Van Gogh has one of the most distinct painting styles in European art. While it may seem like a product of his individual artistic genius, this style was not developed in isolation. The Dutch artist looked up to many artists, with four masters in particular having a huge impact on him. The influence of four artists led to pivotal developments in Van Gogh’s work. These four masters were Rembrandt van Rijn, Jean-François Millet, Eugène Delacroix, and Adolphe Monticelli, each influencing a different aspect of Van Gogh’s art.

Van Gogh’s Love of Rembrandt

Vincent van Gogh and Rembrandt van Rijn are two of the biggest names in Dutch art history. It is then interesting to note the connection between the two, as Rembrandt was one of the earliest sources of influence on Van Gogh’s art. The Dutch Old Master was active two centuries before Van Gogh was born and was therefore already a well-established name during the 19th century. While living in the Netherlands, Van Gogh had some ideas about the developments in modern art in Paris, but had not yet been exposed to any of the new styles or techniques that his peers were working towards. As a result, his knowledge of painting was limited to the Dutch realist tradition, which in itself was heterogeneous.

In 1885, Van Gogh visited the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and saw Rembrandt’s painting The Jewish Bride. This allowed him to study the manner of the Old Master closely. An important thing that he learned from this close examination was that Rembrandt, along with other artists such as Frans Hals, painted quickly without revisiting the canvas too much. He noted that the canvases had minimal retouching and were essentially an arrangement of colors placed beside each other. Their technical perfection lay in the cohesive composition this arrangement produced when viewed from a distance.

Understanding this technique was significant for Van Gogh, and it stayed with him throughout his career as an artist. He started practicing it soon after his museum visit, producing the painting Still Life with Bible in one sitting. Once Van Gogh was exposed to the wonders of Impressionism and modern art in Paris in 1886, he quickly evolved his own palette and style to keep up with his peers and meet the demands of the art market. But Rembrandt’s influence stayed with him even after this transformation from the dark realist manner to the bright modern style, as most of the works that he made during his later years, particularly between 1888 and 1890, were made in one sitting.

The artist also found a way to combine the two by painting his own rendition of old works, such as The Raising of Lazarus, after Rembrandt. Both works depict stark stylistic differences as Van Gogh completely changed the color palette to incorporate bright yellows, greens, and blues in his rendition.

Millet and the Origin of a Peasant Painter

The French artist Jean-François Millet had a notable influence on Van Gogh during his early years as an artist. Millet was a member of the Barbizon school in France and focused most of his oeuvre on paintings of peasants in rural France. A particularly famous painting of his is The Gleaners from 1857. It was Millet’s authentic depictions of peasants that inspired Van Gogh to become a peasant painter. The artist lived in his family home in Nuenen between 1884 and 1885, surrounded by nature and laborers from the countryside.

Even before this, Van Gogh had spent a lot of his early life in rural Brabant, which made him develop a deep appreciation for nature. In Nuenen, Van Gogh became serious about following in the footsteps of Millet and capturing the character of peasant life. In April 1885, he wrote in a letter, “After all, I desire nothing other than to live deep in the country and to paint peasant life.” Van Gogh made a large number of paintings and drawings featuring peasants engrossed in labor, either digging the ground, picking up potatoes, or sowing the field. In addition to this, he also made 50 portraits of peasants as studies that eventually culminated in his first major painting titled The Potato Eaters in 1885.

Millet’s influence on Van Gogh’s interpretation of peasants was always evident as both artists focused on the mundane reality of peasant life. The latter described his views on painting this subject in a letter: “For my part, I’m convinced that in the long run it produces better results to paint them in their coarseness than to introduce conventional sweetness.”

Van Gogh also created several copies after Millet’s paintings throughout his life, such as The Evening (after Millet) and The Sheepshearer (after Millet), both made in 1889. But the most notable work by Millet that inspired Van Gogh was The Sower, made in 1850. Van Gogh was fascinated by this subject and Millet’s rendition of it, and made several sketches after this work. He was keen to paint a work featuring this subject, which resulted in two paintings, The Sower and The Sower with Setting Sun, both made in 1888.

Both of Van Gogh’s paintings depict stylistic differences but center on the subject of the sower who is in the midst of his work in the field, as well as the sun that holds a prominent presence behind the peasant. Van Gogh’s rendition of The Sower is stylistically different from Millet’s as the former uses brighter colors and conspicuous brushstrokes. This was due to the artist’s two-year stay in Paris, which allowed him to learn about and experiment with color and form in order to reimagine Millet’s depiction of the sower in a modern style, while maintaining the essence of the subject as a peasant who is sowing his field with an extended arm.

The Colors of Eugène Delacroix

A major shift occurred in Van Gogh’s art after 1886. During this year, he went to live with his brother in Paris and discovered the colorful palette of the Impressionists. Van Gogh had read about color theory before he arrived in Paris from the books of Charles Blanc, but only started experimenting with it in 1886. A major influence that pushed the artist to implement it in his own work came from the French artist Eugène Delacroix. Van Gogh saw Delacroix’s Christ Asleep During the Tempest in 1886 and was struck by how reds and greens were placed next to each other in the composition and the vivid effect this resulted in.

Another work by Delacroix that he saw was the ceiling painting of Apollo slaying Python in the Louvre, where the French artist put orange and green as well as yellow and purple together. While reading about color theory interested Van Gogh, it was only after he witnessed its successful employment in the works of Delacroix that he was inspired to experiment with it in his own work.

Delacroix’s use of color illustrated a modern approach, and Van Gogh was eager to try it himself. However, lacking the money to hire professional models, he settled on a different subject that allowed him to work with a variety of colors: flower still lifes. While not ideal, this genre was economical and also allowed him to experiment with a variety of different colors. The artist made thirty-five such paintings during the summer of 1886 in order to grasp the correct placement of complementary colors.

This exercise was incredibly important for the development of his style, as it was the beginning of his journey as a colorist. He remained preoccupied with color throughout the rest of his life and planned his paintings based on the color effects they would produce. The influence of Delacroix also stayed with him long after he left Paris, as he painted copies after the French artist’s work, such as Pietà (after Delacroix) in 1889 and The Good Samaritan (after Delacroix) in 1890.

Adolphe Monticelli and Van Gogh’s Use of Impasto

The most distinct stylistic feature in Van Gogh’s art is his use of the impasto technique, which refers to applying a large amount of paint thickly on the canvas. While it may seem that the artist had always adopted the impasto technique in his paintings, the reality is a bit different. Van Gogh’s intentional use of impasto only began after 1886 during his stay in Paris. This was a period of learning and experimentation. His two-year stay in Paris culminated in a completely transformed artistic style.

While working on flower still life paintings to practice color theory, Van Gogh became particularly fascinated by the works of the same genre by the French artist Adolphe Monticelli. Monticelli’s canvases were composed of a thick layer of oil paint applied with a free brush, producing an impasto effect. Van Gogh admired the spontaneous character of Monticelli’s canvases that went against the carefully calculated method of Dutch realist tradition. An example is Monticelli’s Vase of Flowers, painted in 1875, where the oil paint is distinctly visible due to the sheer amount applied to the surface. Van Gogh took inspiration from this visual effect and started incorporating impasto with freely applied brushstrokes in his works in Paris, never to look back.

The flower still lifes from 1886 show the beginnings of impasto in Van Gogh’s oeuvre. We can see this in Vase with Chinese Asters and Gladioli and Glass with Yellow Roses. In 1887, the artist began working alongside Emile Bernard, who was developing the cloisonnist style that featured large sections of color and bold outlines on a flat composition. Together, these elements created a decorative effect similar to stained glass and Japanese woodblock prints, both of which were sources of inspiration for Bernard. Van Gogh implemented these stylistic features in several paintings from his mature years, including the Sunflowers and The Bedroom from 1888-89. But even while working with flatness on the picture plane, he continued the use of impasto, as is visible on these canvases.

Painting with impasto was one of the major reasons Van Gogh ran out of paint quickly and had to ask Theo to send more supplies. However, it was a worthwhile exercise as the impasto, along with his spontaneous brushstrokes, gave Van Gogh’s canvases the sense of aliveness and passion unique to him.

Apart from these four master artists, the Dutch Post-Impressionist was also deeply influenced by Japanese prints, Neo-Impressionism, as well as the works of his peers Emile Bernard and Paul Gauguin. Ironically, a few of these artists have gained recognition today specifically as sources of inspiration for Van Gogh. In addition to all these influences, it was ultimately Van Gogh’s dedication to learning about color and technique that resulted in a highly distinct oeuvre that showcases his stylistic individuality.

At 87 years old, David Hockney is still a practicing and immensely successful artist. Although he was trained as a traditional figurative artist, he became famous for his simplified compositions of swimming pools and natural scenes painted in vivid colors. Despite his age, Hockney does not shy away from technology and eagerly incorporates devices like the iPhone and iPad into his art production. Read on to learn more about David Hockney’s paintings and the inspiration behind them.

