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.

The issues concerning gender and its boundaries were important preoccupations of many modern artists. Interested in the difference in external perception of men and women, as well as the limitations of such distinction, they adopted attributes commonly associated with the opposite gender into their works to deconstruct it. Read on to learn more about the art of drag and seven famous artists who manipulated gender markers in their art.

1. Marcel Duchamp’s Art of Drag: Rrose Sélavy

For the forerunner of conceptual art Marcel Duchamp, the dichotomy and relation of masculine and feminine was always a source of symbolic and philosophical musing. Even his mechanical installations like The Large Glass reflected upon the social and sexual rituals between genders.

In 1920, Duchamp revealed his feminine alter ego, Rrose Sélavy. Initially, Duchamp wanted to invent a character that was a radical opposite to him and thought of creating a Jewish persona to oppose his Catholic identity. However, he realized that a person of another gender would cause a much more radical effect. When read out loud, the name turned into a pun translated from French as “eros is life.”

Rrose represented a more sensual part of Duchamp’s character and was the personification of his art, blending intellect and vulgarity. Like many artists of his time, Duchamp was interested in the concept of creative androgyny and believed that the ideal artist should embrace both male and female traits of their character and ways of thinking. With the help of his friend Man Ray, Duchamp transformed himself into Rrose inside a photographic studio. Despite the use of feminine attributes such as makeup or jewelry, in the case of Duchamp, Rrose was not a woman’s costume but rather a way of authentic self-presentation and definition.

2. Barbette, the Forgotten Surrealist Icon

The aerial performer Barbette is largely forgotten today, yet he was an important figure in the Surrealist movement despite not creating visual art himself. His real name was Vander Clyde, and he was an American trapeze artist, usually labeled as a female impersonator. He appeared on stage as Barbette, wearing ostrich feathers and wigs, fascinating the audience with his acts. Jean Cocteau and Man Ray frequently attended Barbette’s European performances. Cocteau described that at the end of each performance, Barbette took off his wig to reveal a bald head, but instead of revealing his actual gender, he continued to perform the part of a man. From gentle and elegant “feminine” gestures, he transformed into a heavy and somewhat clumsy male athlete, awkwardly shuffling away from the stage.

During his performances, Barbette seamlessly moved between male and female personas, making the audience doubt his real identity. At the same time, his artistic skill and movement made him seem almost non-human. In his way of subverting and challenging gender boundaries through his performative actions, Barbette could be defined as one of the first performance artists. According to Vander Clyde himself, he initially found inspiration in the tradition of Shakespearean theater, where female characters were played by men. Barbette was much more than a circus performer in drag: he was an artist who confronted the public’s expectations of gender and dismantled them, not through aggressive attack, but through pure admiration of beauty.

3. Romaine Brooks

Romaine Brooks was one of the brightest artists who represented the Parisian queer community of the first half of the 20th century. She arrived in France as an American expat and built her oeuvre mostly by painting portraits of queer women from her social circle. Thus, issues of gender and sexuality were crucial for the conceptual landscape she worked in. The notion of queer identity, as well as the idea of separating sexuality from gender, was only emerging at the time. Many of Brooks’ painted characters illustrated the gendered dilemmas of the time.

Brooks herself wore short hair and tailored suits but never regarded them as male attributes. Rather, she argued for the actual comfort of these attributes. Moreover, they visually separated her from the normative expectations of femininity, acting as markers of belonging to another group. Brooks was rather critical of the over-masculinization of queer women and reflected it in a caricature portrait of her friend Una Troubridge who, in Brooks’ opinion, came too close to imitating a man.

4. Claude Cahun

French Surrealist Claude Cahun mostly worked outside of well-known art groups and collectives despite being friends with Andre Breton and some other artists from his circle. Cahun’s most important works were created in collaboration with their partner, Marcel Moore, and were mostly intended for personal use rather than for public display. Cahun’s own relationship with gender was complex and frequently stood outside of traditional binary dynamics. They say that “neutral” was the only gender that suited them permanently.

Together with Moore, Cahun created a series of images that recorded their transformation from woman to man to androgynous being. In these images, gender markers were often confusing and did not give a definitive answer. For Cahun as a queer person living in Nazi-occupied Jersey, experiments with gender presentation could have also been acts of protest and resistance against conservative and oppressive values.

5. Cindy Sherman

For Cindy Sherman, transformation is the main artistic technique. Using makeup, costume, and special effects, she explores various pop cultural and artistic characters, studying the markers of class, gender, and cultural relevance. One of the most famous early series features Sherman transforming into a collection of cinematic feminine archetypes. Although she was not attached to particular films or stories, these characters were nonetheless easily identifiable.

Later, she began experimenting with masculine and androgynous portraits as well. When Sherman poses or performs as a man, she deconstructs masculinity and gender boundaries instead of affirming them. Instead of viewing gender as a fixed category, she shows how we perform it and how easily it can be replicated. With the right clothes, makeup, and light, as well as a little bit of acting, the illusion of stable gender presentation reveals itself to the public, who recognize their own cherished attributes in it.

6. Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol’s social circle included drag performers who transformed onstage. By watching them, Warhol became interested in the idea of artifice and the construction of one’s external perception. In the 1980s, Warhol posed for a series of images wearing makeup and a wig. Instead of trying to appear conventionally feminine, he simply posed as an outer shell of a generic pop cultural character. Warhol tried on many identities, never actually intending to perform them. Rather, he explored visual attributes and the superficiality of culture.

For Warhol, drag queens represented “the way women used to be, and the way some people still want them to be.” Warhol himself was a gay man who existed somewhere in between traditional expressions of identity. His true identity was carefully and safely concealed under the layers of constructed characters, leaving room for manipulating gender and its attributes.

7. Ana Mendieta’s Version of the Art of Drag

For Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta, femininity was one of the most important aspects of artistic work. She moved from Havana to Iowa as a child, where she received her artistic training at a rather conservative University of Iowa. There, as a woman coming from a non-Western background, she was often misunderstood and dismissed both due to her ethnicity and gender. In her early works, she explored the issues of sexual violence and oppression. She quickly recognized the gendered boundaries in the art world and, for a time, searched for tools to address them.

One of Mendieta’s famous early works featured her visual transformation into a male artist. She asked her friend Morty Sklar to shave off his beard and then transferred his hair into her own face, making a “transplant.” In that way, she conceptually transformed herself into a male artist, hinting at the immediate change of aesthetic perception. Mendieta’s strong identification with feminine and feminist values for years acted as a barrier between her and the art world. Her manipulation of gender presentation represents not a desire for transformation but the absurdity of the attributes that form public perception.

Today, Gerda Wegener is mostly recognized as the wife of Lili Elbe, one of the first transgender women to receive gender-affirming surgery. However, Wegener was a celebrated and accomplished artist who created illustrations for magazines like Vogue and La Vie Parisienne. She also created paintings that celebrated femininity, sexual pleasure, and romantic encounters of queer women of her era. Read on to learn more about the forgotten Art Deco icon Gerda Wegener and her art.

Who Was Gerda Wegener, the Forgotten Art Deco Illustrator?

Gerda Wegener was born in the rural part of Denmark in 1885 and came from a conservative family of a church minister. Having been interested in art since childhood, she convinced her parents to let her study painting in Copenhagen. Initially, she was trained as a Realist painter, but the change of location triggered her to explore more daring domains of painting. Immersed in the life of the Danish capital, she focused on trendy art styles of the time and began painting stylized figures in fashionable dresses and heavy makeup.

Today, Gerda Wegener is unjustly forgotten. In the 1910s and 1920s, she was a rare woman artist and illustrator who enjoyed commercial success on the French art scene. She moved to Paris in 1912 with her then-husband and fellow art student Einar Wegener, who would later become known as Lili Elbe. In Paris, Wegener soon found a job working as a fashion magazine illustrator. From magazine illustration, she moved to portrait painting and working on commissions. She created advertisement posters and magazine campaigns and became particularly famous for her erotic illustrations. Wegener mostly relied on the aesthetics of Art Nouveau and Art Deco, moving between fluid, natural forms and geometry. Rich decorations, detailed garments, and makeup, as well as complex maximalist interiors, dominated her work.

