The name Vincent van Gogh brings to mind intense and vividly colored paintings, but it also conjures the image of a tormented man cutting off his ear with a razor inside his house. Both images are true and overlapping, as this Dutch artist continued painting until his last days before committing suicide. The chaotic paintings made during his final weeks, particularly the work Wheatfield with Crows, appear to have been painted by a madman who knew that his end was close. But is this a historical fact?

The Last Weeks in Auvers-sur-Oise

Van Gogh suffered his first mental breakdown in December 1888. After having an argument with his friend and peer Paul Gauguin, the Dutch artist cut off his ear with a razor in his Yellow House in Arles. He was admitted into the hospital the next morning but had little recollection of the whole event. As his mental state became more unstable during the next few months, Van Gogh decided to willingly admit himself into a psychiatric hospital in Provence in May 1889. He stayed at the asylum under the supervision of professionals until May 1890, after which he moved to a small artists’ village near Paris called Auvers-sur-Oise, his final destination. In Auvers, Van Gogh lived in a rented room in an inn, and his health was supervised by a homeopathic physician named Paul Gachet.

Van Gogh would visit Gachet multiple times a week, so the two became close friends, especially as the former suspected that the doctor was suffering from the same “nervous ailment” as him. His days in Auvers were filled with productivity as he immersed himself in painting. Doctor Gachet encouraged him to keep working, and being fascinated with the beauty of Auvers, Van Gogh clearly agreed, as he stated in a letter to his brother Theo, “Auvers is decidedly very beautiful. So much so that I think it’ll be more advantageous to work than not to work, despite all the bad luck that’s to be foreseen with paintings.”

The artist continued planning paintings, making small sketches in his letters and looking for new subjects throughout his time in this village, and most of the works executed here are landscapes capturing the character of this northern village. But despite making efforts to be productive and take care of his health, Van Gogh was dreadfully aware of his psychological problems that had persisted despite his stay at the asylum.

His early days in Auvers were optimistic as he wrote to his brother, “I still believe that it’s above all an illness of the south that I caught, and that the return here will be enough to dispel all that.” However, this optimism disappeared quickly. Van Gogh had moved to Auvers toward the end of May, and only two months later, on July 27, he walked into a field and shot himself in the chest with a revolver. Wounded, he managed to walk back to his room at the inn, only to pass away on his bed two days later, on July 29. He was 37 years old at that time. Van Gogh’s death by suicide has remained a long-discussed historical incident, and his paintings from Auvers are often viewed as containing clues of this tragedy.

Vincent’s Turbulent Wheatfields

Not only did Van Gogh continue painting during his final weeks in Auvers, but he also attempted to experiment with different formats and wider canvases. Some of the major works that the artist made during this period include a series of twelve paintings depicting a wheatfield made on canvases measuring 20 in x 40 in. The painting Wheatfield under Thunderclouds is a famous example from this series, composed of serene blues and greens, depicting a peaceful yet empty landscape. Van Gogh described these paintings in a letter to Theo from July 10, writing, “They’re immense stretches of wheatfields under turbulent skies, and I made a point of trying to express sadness, extreme loneliness.”

The canvas that is frequently cited as the most prominent indication of Van Gogh’s declining mental state is Wheatfield with Crows, made in July 1890. Often understood as his last painting, it depicts a turbulent landscape of wheatfields with crows flying under a dark blue, stormy sky. The harsh brushstrokes, combined with saturated, intense colors, give this painting an unsettled effect, with the deep blue of the sky contrasting with the bright yellow wheatfield and the green-and-red pathway. The winding path appears to be a dead end, and the crows flying overhead appear ominous. These turbulent wheatfields comprise an important part of his oeuvre, shedding light on his artistic development that persisted during his final weeks. However, these works were not the only paintings that Van Gogh made in Auvers.

Other Paintings From Auvers

Right after describing the wheatfield canvases in his letter to Theo, Van Gogh mentioned another painting he was working on called Daubigny’s Garden. It shows a blooming garden at the house of the French painter Charles-François Daubigny. The painting is a serene landscape, flooded with vivid shades of green. The forms and brushstrokes are dynamic and exhibit a lot of character, typical of Van Gogh. He painted another similar canvas as well as a smaller study of this scene during this period.