David Hockney’s Early Years: The Origins of His Artistic Style

David Hockney is one of the most famous artists associated with the Pop Art movement. Despite this immediate link with the art of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Hockney has already outgrown the confines of a single movement and developed his own signature style and look. Although deliberately simple, his works capture the audiences due to their pure color and direct forms of expression.

Hockney was born in 1937 in England and was one of five children in a rather eccentric family. His father was an accountant and an eccentric social activist. He refused to serve in World War II on the grounds of his political beliefs and wrote personal letters to world leaders, calling for immediate nuclear disarmament. Hockney’s mother was a Methodist and vegetarian, and although she was much less expressive than her husband, she equally supported their children’s interest in arts.

In 1953, Hockney began his art school studies, later enrolling in the Royal College of Art in London. His basic training was based on traditional methods of art education, such as drawing and painting from nature and live models or copying other artists’ work. His earliest known work is a 1954 portrait of his mother seated next to her sewing machine.

In college, Hockney began to explore more avant-garde forms of art. In tune with trends, he experimented with abstraction and the style of Jean Dubuffet, the promoter of outsider art. Many of the works from that period reflected Hockney’s identity as a young gay man in a country that did not decriminalize homosexuality until 1967. Despite his early experiments with the non-figurative, quite soon, Hockney realized he was not interested in abstract art, as he wanted to depict only the material world around him.

Hockney’s Californian Period

In 1964, Hockney visited Los Angeles for the first time and soon moved to California to teach art at Berkeley. The transformed surroundings triggered a transformation in Hockney’s painting style. He noticed that people in California were less tense than in New York, where he previously stayed, and that the sunlight and bright colors created an atmosphere incomparable to any other location. In California, Hockney created many of his most famous works, inspired by the colors and lifestyle of the state.

Hockney’s Swimming Pool Series

Undoubtedly, the most famous works of Hockney’s Californian period were also the ones that made him truly popular as an artist. Starting in 1966, he began painting images of swimming pools, strangely still with the only exception of a water splash in the center of each canvas. Despite traces of human presence, like the splash or the empty director’s seat in the background, the scenes were completely empty.

According to Hockney, he did not think about who jumped in the pool or who was present at the scene. Initially, he saw a photograph of a water splash and was mesmerized by the stillness of the shot and the captured moment. Hockney painted his pools almost entirely using paint rollers, spreading acrylic paint evenly and thinly. However, to accurately capture the splash, he used thin brushes and meticulously repeated every detail from his reference photographs. This gesture also positioned his art as an alternative to then-popular drip paintings of the Abstract Expressionist scene.

David Hockney’s Portraits

Another significant part of David Hockney’s oeuvre was a vast collection of portraits that he painted over his entire career. Beginning in the 1960s, Hockney created numerous portraits of his family members, friends, lovers, colleagues, and important figures from the art world who sat for him. He also painted hundreds of self-portraits that depicted the evolution of his artistic style and persona.

Hockney’s portrait style is, as that of his other works, deliberately simple. In most cases, it relies on a shoulder-up image or a seated figure. In the 1970s, however, Hockney painted larger portraits that featured figures in interiors. His most recent painted work that went viral was the 2023 portrait of singer Harry Styles.

Hockney’s Multi-Panel Landscapes: Bigger Grand Canyon

In 1982, David Hockney traveled to see the Great Canyon in Arizona. Impressed by the size and the colors of the space, the artist took numerous photographs of it, but none of them seemed to do it justice. More than a decade later, Hockney decided to paint it, using 60 small canvases that he arranged into a grid. According to Hockney, his Bigger Grand Canyon was an attempt to capture the uncapturable, fitting the enormous size and overwhelming impression of the Canyon into paintings.

The main inspiration for the work came to Hockney through his research of Chinese art. In Chinese tradition, artists often created painted scrolls with landscapes that showed the transformation of one scene during different seasons. The vivid and expressive paintings of Hockney attempted to do exactly that, representing different times of the day and year at once.

Hockney-Falco Thesis

In the late 1990s, David Hockney expanded his artistic input to the domain of art theories. While visiting an exhibition of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’ work, Hockney noticed incredibly subtle and realistic details of the light, draped fabric of dresses, and jewelry. He thought of artists like Andy Warhol and Audrey Flack, who created photorealistic images by projecting photographs onto canvas and tracing them. This led Hockney to suggest that Ingres possibly could have used mirrors or devices that could project images, like camera obscura or camera lucida.

For several years, Hockney studied Western art from the Middle Ages to the modern era and came to the conclusion that most famous artists of the Renaissance and early modernity used various kinds of optic devices. For instance, he claimed that the famous Arnolfini family portrait was painted by Jan van Eyck using a large curved mirror that projected the image of his models onto a wooden board. He also insisted that the degree of realism demonstrated by those skilled painters of past centuries was impossible to achieve without technical advancements.

Hockney’s theory was well-received by the general, amateur public. However, both art historians and optics scientists strongly objected to his ideas. For instance, in van Eyck’s time, the production of a mirror large enough to fit the entire scene was impossible. Moreover, the realistic image of a couple has several mistakes in angles and proportions that could have been avoided if van Eyck had relied on any kind of optic device. The idea that offended experts the most, however, was Hockney’s disbelief in the power of artistic skill of trained practicing artists. To disprove Hockney’s point, his opponents used the help of several contemporary painters who painted realistic fragments of famous paintings without any technical help.

David Hockney’s iPad Paintings

Over the decades of his career, David Hockney was never afraid to explore and experiment with new technology. Since the 1980s, he experimented with various computer programs to paint and create collages. Since 2009, he has used his iPhone and iPad as artistic mediums, creating landscape paintings, still lifes, and portraits. Hockney views technology as an exciting alternative to traditional art making, which requires materials, space, and time to prepare the workspace.

Painting on one’s phone allows for an unprecedented immediacy of impression, form, and color. Moreover, it creates more possibilities to share art with others. According to Hockney, every day, he paints a bouquet of flowers on his iPhone and sends it to his friends so that they can get fresh flowers every day.

Inspired by Claude Monet, Hockney created a series of iPad paintings depicting water lilies and other flowers from his garden in Normandy. In terms of convenience and immediate artistic response, such paintings can be interpreted as the continuation of the Impressionist plein-air tradition. After the invention of portable paint tubes, artists could leave the walls of the studio and paint directly on sight.

The Art Nouveau movement was an international style of art and architecture that celebrated natural forms and decorative excess. One of the main inspirations of Art Nouveau was American dancer Loïe Fuller, who developed a new dance style that relied not only on choreography but on stage light and set design. Read on to learn more about Art Nouveau artists inspired by dancers and their movement.

Art Nouveau and Dance

The refined style of Art Nouveau became popular in the 1890s and defined an entire cultural era with its ornate excess and a long list of inspirations. In contrast to the rigid academic standards that promoted order and harmony, Art Nouveau was loud, maximalist, and dynamic, with naturally curved lines, ornamentation, and details.

Some historians believe that the development of the Art Nouveau style, with its deliberate irrationality and free-flowing forms, was partially provoked by the philosophical ideas of Henri Bergson and his followers. Bergson opposed the overwhelming and rigid belief in rationalism and presented intuition as a legitimate form of cognition and learning. The interest in irrational forms of knowledge stimulated new forms and canon of art.

Another key influence was the growing prominence of Japanese and Egyptian art, expressed by the newly established contact with Japan and the ongoing archaeological research in Egypt. New forms and expressive categories were added to the tired Western artistic canon, calling artists to experiment with decorations and meanings.

The development of modern dance styles and practices also contributed to the movement’s growth, although more in terms of plastic language than ideology. The classical ballet dancing, which was the accepted form of dance, was deemed outdated and too limited to express the full range of human emotion. Moreover, thanks to Edgar Degas’ input, ballet dancers became associated with the Impressionist movement, which, by the turn of the century, already lost its progressive fleur and felt dated and insufficient. To inspire forms and aesthetics, Art Nouveau had to find its own form of dynamic movement.

The Transformation of Modern Dance

By the end of the 19th century, ballet schools served not as developers of the choreographic tradition but as rigid keepers of it. Although such schools had a dubious reputation (in Degas’ time, ballet companies were akin to elite brothels), the true artistic innovation in the domain of dance was happening in places that were even more morally questionable. Cabarets and vaudevilles, as unserious and frivolous forms of dance, were free to experiment with styles and settings. Due to the rising popularity and variety of performances, full-time dancers began to earn significant amounts of money.

One of the most scandalous and revolutionary forms of dance was can-can, an energetic dance that was based on high kicks and acrobatic elements, accompanied by the movement of multi-layered heavy skirts. These skirts, as well as the undergarments (or lack thereof) under them, created an erotic sensation and also added visual complexity to otherwise unsophisticated movements.