In the early 20th century, art education became more available to women, consequently granting them access to the art market and professional self-actualization. Their gendered perspectives were in many ways different from those offered by their male colleagues—especially when it came to depicting women’s bodies and personalities. Instead of the all-encompassing male gaze, these artists offered visual spaces designed and entirely controlled by women. Similarly to Tamara de Lempicka, Wegener painted women as conscious agents of their sexuality, beauty, and life choices.

Who Was Gerda Wegener’s Favorite Model?

Many of Wegener’s works featured a bold, slender woman with a thin face, full lips, and bold eye makeup. While art collectors and viewers guessed who Wegener’s favorite model was, the truth was hiding in plain sight. It was Einar Wegener, the painter’s partner, who kept his secret for years.

Before her transition, Lili Elbe was an accomplished landscape painter who worked under her birth name, assuming male identity. Despite the significant advancements in women’s rights, painting, especially that of a strong expressive landscape, was considered to be a male domain. Even for Elbe, her painting practice was aligned with the male traits of her character so much that she stopped creating art after she began her transition. Still, for several years, she dressed in women’s clothing and posed for her wife in the privacy of their home and studio. According to the story, she realized her gender identity during one of the posing sessions when Gerda asked Lili to pose instead of a female model who failed to show up.

By 1913, Wegener started to use the name Lili Elbe and even appeared in public as Einar Wegener’s cousin. In Paris, however, the couple gradually began to live more openly. By the end of the 1920s, Elbe learned about the possibility of having gender-affirming surgery in Germany. She went through three successful surgeries, but unfortunately, her heart failed after the fourth one.

Lili was the patient of Magnus Hirschfeld, the pioneering sexologist who launched his Institute of Sexual Research in Germany in 1919. Hirschfeld advocated for gay and trans rights and offered medical help to those who could not get it from other practitioners due to widespread transphobia.

Inside the Institute, Hirschfeld created a safe space for his patients, even offering them jobs and shelter. Hirschfeld gathered a team of psychiatrists, gynecologists, and endocrinologists who were focused on the issue of transgender identity and gender-affirming surgeries. The Institute was the first and, for a while, the only institution that performed such surgeries. Unfortunately, after the Nazis came to power in Germany, Hirschfeld was stripped of his citizenship, and the institute was raided. A group of pro-Nazi university students attacked the Institute staff and patients and burned their research archive, ruining priceless collections of studies and cases.

Elbe was not the first transgender woman to receive gender-affirming surgery—the first being Dora Richter several years prior. However, unlike Richter, who worked as a domestic servant and lacemaker, Lili Elbe was part of the artistic bohemian circles, with her story set in decorations of Art Deco opulence. Gerda Wegener played a crucial role in the story of Elbe’s transition as a supportive partner. The act of dressing up and posing was, for both Elbe and Wegener, the act of liberation and expression of love and acceptance.

How Wegener’s Sexuality Defined Her Art?

Gerda Wegener’s sexuality was not easily definable. However, historians are sure that she maintained a relationship with her partner even after Lili began her transition. In Paris, Lili and Gerda lived openly as a queer couple of women. After their marriage was annulled by the King of Denmark, the couple went their separate ways, finding other partners.

Still, queer desire played an important role in the oeuvre of Gerda Wegener. After the couple’s move to Paris, Gerda began experimenting with her art and making it provocative and bolder. The significant body of her work at the time was lesbian erotica of varying degrees of explicitness. Erotic images were often stylized in almost Rococo aesthetics, with lace stockings and crinolines adding exotic and opulent fleur to their subjects.

Not all images, however, were explicit. Some images simply showed her and Lili Elbe strolling by a seashore or singing. Still, these paintings represented the romantic involvement of queer women, depicted on their own terms. Apart from erotica and images of feminine pleasure, it featured images of domesticity, comfortable leisure, and socializing. Thus, Wegener’s art offered a unique perspective of female queer sexuality, multi-faceted and joyful.

Did She Face Any Public Backlash?

Due to her art and association with Lili Elbe, Gerda Wegener faced prosecution and other legal issues several times in her life. The Danish government did not recognize the difference between gender and sexuality at the time and viewed transgender individuals only through a heteronormative lens. For that reason, both Wegener and Elbe had to prove that their relationship was strictly platonic and that Lili was attracted to men only. Following the same logic, their marriage was officially annulled by the King of Denmark in 1930, regardless of the couple’s opinion. However, it allowed Lili to change her name and sex legally.

Erotic illustrations by Wegener were so scandalous they were published only in underground books that skipped the eye of censors and everyday bookstore visitors. Few brave galleries that agreed to show her erotic work faced protests and public scandals.

Gerda Wegener remained a loyal friend and supporter of Lili Elbe even after their marriage was dissolved. Moreover, the funds she accumulated through her successful artistic career financed Elbe’s surgeries and recovery. Unfortunately, after Lili Elbe’s death, she did not recover mentally or professionally. By the mid-1930s, Wegener’s style fell out of fashion as the public began to favor more refined and intellectual art forms.

Gerda Wegener in “The Danish Girl”: Is the Movie Accurate?

In 2015, Tom Hooper directed the biographical drama The Danish Girl, which retold the story of Elbe’s romantic and creative life. The film was based not on the actual story but on a fictionalized retelling published in a book with the same title. It received numerous awards and nominations and re-ignited interest in the story. However, many transgender activists criticized the film for a fetishistic portrayal of Elbe’s transition that was based on fantasy rather than actual transgender experiences. In relation to the story of Gerda Wegener, the movie downplayed the artist’s role and her continuous support for Lili.

The Barbizon School included a group of French artists who worked in the French village of Barbizon during the middle of the 19th century. They focused on painting French nature and rural scenes, revolutionizing the concept of landscape painting. Barbizon School artists like Camille Corot, François Daubigny, and Jean-François Millet were important precursors to Impressionism. Read on to learn five important facts about the Barbizon School and its artists.

1. The Barbizon School Emerged in a French Village With the Same Name

Despite the label of an art movement, the Barbizon School never existed as a body of art theory formulated in a manifesto with a precise list of participants. The name for the movement came from the Barbizon village located near the Fontainebleau forest, not far from Paris. In the mid-19th century, this picturesque village turned into an artists’ colony and a place where landscape painting was transformed once and for all. Back then, it was a rather remote and underdeveloped location that was made accessible only after the significant development of railroads in the region.

At the time of the Barbizon School’s activity, Barbizon had only one street and around 40 houses in total. Today, the small city hotel the artists used to stay in has been transformed into a museum. Like many art movements of the century, the Barbizon School opposed rigid standards of art education and artistic practice of the time. Artists usually worked inside their ateliers and trained by copying antique sculptures and Old Masters paintings. The primary focus was on historical and religious painting, battle scenes, and mythology. The Barbizon School presented a relevant alternative to it, addressing contemporary reality.

2. The School Subverted the Concept of Landscape Painting

Before the Barbizon School, landscape painting was considered to be mostly a backdrop to the central events of the painting—a religious, mythological, or historical scene or a commissioner’s portrait. Gradually, landscapes started to grow symbolic qualities and were used as religious allegories.

Preference of certain landscapes for a while stood in the way of creative progress. Italian vineyards, fields, and antique ruins were deemed the most worthy of subjects. It took a while before the artists started to rely on scenes that were close to their disposal. In particular, such an approach was employed by the Dutch landscape artists in the 17th century. These landscapes quickly gained prominence as alternatives to religious paintings that fell out of favor after the Reformation. They were generally small, rarely symbolic, and usually intended as decorations.