With calmer brushwork, lighter colors, and a peaceful scene depicting the restful beauty of nature, these paintings of Daubigny’s garden elicit an effect distinct from Wheatfield with Crows. They are less popular than the latter but shed light on an important period in Van Gogh’s artistic development. In addition to the garden, Van Gogh also painted several portraits in Auvers, including two of Doctor Gachet and one of his daughter Marguerite Gachet, as well as two paintings depicting Gachet’s garden. But the work that researchers actually consider to be the last painting Van Gogh ever made is called Tree Roots. This work is made on a wide canvas and is composed of strong lines and vivid colors, adding visual intensity to the subject of exposed roots and trunks of trees entangled on a slope.

Paintings as a Signal of His Death?

It is true that Van Gogh was suffering toward the end of his life. He had poured almost ten years into a career as an artist and produced around 2000 paintings and drawings, and yet, he had managed to have only one major sale in his lifetime: The Red Vineyard, made in 1888. Unable to earn a living from his profession, Van Gogh struggled financially and had to rely on his brother. Theo was working at the art dealership Boussod, Valadon & Cie in Paris and earned enough to support his household as well as his brother. But unhappy with his circumstances, he began toying with the idea of leaving his position to start his own business as an art dealer in July 1890. This presented the fear of financial instability for both Theo’s family and Vincent, which was aggravated due to the ill health of Theo, his wife Jo, and their baby during this time. Van Gogh had expressed his regret about being a financial burden to Theo on multiple occasions, and these new circumstances must have intensified his anxiety.

It is possible that Van Gogh’s anguish during this period translated into his work, but there is no clear evidence that his last paintings hint toward his death. For example, the paintings of wheatfields, which are often cited as a clear indication of his impending suicide, don’t have a singular interpretation. Despite appearing chaotic and signifying loneliness, Van Gogh also considered them to be visual expressions of what he considered “healthy and fortifying about the countryside.” Moreover, exploring paintings apart from the wheatfields paints a different picture, as works such as Daubigny’s Garden and Marguerite Gachet in the Garden appear calmer and more peaceful.

This mystery is particularly highlighted when we look at Van Gogh’s letters from this period, which point toward a productive artist experimenting with new formats and searching for a studio space to continue his practice. In a letter from June 3, 1890, he wrote, “But anyway, I live from day to day – the weather is so fine. And my health is good, I go to bed at 9 o’clock but I get up at 5 o’clock most of the time.” Viewing Wheatfield with Crows in particular as the final canvas signaling his death is only a popularly held belief that supports the narrative of the tortured artist. In reality, it is difficult to say when Van Gogh had begun planning his suicide, or if he did so at all.

Despite the visual and textual sources available to us, it is not possible to fully understand Van Gogh’s mental state during the days before his death. He may have expressed his anguish through his paintings, but that is only one interpretation. It is even more improbable to recognize what the artist was thinking or feeling when painting a particular canvas. It is only after his work became popular posthumously that the myth about his last paintings as visual suicide notes was amplified. The actual story of Vincent van Gogh is more complex and layered. Based on his letters from his final weeks, his mental state fluctuated constantly. On good days, he was optimistic about the future, but during his difficult days, he often expressed hopelessness and uncertainty. Nevertheless, despite his struggles, Van Gogh’s legacy is not merely a sensationalized story of a mad and tormented genius, but rather, his legacy consists of a massive oeuvre marked with technical innovation and a unique style that forever changed the course of European modern art.

When Vincent van Gogh made the decision to pursue art professionally in 1880, he was 27 years old. He was familiar with Dutch realist paintings and had a fondness for artists like Rembrandt. He had strong opinions that led him on a long journey to discover his own unique style after years of experimentation. During the last years of his life, Van Gogh had worked out exactly how he wanted to compose his forms, lines, and colors in order to create a work that conveyed the essence of the subject.

What Makes Van Gogh’s Style Unique?

One of the key reasons Van Gogh’s art gains the admiration of its viewers is due to his unique style. The Dutch artist worked tirelessly to improve his technical skills in handling line, form, and color, but his works are not merely technical masterpieces. A common comment about his paintings is how passionate, bold, and colorful these canvases are, and how they stir up intense emotions among viewers. This is exactly what Van Gogh emphasized as an important aspect of art and instilled in his own work by shaping his style around his subject. With each painting, the artist attempted to capture the “character” or “essence” of the subject.

He did not paint accurate imitations, but amplified the most striking qualities of his subjects in the painting. For example, a painting of peasants conveys their difficult labor and connection to the earth through dark colors and exaggerated ruggedness in their faces, while a still-life painting of sunflowers uses the brightest, most vibrant yellows that convey the illuminating presence of the flowers in a room.