The idea of manipulating not only the dancer’s body but their costume was further developed in the so-called skirt dances—routines performed in long layered skirts. Dancers would move the skirt layers to make the fabric move with their bodies, creating a dynamic effect. These curved swirling lines would be adapted by Art Nouveau artists thanks to the involvement of one particular dancer named Loïe Fuller.

Who Was Loïe Fuller, the Dancing Muse of Art Nouveau?

Loïe Fuller was born in the Chicago suburbs in 1862 and began performing at the age of 4. Her childhood consisted of endless rehearsals, performances, and tours, earning her a name at quite an early age. However, as Fuller grew up, she realized she had ambitions for her own production and moved to London to stage a play. Ultimately, the project failed, and Fuller had to take a regular dancer’s job at a local skirt dance theater. Her encounter with this specific type of dance shaped her entire career and made her one of the most famous performers of her era. Fuller’s career lasted for more than thirty years, with her accomplishments including not just performing but running a dance school and ballet company.

Fuller’s appearance and figure were far removed from the long and slim Art Nouveau ideal, but her skill at self-presentation, inventiveness, and talent made her a living embodiment of the movement aesthetic. She was a celebrity and a friend of many famous artists like Franz von Stuck, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Maurice Denis. Her keen interest in science resulted in her friendship with Marie Curie and membership in the French Astronomical Society.

The Serpentine Dance

The invention that made Loïe Fuller famous and shaped the aesthetic of Art Nouveau was the Serpentine Dance. Fuller took the best from the skirt dances she performed in London and developed it into a new dance form. She specifically designed a stage dress, sewing silk and inserting bamboo rods into her sleeves, allowing her to manipulate the fabric more easily. She discarded traditionally demanded corsetry in favor of natural unrestricted movement.

Apart from costume design, Fuller understood the need for set manipulations. Impressed by Paris city illumination, she came up with specific light effects that contributed to the effect of her performances. She invented and patterned several stage light technologies, including colored gelatin plates that would project brightly colored rays onto her dress. Thus, she swirled on stage as a burning flame, a flowing stream, or a blooming flower, in constant movement that was further enhanced by light effects and occasional gusts of air directed by her assistants through a system of manholes on stage.

Loïe Fuller made a sensation during the 1900 Universal Exposition, where she was the only woman performer with her own pavilion. Part of her worldwide success was provided by modern-era technology, as she was frequently photographed and even filmed. Her hypnotizing and well-directed acts recorded on film acted both as her promotion and the demonstration of the camera’s possibilities.

The ability to capture a moment of movement in a photograph greatly helped artists collect references and find new angles for their work. The complex and aesthetically appealing drapes of her dress were soon translated into the language of paint, porcelain, and glass. Sculptures, paintings, vases, lamps, and other objects featuring Fuller’s swirling figure became a trend, and the long curved lines derived from it turned into an Art Nouveau staple. Soon, Serpentine Dance was performed by both self-made imitators and followers trained personally by Fuller, turning into a major obsession both in Europe and the US.

Dance by Alphonse Mucha

Czech-born Alphonse Mucha was the most famous of Art Nouveau masters who rose to fame almost by accident. As an immigrant in Paris, he struggled to find a well-paid design job. Chance brought him to Sarah Bernhardt, the famous actress who urgently needed a poster for her new show. Impressed by the result, Bernhards offered Mucha a six-year contract, almost immediately making him famous.

In 1898, Mucha created a series of lithographs, The Arts, dedicated to four different forms of art: Painting, Poetry, Music, and Dance. Instead of demonstrating connection through traditional attributes like brushes or musical instruments, Mucha expressed the essence of each form through dynamism and links to the forces of nature. Dance was the most dynamic of all figures, blown by a gust of wind and twirling among fallen leaves. The moving draperies of the dancer’s dress are reminiscent of those of Loïe Fuller and are present through many of Mucha’s works. The artist usually worked with photographic references for his works and was aware of a sensation made by Fuller and many of her imitators.

Gustav Klimt’s Dancer: Art Nouveau Painting Inspired by a Tragedy

Another famous dance-related Art Nouveau painting was Gustav Klimt’s Dancer—a tragic tribute to a lost life. Dancer was one of three paintings Klimt created on the commission of his patron, Alexander Munk. Munk’s daughter Ria committed suicide after her fiance broke off their engagement. The first painting of three, which depicts Ria on her deathbed, was rejected by her mother, as she believed it was too realistic. Dancer was the second work that was also not accepted, as Klimt struggled to remember Ria’s face accurately. Still content with the composition, he decided not to waste the almost finished work and repainted the figure’s face to resemble Johanna Jusl, Klimt’s model and the Vienna State Opera dancer. In that context, the figure’s partial nudity that symbolized the tragedy (Ria shot herself in the chest) turned into an emblem of sensuality.

Best known in the art world as the birthplace of Vincent van Gogh, The Netherlands has a rich artistic history. When Van Gogh and his French contemporaries like Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin, and the Symbolists were making their mark on the evolution of modern European art during the long 19th century, a community of Dutch artists flourished in The Netherlands. These artists, while not world-famous, were vital to Dutch culture and participated in movements like Amsterdam Impressionism. They are celebrated in the country to this day.

1. Dutch Modern Artist Hendrik Willem Mesdag (1831-1915)

Being introduced to art from an early age by his father, Hendrik Willem Mesdag went on to build a significant artistic legacy in the Netherlands. The artist initially worked as a merchant at his father’s company but quit his day job to train as an artist in Brussels in 1866. His wife, Sientje van Houten, was also a painter and worked alongside her husband. The couple were collectors of contemporary Dutch and French art, and their collection is known as the Mesdag Collection. It has been owned by the state since 1903.

The collection can be seen at the museum De Mesdag Collectie, located next to the Mesdag house in The Hague. A large part of Mesdag’s oeuvre comprises seascapes. The artist was captivated by the ocean and moved to The Hague in 1869 to remain close to the Scheveningen, a fishing village close to the city. Today, Mesdag is best known for his Panorama of Scheveningen, the largest painting in The Netherlands.

Panorama of Scheveningen (1881)

The Panorama of Scheveningen is a 360-degree painting of a fishing village. It depicts the sea, the beach full of people and horses, and fishing boats. It can be viewed by standing in the center of it, on the highest dune in the area called Seinpostduin. The Panorama of Scheveningen is still in its original place, which is unusual for a painting of this size. This masterpiece was not solely completed by Mesdag. He was helped by his wife, Sientje Mesdag-van Houten, as well as other artists, including Bernard Blommers, George Breitner, and Théophile de Bock. The Panorama of Scheveningen opened to the public in 1881 and can still be enjoyed today, among other works by the Mesdags, at the Museum Panorama Mesdag in The Hague.

2. George Hendrik Breitner (1857-1923)

Born in 1857 in Rotterdam, George Breitner is best known for his depictions of Amsterdam city life. He trained at several schools, including the Hague Academy, the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, and Académie Cormon in Paris (known for being a frequently visited spot among French modern artists and Van Gogh). Breitner also briefly worked with Van Gogh in 1882, at the beginning of the latter’s artistic career.

Breitner was also active in a literary group called the Tachtigers, which promoted the shift from Romanticism to Impressionism. However, unlike the French Impressionists, Breitner used somber colors in his paintings while employing fluid Impressionist brushwork. In addition to being a painter, Breitner was also a photographer, and his affinity for photography is reflected in his paintings.

The Singel Bridge at the Paleisstraat in Amsterdam (1896)

This painting is a typical example of Breitner’s use of photographic elements as well as the Impressionist style in his paintings. This work depicts a regular moment from a winter scene on the busy streets of Amsterdam. The frame of this scene is cut off abruptly at the bottom as in a photograph, which is also a result of Breitner’s use of photographs as references for painting. The people depicted in this painting are common folk, which was a regular occurrence in Breitner’s works as the artist described himself as the painter of the people.

3. Richard Roland Holst (1868-1938)

Richard Roland Holst was a versatile artist who dabbled in painting, lithography, sculpture, furniture design, illustration, glass painting, and woodcuts, among other things. He decided to pursue art at a very early age, which was made possible due to his privileged background. In the later years of his career, Holst embraced the theoretical side of art and became a professor of art history at the Rijksacademie in 1918.

As an artist, Holst was inspired by the growing Arts and Crafts movement in Europe towards the end of the 19th century. After coming across works by British designer William Morris, he decided to commit himself entirely to lithographic printmaking. Holst was also an early supporter of Van Gogh. In 1892, two years after the latter’s death, an exhibition was organized dedicated to Van Gogh’s works, for which Holst made the catalog cover as a lithograph depicting a drooping sunflower with the name Vincent etched under it.

A Socialist Artist

Despite coming from an elite family, Holst was sympathetic to the socialist cause and joined the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (SDAP) in 1897. He made prints and posters for the party and was eventually commissioned by a trade union to paint murals about the history of the labor movement in the Netherlands. His wife, socialist poet Henriëtte van der Schalk, wrote accompanying texts for his works. Holst’s murals can still be viewed today at the Trade Union Museum in Amsterdam.