Most frequently, the landscape was constructed rather than recreated. The famous English artist Thomas Gainsborough used stones, pieces of broccoli, and moss to create small artificial landscapes he would later turn into paintings. Even if a painted landscape was inspired by a real scene, it was nonetheless improved by adding extra elements or removing those that ruined artistic harmony. Nature, as it turned out, was never as harmonious as Western artists of the time would have liked it to be. Landscape as an expressive method was fully employed by the artists of Romanticism. In their works, imaginary nature became a character that interacted with human protagonists and illustrated their spiritual and emotional turmoil.

The Barbizon School took a different approach. They valued natural scenes as they were and aimed to preserve the effects of natural light and space in their painted scenes. Instead of painting imaginary tropical jungles or traveling to Italy, which had been the favorite artistic spot for centuries, Barbizon School artists started to look for subject matter in their homeland. French villages, small rivers, fields, and forests at home were similarly worthy of depiction and adoration. Some of their predecessors already shared a similar point of view.

Although it is hardly obvious to us today, in the 19th century, the members of the Barbizon School made a radical gesture that was quite shocking and provocative. Even the mere decision to leave the capital and its art institutions for a remote village with one street and no post office was a statement of sorts. By choosing Barbizon, these artists declared their commitment to finding inspiration and sources for their art in real life.

3. Critics Were Not Enthusiastic About Their Work

In the first years of the movement, the critical reception of the Barbizon School was largely negative. Critics who were used to grandiose and expressive scenes were offended by the mundane and all-too-familiar scenes of French villages and forests. Muddy roads, shabby old churches, and farm animals were allegedly too far removed from the notions of good taste and aesthetic harmony. Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot started his career as a conventional Salon painter but found it insufficient. After his transition, critics labeled his works as naive and awkward, refusing to show his pieces at the Paris Salon.

One of the most scandalous works of the School was Jean-François Millet’s painting of wheat gleaners at work, with their backs bent uncomfortably. Critics were outraged that Millet placed peasants on the same pedestal as ancient heroes by focusing an entire painting on their work. The upper classes, afraid of yet another revolution that would endanger their privileges, reacted to the work with poorly concealed anger. The farm workers on whose labor these privileges were built greatly outnumbered the higher classes and could cause a threat if they managed to recognize their worth.

Soon, Gustave Courbet and his Realist painting would shatter the remaining conventions one more time, demonstrating uncompromising honesty and refusal to ask for his place in art history. Courbet simply came and took it, bringing his poor farmers, stone breakers, and provincial crowds with him.

4. They Focused on the Effects of Light

The painters of the Barbizon School rarely painted bright and sunny days, preferring the complex play of light and shadow under clouded skies. In terms of time, they also preferred transitional periods when the sun was either setting or just rising. They relied on soft forms and loose brushwork to show the hazy atmosphere of fields and forests.

Charles-Francois Daubigny built a boat that doubled as an artist’s studio. Equipped with easels, paints, and brushes, he traveled French rivers and painted his works directly from the boat. Such a position allowed him to find new angles and to capture the play of light in water that transformed the landscapes around him. Daubigny disliked the subjective component of Romantic painting and believed that images of nature should not incorporate the artist’s bias. Often, he deliberately chose scenes that were not the most aesthetically pleasing for representation to avoid commentaries on the poetic qualities of his work. Later, Claude Monet would find inspiration in his method and build a similar traveling studio on a boat.

5. The Barbizon School Was the Precursor of Impressionism

The invention of portable paint tubes allowed artists to work outside of their studios, and the Barbizon School artists were among the first to take advantage of this opportunity. The change of location affected the style and quality of the painting, as well as its relation to the reality it was modeled from. The Barbizon School landscapes were spatially and temporarily connected to places they were inspired by and thus contained fewer assumptions and imagined elements. Their paintings contained the immediate impression of natural scenes in the moment while the feelings were still fresh.

Impressionism blended the technical and conceptual ideas of the Barbizon School with contemporary studies in light and optics. The famous Impressionists Edgar Degas and Edouard Manet were affiliated with the School and drew inspiration from it. There were, however, other important movements influenced by the School. Barbizon painter Theodore Rousseau preferred a more somber palette and spaces enclosed by trees and other natural elements. His human figures were usually small, nearly lost in the vast and overpowering landscape. In their nature, Rousseau’s works were much closer to Realist painting in their dark and provocative sincerity.

Sigmar Polke’s works were both whimsical and mystical, ironic and politically sharp. He made political statements, provoked conversations, and transgressed the boundaries of contemporary art. For the 1986 Venice Biennale, Sigmar Polke designed a pavilion that changed color in response to weather and human presence. Read on to learn more about 8 important works created by the amazing Sigmar Polke.

1. Sigmar Polke’s Early Works: Chocolate Painting, 1964

In 1964, while still studying at the Dusseldorf Art Academy, Sigmar Polke started rethinking the cultural and political divide his country faced after the war. As a child, he lived in East Germany before his parents escaped to the West. Disenchanted with both promises of Communism in the East and Capitalism in the West, Polke developed a short-lived art movement he called Capitalist Realism. It relied on contemporary capitalist aesthetics in opposition to Soviet Socialist Realism and was visually similar to Pop Art.

Before Pop Art, food was mostly present in art in the form of raw or homemade products like fruit, meat, or freshly baked bread. As the mode of consumption changed from making the products to simply purchasing them, the imagery of food transformed. Instead of products, customers began to choose between brands and manufacturers. This tendency was reflected in Pop Art paintings that copied popular packages and logos. However, Sigmar Polke’s work, in that sense, was different from others. His food paintings from the 1960s did not feature any particular brands. Rather, the works represented a familiar aesthetic of popular capitalist consumerism that triggered the desire to buy.

2. Bunnies, 1966

Bunnies was the next step in Polke’s work, where he began to not only explore the popular visual culture but gradually started to transform it into something familiar only to him. He turned a photographic image of models wearing Playboy bunny costumes into an optical illusion composed of many colorful dots. Some of these dots were blurred or overlapped each other, creating an impression of a poorly printed street poster. Polke used tones that corresponded to those used in the commercial printing process yet nonetheless reproduced the image with acrylic paint and brush. His mechanical repetition of dots left the image recognizable but blurry and worn out, as repetitive pop cultural symbols gradually lost their value.

3. Potato House, 1967

Sigmar Polke rarely worked with sculpture—most of his sculptural works referred to his early experimental periods. In 1967, he created a shelter-like structure from wooden grids. Each block of the grid had a raw potato fixed on it. Some critics saw it as a mockery of the contemporary Minimalist movement, which frequently relied on grids and see-through structures.

Potatoes were the most common food in Germany at the time when post-war scarcity and restrictions were still in place. The existence of Polke’s potato structure had two possible outcomes: either it would sprout and continue its life cycle in a new form, reinforcing and covering the grid structure, or it would succumb to the atmosphere and start rotting. Many art experts compare Potato House to a later work of the Swiss conceptual artist Urs Fischer, who built a small village out of bread. Fischer’s work, however, suggested gradual decay as the only possible option.

4. Telepathic Session II (William Blake – Sigmar Polke), 1968

Apart from experimenting with mediums, in the 1960s and 1970s, Polke developed the same approach to substances, taking various drugs and often creating under the influence. Drug-induced states were part of his spiritual and occult explorations. Telepathy was one of the concepts that occupied his mind.

In 1968, Sigmar Polke created a series of works that allegedly represented instruments for telepathic sessions with famous artists of the past. The works consisted of two panels with grids and plugs, which were essentially hybrids of Ouija boards used in spiritual seances and early computers. One such figure Sigmar Polke wanted to connect to was William Blake, legendary English poet, artist, and author of prophetic books. Another similar work supposedly established contact with Max Klinger, a famous Symbolist and Art Nouveau artist. Despite creating cutting-edge contemporary art with materials and techniques unseen before, Polke always highlighted the importance of knowing and remembering one’s roots, both to honor them and to learn from past mistakes.