Although Van Gogh is today regarded as a genius due to his incredible skill in identifying and conveying the essence of his subjects, his style kept evolving throughout his career. His work can be classified into different periods due to varying stylistic qualities, particularly in the way he approached color. The improvement of his technical skills over the years, combined with a clearer idea of the direction he wanted his art to take, resulted in a unique and stylistically diverse oeuvre that has gained global acclaim.

Nuenen (1884-85)

After moving around different cities in England, Belgium, and the Netherlands during the early years of his life, Van Gogh finally arrived in the town of Nuenen in the Dutch province of North Brabant in December 1883. His father, a Protestant minister, had his parish in this town, so Van Gogh moved into his parents’ house. He had set his mind on becoming an artist and set up a studio behind the house. Although the artist was still contemplating his stylistic choices, he was sure about one thing: he wanted to paint peasants in their regular settings.

One of his greatest artistic inspirations was the French realist painter Jean-François Millet, whose oeuvre consisted largely of depictions of peasant life, such as the renowned painting The Gleaners (1857). And so, most of Van Gogh’s work from Nuenen, painted between 1884 and 1885, depicts peasants working in the fields or inside their homes.

Keeping in mind his resolve to convey the feeling of peasant life over an accurate imitation of reality, he relied on dark, dirt-like colors and exaggerated forms of the figures. He justified his reason for this stylistic choice to Theo in a letter from 1885, writing, “For my part, I’m convinced that in the long run it produces better results to paint them in their coarseness than to introduce conventional sweetness.”

Van Gogh’s efforts in honing his style as a peasant painter took up most of his time in Nuenen. He continued working with somber colors that he considered fit for his subjects, and the evolution of his style in Nuenen was guided by his intention to create honest and authentic peasant paintings. In 1885, his efforts finally resulted in a finished project that he called The Potato Eaters. This painting is hailed as a masterpiece by Van Gogh, showcasing his intentional stylistic choices. The dark room with only one light source, the almost animal-like features of the peasants’ faces, and the color palette resembling “a really dusty potato” together convey a feeling of the everyday life of peasants spent working on the land and eating from it.

Paris (1886-87)

From 1886 onwards, Van Gogh’s style changed completely. This was the period when he lived with Theo in Paris, with the aim of better acquainting himself with avant-garde developments in art. For the first time in his life, he witnessed the bright canvases of the Impressionists, which stood in stark contrast to the Dutch realist tradition he had thus far been familiar with. Impressionism was well-established in Paris by the 1880s, and avant-garde developments in art were being sustained by the next generation of artists, primarily Paul Gauguin, Émile Bernard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Georges Seurat, and Paul Signac. Van Gogh quickly befriended these artists and took an interest in the various stylistic techniques they were working on.

The artist was also introduced to Japanese woodblock prints in Paris, which had gained immense popularity in Europe during the 19th century. Most importantly, Paris transformed his palette as he began experimenting with color theory that dictated that certain colors are complementary to each other and enhance each other’s intensity when placed together. This idea resulted in Van Gogh’s intensely vivid paintings during his mature years.

Being exposed to a number of different styles and approaches to art, Van Gogh’s works from Paris suggest an experimental phase. Apart from color, one of the primary elements that the artist focused on was the simplification of form as well as the flattening of the picture plane. These were key compositional techniques in Japanese prints and informed Van Gogh’s later development. Abandoning the realist tendency to instill depth in a composition, Van Gogh created two-dimensional compositions and simplified his forms, as can be seen in the painting Carafe and Dish with Citrus Fruit (1887). This painting also shows the table with the carafe and lemons arranged diagonally. This kind of perspective based on diagonal lines was typical of Japanese prints and became another stylistic choice that Van Gogh implemented in later works, such as in the painting The Bedroom from 1888.

These stylistic choices were accompanied by a change in Van Gogh’s brushwork. Realist painting called for inconspicuous brushstrokes that blend into the larger composition, while French avant-garde artists, including the Impressionists, painted with distinctly visible brushstrokes. Artists like Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, for example, painted using the pointillist technique wherein unmixed color was applied to the surface in the form of dots and small dashes.

Van Gogh experimented with this technique in paintings such as View from Theo’s Apartment (1887) but did not fully commit to pointillism as a stylistic direction. Instead, he modified it to fit his own artistic vision. This can be seen in paintings like Apples and Grapes from 1887 that feature small dashes in some places but the works are not entirely composed of the pointillist technique. Further, Van Gogh began painting with impasto in Paris by applying paint thickly on the surface, which is by far one of the most characteristic features of his style and remained an integral part of his creative process.

Carrying all this new knowledge, Van Gogh left Paris in February 1888 for a quieter life in the countryside. His destination was the city of Arles in the Provençal region of France, where he lived for over a year. His time in Paris formed the foundation for the development of his mature style, which was a combination of the stylistic techniques of his peers and his own artistic vision.