4. Johann Georg van Caspel (1870-1928)

Johann Georg van Caspel was one of the first commercial artists in The Netherlands. His oeuvre is full of advertisement prints and posters, as well as catalogs, calendars, and book covers. In 1896, he received a permanent position with Senefelder commercial printers, becoming the first artist to do so in The Netherlands. Commercial prints were new to the country at the time, which made Van Caspel a pioneer in this art form.

The artist mostly worked in the Art Nouveau style and was also influenced by Japanese prints. The perspective employed in his prints was inspired by Japanese art, as the subjects were placed off-center. Van Caspel’s prints feature various typographies, bold outlines, and bright, eye-catching colors common in advertisements. Although the artist is not renowned today, Van Caspel’s style and contribution to early advertising material are an important legacy for commercial printmaking in the Netherlands.

5. Isaac Israëls (1865-1934)

Isaac Israëls was the son of Jozef Israëls, a prominent Dutch painter from The Hague School. With a familial background in painting, Isaac Israëls became an active participant in the modern art movement in The Netherlands. However, his aim was to stand out from his father’s legacy and build a name for himself. This meant leaving behind the landscape paintings that the artists of the Hague School were known for, as well as painting the city life of Amsterdam. As a contemporary of Breitner, Israëls also painted the leisurely aspects of city life, with most of his work depicting scenes from streets, shops, and cafes.

His works resembled those of the Impressionists with their quick brushstrokes that capture a fleeting moment, emphasis on mundane moments from daily life, and the abruptly cut frame of the painting, resembling a photograph. Israëls and Breitner soon became prominent members of Amsterdam Impressionism and offered healthy competition to one another.

Series of Portraits Featuring Van Gogh’s Works (1915-20)

One of Israëls’ most important works includes a series of portraits he painted between 1915-20 featuring Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. The Sunflowers were lent to him by Van Gogh’s sister-in-law, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger. Israëls was quite fond of Van Gogh and was deeply influenced by his use of bright colors as a means of emotional expression. However, he was not interested in copying the Sunflowers but in using them as an element in his own works. Some of the works from the series include An Elegant Lady Posing Before the Sunflowers of Vincent van Gogh, Woman Standing in Front of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, and Nude Before ‘Sunflowers’ by Van Gogh. It is noticeable that Israëls captured the Sunflowers in his own style and did not make them the center of attention in his composition.

6. Jan Toorop (1858-1928)

Jan Toorop was a versatile modern artist who began his career with Amsterdam Impressionism and later developed his oeuvre according to Pointillism, Symbolism, and Art Nouveau. He was born on the Indonesian island of Java but soon moved to The Netherlands and studied art at the Rijksacademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam and the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. Toorop was the most modern Dutch artist of his time. Throughout his career, he remained open to new developments in art and learned new techniques to experiment with different methods of expression through painting. He mastered each style before moving on to the next.

This openness to new ideas and Toorop’s travels to France and Belgium inspired his Dutch contemporaries, who, through him, became aware of international developments in art. Moreover, Toorop supported the feminist agenda and even designed the poster for the National Exhibition of Women’s Labour, held in 1898.

Dutch Modern Artist’s Slaolistijl

Toorop had a dynamic career that went beyond painting and included graphic design for books and ceramics. He is particularly famous for his Art Nouveau works, such as his commercial lithograph to promote Delft salad oil in The Netherlands. Because this lithograph gained so much popularity, the Art Nouveau style became known as the slaolistijl (meaning salad oil style) in The Netherlands after Toorop’s work.

Wassily Kandinsky’s decisive turn toward art happened relatively late in his life. Until his thirties, he was a promising lawyer. His vision transformed after encountering the bright and diverse folk art in remote Russian villages where he traveled to study local interpretations of law. Instead of simply creating and observing art, the locals lived in it, with their houses, household objects, and clothes entirely covered with ornaments. The same idea of entering art rather than turning one’s gaze on it Wassily Kandinsky later applied to his abstract works.

Wassily Kandinsky’s Childhood: The Origins of His Abstract Art

Wassily Kandinsky was a rare painter who left behind not only his artistic work but a written testimony of the formative events of his early years that made him an artist. In his autobiographical essay, he recounted his childhood memories of color: green, brown, and white of freshly cut tree branches in the family’s garden, the black waters of Florence where his mother took him to travel, the yellow of a toy horse his aunt gave him. Thirty years after receiving this gift, on the day he decided to become an artist, he saw the same horse in the streets of Munich, this time alive, and interpreted it as a symbolic approval of his decision.

Although he was born in Moscow, Wassily Kandinsky had a complex ethnic heritage. His grandmother was German, and thus the family frequently spoke German at home. His father’s side of the family originated from the Evenki people, an Indigenous group of North Asia. Kandinsky’s grandfather was a gang leader who attacked trade expeditions in Siberia. After being arrested, he managed to avoid punishment and open a completely legal business enterprise, building a fortune for the family. Such a diverse family background provided Kandinsky with different cultural influences and impressions.

Kandinsky had artistic inclinations since his childhood. He remembered that drawing and painting were the only things for him that immersed him completely as a child as if placing him somewhere outside of time and space. However, he hardly ever thought of making it his career at first, preferring the conventional occupation of a lawyer. Still, art was always around him and always excited him. He remembered seeing a red ring of the Kremlin wall, pierced by a strict white column of the bell tower. The tower’s gilded dome appeared to him in the dimming evening light as another sun slowly descended upon the city. Obsessed with this image, Kandinsky wanted to paint it but did not yet have the means or skills to convey it the way he wanted to. It would take him years to finally find his artistic path and turn his memory into a coherent image.

Another formative aesthetic experience for Kandinsky was his first encounter with Richard Wagner’s music during his student years. The famous opera Lohengrin, based on a medieval German romance, in Kandinsky’s mind entirely corresponded to the image of old Moscow in the pre-evening hours he was so struck by. Shocked and mesmerized, Kandinsky made a parallel between visual arts and music for the first time.

Kandinsky’s Trip to Vologda

Another influential event in Kandinsky’s life that opened his eyes to Russian heritage and the new progressive style of painting was his 1889 trip to the Vologda region north of Moscow. At the time, Kandinsky was just 23 years old and was sent there on an ethnographic expedition to remote villages. His two main objectives were to study the interpretation and application of Russian law in these areas and to search for the remnants of pagan practices and beliefs in Orthodox communities separated from the mainstream church.

Kandinsky frequently painted during his law studies and recounted his experiences and memories of color. However, he was still not entirely sure what to do with them. He visited museums and exhibitions and studied the works of great artists like Rembrandt. Still, his inspiration came from an unexpected source. Kandinsky joined the expedition later than the rest of the group and had to travel for days through deep, dark forests. This meditative experience prepared him for what he was about to see. His first impression came from the village locals, who were dressed so brightly and so vividly that Kandinsky, used to a somber and reserved palette of the city, compared them to walking paintings.

Another wave of shock came from their homes. Despite living in poverty and having little to eat apart from oat-based bread, they covered their houses both inside and outside with carvings, textiles, and paintings. These people did not see art—they inhabited it. Over the painted walls, shelves, and stoves, they hung colorful prints and tapestries. All these elements were painted so vividly and boldly that the subject matter literally dissolved in them, turning into an expressive ornament.

Later, Kandinsky remembered that for the first time in his life, he realized how to stop looking at art and start living in it. These painted houses immersed him into a completely different reality rich with aesthetic and emotional experiences. Once triggered, these experiences began traveling with him, reappearing again in old Catholic and Orthodox churches and next to some outstanding pieces of art. Years later, he would learn to recreate it and incorporate it into his abstract works, making the experience the central element of a painting. In his Expressionist years, Kandinsky would often paint folk characters and magical scenes inspired by tales.

Kandinsky & Orthodox Icons

Kandinsky finally abandoned his law career in 1896 and began studying art to make it his full-time job. At the time, he already employed influences from his native culture. After his experience in Vologda, he began collecting lubki—printed graphic works that were sold at provincial fairs and used as home decor. Lubki depicted religious, folkloric, or even mundane scenes and were usually similar to comic strips, presenting text and images together in several sequences.

Another crucial influence for Kandinsky was the centuries-long tradition of Orthodox Christian icons. At the beginning of the 20th century, many Russian artists finally recognized this art as an independent form with its unique plastic qualities. In 1911, Henri Matisse arrived in Moscow and was struck by the icon style he had never encountered before. Kandinsky was an Orthodox Christian, but his interest in sacred images went far beyond ritualistic purposes. He believed that painterly qualities gave way more expression in these images than the actual subject matter. The radical and easily recognizable stylization of Orthodox works distanced them from the material world and approached the viewer to the domain of the immaterial and non-figurative.