5. Dr. Bonn, 1978

Despite the mystical undertones of his work, Sigmar Polke was never an escapist and always a politically active artist who reacted to the events around him. In 1972, the West German authorities arrested members of the Red Army Faction, a militant left-wing group that organized terrorist attacks on US military bases in Germany. Five years later, the key members of the group, including its leaders Andreas Baader, Jan-Carl Raspe, and Ulrike Meinhof, were found dead in their cells. The officials hastily explained the events as collective suicide, yet many facts did not add up. A few months later, Polke created a painting that resembled a newspaper cartoon. In it, a faceless German bureaucrat named Dr. Bonn (Bonn was established as the capital of West Germany after the war) is trying to shoot himself with a slingshot under the watchful eyes of Baader and Raspe.

6. Watchtower, 1984

Sigmar Polke had little reservations when discussing the difficult and traumatizing legacy of German history and the responsibility of previous generations for the events of World War II and the Holocaust. If anything, his imagery was sometimes too raw and shocking. He painted swarms of swastikas in bright gouache colors, reconstructed concentration camp gates, and locked his paintings behind them.

His 1984 series Watchtower relied on an identical stenciled image of a structure adjacent to concentration camp walls. Sigmar Polke managed to imitate the haunting effect of a moving light searching for those trying to escape: the tower is only visible from certain vantage points, where paint reflects the gallery room light. He printed the image, adding silver oxide in the ink. The final result was both captivating and deeply unsettling. The flickering tower provoked anxiety and terror, as if the viewers were about to be discovered by whoever was guarding the tower.

7. The Spirits That Lend Strength Are Invisible III (Nickel/Neusilber)

Manipulation with chemical elements occupied Sigmar Polke’s mind for quite a long time. The state of transformation, both mental and physical, immediate and prolonged, was present in many of his works, yet this fully manifested itself in his alchemical experiments. His art was supposed to change with the world around it instead of passively waiting to become obsolete. Polke traveled the world to find pigments and natural materials he could use in his works. He went to Pakistan and Afghanistan and learned the techniques Indigenous Americans used in their art.

The Spirits That Lend Strength Are Invisible was a series of paintings inspired by Polke’s trip to North America. The title came from Native American sources that the artist carefully studied. For his work, he used minerals that were present only in North America and were significant for the Indigenous population, such as meteorite powder. He then used crushed minerals to color clear resin and poured it over the canvas. Into still-wet resin, he incorporated Neolithic-era tools made by the ancestors of Indigenous Americans and bits of silver leaf.

8. Athanor: Sigmar Polke’s Work That Shook the Venice Biennale

Sigmar Polke’s alchemical approach to art made his works transcend the boundaries of conventional painting and turned them into responsive and active substances. He launched chemical reactions on canvases that transformed his works over time, with their appearance changing radically over the course of days and years. This approach makes Polke’s work incredibly different for museum conservation and restoration departments. It is still debatable whether they should halt these reactions to stop works from deteriorating or leave them as they are and embrace Sigmar Polke’s artistic vision.

The most famous manifestation of his artistic principles happened in 1986 during the Venice Biennale. Polke occupied the entire West German pavilion with the work called Athanor, or the alchemist’s kiln. Inside the pavilion, he placed a real meteorite and rock crystals and painted the walls with abstract images. However, his main point was not in the paintings themselves, but in their compositions. He used pigments such as cobalt chloride, that reacted to the weather, humidity, temperature, and light conditions around them. Amazed visitors watched Polke’s art transforming and reacting to their presence, as more and more human bodies filled the pavilion.

The idea of a muse stems from Greek mythology. The nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne are the personification of inspiration for art and science. While these muses were actively guiding the creator, today’s interpretation of the term suggests a muse is more of a passive object; a beautiful woman behind the artistic, male genius. Throughout history, many women have been given this title. In art in particular, male artists are often credited with having a muse. While in reality, these women were anything but passive objects in the background.

Camille Claudel: Muse and Artist in the Shadow of Rodin?

Camille Claudel, born in 1864, was the eldest daughter of three children of a provincial middle-class family. A strict but devoted father and a mother mainly occupied with her duties as a housewife shaped her early childhood years. When the family moved to Paris, Camille began to take sculpting classes at the Académie Colarossi.

A year later, in 1882, Auguste Rodin and Camille Claudel met when the French sculptor took over the class Claudel was attending from his predecessor and friend Alfred Boucher. At the time, Rodin was already in a lifelong partnership with Rose Beuret, with whom he had a son in 1866, only two years younger than Camille.

However, the large age difference did not prevent the two from starting an affair. Intrigued by the fierce 19-year-old student, Rodin appointed Camille as an assistant in his studio. From then on, their connection intensified quickly. She became his muse, colleague, mistress, collaborator, and assistant.

He was simultaneously her lover and her master, which made her subordinate to him. Not necessarily because Rodin wanted her to be; on the contrary, he had a firm belief in her ability as an artist, but because of the nature of their relationship.

During the first years of their romantic relationship, the artworks of both sculptors seemed to reflect their closeness and initial attraction to each other. Rodin’s influence on Claudel is clearly visible in pieces like The Torso of a Crouching Woman and The Torso of a Standing Woman. Regardless of the fact that Rodin was a much more experienced artist, he was influenced by Claudel’s talent. For example, his Galatea shows a strong resemblance to Claudel’s Young Girl with a Sheaf.

At the beginning of the 1890s, Claudel began to distance herself more and more from Rodin. “I have lots of new ideas that would please you enormously… I’m greatly enjoying working… As you can see, it’s no longer anything like Rodin,” she wrote to her brother Paul. Claudel kept working independently, and her works were shown in several exhibitions. However, securing and keeping public commissions proved incredibly difficult. While she did receive prestigious commissions, such as the state-sponsored plaster model of The Age of Maturity, they were often caught in bureaucratic and personal crossfire, leading to cancellations or rejections. The male-dominated art world struggled with her way of depicting female sensuality and nudity.

Claudel also believed Rodin to be responsible for the loss of her commission for The Age of Maturity, although his involvement was never proven. A male figure torn between an older woman and a younger one: A piece that seems to show the troublesome relationship between Rodin, his wife, and Claudel.

Reality began to blend with her emerging paranoia, convinced that her former lover and master would use her ideas as his own. Today, about 90 of her works still exist. Claudel’s deteriorating mental health led to periods of destroying her own art. Ultimately, she was committed to a mental asylum in 1913. The sculptor remained institutionalized until her death in 1943. Unlike Rodin, she would never live to witness the success of her own work. Her genius and talent only gained recognition in the 1980s. Since then, countless exhibitions, books, and even films have honored her oeuvre. Still, her relationship to Rodin remained connected to her name.

Victorine Meurent: From Model to Muse to Artist

Victorine Meurent was not even 20 when she met 30-year-old Édouard Manet in Paris in 1862. Where exactly the two met can not be known with certainty. While some theories assume that he discovered her on the streets of Paris, possibly while she was working as a musician, it is more likely that their first encounter happened through their mutual connection with Thomas Couture. Manet had completed his academic training in his atelier, and Meurent was said to have posed as a model for him.

Her name and existence were long unknown in the art world. What made her famous was not her own art but the art that would depict her. Manet chose her for a variety of paintings between 1862 and 1873, the two most prominent being Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe and Olympia.

Le Déjeuner Sur L’Herbe or Luncheon on the Grass was painted in 1863. In the same year, it was shown at the first Salon des Refusés, the exhibition of the works rejected by the official Paris Salon. While the Salon of the Refused was meant to showcase more progressive and less conservative artworks, Manet’s picnic scene still received backlash. The naked woman next to fully clothed men during a luncheon in the park raised a controversy about how female nudity was to be portrayed in art. The nude was real, too real for the taste of the time.