Arles (1888-89)

The Arles period stretched from February 1888 to May 1889. Within the span of one year, Van Gogh managed to produce around 200 paintings, including some of his most famous masterpieces such as Sunflowers and Café Terrace at Night. The artist discovered light on the Impressionist canvases in Paris and Arles provided him with the perfect setting to add light to his own work. The region received an immense amount of intense sunlight that illuminated the entire land. Van Gogh’s paintings in Arles feature many vivid colors, most of all yellow, that intend to capture the brightness of the Arlesian landscapes, as he once described in a letter: “Sunshine, a light which, for want of a better word I can only call yellow — pale sulfur yellow, pale lemon, gold. How beautiful yellow is!”

Van Gogh’s style in Arles also became more intentional as he found a direction for his work after exploring different techniques in Paris. He continued experimenting with color theory in Arles, which became easier due to the abundance of colorful subjects readily available to him. His fascination with Japanese prints also grew, and he continued incorporating the Japanese approach to form and perspective in his own works, for example, in The Yellow House. This painting does not feature stippling, i.e., the use of dots and dashes as per the pointillist technique, and is instead composed of flat sections of color, a flat picture plane, and strong lines. These elements were characteristic of the Cloisonnist style, inspired by Japanese art and pioneered by his peer Emile Bernard, as well as implemented by Paul Gauguin. Van Gogh painted in this style on many occasions in Arles; examples include Sunflowers and The Zouave. 

Although an important period in Van Gogh’s stylistic development, the time in Arles was also fraught with difficulties. Van Gogh suffered his first major mental breakdown in December 1888 and was admitted to a hospital. The first half of 1889 was spent going in and out of hospitals up until May, when he voluntarily admitted himself to a psychiatric hospital in Saint-Rémy, where he stayed for a year. In 1890, he was discharged from the hospital and moved to an artists’ village near Paris called Auvers-sur-Oise. Despite these circumstances, Van Gogh never abandoned painting and remained consistent in his efforts to hone his style. He maintained his fascination with the compositional techniques of Japanese prints, cloisonnism, pointillism, as well as impasto, creating works with stylistic and coloristic diversity

Van Gogh in Saint-Rémy and Auvers-sur-Oise (1889-90)

In Saint-Rémy, Van Gogh returned to his experiments with stippling, which is featured in a large part of his paintings from this period, such as The Starry Night, Olive Grove, and Country Road in Provence by Night. These works demonstrate how the artist started employing undulating lines more often, a feature that intensified even further in 1890. Paintings leaning towards the cloisonnist and Japanese style were still being made during this period, but the use of small dashes became a prominent feature of Van Gogh’s style in 1889 and 1890. Painting with small dashes became a significant stylistic element in the last few months of his life, which were spent in Auvers, as can be seen in Portrait of Doctor Gachet and Daubigny’s Garden.

However, the artist did not exclusively rely on stippling, but instead attempted to merge different styles. Van Gogh’s works from Auvers also appear more passionate and spontaneous, something that has often been linked to his mental state at the time. While there is no conclusive proof for this connection, the artist’s style certainly became more confident during his mature years.

Both avant-garde artists and realist painters inspired Van Gogh, playing a key role in his stylistic development, but the manner in which the artist assimilated this knowledge into his own artistic vision is what resulted in the unique stylistic character of his paintings. The choice of subjects remained a key factor in determining his stylistic choices, which were ultimately a medium to create emotionally expressive paintings that convey the essence of the subjects.

Van Gogh’s oeuvre boasts 2,000 paintings and drawings made over a period of 10 years, with a majority of these works revolving around nature. Having spent most of his life in the countryside, the artist immersed himself in capturing natural subjects and even developed a spiritual relationship with nature later in life. However, most of his paintings of the countryside depict landscapes and peasants. Works featuring animals are rare, despite their ubiquitous presence in these areas.

Animals as Subjects in Modern Art

Even when they do appear in Van Gogh’s works, animals are mostly confined to background spaces as supporting elements and rarely function as central subjects. Still, animals do make an appearance in paintings wherein the artist saw it fit to include them.

Painting landscapes of the countryside depicting fields and farms has been a common tradition in European painting and has naturally led to many works featuring domesticated animals such as horses, cows, donkeys, herds of sheep, ducks, etc. In the second half of the 19th century, the Hague School of painters from the Netherlands sustained this tradition with paintings such as The Return of the Flock, Laren by Anton Mauve.