Many of Kandinsky’s early abstract works were inspired by religious Orthodox scenes or figures. His abstract paintings of saints, such as the series centered around the figure of Saint George, presented not iconographically correct images, but rather their spiritual and emotional essence. Devoid of clearly readable subject matter, these works were meant to convey the same spiritual state as the original icons. Another popular concept for Kandinsky’s abstract works was the Genesis flood myth, in which God chose to wipe off the entire world except for Noah, his family, and some animals. The flood myth in its various forms was popular in different cultures and represented renewal through destruction.

Wassily Kandinsky in Germany: His Abstract Art and German Heritage

Despite having worked with abstract art since the 1910s, Kandinsky did not completely abandon figurative art. In 1914, after the outbreak of World War I, he was forced to leave Germany and return to Moscow. There, he once again remembered his native culture, creating several series of fantasy-like paintings of folk characters, castles, and forests, typical for Russian fairy tales. These collections of images were not a step back in his exploration, but rather a logical offshoot of it. Highly decorative forms hardly relied on natural forms, bending and molding painted reality in a manner that defied all natural laws.

One of Kandinsky’s most well-researched and appreciated artistic periods was his return to Germany in 1921 and his years in the Bauhaus. The newly formed Soviet Union rejected the artist, discarding his ideas as absurd. In the Bauhaus, the new progressive art school launched by architect Walter Gropius, he found a responsive and interested audience. He was also able to unite many of his influences and fragments of vast knowledge into an extensive study program that would raise a new generation of radical contemporary artists and designers.

While working in Germany, Kandinsky often highlighted his Russian identity—perhaps, due to the flair of exoticism it gave him. Kandinsky’s Asian features, reserved temper, and the sheer strangeness of his art led to all kinds of assumptions about him and his works. German critics speculated about the influence of Byzantine art on his work. While Kandinsky had certainly studied it, he primarily drew on distinctly Russian Orthodox art forms. Some accused him of promoting anarchism, and others called him The Red Commissar, hinting at his stereotypically implied connection to the Soviet government.

Sigmar Polke was a German artist born during World War II. As a young artist in post-war divided Germany, his creative aspirations were to rethink the past decades and create art that would admit and own the trauma and guilt and still be innovative. Polke experimented with Pop Art and photography and launched complex chemical reactions right in his paintings. Read on to learn more about Sigmar Polke and his art.

1. Sigmar Polke Represented the Generation of Post-War German Artists

Sigmar Polke lived through a traumatic yet immensely important and culturally rich era of German art. Born in Poland during World War II, he and his family were forcibly moved to East Germany in 1945 as German citizens. In 1953, the family escaped the communist regime and settled in West Germany. There, he started to visit galleries and museums and even spent a year working as an apprentice at a stained glass factory. Soon, he began studying art professionally.

German post-war artists, who were trying to reflect upon the events of World War II, war crimes, and responsibility, largely believed that the old art, which was focused on depictions of the external world, proved itself inadequate to reality. In a world after concentration camps, gas chambers, and nuclear bombs, any attempt to address physical reality was useless. Thus, the new type of art had to be directed inward, reflecting artists’ inner emotions and impulses. This idea gave rise to large-scale gestural abstract art that was focused on the act of painting itself as the ultimate creative expression.

2. His Teachers Were Karl Otto Götz and Joseph Beuys

Sigmar Polke studied at the Dusseldorf Art Academy. His instructors were two artists who embodied the complexity of German war trauma. Karl Otto Götz was a former Bauhaus student who started his career in the late 1920s. He began his experiments with abstract art in the 1930s, and after the Nazis came to power, he was officially forbidden to paint, like many artists of his generation. Distressed and afraid, Götz continued to work discreetly.

During the war, Götz was drafted and served as a signal officer in Norway. In 1944, he was discharged and moved to Dresden, where he witnessed the destruction of the city by the Allies’ bombs. At the same time, most of his early art was destroyed. After the war, Götz resumed his experiments with art techniques and mediums. Apart from abstraction, he worked with video art and printmaking and started a teaching career.

Joseph Beuys was famous as one of the key artists of European performance. He had a difficult and controversial life story: during the war, he voluntarily joined the Luftwaffe and was stationed in the Crimea. In 1944, his plane crashed, and, according to Beuys, he was found and nursed back to health by a Crimean Tatar shaman. After recovering, he allegedly quit the army and decided to become an artist. However, most art historians today reject the story about Crimean Tatars as a self-made myth and doubt that he really denounced his Nazi ties. Still, in the 1960s, Beuys became one of the most influential artists of his time.

3. He Invented Capitalist Realism

As an artist who grew up in East Germany, Sigmar Polke was all too familiar with the dominating art ideology of Socialist Realism. Socialist Realism began in the Soviet Union as an artificially established art style that idealized life under Socialism, promoted Soviet values and achievements, and glorified leaders, exemplary workers, and other notable citizens. Socialist Realism was enthusiastic but too good to be true and rarely corresponded to reality. It was a utopian dream that was so aggressively imposed on culture that it provoked aversion.

Sigmar Polke and other artists of his generation, many of whom escaped East Germany, kept in mind that they were demanded to believe in the artificial aesthetic. As an act of protest, Polke and his colleagues devised a movement called Capitalist Realism, a radical opposition to the world they grew up in. In May 1963, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, and Konrad Lueg presented their first exhibition, Demonstration for Capitalist Realism, in a supermarket in Dusseldorf.

Apart from opposing the aesthetic of Socialist Realism, their art also commented upon the capitalist consumer culture in West Germany, which was mostly driven by American goods and supplies. The visual language of Capitalist Realism was similar to European Pop Art, which became prominent in Great Britain in the 1950s. However, Polke was hardly aware of the presence of Pop Art in the USA and UK at the time. His creative experiments were fueled by the same sources: American films, magazines, advertisements, and consumerism. At the same time, Polke’s artworks of this period rarely incorporated brands and logos as elements of his work; instead, he referred to the catchy but uniform packaging style.

4. He Was Friends With Gerhard Richter

One of the most important figures in Sigmar Polke’s life was another great German artist, Gerhard Richter. Both artists shared the experience of escaping East Germany and they studied in Dusseldorf. In 1966, they had another group exhibition in which they presented photography and collages made through collaboration. Richter became famous for his large-scale abstract canvases and for manipulating photography. He treated printed images with chemicals, painted over them, and experimented with glass sculpture.

5. He Was an Alchemist of Art

Endless experimentation was at the core of Sigmar Polke’s art. One of his long-term experiments was alchemical manipulation with pigments, acids, and metals. He turned fabrics transparent by threatening them with chemicals, created green paint based on arsenic to recreate the Victorian-era dyeing practice, and mixed pigments that would react to humidity and temperature inside the gallery room.

Impermanence and transformation were important elements of Polke’s work. His paintings changed appearances depending on the angle of the viewer and transformed over time through slow chemical reactions. That way, every time someone encountered Polke’s work, they met it in a new and unique state of existence that could not be replicated.

6. He Worked With the Difficult History of His Culture

In 1976, thirty-five-year-old Polke shocked the public at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf during the opening of his first retrospective exhibition. Upon agreeing to the project, he insisted that he would be in charge of the exhibition design and hanging rather than local curators. He refused to show any plans or preliminary results to the museum’s team, although they were not as suspicious about it as they should have been.

On the day of the opening, the public arrived to find half of the paintings unpacked and still wrapped in protective materials and the other half lying face down on the floor. Worse was the wooden gate that greeted the guests. Over it, Polke hammered the letters KUNST MACHT FREI (“art makes you free”), a gruesome reference to the infamous ARBEIT MACHT FREI (“work makes you free”), the slogan found on the gates of several concentration camps. Behind the gate, there were more works by Polke, similarly turned with their backs to the viewers. In that enclosed space, art was non-functional and meaningless; thus, the reworked slogan was as meaningless as its cruel original. In his other works, Polke frequently used imagery that related to the Nazi regime and concentration camps.

7. He Often Gave Weird Titles to His Works

Another famous feature of Sigmar Polke’s art was his penchant for inventing weird and nonsensical titles for his artworks. Names such as Apparatus Whereby One Potato Can Orbit Another, Franz Liszt Likes to Come to Me to Watch TV or Oversalted Food May Be Fixed if You Put a Newspaper Sheet Under the Carpet added an element of absurdity to his works. Some of them mimicked tips for housewives from magazines, while others sounded like fragments of a random overheard conversation. Some art critics saw these titles as the mockery of the contemporary art world and the absurd titles of abstract paintings that were in no way connected to the imagery.

8. Sigmar Polke Avoided Public Attention

For many years, Sigmar Polke was known as a reclusive character who avoided the press and rarely spoke about his work in public. His photographs were even carefully edited to remove any personal information that could be deduced from objects around the artist. He even occasionally gave incorrect studio addresses to interviewers to avoid contact. He never explained his works and deliberately published the most confusing and misleading accounts of his life and art. Sigmar Polke died in 2010 from cancer complications. His art remains highly influential and esteemed by both critics and collectors.