Manet’s Olympia was created in the same year. In 1865, it was accepted for the Paris Salon. The erotic element of the nude is undeniable here. It shows a demimonde, a courtesan to a wealthy lover, lying naked on a bed, attended by her maid. Instead of an idealized goddess or a passive nude, Olympia contains a certain directness and a confrontation with sex, erotica, and female confidence. The public discourse simply called her a prostitute. This narrative was mirrored in the speculations about the model behind these two controversial paintings, claiming she was a prostitute and an alcoholic who died young.

In reality, the opposite was the case. Victorine Meurent was an artist herself. She even managed to be in the Salon exhibition of 1876, the same year when Manet’s works were rejected. She was accepted to the Salon four times in total, and from 1903 onward, she was an elected member of the Société des Artistes Français. Despite numerous rumors surrounding her persona, she never had any kind of romantic relationship with Manet. Once Meurent decided to pursue her artistic career, she stopped working as a model for him. However, her success and name almost vanished from the history of art. Nearly all of her paintings are lost, and only a few were recovered in this century. Her Self Portrait from 1876 is exhibited at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, as the first one shown in a museum outside of France.

Frida Kahlo: The Muse That Became an Icon

The relationship between Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo was complex and powerful. The two artists had a great influence on each other, resulting in outstanding artworks. Today, Kahlo’s name is known worldwide, but at the beginning of their relationship, Rivera had a much stronger reputation.

In 1922, Kahlo was 15 years old and a student at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria in Mexico City. Rivera was 20 years older and working on his mural Creation. By that time, he was already an established artist, known for his political works and his approach to cultural identity in post-revolutionary Mexico. The young student, fascinated by his work, observed him for hours.

Several years later, they met again when Kahlo asked Rivera for his opinion about her art. The young woman’s life was severely impacted by a bus accident in which she suffered serious injuries to her spine, pelvis, and abdomen. During her monthlong recovery on bed rest, Kahlo started to paint. Rivera wrote about his first impression of her work: “They had a fundamental plastic honesty, and an artistic personality of their own. They communicated a vital sensuality, complemented by a merciless yet sensitive power of observation. It was obvious to me that this girl was an authentic artist.” His encouragement influenced Kahlo to continue pursuing a serious artistic career.

The pair married in 1929, when Kahlo was 22 years old. She was Rivera’s third wife. Their marriage was passionate and unconventional. Both had multiple affairs, one of them leading to a divorce in 1939 and a remarriage in 1940.

Kahlo processed the ups and downs of her marriage with Diego in her art. Their wedding portrait from 1931 depicts the two standing next to each other. Rivera in a gray suit, tall and large, with brushes and a palette in one hand. He is slightly averted from Kahlo, who is dressed in a long green dress and a vibrant red scarf. The portrait indicates the nature of the beginning years of their marriage: He is the colossal maestro, she the delicate depiction of femininity. Their hands touch ever so slightly, as if Kahlo knew that their bond wasn’t based on traditional monogamy. She writes: “Being the wife of Diego is the most marvelous thing in the world … I let him play matrimony with other women. Diego is not anybody’s husband and never will be, but he is a great comrade.”

While Diego Rivera’s art can be seen as political, historical, and ideological, Kahlo seems to focus more on her individual emotions and trauma processing. An inward-looking art, rather than art that portrays the concerns of a whole society.

In 1939, the year of their divorce, Kahlo painted Las dos Fridas, a self-portrait that addresses topics like national identity, cultural traditions, and her relationship with Rivera. In contrast to the wedding portrait, the two Fridas firmly hold hands. A gesture that can be described as a form of self-healing and a strong connection. Although Rivera’s influence on her life is well-documented and clearly visible in her artworks, Kahlo was never really her husband’s muse, but that of her own.

Margaret Keane: The Muse With the Big Eyes

Margaret Keane could be named the muse that never was one. Although her second husband, Walter Keane, was an artist, it was not his art that made him famous. It was hers.

Born in 1927 in Tennessee as Peggy Doris Hawkins, she developed an interest in art early on. As a result of a mastoid operation, she lost her hearing in one ear and started to rely on her eyes more. This was reflected in her works. When her first and only daughter was born, Keane portrayed her with big eyes. Something that would become her trademark.

After her first marriage ended, Margaret and her daughter moved to San Francisco, where she met Walter Keane at an art exhibition in Berkeley in 1955. The pair got married, and soon after, Walter began to sell Margaret’s paintings. First under her name and then depicted as a group effort. After he realized how well the artworks were received, he sold them as his own. The transition was smooth and quick, and eventually Margaret struggled to find a way out of the scheme.

They both shared a passion for becoming artists, but unlike Margaret, Walter never had any formal education in art. Instead, he had a talent for sales. And in that, he succeeded tremendously.

In the 1950s and 1960s, consumerism was in full bloom. Families moved to the suburbs, bought cars, and household appliances. Affordable art was a market niche that Walter Keane successfully tapped into. Margaret’s works appealed to the taste of the general public. They were figurative and emotional. While art critics and curators often referred to the style as kitsch, the sales figures spoke for themselves.

For over a decade, Margaret produced painting after painting, generating millions. At the height of Walter’s fake artistic career, he got commissioned for the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair. Tomorrow Forever was displayed in the Hall of Education, showing 100 sad-looking, big-eyed children. Here, however, the style was met with strong disapproval. An article in the New York Times by John Canaday stated: “This tasteless hack work contains about 100 children and hence it is about 100 times as bad as the average Keane.” As a result, the commission was withdrawn.

A year later, the couple divorced, Margaret moved with her daughter to Hawaii and remarried. She continued painting children with big eyes for Walter, afraid of his anger and revenge. The portrayed kids became gradually less sad, surrounded by blue water and vibrant flowers.

Finally, in 1970, Margaret confessed in a radio interview that she was the actual artist behind the paintings. Walter denied the claims for years and even accused his ex-wife of stealing from him. Over a decade later, Margaret filed a lawsuit against Walter, which led to a court-ordered paint-off in front of a judge. She painted one of her classic big-eyed children in under an hour, while Walter claimed to be unable to work due to a shoulder injury. The court awarded Margaret the authorship of her art. Walter was originally ordered to pay 4 million dollars in damages, which was later overruled.

While one could argue that Margaret profited from Walter’s talent for salesmanship, it still took almost 30 years for her to claim ownership of her art back. These years were filled with artistic submission, abuse, and financial control. In the end, it turned out that Margaret was the muse of a salesman. But Walter was never the artist.

Walter Sickert is a rather obscure figure. A British Impressionist trained by James McNeill Whistler and Edgar Degas, he preferred dark tones and deep shadows. Outstandingly talented, Sickert was challenging to be around, shifting his beliefs and ideas as fluidly as he blended colors on his easel. Read on to learn more about seven works by Walter Sickert you need to know.

1. Walter Sickert’s “Little Dot Hetherington at the Old Bedford,” 1888-89

Before becoming an artist, Walter Sickert was interested in theater. Expressive and prone to drama from a young age, Sickert was an insufferable child who aggressively dominated his siblings, skillfully played the victim in every possible situation, and enjoyed the unconditional support of his mother, who clearly favored him over other children. Sickert’s stage career was rather brief. After playing several minor roles, he got bored with theater and started studying art in 1881. Ambitious up to the point of arrogance, he managed to secure a job as the assistant for James McNeill Whistler.

Despite a career change, the theater never truly left his life. Apart from frequently attending the shows, he regularly painted both actors on stage and the crowd that came to see them. In Victorian England, theater was a place for the middle to upper classes to socialize and present themselves to those of similar status.

2. Venetian Series, 1901

Sickert moved from Whistler’s studio to Paris, where he took lessons from Edgar Degas. Combining the influences of the two great modern artists, Sickert developed his own version of Impressionism based on dark tones and deep shadows. He also developed a deep connection to France, spending several years there throughout his life. Venice was another crucial space for Sickert’s oeuvre. In the mid-1890s, Sickert traveled there for the first time, and this trip left a formative impact on his style. Impressed by the architecture and the beauty of the city, he learned how to manipulate light and space by painting Venetian scenes.

