I'm Only Happy When It Rains

Paul Cezanne was born in France in 1839, went to school in Aix, and formed an early friendship with the novelist Emile Zola. He studied law from 1859 to 1861, at the same time he studied drawing. Against his father’s will, he made up his mind to become a painter and in 1861 joined Zola in Paris.

He was reluctantly supported by his father and an inheritance that allowed him to pursue his painting career. His work was considered difficult and was rejected by official exhibitions at the Salon in Paris in 1864 to 1869. He exhibited his work with the impressionist group in 1874 and 1877.

Paul Cezanne was a contemporary of the impressionists, but he went beyond their interests into a new sense of mass, composition, and the intersection of planes. His work is divided into time frames as he developed his artwork. From 1864 to 1870 his paintings form what is called his early romantic period. Extremely personal in character, it deals with bizarre subjects of violence and fantasy in somber colors and extremely heavy paint. After this period, Cezanne began to assimilate the principles of color and lighting of Impressionism, loosening up his brushwork. In the late 1870s Cezanne entered the phase known as “constructive,” characterized by hatched brush strokes that build up the mass in the painting. He continued in this style until the 1890s when the paintings became more architectural in their solidity and thrust, and the space and atmosphere more charged with mass and energy of their own. In his last phase, Cezanne worked on a few basic subjects: still lives, successive views of Mont Sainte-Victoire, and landscapes. The bathers were based on the male nude from memory, earlier studies, and sources of art from the past. Monte Sainte-Victoire was a nearby landmark that he could see looking out his studio window across the valley.

By the time of his death in 1906, Cezanne’s art had begun to be shown all across Europe and it became influential to younger working artists of the Fauves and Cubist movements. His work was so original and ground breaking that he continued to be influential into the twentieth and now into the twenty first century.

Paul Gauguin (June 7, 1848 - May 9, 1903) was an Impressionist painter.

Gauguin’s artistic development of a conceptual method of representation was important for the history of art as it moved into the twentieth century. The name for the movement was called by Jean Moreas Symbolism, “ as the only name capable of giving a reasonable definition of the present trend of the creative in spirit in art.” Its essential character was, “to clothe an idea in a visible form.”

Painters no longer aimed at depicting the outer world but at rendering their inner dreams by symbolic allusion and decorative form. Line and color developed their powers of expression, taking inspiration in global art from Japanese art prints to primitive African art.On the subject of line and drawing, Gauguin said in 1879, “One must draw and draw again…It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one day you are amazed to discover that you have found the way to render a thing with its own character…don’t make pretty, clever little lines, but be simple and insist on the major lines that count…”

Gauguin said himself about his drawings that “It always seems to me that something is missing: the color.” Though based, to use Gauguin’s words, on “sharpness of outline,” it is their color that brings Gauguin’s best drawings and paintings to life. It is the novel color harmonies, inspired and heightened by his travels to the tropics that give his work a hallucinatory richness that has never been matched. His legacy of expressionistic color and composition inspired the twentieth century and continues to excite contemporary artists of the twenty first.

Gauguin’s father died the year after Gauguin was born and he was raised by his mother in Peru, “that wonderful land where it never rains,” Gauguin was destined to travel throughout his lifetime and find inspiration in exotic lands. Gauguin joined the merchant navy in 1865, and in 1872 began a successful career as a stockbroker in Paris. In 1973 he married Mette Gad, a pretty Danish society girl and had five children within ten years. Gauguin collected oriental carpets, pottery, Japanese prints, and art by Pissarro, Manet, Sisley, Renoir, Monet, Guillaumin, Daumier and Degas. Pissarro became a friend and painting teacher as Gauguin began to paint himself. He worked with Van Gogh and Degas who bought several of Gauguin’s paintings. If his career started late and developed slowly, he had the advantage of entering into immediate contact with the living art of his day.

In 1883-84 the bank that employed Gauguin got into financial difficulties and Gauguin began to paint every day. His wife and children moved to Denmark and so began his tumultuous years as an artist. He traveled to Denmark, then lived in Rouen, both times attempting to make a viable life with his family and painting. His mind was obsessed with theoretical foundations of his art and painting that proclaimed his personal vision. “The further I go, the more I feel sure that thoughts can be expressed by something quite different from literature,” he wrote.

In 1887 Gauguin leaves for Panama and Martinique, where he paints several landscapes prefiguring his Tahitian pictures. He returns to Paris and Theo Van Gogh organizes Gauguin’s first one-man show in Paris. In 1891 he sails for Tahiti and acquires a native hut in the Mataiea district. He has two fruitful years before returning to Europe with ill health. He returns to Tahiti in 1895 and has more fruitful years despite illness and trouble with local authorities. In 1901 Gauguin sought still more distant and freer lands, the Marquesas Islands, where he built a cabin he called the House of Joy on the beautiful island of Dominique. Gauguin died there in 1903.

Vincent van Gogh (March 30, 1853 - July 29, 1890) is generally considered the greatest Dutch painter after Rembrandt, though he had little success during his lifetime. Van Gogh produced all of his work (some 900 paintings and 1100 drawings) during a period of only 10 years before he succumbed to mental illness (possibly bipolar disorder) and committed suicide.

His fame grew rapidly after his death especially following a showing of 71 of van Gogh's paintings in Paris on March 17, 1901 (11 years after his death).

Van Gogh's influence on expressionism, fauvism and early abstraction was enormous, and can be seen in many other aspects of 20th-century art. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is dedicated to Van Gogh's work and that of his contemporaries. The Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo (also in The Netherlands), has a considerable collection of Vincent van Gogh paintings as well.