Animals can also be seen in many Impressionist paintings, such as in Edouard Manet’s A King Charles Spaniel from c. 1866 and Mary Cassatt’s Young Girl at a Window from c. 1883-84. The Post-Impressionist artist and Van Gogh’s peer Paul Gauguin too gave space to animal subjects in his paintings such as in his 1885 work Landscape with Cows in an Orchard and Still Life with Puppies from 1888.

Animals were also a common subject in Japanese woodblock prints called ukiyo-e that gained popularity in Europe in the 19th century. Many Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists took inspiration from Japanese composition techniques to develop their own style, and Van Gogh was particularly fond of these prints. Pet animals such as dogs, cats and birds as well as wild animals made several appearances in ukiyo-e prints. They served different purposes: certain animals were associated with religious beliefs, sometimes animals served as decorative motifs and other times they held personal meaning, such as the depiction of pets. As Van Gogh was an avid collector of Japanese prints and even made several repetitions of them with oil and canvas, he would have been familiar with this subject matter and how it was portrayed by Japanese printmakers.

Van Gogh’s View

Painting animals in some shape or form was therefore common amongst the artists that Van Gogh considered to be his peers. But despite the frequent consideration of fauna as a subject of painting by his fellow artists, Van Gogh was not always keen on doing the same in his paintings. While his primary interest lay in painting country life just like his tutor and a member of the Hague School, Anton Mauve, Van Gogh’s works focused on the people of the land. He was largely absorbed by the task of capturing the life of the peasants who worked on the land and made a large number of drawings and paintings featuring this subject in a very specific style as is evident in the painting Woman Lifting Potatoes from 1885.

Describing the effects he intended to achieve with his peasant paintings, he wrote, “You see, I really have wanted to make it so that people get the idea that these folk, who are eating their potatoes by the light of their little lamp, have tilled the earth themselves with these hands they are putting in the dish, and so it speaks of MANUAL LABOUR and — that they have thus honestly earned their food.”

During the time he spent at his parents’ house in Nuenen in 1884-85, Van Gogh’s efforts resulted in 50 portraits of peasants from the province of Brabant in the Netherlands, as well as his masterpiece The Potato Eaters. This interest in painting peasant life was in part a result of Van Gogh’s admiration with the French artist Jean-François Millet who gained recognition as a painter of peasant life in the 19th century. Van Gogh comments on Millet and his work in multiple letters written throughout his life and made numerous repetitions of his paintings. He explained his dedication to painting peasants in a letter to Theo from 1885: “When I say that I’m a peasant painter, that is really so, and will become clearer to you in future; I feel at home there. . . I’ve become so absorbed in peasant life by continually seeing it at all hours of the day that I really hardly ever think of anything else.”

Despite spending a great amount of time in fields and natural settings in order to capture the subject of the peasant, Van Gogh paid significantly little attention to the animals populating these areas. While paintings of animals are few and far between, they are not entirely absent from his oeuvre. He gave special attention to fauna in some paintings, usually because he was visually intrigued by the subject or because the animal added character to the scene he was portraying. A few of the paintings also focus on animals not usually found in farms or everyday settings. Let’s analyze Van Gogh’s works of art that feature animals!

“Oxcart” and “Cart With Black Ox” (1884)

This painting dates back to Van Gogh’s early years as an artist that he spent at his parents’ house in Nuenen. He started taking art seriously as a profession at the age of 27 and initially began working with making sketched copies of paintings by Rembrandt or Millet as well as studies of laborers. While Impressionism was already a well-established movement in France by this time, Van Gogh did not witness a painting with light and bright colors until 1886.

He stuck to the traditional rules of Dutch art that he had observed with great attention in his own works,  visible through his use of dark colors and inconspicuous brushstrokes in Oxcart and Cart with Black Ox. Both paintings depict an ox hitched to a cart as its central focus. One animal is red and white while the other is black with white legs. The background hints towards a field setting, although it does not consist of many details.

Paintings such as these, with the animal as the main subject, are not typical of Van Gogh, but it is possible that the artist was practicing his command of colors and the brush by painting these as studies. These compositions also allowed him the opportunity to practice painting complex mechanisms such as that of the cart, something that he also attempted in the several paintings and drawings of weavers on a loom that he made in Nuenen. The painting Oxcart was most likely a reference to a work by his teacher Anton Mauve titled Oxcart on a Country Road from 1867.

