for what he called “a reasoned and frank return to the beginning, that is to say, to primitive art.” He was joined there by young painters, including Émile Bernard and Paul Sérusier, who also were seeking a more direct expression in their painting. Gauguin achieved a step towards this ideal in the seminal Vision After the Sermon (1888), a painting in which he used broad planes of colour, clear outlines, and simplified forms. Gauguin coined the term “Synthetism” to describe his style during this period, referring to the synthesis of his paintings’ formal elements with the idea or emotion they conveyed.

For the next several years, Gauguin alternated between living in Paris and Brittany. In Paris he became acquainted with the avant-garde literary circles of Symbolist poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine. These poets, who advocated abandoning traditional forms in order to embody inner emotional and spiritual life, saw their equivalent in the visual arts in the work of Gauguin. In a famous essay in the Mercure de France in 1891, the critic Albert Aurier declared Gauguin to be the leader of a group of Symbolist artists, and he defined his work as “ideational, symbolic, synthetic, subjective, and decorative.”

L’article Two Tahitian Women est apparu en premier sur Lemoineau.