Despite being considered a British artist, Sickert had a fluid natural and cultural identity. Born in Bavaria to Danish and Irish parents, in his early years, he identified as German and later as English and even French. The desire to shock and confuse was stronger in him than any other belief, so he changed political affiliation, opinions, and details of his biography as he pleased. He even changed his name in the 1960s, spending his final years as Richard Sickert.

3. La Hollandaise, 1906

The nude feminine figure was one of Sickert’s most popular subjects. His style of painting was rather raw and without idealization. Something uncomfortably physiological in his works still repulses some viewers, especially women.

Most of Sickert’s painted subjects came from the working class. Wealthy and popular, he expressed a borderline unhealthy and fetishistic interest in working-class realities and bodies. He called himself a Realist, yet unlike the famous Realist Gustave Courbet, who felt a deep inner connection to the workers he painted, Sickert was an outside observer—a voyeurist, enjoyably picking at someone’s burdens and suffering.

4. Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom, 1906-07

In 1888, London was shaken by a series of gruesome murders of sex workers. The victims’ bodies were slashed, and some of their inner organs were missing. The killer sent mocking letters to the police officials, introducing himself as Jack The Ripper. His identity was never revealed, and the horrific murders suddenly stopped in 1891. Historians believe that he either died or moved away from London.

In 1907, Walter Sickert painted the dark bedroom of the notorious killer, with the perpetrator’s figure looking out of the window. The layout of the room corresponded to one of Sickert’s studios in London, which he kept secret from his wife and most of his friends. The morbid undertone of the painting, as well as a series of factual coincidences, made some authors and enthusiasts assume that Sickert was, in fact, Jack the Ripper, who confessed his crimes through his art.

Jack the Ripper was the first serial killer to get extensive media coverage, yet, contrary to the popular misconception, he was not the first criminal of such sort. Modern urbanization and changing life pace made these crimes much more visible and easy to cover. Moreover, with the development of psychiatry and medicine, people became able to rationalize the presence of some horrific crimes. Some experts believe that before the modern era, especially in rural areas, the appearances of serial killers might have been attributed to supernatural forces. Thus, the medieval accounts of werewolves and vampires might have been actually the works of serial killers, who were dehumanized in desperate attempts to explain the motives for their actions.

5. Camden Town Murder Series, 1907

Another incriminating evidence against Sickert was revealed the following year. In 1907, a sex worker named Emily Dimmock was murdered in her bedroom in Camden Town, London. Although there was no clear link between the Ripper’s crimes and Dimmock’s murder, the press immediately announced the return of the notorious serial killer.

At the time, Sickert rented a studio in Camden Town. A famous and popular painter, he appeared at the crime scene while the police were there. Later, he attended a public hearing for the murder suspect,  a former client of Dimmock who was soon cleared of all charges. The following year, he presented a series of paintings titled Camden Town Murder, with nude (and supposedly dead) women lying on beds next to fully clothed and desperate men.

The proponents of the Ripper theory focus on Sickert’s obsession with the case and the supposed matches of the victims’ photographs with nude figures in his painting. Although this connection seems tempting, true crime enthusiasts need to understand how fanatical the public obsession with this case was, especially in the circles of cynical intellectuals. The media spread theories of various degrees of absurdity and recounted every gruesome detail of the murder. Thousands of people found it funny to send forged Ripper letters to the police, looking for attention and trying to confuse the authorities. Some were horrified by the crimes, refusing to let their wives and daughters leave their houses, while others found them amusing.

Attending public trials was also nothing out of the ordinary, especially for artists at the time. Sickert’s teacher, Edgar Degas, was interested in physiognomy and went to trials and prisons to study the faces of criminals. Like many of his contemporaries, he believed that the inclination towards crime was reflected by a person’s facial features and body. That being said, while Sickert’s interest seems gruesome, it was not entirely unconventional. For sure, it cannot lead to any accusations or even suspicions. As noted by Jack the Ripper experts, with the same degree of success, one could accuse Vincent van Gogh, Mark Twain, or even Queen Victoria herself of being the infamous murderer.

6. Ennui, 1913

Sickert was progressive in painting style but rather conservative in his work habits. For years, he moved the same props from studio to studio (including the iron bed frame that appeared on many of his paintings) and worked with the same models.

One of his most cherished models was a couple, Hubby and Marie Hayes, a former sailor and Sickert’s housekeeper. Hubby Hayes has also worked in the Sickert household for a while but was fired for being constantly drunk. Ennui was one of the most famous paintings that featured a couple, bored and annoyed with each other, yet living together out of habit. Their sharp emotional detachment is unsettling. Virginia Woolf noted that the scene did not offer a hint of a possible solution for the two, with “the accumulated weariness of innumerable days” discharging its burden over them.

7. Walter Sickert’s Portrait of Winston Churchill

A lesser-known yet important work in Walter Sickert’s later oeuvre was his 1927 portrait of Winston Churchill. Churchill was an amateur painter, rather conservative in his artistic views. Still, he liked Sickert’s work and even befriended the artist after several visits to his studio. Sickert occasionally gave Churchill painting lessons, broadening his creative horizons.

Despite their friendship, Churchill disliked the portrait and gave it away to an art gallery. At the end of his life, Sickert became ill and impoverished despite his previous success. Churchill was among those who raised funds to cover Sickert’s debts. When Churchill became the Prime Minister, he awarded Sickert an annual pension that would support him until his death in 1942.

“I live in a little yellow house with green door and shutters, whitewashed inside—on the white walls—very brightly coloured Japanese drawings—red tiles on the floor—the house in the full sun—and a bright blue sky above it and—the shadow in the middle of the day much shorter than at home.” Van Gogh wrote this to his sister Willemien in June 1888, describing his house in Arles. Van Gogh’s Yellow House was not only a place of residence for him, but also a sanctuary.

What Was Van Gogh’s Yellow House?

After living in Paris for a year, Van Gogh desired the serenity of the countryside and thus decided to move to the south of France. He set the city of Arles as his destination, which was famous for its natural beauty and brilliant light. Initially, the artist stayed at a boarding house but found it too expensive for long-term residence. In May, Van Gogh finally found a new residence: a two-story house at 2 Place Lamartine. He rented four rooms on the right side of this house, two on each floor, for 15 francs a month.

Having officially rented it in May, he finally moved into the Yellow House in September after it had been painted inside and outside, furnished, and redecorated. Van Gogh informed his brother Theo about renting the house in a letter written on May 1, describing it as having two bedrooms on the second floor, one of which was to be his own, and a studio and a kitchen on the first floor. The windows on the second floor looked out towards a small garden with a pond in the center, as Van Gogh depicted in the sketch Public garden and pond in front of the Yellow House. The house was painted yellow on the outside, while the walls inside were white, which delighted Van Gogh as he longed to look at his canvases in bright, well-lit interiors.

Van Gogh remarked on the color of the house and surrounding buildings in September, describing them as “these yellow houses in the sunlight.” He referred to it as “the little yellow house where we work” in December, when Gauguin was living with him. Due to his repeated mentions of the color of the house that stood under a blazing sun with clear light, the Yellow House came to be famously known as such.

While Van Gogh was happy enough to have a studio of his own, he had loftier plans for the Yellow House. He wanted to establish the studio as an artists’ association, especially for younger artists, in order to provide them with a sense of community, as well as financial assistance. The proposed arrangement was to request donations of paintings from Impressionists such as Claude Monet and Edgar Degas that would then be sold and act as a stream of revenue for emerging artists. His ideas were very specific: “I really want to make of it — an artist’s house but not precious, on the contrary, nothing precious, but everything from the chair to the painting having character.”