Flying Fox (1885)

This painting of a flying fox made in 1885 is an isolated subject in Van Gogh’s oeuvre. The work depicts a taxidermied fruit-eating bat from a tropical region with its wings fully expanded outwards, as if in mid-flight. The fact that this animal is not alive and is rather stuffed is evident from the posture of the creature that appears to be on display. At the same time, Van Gogh did not depict it within an enclosure, perhaps to give the effect of the bat flying in its natural setting.

Either way, this species of bat was not native to Europe and rare animals like these would be brought into the continent as collector items. Access to such a subject was likely possible through Van Gogh’s friend Antoon Hermans who lived in Eindhoven and had a collection of 300 rare animals and birds. In Flying Fox, the surroundings of the bat are dark and blurry with only one light source placed directly behind the animal to illuminate its wings.

“A Crab on Its Back” (1889) and “Two Crabs” (1889)

These two paintings featuring crabs demonstrate that Japanese prints did inspire Van Gogh to paint animals. These prints featured this subject and the artist attempted to create his own rendition of it in these two paintings. Crab on Its Back featuring a single crab was painted when Van Gogh was living in Arles. During this time, he was experimenting with the rules of color theory set out by Charles Blanc which is evident in the palette of this composition. The crab is painted with different shades of red and the background is a vibrant green. According to color theory, red and green are complementary colors that enhance each other’s vividness when placed next to each other.

Two Crabs, painted in Arles during Van Gogh’s stay in Provence, depicts two crustaceans, with one flipped on its back. It is unclear whether Van Gogh painted two different crabs or the same crab twice in the same composition. Nevertheless, these paintings are examples of the artist’s grasp of color theory as well as his ability to depict the complex anatomy of a crab. The fact that he chose to paint this animal on two different occasions suggests that the subject was compelling enough to satisfy his artistic curiosity.

“Giant Peacock Moth” (1889)

This painting of a Peacock Moth native to Europe was made during Van Gogh’s one-year stay at the psychiatric hospital in Saint-Rémy in the Provence region between 1889 and 1890. As he was not allowed to leave the premises of the hospital as a patient, he spent most of his time looking for subjects in the walled garden of the institution which is where he first discovered the Peacock Moth. He chose the subject very intentionally and found it to be visually intriguing and worthy of painting. This was not often the case with his paintings of animals, which is what makes this work interesting.

Describing his encounter with the animal that he remarked as being quite big in size, he wrote to Theo: “Yesterday I drew a very large, rather rare night moth there which is called the death’s head, its coloration astonishingly distinguished . . . To paint it I would have had to kill it, and that would have been a shame since the animal was so beautiful.”

It was not common for Van Gogh to impart such a detailed description to an animal from an artistic perspective. He ultimately could not let go of the subject and used his drawing of the moth as reference for the painting. This was one of many works that he painted in the garden of the hospital at Saint-Rémy.

Van Gogh’s “Cows” (1890)

Even though Van Gogh had this subject readily available in the countryside, the painting Cows from 1890 was painted as a copy of a print. At the time, Van Gogh was living in Auvers-sur-Oise which was an artists’ retreat close to Paris. He was staying there under the supervision of Doctor Paul Gachet, a physician and amateur artist who was well-known among the artist circles in Paris. Gachet used to make etchings under the pseudonym Paul van Ryssel with an etching machine in the attic of his house.

He made an etching of the painting Study of Cows by Jacob Jordaens, which then served as a reference for Van Gogh’s painting. This process of painting a copy from another copy was a fairly new exercise for the artist, but making drawings and paintings after other artworks was a common practice for the artist.

In Cows, Van Gogh used bright greens, yellows and browns. The contrasting yet harmonious colors, the bold use of line as well as the unique interpretation of forms renders Cows as a testament to Van Gogh’s development as a modern artist that is especially noticeable when compared to his handling of the similar subject of oxen in Nuenen.

Have you ever looked at a painting and wondered whether it was a photograph? If so, you were most likely looking at a work of art executed through hyperrealism—a term used to describe works of art that capture objects and people in highly precise detail. Although often confused with Photorealism (its predecessor), Hyperrealism seeks more than to mimic photography. In addition to foregrounding the ordinary, hyperrealist artists also employ this technique as a tool for social commentary. Hyperrealism goes a step further than Photorealism in that it subverts reality.

Rejection of the Standard: Before Hyperrealism

The foundations of Hyperrealism can be found in European paintings of the 19th century. These are referred to as realist paintings, or paintings that use Realism.

