Vincent Van Gogh and Expressionism
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Vincent van Gogh and Expressionism Jill Lloyd “Van Gogh was Father to us All!” When he made this remark about Van Gogh, the German Expressionist painter Max Pechstein spoke for a whole generation of artists.1 Not only in Germany and Austria but in many countries across Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, Van Gogh’s impassioned paintings captured the imagination of mod- ern artists who were intent on reinventing the art of their times. After Van Gogh’s death in 1890 it took some ten years before his paintings emerged from obscurity. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the artists and writers of the Expressionist generation immediately responded to the vibrant colors and animated brushwork they found in his work. The highly charged emotional intensity of Van Gogh’s painting and his readiness to depart from slavish representations of nature in order to penetrate deeper underlying truths showed them how to break free from the shackles of nineteenth-century realism. “What was in the air?” the Expressionist poet Ernst Blass inquired. “Above all Van Gogh, Nietzsche, Freud too and Wedekind. … Van Gogh stood for expression and experience as opposed to Impressionism and Naturalism. Flaming concentration, youthful sincerity, immediacy, depth, exhibition and hallucination. The term Expressionism was coined by others; but in our circle we had been sailing in Expressionistic waters for a long time. Van Gogh: that meant the courage of one’s own means of expression.”2 The passion for Van Gogh’s paintings struck a particular chord in the psyche of Ger- man and Austrian artists. In these countries Expressionism took its most powerful form, although the term was originally used around 1910 by German art critics to describe both French and German art that broke with Impressionism. There is a certain irony that Van Gogh was regarded as a trailblazer by artists who turned their back on recording their sensations of nature in favor of pouring out their innermost feelings and emotions. Van Gogh’s deliberate exaggerations of line and color were meant to convey his passionate response to the world; but he always remained true to nature and considered himself a realist. The Expressionists interpreted Van Gogh’s work in a way that he certainly never intended—for example, as a license to distance themselves from nature and explore the expressive potential of pure colors and forms. In France, the Fauve artists Henri Matisse, André Derain, and Maurice de Vlaminck responded to the revolutionary aspects of Van Gogh’s style. But in Germany and Austria, where Expressionism became a movement that spread like wildfire through art, literature and theatre (and eventually through architecture and cinema as well), there was a more profound dissatisfaction with art that merely imitated the outward appearances of the world. The subjective, romantic mood of 11 Following the same structure as the previous year’s exhibition, Cézanne and Structure in Modern Painting, the 1964 exhibition Van Gogh and Expressionism was an attempt to illustrate Vincent Van Gogh’s influence on subsequent art movements, such as Abstract Expressionism. In lieu of discussing which artists exerted an influence on Van Gogh, curator Maurice Tuchman discusses how Van Gogh was a model for the modern Expressionists of the 21st century. In separate essays, Tuchman describes each artist’s form of Expressionism, how they have learned from Van Gogh, and developed their own unique Expressionist style. Vincent Willem van Gogh (Dutch: [ˈvɪnsÉ™nt ˈʋɪlÉ™m vÉ‘Å‹ ˈɣɔx] (listen); 30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890) was a Dutch post-impressionist painter who posthumously became one of the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In a decade, he created about 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of which date from the last two years of his life. They include landscapes, still lifes, portraits and self-portraits, and are characterised by bold colours and dramatic... Vincent van Gogh - Expressionism. Collection by Dori Aronson • Last updated 7 weeks ago. 3.8k. • Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) An Expressionist Painter On September 10, 1889, he writes to Theo:Had I had the strength to continue, I’d have done portraits of saints and of holy women from life, and who would have appeared to be from another century and they would be citizens of the present day, and yet would have had something in common. with very primitive Christians. All his paintings are autobiographical. Emotional colours and brushwork. Distorted form and colour to convey inner feelings. Art Van Van Gogh Art Van Gogh Pinturas Vincent Van Gogh Post Impressionism Impressionist Art Van Gogh Paintings Paul Gauguin Henri Matisse. ARLES JARDINS. Vincent van Gogh lived in the XIX cent., a remarkable figure of Dutch Post-Impressionism. Find more works of this artist at Wikiart.org – best visual art database. The striking colour, emphatic brushwork, and contoured forms of his work powerfully influenced the current of Expressionism in modern art. Van Gogh’s art became astoundingly popular after his death, especially in the late 20th century, when his work sold for record-breaking sums at auctions around the world and was featured in blockbuster touring exhibitions. In 1890 Vincent van Gogh fatally shot himself in the French countryside. Three years later the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch was walking near Oslo’s fjord at sunset. As the sun went down, he remembered years later, he was seized by a dreadful vision: “The air became like blood – with piercing strands of fire I felt a great scream – and I actually heard a great scream.â€Â Seeing Munch and Van Gogh side by side is a journey to the birth of expressionism. They never met, and Van Gogh never knew Munch existed – although Munch, who lived until 1944, certainly got to know eventually about Van Gogh. Yet both artists intuited something similar. They felt the world crying out to express itself in colours..