Van Gogh’s hopes were supported by Theo, who wrote to him in October, “I hope that your efforts will succeed in making your house a place where artists will feel at home.” Van Gogh had already put forth the idea of sharing the studio with the French artist Paul Gauguin in May, and eventually invited him to Arles to live with him in the Yellow House. After much deliberation, Gauguin arrived in October 1888, and the two artists lived together there until the end of December.

The Yellow House as Artistic Inspiration

Soon after moving into it, the Yellow House became a source of artistic inspiration for Van Gogh. He produced numerous paintings for the house itself, as well as a canvas depicting the Yellow House as viewed from the street. He called this painting The Street, but it is today famously known as The Yellow House. It perfectly captures Van Gogh’s impression of the house and the neighborhood he lived in. As can be seen in the painting, the house, the surrounding buildings, and the ground are all painted in yellow. There is a distinctly green door and window shutters on the front side of both floors of the house. The building on the left is the Restaurant Vénissac, where Van Gogh dined every day, and the cafe from his painting titled The Night Café lies on the left of this restaurant.

The entire scene lies “under a sulfur sun, under a pure cobalt sky” that the artist so admired in Arles. A strange detail in this scene was recently analyzed by the Van Gogh Museum, which provides a deeper insight into life in Arles in the late 19th century. Running along the street adjacent to the house are big heaps of sand that were often placed along the streets in order to absorb the dung left behind by horses and other animals. Van Gogh included this detail in the painting but did not explain it in his letters, possibly because its purpose was well understood by most people in the 19th century.

Apart from capturing the street, Van Gogh also decided to decorate the interiors of the Yellow House to give it a personal touch. This desire led to his decision to paint a series of decorations that the artist worked on in 1888 and 1889. One of these decorations were Van Gogh’s renowned Sunflowers. “I’m thinking of decorating my studio with half a dozen paintings of Sunflowers,” he wrote. The artist painted seven canvases depicting sunflowers in bloom placed inside a vase for the purpose of hanging them inside the Yellow House, particularly in the extra bedroom where Gauguin was going to stay. These works were some of his best, glowing in vibrant yellows, and the decision to hang them in Gauguin’s room was meant to portray Van Gogh’s success as an artist.

He was capable of creating paintings with character with a harmonious arrangement of forms and colors, and Gauguin had to see that every day. Van Gogh also hoped that Theo would come to stay with him in the Yellow House during the following summer, by which time he wanted to fill the house with paintings, starting with a big decoration of Sunflowers in the guest room. The color yellow was a recurring theme in Arles, particularly in the Yellow House, with its “yellow of fresh butter.” This fondness for yellow was also reflected in the Sunflowers, as Van Gogh described one of the canvases as “a painting all in yellow of sunflowers (14 flowers) in a yellow vase and against a yellow background.”

The decoration of Sunflowers also inspired another series of paintings in 1889 titled La Berceuse. This consisted of five different versions of portraits of Madame Augustine Roulin, the wife of Van Gogh’s friend Joseph Roulin who was a postman at the Arles station. Both Sunflowers and La Berceuse depict stylistic similarities, particularly a flat pictorial space with simplified forms and colors. Van Gogh even expressed his wish to make a triptych with these paintings, with La Berceuse in the middle and two Sunflowers on the sides. Apart from this, Van Gogh also made a decoration for the extra bedroom that he titled “The Poet’s Garden” that included the paintings The public garden, The public garden with a couple strolling, Row of cypresses with a couple strolling and another unknown painting. The Yellow House was therefore a source of creative inspiration for Van Gogh, leading him to produce several paintings as decorations for the house. Even apart from paintings meant to be hung inside, the house also allowed him to work freely, as he wrote to Willemien, “Inside, I can live and breathe, and think and paint.”

The Yellow House as a Personal Motif

The Yellow House not only inspired Van Gogh’s brush, but was also the spot of the development of his friendship with Gauguin. He never intended to live alone in the house, as he told Theo in September 1888, “From the start, I wanted to arrange the house not just for myself but in such a way as to be able to put somebody up.” He put forth the proposal of living together in the Yellow House to Gauguin, with the idea that Theo would send 250 francs each month, to be used by both artists as long as they were frugal with their expenses. In return, Gauguin would have to provide Theo with one painting per month.

The French artist finally agreed to this arrangement and moved into the Yellow House at the end of October 1888. Before Gauguin’s arrival, Van Gogh had already furnished the house with two beds, a mirror, chairs, and a table. He expressed his wish to make the extra room where Gauguin or another guest could stay “as nice as possible, like a woman’s boudoir, really artistic.” He described his plans to decorate this room in great detail in a letter to Theo, emphasizing that it was going to be elegant and pretty, with decorations on the walls and a view of the garden and the rising sun from the window. He chose every piece of furniture for the house carefully in order to ensure that it had character.

Both Van Gogh and Gauguin were hopeful for a fruitful cohabitation that would lead to an exchange of artistic ideas and numerous works capturing the natural beauty of Provence. However, their cohabitation was rather tumultuous. Van Gogh and Gauguin had different approaches to art. While Van Gogh was a strong advocate for art rooted in and depicting reality, Gauguin aimed for the opposite and claimed that an artist must paint from memory or the imagination to truly express one’s interior world. This disagreement may not have affected their friendship to a great extent when they met in Paris, but it put a strain on their cohabitation in Arles.

They would argue frequently, but they continued working together until one fateful day when tensions rose to new heights as Gauguin declared his intention to leave Arles. On December 23rd, a distraught Van Gogh then suffered a psychotic episode that led him to cut off his ear with a razor in the Yellow House. He was admitted to a hospital the next morning. Gauguin refused to visit him and left Arles in the next few days.

Van Gogh returned to the Yellow House after being discharged from the hospital and went back to painting in January. His Self-portrait with bandaged ear and pipe and La Berceuse were also painted here. But as his health declined, both brothers considered it reasonable for the artist to be admitted to a psychiatric facility to receive proper care. He stored his furniture from the Yellow House at the Café de la Gare, where he had resided previously, and left Arles for Saint-Rémy in May 1889. He resided in the psychiatric hospital Saint-Paul-de-Mausole for a year following an epilepsy diagnosis by Dr. Félix Rey in Arles.

And so, Van Gogh left the Yellow House behind. The studio in the south signified his successful days as an artist, the spot of his developing relationship with Gauguin, as well as his declining health. Van Gogh’s great plans for the house to become an artists’ colony could unfortunately not be realized. His health never improved completely, and Van Gogh was never to return to Arles again. Van Gogh’s Yellow House no longer exists as it was destroyed in a bombing in 1944 during World War II, but its legacy as an important motif in the artist’s life lives on today through his art and letters.

In a career spanning only ten years, the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh managed to change the course of art history. Known for his eccentric character and emotive, boldly colorful paintings, Van Gogh’s life as an artist was fraught with difficulties. However, his determination to work on his artistic vision and the support of his brother were unwavering, leading to many masterpieces painted over a short span of time. These eight stories shed light on the artist’s intriguing life, which resulted in a large and diverse oeuvre.

1. Van Gogh’s Experiences With Religion

Van Gogh grew up in a religious environment in the Netherlands. His father, Theodorus van Gogh, was a Dutch Reformed minister. Van Gogh’s first inclination was toward the church, long before he decided to become an artist. He was studying to take the entrance exam for Theology at the University of Amsterdam, but soon abandoned this path and ended up working as a lay preacher instead. In 1878, Van Gogh was posted in Borinage, a mining village in Belgium. This period of his life constituted some of his most complex experiences with Christianity as he found compassion for the poor working miners living in harsh conditions.

Van Gogh gave away many of his possessions to support the miner families, and often shared his food with them, surviving on scraps himself. This is where he started making his first sketches that soon ignited his passion for art. After having such a close interaction with the reality of working-class people, Van Gogh turned his focus away from the church and toward capturing nature, peasants, and other laborers who worked on the land in his drawings and paintings. He still carried his religious teachings with him, but developed a more spiritual relationship with God and nature later in life.