Brassaï was one of the most influential and innovative French photographers. Born in Hungary, he moved to Berlin and then to Paris. In France, he was charmed by the gloomy other side of Paris, filled with underground bars and nightclubs. He was also a close friend of Pablo Picasso. His work inspired many photographers, artists, and designers, including Diane Arbus and John Galliano. Read on to learn more about Brassaï and his art.

1. Brassaï Was a Hungarian Immigrant

The man who would later become known as Brassaï was born Gyula Halasz in 1899 in Brasso, the Kingdom of Hungary (present-day Brașov in Romania). His artistic pseudonym originated directly from his native land, loosely translated as the one from Brasso. The city was and still remains a perfect setting for a dark fairytale with its gothic cathedrals and pine forests.

His father was a professor of French literature at a local university who taught at the Sorbonne for several years, so young Gyula had extensive exposure to Western culture. He was part of the generation of Hungarian creatives who left the country at the beginning of the 20th century, establishing careers in other countries.

After World War I, Brasso was transferred to Romania and became Brașov. Guyla Halasz moved to Berlin, where he worked as a news reporter for Hungarian newspapers. Still, the impression of French culture he received from his father was too strong, and he soon started learning French by reading untranslated novels by Marcel Proust.

2. He Started His Career as a Painter

Like many photographers of his era, Brassaï’s initial artistic training was focused on painting. Similarly to Man Ray and others, his ambitions soon outgrew a single medium, leading him to explore photography and its documentary and artistic potential. He studied fine art in Budapest and was enamored with the style of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Lautrec’s influence later made a conceptual comeback in Brassaï’s photographic works.

As a child of an aristocratic family, Toulouse-Lautrec was alienated from the noble circle due to his disability and found himself comfortable enough in the company of dancers, circus performers, sex workers, and queer Parisians, all falling out of the societal categories of respectability.

No information about Brassaï’s pre-photographic work remained, yet his obsession with sculpture preserved itself in his later creations. The 1932 series Involuntary Sculptures captures random pieces of paper crumpled, torn, or folded in unconscious gestures of strangers. From worthless trash, these pieces turned into abstract sculptural forms rivaling the works of Constantin Brancusi and Jean Arp.

3. Brassaï Worked in Places Everyone Else Avoided

Friends called him the Eye of Paris and claimed he could see behind the superficial air of theatrical disguise, catching things and people in their truest forms. He had ambitions for filmmaking, too, envisioning scenarios and proposing ideas to his friends, but they usually required way too much courage and boldness to actually film.

As his colleagues noted, Brassaï had a remarkable talent for conversations, both in talking and in listening. This talent made him welcome almost everywhere, from a posh restaurant for the upper class to an underground brothel frequented by criminals.

Brassaï preferred to film at night, believing that the images were more emotionally charged that way. In 1933, Brassaï published a book titled Paris by Night, that presented the real face of the city, dissociated from a touristic postcard. Underground bars, criminal lairs, brothels, gay clubs, suspiciously empty and poor-lit streets—these dangerous yet alluring spaces formed the real frightening beauty of Paris, which was dear to Brassaï.

4. He Was a Writer Too

Brassaï’s artistic oeuvre was not only focused on photography. He accompanied his collection of photographs with semi-autobiographical essays that explained his views on photography and some of his models’ backstories. During the opening of the 1968 retrospective exhibition of Brassaï’s work in MoMA, the famous writer Lawrence Durell complained that writing about the photographer was essentially useless since he had already written everything that was necessary himself.

During his years in Berlin, Brassaï made a living as a newspaper reporter. He continued his job in Paris, spending hours each day in cafes that provided free paper and ink for visitors. These cafes were filled with writers, journalists, and artists and served not only as places where one could eat and rest but also as coworking and networking spaces.

5. He Befriended Picasso During a Photoshoot

Surprisingly, stories of Brassaï’s social skills vary drastically from person to person. Many called him charming, exciting, and immensely knowledgeable. Others, including the writer Henry Miller, thought he was boring. Pablo Picasso certainly belonged to the former category. They met in 1932 when Brassaï came into the artist’s studio to shoot his sculptures for the Surrealist periodical Minotaure. Despite Picasso’s fame and reputation of arrogance, to Brassaï, he seemed kind and easygoing. He ironically called Brassaï the terrorist because of the deafening explosive sounds of flash powder. Both of them were foreigners who had learned to navigate the huge and loud Paris, and both had curious minds and attentive eyes.

In Brassaï, Picasso found a close friend and a like-minded artist, similarly ready to experiment, unwilling to remain in one state for too long. In 1964, Brassaï turned their meetings and photoshoots into a book called Conversations with Picasso, which contained discussions on art and modernity and presented surprisingly gentle, intimate portraits of the two artists.

6. He Inspired Generations of Photographers

Brassaï’s work was much more than a collection of images and characters. It documented a certain cultural era in its complex contexts and dark parts. One of the most prominent photographers who constructed their signature style on the basis of Brassaï’s innovation was Diane Arbus. Similarly, Arbus photographed those ignored by the mainstream media—disabled people, sex workers, and drag queens. However, Arbus’s interest in her subjects was almost anthropological, offering a more detached social engagement compared to Brassaï’s approach.

Other famous photographers inspired by Brassaï were the pioneers of humanist photography, Robert Doisneau and Willy Ronis.

7. John Galliano Turned Brassaï’s Work Into a Fashion Collection

The most recent project inspired by Brassaï was presented in January 2024, when the famous designer and the current creative director of the Maison Margiela fashion house, John Galliano, presented his new couture collection. The podium was set under the Pont Alexandre III in Paris, where set designers reconstructed a hundred-year-old abandoned cafe.  The models, dressed in half-decayed silk and lace, resembled Brassaï’s subjects from the darkest corners of 1920s Paris—aggressive yet fragile, exquisite yet dangerous monuments to a bygone era, exuding the same faded decadence as their surroundings.

Bill Viola was one of the most influential video artists of all time. Unlike his other colleagues, he did not have any classical artistic training, moving from technology backward toward more traditional forms of art. Inspired by the dramatism and dynamism of Baroque art, Viola created video works that bridged the gap between the old and the new art. His works required a prolonged involved contemplation rather than a brief passing glance. Read on to learn more about Bill Viola and his most famous artworks.

1. Tape I, 1972: Bill Viola’s Early Video Experiments

Bill Viola started his career in video art in the 1970s when the technology was still rather primitive compared to the possibilities the artist enjoyed in the 2000s. Back then, video art was mostly seen as a passing fad that would soon disintegrate, reestablishing the hierarchy of classical media. Unlike many other artists working with technology, Viola had no prior training in more traditional forms of art. He described his first encounter with the video-making process as something revolutionary and miraculous. Over the years, his artistic language evolved with the development of video technology, transforming not only instrumentally but philosophically as well.

Viola’s first video works had little in common with the dramatic and highly aestheticized compositions that brought him fame. Rather than that, he was part of the artistic scene that aimed to defy the suffocating conventions of the art world and break the barrier between art and reality. He did it quite literally in one of his early works, a 1972 video titled Tape I. There, Viola entered a room and stood in front of the camera, interacting with it as with a mirror. After several minutes of intense staring, he screamed and broke the tape recorder, symbolically destroying himself and his double in the mirror, imitated by the video’s viewers. I in the title thus had a double meaning, it functioned both as a Roman number one and a pronoun.

2. Quintet of The Astonished, 2000

The definitive impact on Bill Viola’s visual language and work was made by his 1974 move to Florence, Italy. Although Viola explained that back then he had little to no interest in classical art, he clearly soaked in experiences and concepts that would later be resurrected in his work. The art found in Florentine churches requires a radically different way of engagement than any museum collection or a sterile white gallery. Such type of art demands its viewers to take time to appreciate the complexity and intensity of religious experience. It also requires movement—not frantic but careful, slow, and respectful. Viola managed to translate these principles into video art and reconstruct the ecstatic religious experience in a secular setting.

One of the greatest examples of Renaissance influence on Bill Viola is his film Quintet of the Astonished, which shows five figures in slow motion, each face distorted with intense emotion. The figures’ feelings and experiences are hard to verbalize and almost impossible to explain with any level of certainty, yet their expressions and feelings feel overwhelmingly familiar and contagious. Their faces are archetypes in a sense attributed to the word by Carl Jung: primitive and universally relatable emotions coming deep from the collective unconscious.

3. Chott El-Djerid, 1979

However, before entirely focusing on Baroque inspiration, Bill Viola explored other formats and applications for video art. Another formative trip for him was his brief voyage to Tunisia in 1979. There, he created a film that demonstrated how unreliable our visual perception could be, how cruel our imagination was, and how misleading—the seemingly objective medium of video. Two parts of the video were shot in Tunisia and Canada, respectively, and brought together snowy landscapes and burning hot sand. In Chott El-Djerid, Viola expressed the origins of mirages and hallucinations, creating and recording optical and sound illusions.