French artists such as Gustave Courbet, Jean-Francois Millet, and Honore Daumier represented a new genre that rejected and sought to differentiate itself from the art of the so-called Romantic Period or Romanticism. This style of art was characterized by an intensity and drama used to depict landscapes or other elements of nature, mythological or historical scenes, or the idea of the individual hero. What Courbet, Millet, and Daumier all had in common was their desire not to depict nature at its peak of destruction or beauty, nor an imagined narrativization of an important historical moment, but instead, the world, lives, labor, and experiences of ordinary people.

In doing so, these artists captured what things looked like in the now, recreating a scene on canvas, or in sculpture, that was from a real time and space. As opposed to Romanticism, realist artists sought to depict ordinary people and their surrounding environments as true to life as possible, abandoning any added drama or exaggeration. Sometimes the subjects of their works included laborers, field workers, and even those living in poverty.

Through foregrounding these people as their subjects, they touched upon wider social issues such as economic inequalities, injustices, and other struggles faced by the marginalized people of their societies. This element of social commentary will reappear in the works by hyperrealist artists in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It is important to note that realism didn’t stay localized in France, but circulated around Europe, with various artists using it to explore and showcase the inequalities that were plaguing their own countries.

Imitation of the Photograph

Photography also played a huge role in the advent of realism, as it completely shifted the landscape of art and representation. Through photography’s ability to objectively capture what was in front of the lens, an interesting dilemma was created for artists, as there was no longer a reliance on their hands to recreate reality. This caused some artists to shift towards photography as their sole artistic medium, while others saw it as an excuse to explore other types of art whose intent wasn’t to capture reality, but create a new reality.

For realists, some would use photographs as references for their paintings. Gustave Courbet used photographs of models to create his works. Photography and painting would become more entwined in the 20th century, specifically with the artists of the photorealist movement.

Photorealism, Hyperrealism’s Predecessor

As photography was capable of depicting reality, artists began to explore the new role of art that leaned more towards investigating the human psyche, emotions, and abstraction. This gave way to artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, and art movements like Fauvism, Expressionism, and Cubism. The pendulum swung back in the direction of realism during the 1960s, as some artists working at this time saw artistic production as oversaturated with abstraction. Like the realists of the 19th century, photorealists began making art to digress from the standard or what was popularized at the time.

In doing so, artists turned back towards photography as a source of inspiration and point of reference, creating the genre of Photorealism. Photorealism was not about subjection and personal perspective, but instead sought to replicate exactly how a photograph depicts a subject. In many cases, this entailed using photographs as a direct reference for paintings.

One of the most well-known examples would be the Big Self-Portrait by American painter Chuck Close, completed between 1967 and 1968. The painting began with a photograph over which Close created a grid system, breaking it down into a series of squares. Using an eight-foot canvas, he then re-created the image square by square, capturing every shadow, detail, and blemish of his face. Photorealists were also influenced by other movements that were shaping the art landscape of the 1950s and 1960s.

The Influence of Pop Art

The postwar environment of America saw the new identity of the U.S., among many other places, actively being constructed. This was through new spaces such as fast food restaurants, the flooding of the consumer market with new products and accompanying advertisements, and the promotion of American objects and companies. What did it mean to be American at this time, and what did America look like? These were the themes explored by artists of the Pop Art movement, whose works made commentary about the commercialization of culture permeating the everyday, through things like advertising and mass production.

It is important to note that Pop Art originated in the United Kingdom and eventually circulated and became popularized in the U.S. A staple of Pop Art was the inclusion of seemingly normal objects, available virtually anywhere through mass production, that became the forefront of artwork, or even the art itself. Think of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup cans, for example.

This elevation of the everyday would become incorporated into works by other photorealists such as Ralph Goings. In his paintings, ideas about Americana collapsed into his highly detailed reproduction of diner interiors. A diner is an architectural and cultural staple of U.S. towns across the country, and they have been memorialized in works such as Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. The diner became popularized during the postwar era as a family-friendly space that could also serve as a hangout spot for young teens.

There is a sense of nostalgia that permeates Goings’ paintings through his foregrounding of a space so seemingly ordinary and is simultaneously omnipresent throughout the U.S. No matter which diner he is depicting, there is a sense of familiarity between the viewer and his work. This is through interior design, Heinz ketchup bottles, doughnuts, and even the mugs for coffee. This ties back to themes explored by Pop Artists that touch on the ways that culture is commercialized, especially in the time of the post-war era.

Audrey Flack is another photorealist artist largely recognized for her works from the 1970s. In her Still Life series, she projects seemingly ordinary objects centerfold on her canvases, referencing the centuries-old still life genre in painting, which was thematically centered around references to life and mortality. Flack does this through objects such as cards, family photographs, lipsticks, and other small objects.