2. Van Gogh Did Not Always Plan on Being an Artist

Van Gogh did not start his career as an artist until he was 27 years old. At this time, he was living and working as a preacher in the Borinage. He was fascinated and had a great admiration for the hard work performed by miners, and would often make small sketches of them in his letters to his brother Theo. After going through some of these sketches, Theo encouraged him to continue drawing. After feeling lost in his career for years, Van Gogh found a sense of direction for the first time. He immediately immersed himself in his work, making copies after Rembrandt and Jean-François Millet to practice his drawing skills.

Looking for a mentor, he reached out to the artist Anton Mauve, who was married to his cousin. Van Gogh learned to work with watercolors under Mauve’s guidance and soon started painting. In 1885, he painted his first serious work, The Potato Eaters, depicting a family of Dutch peasants seated around a table for supper. Its dark and somber colors were typical of the Dutch palette, but Van Gogh eventually adopted a brighter palette for his work, never to look back.

3. The Close Relationship Between Vincent and Theo van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh was the oldest of six children. Over the course of his life, he developed a close relationship with his younger brother Theo, who was the second child. Theo’s name is inseparable from the story of Vincent van Gogh. Both Vincent and Theo started working at the art dealership Goupil & Cie at a young age, and Theo eventually built a successful career as an art dealer based in Paris. Vincent, on the other hand, left the dealership and followed several different career paths before he decided to pursue a life as an artist. The only reason Vincent was able to follow this path was because of the support of his younger brother, both financial and emotional.

Theo sent Vincent a fixed allowance each month so that he could focus solely on developing his skills as an artist. Eventually, the two formed a mutually beneficial arrangement: Theo would support Vincent financially by sending a small sum of money every month, and in return, Vincent would send all the paintings he made to Theo, who would be free to do with them as he pleased. This way, Vincent was “selling” his works to his brother. This arrangement continued until the end of Vincent’s life, and Theo’s Paris apartment was filled with hundreds of paintings made by his brother.

The two remained in constant correspondence, and everything we know about Van Gogh today is based on the letters exchanged between the two brothers that were published by Theo’s widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger. Theo also named his son after Vincent. The artist passed away in July 1890 after suffering from psychological issues, and Theo died six months later.

4. Van Gogh’s Fascination With Japanese Prints

In 1886, Van Gogh moved to Paris to live with Theo and familiarize himself with the latest developments in painting. For the first time, he came across avant-garde artists experimenting with different techniques as well as bright and colorful paintings by Impressionists. But one of the most important things he discovered in Paris was the art of woodblock prints from Japan. Such prints were gaining popularity in Europe during the second half of the 19th century, and Van Gogh soon became an avid collector of them.

These prints of beautiful natural scenes in a foreign land featured simplified compositional techniques, particularly the lack of spatial depth, that impressed Van Gogh. Van Gogh made several copies after famous Japanese prints and intended to achieve a similar effect in his own works. He was fascinated by the peaceful natural environments depicted in these prints, and this fascination led him to leave the city of Paris and move to the countryside in the south of France, surrounded by natural beauty, as he described in a letter, “I want to begin by telling you that this part of the world seems to me as beautiful as Japan for the clearness of the atmosphere and the gay colour effects.”

5. The Friendship Between Van Gogh and Gauguin

Van Gogh made several friends after moving to Paris in 1886. He lived with Theo in an apartment and was introduced to the circle of young avant-garde artists working in the city, such as Emile Bernard, Georges Seurat, and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, among others. But the most important friend he made in Paris was the French artist Paul Gauguin. They exchanged many letters sharing the work they were doing after Van Gogh left Paris to live in the south of France. An important point in their friendship arrived in 1888, when Van Gogh was living in Arles. He had rented a house with four rooms, called the Yellow House, and invited Gauguin to stay with him. The idea was for the two artists to treat the house as a studio and work together while surrounded by the beauty of the countryside.

While this cohabitation did lead to some paintings, the experience was far from successful. Van Gogh and Gauguin would argue frequently about their opposing views on art and methods of working, and one fateful day, the tension between them reached new heights. A distressed Van Gogh cut off a portion of his ear and was hospitalized, and Gauguin left Arles. The two did not speak for some time after that.

6. “A Mad Genius”: Van Gogh’s Mental Issues

The incident with Gauguin in Arles was the beginning of the psychiatric issues that Van Gogh faced until the end of his life. After being hospitalized in Arles for a few days, he returned to his Yellow House and continued painting. He had little memory of mutilating his ear. After spending a few more months in Arles, Van Gogh’s health did not seem to improve, which led him to make the decision to be officially hospitalized for a long duration. He moved to the psychiatric hospital Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy and stayed there for a year. He was diagnosed with epilepsy and continued suffering attacks that hindered his ability to paint. Still, Van Gogh painted many works during this period whenever he was in a functional state, including his world-famous masterpiece The Starry Night.

After being discharged from the hospital in Saint-Rémy, things did not seem to be improving significantly. Van Gogh wanted to stay close to Theo, who lived in Paris, so he decided to leave Provence and move back to the north of France in May 1890. He lived in an artists’ village near Paris called Auvers-sur-Oise, under the supervision of Doctor Paul Gachet, a homeopathic physician and amateur artist. This period only lasted for about two months, as Van Gogh died by suicide in July. The last few years of Van Gogh’s life are associated with his mental illness as well as some of his best works. Such a connection has led to the popular recognition of Vincent van Gogh as a mad genius whose brush was driven by his unstable mental state, leading to intensely colorful and emotionally expressive masterpieces.

7. Van Gogh’s Masterpieces: The Sunflowers

Van Gogh has a long list of masterpieces, but some of these works are not only artistic achievements, but are also linked to important moments in the artist’s life. Van Gogh painted Sunflowers as decorations for his Yellow House. These canvases depict blooming sunflowers placed inside a vase, painted in different combinations of illuminating yellows and blues. That is exactly the kind of effect he wished to achieve with these works, comparing them to “standard lamps or candelabra.” At the same time, the Sunflowers were a means for Van Gogh to show off his skills to Paul Gauguin, who was soon to arrive in Arles. He even put his signature on the vase of sunflowers on the canvas that was to hang in Gauguin’s room—a way of claiming ownership of his work.

The artist began painting this series in the summer of 1888 and finished it in 1889. He suffered from an attack and was hospitalized while he was in the middle of finishing this series. The Sunflowers are a testament to Van Gogh’s development as an artist who found a way to express his own vision despite everything.

8. Van Gogh’s Last Works

Despite facing many attacks and an unstable mental state for two years, Van Gogh continued painting until the end of his life. Living in Auvers-sur-Oise from May to July 1890, he took full advantage of the beautiful natural surroundings, painting wheatfields, gardens, and views of the village. Some of his most notable works from the last few weeks of his life are two paintings of wheatfields around Auvers called Wheatfield under Thunderclouds and Wheatfield after the Rain. In a letter to Theo, he described these paintings as “immense stretches of wheatfields under turbulent skies, and I made a point of trying to express sadness, extreme loneliness.” But he was not entirely hopeless, as even during this difficult time, he emphasized the healing aspect of nature: “I’d almost believe that these canvases will tell you what I can’t say in words, what I consider healthy and fortifying about the countryside.”

Another important painting was Wheatfield with Crows. This turbulent painting with emotionally charged brushstrokes is often associated with Van Gogh’s suicide, particularly as the composition is painted with highly contrasting shades of yellow, red, blue, and black. And yet, not all of his paintings during his last few weeks express the same emotions. One of the paintings that Van Gogh mentioned to Theo in his very last letter from July 23, 1890, was Daubigny’s Garden, portraying a calm, blooming garden painted in light greens and blues. It is difficult to gather the exact state of his mind during his last days, but he continued painting nevertheless and remained devoted to capturing natural beauty in vivid colors and bold, intentional brushstrokes.