This painting is one of the first representations of urban proletariat. Whereas peasants (Gleaners by Millet) or country workers (Stone Breakers by Courbet) had often been shown, city workers had seldom been painted. Unlike Courbet or Millet, Caillebotte does not incorporate any social, moralising or political message in his...
From the moment of his arrival in Arles, on 8 February 1888, Van Gogh was constantly preoccupied with the representation of “night effects”. In April 1888, he wrote to his brother Theo: “I need a starry night with cypresses or maybe above a field of ripe wheat.” In June, he confided to the painter Emile Bernard: “But...
When he painted The Saint-Lazare Station, Monet had just left Argenteuil to settle in Paris. After several years of painting in the countryside, he turned to urban landscapes. At a time when the critics Duranty and Zola exhorted artists to paint their own times, Monet tried to diversify his sources of inspiration and longed to...
The French painter Corot displayed a great originality in lyrical landscape painting. He traveled to Italy three times during his life, but he only visited the subject of this work, Naples, on his first trip. From his several small sketches of Naples Castle, Mt. Vesuvius, Ischia and Amalfi, however, it would seem that this trip...
In contrast to the cluttered assemblage of juxtaposed objects of varying scales in other boxes, Joseph Cornell here creates a coherent miniaturized world. A black painted border on the surface of the glass frames a white palace and serves as a proscenium that invokes the world of theater and spectacle. The title Setting for a...
Lida Abdul is a performance and video artist. She and her family fled Afghanistan following the Soviet invasion of 1979, and lived as refugees in India and Germany before immigrating to the United States. Based on this experience, Abdul considers herself a nomadic artist, and her films, videos, and installations focus on themes...
In a group of works made between 1930 and 1933, Alberto Giacometti used the Surrealist techniques of shocking juxtaposition and the distortion and displacement of anatomical parts to express the fears and urges of the subconscious. The aggressiveness with which the human figure is treated in these fantasies of brutal erotic...
The enormous Studio is without doubt Courbet’s most mysterious composition. However, he provides several clues to its interpretation: “It’s the whole world coming to me to be painted”, he declared, “on the right, all the shareholders, by that I mean friends, fellow workers, art lovers. On the left is the other world of...
This painting is doubtless Renoir’s most important work of the mid 1870’s and was shown at the Impressionist exhibition in 1877. Though some of his friends appear in the picture, Renoir’s main aim was to convey the vivacious and joyful atmosphere of this popular dance garden on the Butte Montmartre. The study of the moving...
The late 1870s to the 1880s were a major turning point in the careers of Pissarro and the other Impressionists. We can find evidence of these changes in this Conversation. Here we can see Pissarro’s tendency toward pointillist techniques which would be further developed in the later 1880s under Seurat’s influence. In terms...
Cezanne’s father purchased a large mansion called Jas de Bouffan on the outskirts of Aix-en-Provence in 1859. Cezanne stayed frequently in Aix at the beginning of the 1880s where he painted the surroundings of the estate. This work was painted near the back gate of the estate. The undulations that continue from the back...
“My eyes search for people who are grateful for life, people who forgive whose doubts have been removed, who understand the truth, whose enduring spirit is bathed by such piercing light as to provide their present and future with hope.”...
This impressionist portrait of the artist in an apocalyptic Germany of 1946 is filled with sadness, anger, bewilderment and fear. The devastation to life, culture and environment brought by the Nazis left everything Huther saw in tatters. Probably painted earlier, and only released after the Nazi’s were out of power for fear...
At the 1905 Salon d’automne, Derain shared the same gallery as Matisse, Vlaminck and Van Dongen. A critic, noticing a sculpture by Albert Marque in the middle of these vividly coloured paintings, remarked : “Mais c’est Donatello parmi les fauves!” (“Look, it’s Donatello among wild beasts!”). The phrase caught on...
Bernard Frize is a French painter who works in a variety of materials and utilizes a multitude of techniques. As an artist he explores the bare minimal essence of painting, devoid of conception and aesthetic, instead focusing on an industrial approach to making art. His work is highly process-oriented, often requiring...
This painting is part of the Regency Girls series. For this series Paul looks back at artists such as Thomas Gainsborough and tries to create a different take on classical pieces. Paul uses his signature brush marks and rich palette to give these traditional pieces a modern edge....