Pioneer of Expressionism (1853-1890)

"This man is either mad or he lets us all far behind ", already prophesied Camille Pissarro born in 1853- son of Vincent van Gogh a clergyman. And in fact, the Dutch became a pioneer of modern, with its curved lines and bright colours, which ushered in the Expressionism. While van Gogh got hardly any money for paint and canvas in his lifetime for his paintings,and with the support of his brother Theo, he achieve his works today regularly usually tens of millions on spectacular auctions.

Van Gogh (1853-1890) comes from a family of Protestant pastor in Groot-Zundert in Brabant. With art, he first came into contact through an uncle, the art dealer was. Initially, van Gogh worked in stores of Galerie Goupil in the Hague, London and Paris, but also as a tutor in England and as a Methodist preacher. He began as a preacher in the mining area of Boringe for the first time to draw. Just a few months he attended the Brussels Academy, formed further but as an autodidact.

His first oil paintings represent poor farmers and workers. These pictures are very dark and painted with simple, broad lines. Antwerp, where he remained for three months and met the lightness and elegance of Japanese woodblock prints, he moved to Paris. Here he discovered the Sun and bright colours. He studied the early Symbolists, Impressionist and pointillist artists, and painted urban images, landscapes and portraits. More light and freedom-seeking, he went to Arles in southern France, where he followed his friend Paul Gauguin in 1888. Van Gogh was planning to set up a community of artists and to invite all of his painter friends, to live with him and to work, but the plan failed. After a dramatic confrontation with Gauguin in van Gogh injured himself on the ear he had to move several times longer with overwrought nerves in the hospital. These crises should worsen later and later led to his suicide.

In the time in Arles, van Gogh's most famous paintings emerged. All of the Sun's luminosity is in them; Fields, trees and clouds speak of the force of nature in impressive language. It is hard to imagine to us today's viewers, what force may have been necessary, to repudiate such Burgundian masterpieces of personal mental distress. It is van Gogh's secret - and it remains until today the secret of his late work.

The style of Impressionism that emerged in French painting in 1870 owes its name to the Claude Monet's landscape 'Impression, Soleil Levant'. After initial refusal it began a true triumphant advance.

Such painters as Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Auguste Renoir and others created motifs from everyday life, urban and landscape scenes in a bright, natural light.

Impressionism can be seen as a reaction to the academic painting. The emphasis was not on content with its strict rules of painting structure, but on the object as it appears at any given moment, in an often random cut out. The reality was seen in its whole color variety in natural lighting. The studio painting was replaced by the open-air painting.

The brightening of the palette and the dissolution of firm contours was accompanied by a new way of handling with color. Often, the colors were no longer mixed on the palette but side by side on the canvas so that the final impression lies in the eye of the beholder with a certain distance. In "Pointillism", (with such painters as Georges Seurat or Paul Signac) this principle was carried to the extreme.

Outside France, Impressionism was taken up by such painters as Max Slevogt, Max Liebermann and Lovis Corinth in Germany, and by James A. M. Whistler in the United States.

In sculpture, the impressionism expressed itself only conditionally. In the works of Auguste Rodin, who is considered one of the main representatives, you can see a resolution of the surfaces in which the play of light and shadow is included in the artistic expression. Degas and Renoir created sculptures as well.