4. The Tristan Project, 2005

Another significant project by Viola connected his video art to music and theater. In 2005, he created a video work based on Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde. Initially, the four-hour film was shown on screens, and real opera singers performed in a minimalist stage setting. However, Viola later reworked it into pieces that could be presented in museums. The artist described Tristan and Isolde as a story of love that was too overwhelming to be contained within the characters. This love poured into the environments and natural forces surrounding them.

Viola has no interest in explaining the plot of his scenes, focusing on pure emotions and impressions. Together with the intensity of his artworks, this creates an astonishingly disorienting effect. Despite the obvious association with the religious art of Caravaggio’s era, Viola’s works have no direct references to Christianity or any other religion. There are no quotes, no figures, or situations borrowed. Strictly speaking, Viola’s works are a deception: the viewer is looking for a coherent narrative and a reference point, readily equipped by a belief system of any sort, and is doomed to wander in confusion.

5. The Raft, 2004

Another Bill Viola work that referenced an already famous piece was the 2004 video The Raft. Both the title and the scene alluded to the legendary painting The Raft of The Medusa by Theodore Gericault. Gericault depicted the events of his time—the tragedy of a raft full of shipwreck survivors. Betrayed by their captain, the raft drifted into the ocean for two weeks. Most of the passengers died, and the remaining ones had to resort to cannibalism to survive.

Bill Viola’s raft gathered people of all ages and ethnicities. They stand quietly until the mass of water throws them to the ground and drags them apart. The instability and fragility of the contemporary world, shown by these waves, are balanced by people’s kindness—after the sudden storm is over, they help each other get back on their feet.

Viola frequently worked with the four elements of earth, air, water, and fire. Water, in particular, has special significance for the artist. When Viola was six, he almost drowned in a lake, yet he remembered it not as a horrifying experience but as a mystical dream. The underwater world seemed magical and heavenly, and in many of his works, he strived to recreate the feeling.

6. The Crossing, 1996

Although Viola had no traditional art historical training, he developed a deep understanding of Medieval and Baroque sensibility. For his nuanced and intense work, he was dubbed the Rembrandt of the video age. Unlike other artists, he did not start his work based on the artistic expression and visual experience of the Old Masters but walked a conscious path towards it, moving backward.

Bill Viola stated that the main inspiring force for him was the art of the Italian Gothic painter Giotto. Giotto’s works preceded Renaissance art, and he was the first artist in Western history who focused on the realism of emotion and feeling. From the Renaissance paintings, Viola borrowed the obsession with movement and dynamism, expressed through bodies, draperies, and shadows. He was usually compared to Caravaggio for his expert use of light and shadow and compositional principles. Still, unlike Baroque artists, he never based his art completely on Christian symbols and values. The Crossing, a video work that reflected Viola’s Baroque influences, used fire and water as universal metaphors of rebirth and spiritual transformation.

7. Martyrs, 2014: Bill Viola’s Famous Work

Martyrs is one of Bill Viola’s most famous works. It featured four screens with four people—burning alive, drowning, being hung mid-air with their limbs unnaturally bent, or gradually covered with earth. Initially, Viola created the work for Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London, yet, as usual, stripped it of the traditional Christian iconography and turned it into a universal spiritual experience. He was not interested in the concept of martyrdom as a spiritual act but rather in the transformative processes expressed through human emotion. As Viola stated, initially, the Greek word for martyr meant witness. Contemporary media turned us into witnesses of others’ traumas, effectively scarring us all and turning us into martyrs in the original sense of the word.

Arte Povera originated in the 1960s in Italy. The term, coined by the art critic Germano Celant, was translated as poor art and referred to the artists’ use of cheap non-artistic materials like metal scraps, rags, foil, earth, or wood. Arte Povera was a protest against the increasingly commodifying art sphere, as artists created works that fell out of the category of high-price elitist art. Read on to get familiar with six important works of the Arte Povera movement.

1. Arte Povera’s Iconic “Venus of the Rags” by Michelangelo Pistoletto

Michelangelo Pistoletto was perhaps the most popular of all Arte Povera artists. His Venus of the Rags became emblematic of the entire movement. Contrast was the main expressive method of the Arte Povera artists—the contrast of high and low, of outstanding and mundane, as well as highbrow gallery spaces and cheap materials found in trash or taken directly from nature. The visitor, confronted by piles of wood, scraps of metal, and live horses within the gallery space, stands astonished, almost identical to Pistoletto’s Venus, facing a stack of cheap rags.

Pistoletto’s sculpture featured a pile of cheap clothing items discarded in a corner. The unique sculpture of the goddess of beauty, Venus, is almost lost in it, standing with her back to the viewer. Pistoletto’s sculptures show how strange high art looks when it encounters the objective reality of the world outside art markets and collectors’ parties. Pistoletto reacted to the wave of student protests of the late 1960s and created work that commented upon destructive capitalism and elitism of the art world. Today, this sculpture has gained a new meaning: the fast fashion industry is one of the biggest polluting forces today, not just threatening our existence but also causing a detrimental impact on the climate.

2. “To Invent of The Spot (12 Live Horses)” by Jannis Kounellis

In 1969, a Greek-Italian artist called Jannis Kounellis brought 12 live horses into the prestigious Galleria L’Attico in Rome. The animals calmly chewed on hay and occasionally gently explored the gallery space. Still, their quiet presence turned into a disruptive force of nature that turned the snobbish gallery space into something alive and functional. Some saw Kounellis’ piece as a celebration of pre-industrial techniques and the joyful superiority of natural experiences over urban ways of life. Indeed, the living and breathing horses seemed much more pleasant than the sterile exhibition space on its own.

In the years that followed, Jannis Kounellis repeated this performance several times. He considered its fleeting nature one of the most important aspects of the work. Unlike a painting or a sculpture that could be hung in place, sold, or passed from owner to owner, the presence of horses in time and space could not be replicated or captured. Each iteration of the performance was slightly different due to the animals’ natural behaviors. Kounellis’ animal performances thus were powerful anticapitalist actions focused on organic and genuine experiences of reality.

3. “Merda d’artista” by Piero Manzoni

One of the most provocative and scandalous gestures in the history of contemporary art was made in 1961 by Piero Manzoni. Manzoni died before he could participate in Arte Povera as a coherent movement, yet his works perfectly corresponded to the spirit and the goals of the movement.

In 1961, Manzoni presented 90 sealed tin cans, each one of them supposedly containing 30 grams of human feces. The labels on cans stated the title of the work and the date of its creation. Despite a rather repulsive concept, the works successfully and fairly expressed Manzoni’s disdain for the art market and the celebrity status of artists who stood in the way of creating quality art. Artists themselves turn into commodities, fetishized into prestigious pieces someone could own. Collectors rushed to get the most intimate and personal expression of an artist’s activity, so Piero Manzoni gave them exactly that.

Curiously, we still don’t know if the contents of these cans correspond to Manzoni’s claims, as any attempt to learn the truth ultimately leads to the work’s destruction. Even if someone mastered the courage to dismantle the work, it would hardly bring them any satisfaction. If someone broke into a sealed can with such a label to find exactly what the label stated, the situation would only turn even more absurd, unpleasant, and devoid of any exploratory excitement.

4. “Untitled (Eating Structure)” by Giovanni Anselmo

The contrast of materials and their interrelation played a surprising role in the work of Giovanni Anselmo. Anselmo juxtaposed organic and inorganic, light and heavy, eternal and short-lived. His most significant piece was the sculpture Eating Structure. Anselmo took two blocks of polished granite and loosely tied them with a copper wire. To fix the blocks, he placed fresh lettuce between them to add volume and tighten the wire. Over time, the water evaporating from lettuce caused it to fall apart. Thus, without the force holding the wire, the entire structure fell apart. To maintain the structure’s integrity, someone had to pay attention to the work and replace the lettuce. Alselmo’s work explored the ideas of replenishment and maintenance, as well as the care and attention required to balance any structure, be it a physical sculpture or an intangible feeling or relationship.

In one of his later interviews, Anselmo stated that initially, he used a piece of meat for the work to make the contrast between the living object and the stone even sharper. However, he soon changed his mind upon learning more about the global problem of hunger and the scarcity of food in certain parts of the world. Lettuce, in this case, was an easily renewable material that wasted significantly fewer resources and did not evoke associations with death and decay.

5. “Igloo with Tree” by Mario Merz

Many artists of various movements throughout history glorified utopian hi-tech futures or created images of idealized scenes, conditions, or events. Instead of continuing the cycle of creative daydreaming, Arte Povera artists grounded themselves in the present. For this reason, they relied on simple, readily available materials. Transformed into works of art, these materials received a chance to be appreciated anew.

