| Modern Art by Buck Spinster, 2003
Post Impressionism was the next generation after the Impressionists when Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gough would go in search of their respective "Japans". The patterns and brilliant colors of Van Gough's palette were a product of not only the influences of his elders but also the idea of a far away and beautiful paradise that he would find in the south of France where the natural light is uncannily beautiful. Vincent's work is also an outpouring of love and hopeless romanticism that speaks of unrequited love. He painted what he saw in the world and in his mind. A sad yet beautiful life. Paul Gauguin would find his Japan in Tahiti, where he painted some of the most lovely color harmonies depicting the innocent natives, especially the women, playing and worshipping in their garden of delights. The flatness of his paintings would be a precursor to the art of the 20th century. Paul Cézanne, was neither an Impressionist nor a Post Impressionist, preferring to work alone as a scientist trying to discover something unique. His many still-lifes, landscapes and figures were the result of an attempt at creating a new kind of space in painting that had never existed before. His use of color changes to create the illusion of volume as opposed to value changes, combined with the dissection of pictorial space into geometric shapes would later inspire Picasso to develop his first Cubist painting in 1907, Les Mademoiselles d' Avignon. Picasso was also inspired by African art which was being exhibited in Paris around the same time, hence the mask-like faces on some of the prostitutes in what some historians to be the first true modern art painting although I believe that modernism started nearly a century earlier. To Be Continued...
|
Updated:
April 17, 2004
Back
Index
Home
