Dutch Post-Impressionist Painter, 1853-1890 Vincent Willem van Gogh (30 March 1853 ?C 29 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist artist. Some of his paintings are now among the world's best known, most popular and expensive works of art. Van Gogh spent his early adult life working for a firm of art dealers. After a brief spell as a teacher, he became a missionary worker in a very poor mining region. He did not embark upon a career as an artist until 1880. Initially, Van Gogh worked only with sombre colours, until he encountered Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism in Paris. He incorporated their brighter colours and style of painting into a uniquely recognizable style, which was fully developed during the time he spent at Arles, France. He produced more than 2,000 works, including around 900 paintings and 1,100 drawings and sketches, during the last ten years of his life. Most of his best-known works were produced in the final two years of his life, during which time he cut off part of his left ear following a breakdown in his friendship with Paul Gauguin. After this he suffered recurrent bouts of mental illness, which led to his suicide. The central figure in Van Gogh's life was his brother Theo, who continually and selflessly provided financial support. Their lifelong friendship is documented in numerous letters they exchanged from August 1872 onwards. Van Gogh is a pioneer of what came to be known as Expressionism. He had an enormous influence on 20th century art, especially on the Fauves and German Expressionists.  Related Paintings of Vincent Van Gogh :. | Wheat Fields with Stacks (nn04) | Sunflowers | Portraif of Madame Augustine Roulin (nn04) | Portrait of a Woman (nn04) | Starry Night |
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Piet Mondrian
Dutch 1872-1944 Piet Mondrian Location was a Dutch painter. He was an important contributor to the De Stijl art movement and group, which was founded by Theo van Doesburg. He evolved a non-representational form which he termed Neo-Plasticism. This consisted of a grid of vertical and horizontal black lines and the use of the three primary colours. When 47-year-old Piet Mondrian left his artistically conservative native Holland for unfettered Paris for the second and last time in 1919, he set about at once to make his studio a nurturing environment for paintings he had in mind that would increasingly express the principles of Neo-Plasticism about which he had been writing for two years. To hide the studio's structural flaws quickly and inexpensively, he tacked up large rectangular placards, each in a single color or neutral hue. Smaller colored paper squares and rectangles, composed together, accented the walls. Then came an intense period of painting. Then again he addressed the walls, repositioning the colored cutouts, adding to their number, altering the dynamics of color and space, producing new tensions and equilibrium. Before long, he had established a creative schedule in which a period of painting took turns with a period of experimentally regrouping the smaller papers on the walls, a process that directly fed the next period of painting. It was a pattern he followed for the rest of his life, through wartime moves from Paris to London??s Hampstead in 1938 and 1940, across the Atlantic to Manhattan. At 71 in the fall of 1943, Mondrian moved into his second and final New York studio at 15 East 59th Street, and set about again to create the environment he had learned over the years was most congenial to his modest way of life and most stimulating to his art. He painted the high walls the same off-white he used on his easel and on the seats, tables and storage cases he designed and fashioned meticulously from discarded orange and apple-crates. He glossed the top of a white metal stool in the same brilliant primary red he applied to the cardboard sheath he made for the radio-phonograph that spilled forth his beloved jazz from well-traveled records, Visitors to this last studio seldom saw more than one or two new canvases, but found, often to their astonishment, that eight large compositions of colored bits of paper he had tacked and re-tacked to the walls in ever-changing relationships constituted together an environment that, paradoxically and simultaneously, was both kinetic and serene, stimulating and restful. It was the best space, Mondrian said, that he had ever inhabited. Tragically, he was there for only a few months: he died of pneumonia in February 1944.
Emma Minnie Boyd
Australian Painter, 1858-1936
constant permeke
Constant Permeke (Dutch pronunciation: July 31, 1886 ?C January 4, 1952) was a Belgian painter and sculptor who is considered the leading figure of Flemish expressionism. Permeke was born in Antwerp but when he was six years old the family moved to Ostend, where his father became curator of the Municipal Museum of Arts. Permeke went to school in Bruges from 1903 until 1906, when he was drafted into the Belgian army. He served in a university company with whom he settled in Sint-Martens-Latem. After his military service ended in March 1908, Permeke returned to Ostend where he roomed together with another artist, Gustave De Smet but in 1909 he returned to Latem where he lived as a recluse. His work of this period is characterized by his heavy brush. In 1912 Permeke married Maria Delaere and the newlyweds settled in Ostend. His work from this period gains its expressive force through muted tonality and brutal forms. When World War I started, Permeke was mobilized and during the defense of Antwerp he was wounded in action near the town of Duffel. His wounds forced him to be evacuated to the United Kingdom where he was in hospital at South Hillwood. After his release from hospital he was reunited with his family in Folkestone, where his son John was born. In 1916 he moved to Chardstock in Devonshire and started painting again, mostly colorful English landscapes. After the end of the war, the Permeke family returned to Ostend in 1919. In contrast to the happy time in Devonshire, the harsh reality of the worker's life turns Permeke's work back to a gloomier mood as he mainly paints the harsh fisherman's life. In 1921 Permeke was able to exhibit his work in Antwerp and in Paris. Between 1922 and 1924, Permeke regularly went to Astene, in order to cooperate with Frits Van den Berghe. In 1926 Permeke went to Vevey in Switzerland where he mainly painted mountain scenes. In 1929 he moved to Jabbeke. During this period he changed his subject: instead of the fisherman and the sea he now focused on the farmer and his land. During this period, Permeke was enormously productive with works like "Gouden Oogst" (1935), "De Grote Marine" (1935), "Moederschap" (1936), "Het Afscheid" (1948), "Dagelijks Brood" (1950). Starting in 1937 Permeke tried his hand at sculpting as well. As a sculptor, Permeke tried to isolate the human figure in monumental efforts. "De Zaaier" (1939), "Niobe" (1946) and "De Drie Gratiën" (1949) are good examples of this period. During World War II, Permeke was forbidden to paint by the German occupiers as his art was seen by them as Entartete Kunst. Privately, things were even worse as his son Paul was arrested and sent to Germany as a forced labourer. After the war, Permeke was appointed director of the National higher Institute and of the Royal Academy in Antwerp but after only one year he offered his resignation. In 1947-1948, Permeke had a big retrospective exhibition in Paris but his happiness at the return of his son was soon shattered when in 1948 his wife died. Emotionally scarred and ailing, Permeke had to be nursed by his daughter.