In the 1940s, Mario Merz was a medical student at the University of Turin and a secret member of an anti-fascist organization. In 1945, he was arrested and imprisoned, and during his months in jail, he started to channel his stress into drawing. After being released, he chose to make art his full-time profession. The dominant motif in Merz’s art was the igloo—a shelter usually built from snow that protects people from cold, even in the most hostile parts of Canada and Greenland. The igloo is a symbol of home as a concept, as well as the safety and warmth it provides. The hemisphere form is also universal for many cultures and climates.

During his long artistic career, Mario Merz designed dozens of igloos from different materials. One of the most famous was a clear glass dome with a tree that grew right through it, not breaking the glass but becoming part of it. The structure was deliberately crude, as if assembled by hands in need of shelter. Merz’s igloos were manifestations of human resilience and determination to survive, the celebration of unbreakable spirit and our desire to make a home out of any place, however dangerous, hostile, and unforgiving it might be.

6. “Imprint” by Luciano Fabro: Destruction as an Arte Povera Statement

Luciano Fabro was one of the most prominent Arte Povera artists who worked extensively with glass. One of his most celebrated works was the opaque-glass circle with a footprint at the center, titled Imprint. The footprint strangely resembled the vision of a planet from space and, according to Fabro, celebrated the longevity of the Earth and our connection to it.

The work itself would not be as significant if it were not for its untimely and absurd demise. In 2013, during an exhibition opening in a Turin art gallery, an unnamed journalist representing Radio Switzerland reached to grab some canapés from a plate and knocked the sculpture, shattering it into countless pieces. Ironically, this event added an extra layer of commentary to Fabro’s idea of the Earth’s longevity and the Arte Povera artists’ concerns about the art world and media acting as destructive forces rather than promoters of art.

Tachisme originated in France in the late 1940s and represented a larger trend for art without limits and conventions. Tachisme artists used unconventional methods (like painting with tree branches or spreading ink over the surface with a hairdryer) and created fluid and lyrical forms. Their main goal was to create improvised and sincere art with little to no conscious involvement. Read on to learn 10 important facts about Tachisme and its artists.

1. Tachisme Was Part of a Bigger Trend in French Art

Tachisme was a French art movement that originated in the 1940s. It represented fluid abstraction, usually created intuitively. It was part of the larger movement in French and European art known as art informal—“informal art” in the sense that it lacked precise form and conventional format. Apart from Tachisme, art informal included other gestural and abstract art styles and art brut—art created by the outsiders of the conventional art market, who often had no formal training. Apart from France, Tachisme found its followers in other European countries. Particularly prominent was the art group CoBrA. The name of the group was formed using letters from the cities of the members’ origins—Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam.

2. It Had Cubist Origins

Despite several decades that separated Cubism from Tachisme, the latter movement actually relied on the former. Cubism was a deeply intellectual movement that relied on rationalism and analysis of real-life scenes in front of the artists. It was strictly figurative and deeply rooted in physical objectivity and properties of three-dimensional objects. Tachisme was the exact opposite of it: it celebrated pure abstraction with no real-world sources (although some artists later painted Tachist landscapes), and preferred intuition to calculation.

3. The Term Itself Was Much Older Than the Movement

The term Tachisme originated from the French word tache, meaning stain or drip.  For the first time, it was applied to the new movement in 1951 with a derogatory undertone. However, the use of this term has a much longer history. According to art historians, it was first applied to Divisionist and Pointillist artists in the 1880s. Divisionism was a technique of painting with small separate brushstrokes of unmixed color, layering them closely to one another. Allegedly, these strokes were meant to mix inside the viewers’ brains, turning into a luminous and vivid whole. Pointillism was essentially the same, only with small dots replacing the strokes.

4. Tachisme Artists Used Unconventional Techniques

Often, Tachisme painters relied on unconventional painting techniques to make their art more expressive. Hans Hartung took the idea of organic forms to a new level by dipping tree branches into paint instead of brushes. Other artists dripped paint from cans suspended over flat canvases or splashed it onto the surface.

Other unconventional methods were used. Henri Michaux frequently worked under the influence of alcohol or mescaline. According to one of the movement’s theoreticians, Georges Mathieu, an ecstatic state of mind was necessary to create a true and honest artwork. Michaux, according to contemporaries, was deeply insecure and at odds with the rules of the world around him. He experimented with substances to calm his mind and find inspiration. He also used a hairdryer to spread ink and painted using his left hand despite being right-handed.

5. The Founding Father of Tachisme Was Wols

The most prominent figure of Tachisme was the painter and photographer known as Wols. He was born Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze into a wealthy German family. His father was an art patron and a friend of Otto Dix, so the atmosphere at home promoted his artistic inclinations. Taking the advice of László Moholy-Nagy, the Hungarian artist and Bauhaus professor, 19-year-old Wols moved to Paris to pursue art. There, his circle of friends included Fernand Leger, Max Ernst, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Wols had no formal training as an artist but compensated for it with enthusiasm, self-education, and decisive action. He painted his works using a technique similar to the Surrealist automatic drawing—a process of creating shapes and images without the conscious involvement of the mind.

6. Tachisme Was Different From Abstract Expressionism

Frequently, Tachisme is described as a French alternative to American Abstract Expressionism. Many of the movement’s artists were indeed inspired by their overseas colleagues. Painter Jean-Paul Riopelle came close to imitating the work of Jackson Pollock. Although the movements were close from a formal point of view, there were certain tonal differences between them.

Despite similar artistic methods and the focus on individual artistic expression, Tachisme was usually less aggressive and more refined than Abstract Expressionism. Moreover, it was different from a political point of view. Abstract Expressionism was weaponized by governmental institutions as a tool of propaganda for American values and creative individualism. One such case was the famous exhibition The New American Painting curated by the CIA. It did not matter that most artists did not share the ideology they were supposed to promote—still, their art was labeled as such and brought to other countries as examples of national creativity backed by the state. Tachisme, on the other hand, was made by politically active figures who had no ambitions of siding with the government and were largely left alone by the authorities. Many of them were activists, who supported the 1968 student protests and the anti-fascist movement.

7. Some Tachist Painters Turned Their Art Into Performances

Despite the movement’s umbrella term, different Tachisme painters treated its boundaries differently. One of the most eccentric and influential representatives was Georges Mathieu, who often painted in public and on stage. He presented aesthetic performances dressed in medieval garments, creating paintings of enormous sizes in just hours. Mathieu was also one of the movement’s theoreticians. In 1947, he drafted the four principles of lyrical abstraction: fast execution to avoid involving the artist’s consciousness, complete absence of references, no premeditated moves, and an ecstatic state of mind.

8. One of the Most Famous Tachists Found Inspiration in Astronomy

Inspirations for the colorful abstractions of Tachisme came from many sources. Hans Hartung, a German-French painter and one of the Tachist movement, had a deep obsessive interest in astronomy and mathematics from his childhood. The movements of stars and comets and the endless motion of the universe could be found in many of his works. For Hartung, space was never dark and frightening; rather, it represented our unity with the universe and hopes for something better.

As a German citizen living in France, Hartung met the beginning of World War II with anger and deep sadness. He enlisted in the French Foreign Legion and fought against the Nazi forces. After France was occupied, Hartung was arrested and imprisoned in a cell painted bright red to drive him insane and disrupt his vision. After seven months in prison, he was released and went to fight again. In 1944, he was severely wounded and lost his leg. Still, the physical trauma never stood in his way of creating art. Years later, the already aging artist suffered a stroke which confined him to a wheelchair. Unable to work with a brush, Hartung began to use an industrial paint gun.

9. Pierre Soulages Painted Tachisme All-Black

Although Tachisme is mostly associated with bold colors, there were some who preferred a more somber color palette. Pierre Soulages worked almost predominantly with black. He had a deep and personal relationship with this color: since his childhood, he only wore black, annoying his mother, who even asked him why he was wearing clothes for mourning so soon. According to the artist, as a child, he once painted snow with black ink, which led to incessant jokes from his siblings. As a mature artist, he mixed his own black paint with walnut oil, manipulating proportions to create the deepest color and the most expressive texture.

Soulages never allowed the framing of his works, insisting they should interact with air and space directly. He insisted that black was the most versatile color, transforming in various light conditions. He preferred natural light to artificial light. Before turning to painting, he worked with stained glass making, which allowed him to study light and the transformation of colors.

10. Tachisme Did Not Last Long

Unfortunately, the lifespan of Tachisme was rather short. The initial enthusiasm for expressive form and bold color wore off by the late 1950s. Although many painters continued to work in the same manner in the 1960s and 1970s, the colored dots and drips with no references to reality became too boring and expected. Some Tachist artists gradually moved to more figurative works. Generally, abstract art based on pure emotions and intuitive outbursts was on the decline, clearing the way for the more complex and multi-dimensional movement of conceptual art.