Several paintings by Van Gogh rank among the most expensive paintings in the world. On March 30, 1987 Van Gogh's painting Irises was sold for a record $53.9 million at Southeby's, New York. On May 15, 1990 his Portrait of Doctor Gachet was sold for $82.5 million at Christie's, thus establishing a new price record (see also List of most expensive paintings).

Life and Work

Vincent was born in Zundert, Netherlands; his father was a protestant minister, a profession that Vincent found appealing and to which he would be drawn to a certain extent later in his life. His sister described him as a serious and introspective child.
At age 16 Vincent started to work for the art dealer Goupil & Co. in The Hague. His brother Theo, four years his junior, with whom Vincent cherished a life long friendship, would join the company later. This friendship is amply documented in a vast amount of letters they sent each other. These letters have been preserved and were published in 1914. They provide a lot of insight into the life of the painter, and show him to be a talented writer with a keen mind. Theo would support Vincent financially throughout his life.

In 1873, his firm transferred him to London, then to Paris. He became increasingly interested in religion; in 1876 Goupil dismissed him for lack of motivation. He became a teaching assistant in Ramsgate near London, then returned to Amsterdam to study theology in 1877.

After dropping out in 1878, he became a lay preacher in Belgium in a poor mining region known as the Borinage. He even preached down in the mines and was extremely concerned with the lot of the workers. He was dismissed after 6 months and continued without pay. During this period he started to produce charcoal sketches.

In 1880, Vincent followed the suggestion of his brother Theo and took up painting in earnest. For a brief period Vincent took painting lessons from Anton Mauve at The Hague. Although Vincent and Anton soon split over divergence of artistic views, influences of the Hague School of painting would remain in Vincent's work, notably in the way he played with light and in the looseness of his brush strokes. However his usage of colours, favouring dark tones, set him apart from his teacher.

The Potato Eaters (1885)In 1881 he declared his love to his widowed cousin Kee Vos, who rejected him. Later he would move in with the prostitute Sien Hoornik and her children and considered marrying her; his father was strictly against this relationship and even his brother Theo advised against it. They later separated.

Impressed and influenced by Jean-François Millet, van Gogh focused on painting peasants and rural scenes. He moved to the Dutch province Drenthe, later to Nuenen, North Brabant, also in The Netherlands. Here he painted in 1885 The Potato Eaters (Dutch Aardappeleters, now in The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam).

In the winter of 1885-1886 Van Gogh attended the art academy of Antwerp, Belgium. This proved a disappointment as he was dismissed after a few months by Professor Eugène Siberdt. Van Gogh did however get in touch with Japanese art during this period, which he started to collect eagerly. He admired its bright colours, use of canvas space and the role lines played in the picture. These impressions would influence him strongly. Van Gogh made some painting in Japanese style. Also some of the portraits he painted are set against a background which shows Japanese art.

Sunflowers (1888)In spring 1886 Van Gogh went to Paris, where he moved in with his brother Theo; they shared a house on Montmartre. Here he met the painters met Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Bernard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Paul Gauguin. He discoverd impressionism and liked its use of light and colour, more than its lack of social engagement (as he saw it). Especially the technique known as pointillism (where many small dots are applied to the canvas that blend into rich colors only in the eye of the beholder, seeing it from a distance) made its mark on Van Goghs own style. It should be noted that Van Gogh is regarded as a post-impressionist, rather than an impressionist. Van Gogh also used complementary colors, especially blue and orange, in close proximity in order to enhance the brilliance of each (see color).

Cafe Terrace at Night (1888)In 1888, when city life and living with his brothers proved too much, Van Gogh left Paris and went to Arles, Bouches-du-Rhône, France. He was impressed with the local landscape and hoped to found an art colony. He decorated a "yellow house" and created a celebrated series of yellow sunflower paintings for this purpose. Only Paul Gauguin, whose simplified colour schemes and forms (known as synthetism) attracted van Gogh, followed his invitation. The admiration was mutual, and Gauguin painted van Gogh painting sunflowers. However their encounter ended in a quarrel. Van Gogh suffered a mental breakdown and cut off part of his left ear, which he gave to a startled prostitute friend. Gauguin left in December 1888.

The only painting he sold during his lifetime, The Red Vineyard, was created in 1888. It is now on display in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, Russia.

Van Gogh now exchanged painting dots for small stripes. He suffered from depression, and in 1889 on his own request Van Gogh was admitted to the psychiatric center at Monastery Saint-Paul de Mausole in Saint Remy de Provence, Bouches-du-Rhône, France. During his stay here the clinic and its garden became his main subject. Pencil strokes changed again, now into spiral curves.

In May 1890 Vincent left the clinic and went to the physician Paul Gachet, in Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris, where he was closer to his brother Theo, who had recently married. Gachet had been recommended to him by Pissarro; he had treated several artists before. Here van Gogh created his only etching: a portrait of the melancholic doctor Gachet. His depression aggravated. On July 27 of the same year, at the age of 37, after a fit of painting activity, van Gogh shot himself in the chest. He died two days later, with Theo at his side, who reported his last words as "La tristesse durera toujours" (French: "The sadness will last forever"). He was buried at the cemetery of Auvers-sur-Oise; Theo unable to come to terms with his brother's death died 6 months later and was buried next to him. It would not take long before his fame grew higher and higher. Large exhibitions were organised soon: Paris 1901, Amsterdam 1905, Cologne 1912, New York 1913 and Berlin 1914.

I'm back from my vacation...i really miss all of you and i'm very happy,'cause you've left me soo nice notes and comments!!! Kisses and hugs to all of you =)

P.S. well,it was a great holiday btw.,but i'm too lazy and too tired to write about it :P

Denica

Hey,Sweethearts,i won't be online for ten days,because i'm going on my summer vacation tomorrow =)_i'm gonna miss you all,especially some of you :)

Kisses and Hugs...and take care!!!

Bye!

Denica