Although works by Flack, Goings, and Close put the ordinary front and center in their canvases with incredible technical skill, their paintings were simultaneously criticized for having nothing to offer beneath their surfaces. Some of their biggest critics argued that due to the attention paid to technique, photorealists’ works lacked emotional, spiritual, or psychological depth or meaning.

Hyperreality

L’hyperréalisme, or hyperrealism, was a term first coined by Isy Brachot, a Belgian gallery owner and art collector, for his 1973 exhibition of artists such as Chuck Close, Ralph Goings, and Gerhard Richter, who at the time were considered photorealists. Since then, the term hyperrealism has become its own genre entirely, however, with much influence from the prior art movements previously mentioned.

Hyperrealism differentiates from Photorealism in that it indulges in social, emotional, or psychological commentary, or all three. Take, for example, the art of Duane Hanson. In the 1970s, his sculptures became known not just for their elaborate realism, such as the inclusion of varicose veins, bruises, and blemishes on his subjects, but also for how they touched upon themes of consumerism, isolation, and the human experience. In his sculptures of overweight, comically dressed Americans who stare despondently past the viewer, there is a sense of isolation and longing—even though the subjects are often dressed for vacation or carrying consumer products.

Marilyn Minter provides another example of the ways that Hyperrealism can be critical of our everyday world. In her works that depict women’s feet in high heels decorated with diamonds and other gems, the feet are covered with mud, dirt, and grime. This juxtaposition was a direct response to advertisements targeting women that depict women, or solely their body parts, in a perfectly manicured and idealized way. The splintering realism of Minter’s paintings is also a defining characteristic of Hyperrealism itself.

Hyperrealistic paintings and sculptures don’t intend to simply recreate a photograph, but instead seek to push past the abilities of a photo or even reality itself. Like 19th-century realism, Hyperrealism emerged alongside the invention of the digital camera, which captured a level of detail that surpassed analog photography. With Hyperrealism, digital photos are often used as a reference, but additional details are incorporated that weren’t present originally, creating a new reality that overrides even that of the photograph.

Opposed to creating a sense of nostalgia and comfort like the works of Ralph Goings and Audrey Flack, Hyperrealism almost disrupts and unsettles the viewer through the intensity of detail, which is also reinforced through size. Take, for example, the sculptures of Ron Mueck, who captures the idiosyncrasies of his subjects in painstaking detail, often in intimate moments—a man during sleep, a baby seconds after birth, or a couple in bed. Although seemingly ordinary, the amount of detail, like the individual hairs from stubble, creates an unsettling atmosphere for the viewer. Not to mention the size of his sculptures, which often take up entire rooms, such as his works Boy or Girl. Extremity of detail combined with a demanding physical presence is a defining characteristic of hyperrealist works.

Hyperrealism: A Lens to View the World

Returning to social commentary, the selection of subjects for hyperrealist artists is often socially or politically charged. The paintings of Denis Peterson often depict people at the margins of society. Peterson’s works recall Realism, Pop Art, and Photorealism by foregrounding everyday people; however, the everyday that he exposes is the underbelly of our modern world. Figures of homeless people are juxtaposed with people eating in restaurants, advertisements for consumer products, or streets full of people who pay his subjects no mind. His works challenge the viewer to look at the people we are often told not to stare at in our society.

Representing the world around us through art and visual culture is not a new phenomenon. Although hyperrealist works of art are visually captivating through their highly technical execution, they also scratch at larger questions and realities that shape our human existence and the intricacies of the modern world. They are both a replication and exaggeration of what is real, perhaps even creating a new reality themselves.

To the general Swedish public, Hilma af Klint was a relatively successful illustrator, creating works for botanical atlases and encyclopedias. However, in the seclusion of her studio, she was a groundbreaking abstract artist who created paintings dictated to her by the spirits. Her art relied heavily on the religious and spiritual philosophies of her time, including Theosophy, Anthroposophy, and other ideas. Read on to learn more about Hilma af Klint’s abstract art and occult ideas.

Hilma af Klint’s Early Encounters With the Occult

The now-famous pioneer of abstract art Hilma af Klint represented one of the first generations of Swedish women who were allowed to become professional painters. During her lifetime, she was relatively unknown but had a prolific artistic practice focusing on botanical illustration. At the same time, unbeknownst to most of her clients and even to herself, she made a revolution in art by moving to the domain of abstract painting already in the early 1900s. Her work was heavily inspired by her contemporary teachings of spiritualism, Theosophy, and other occult ideas.

Hilma af Klint’s systematic engagement with the occult began in the late 1870s. At the time, spiritualism was already a popular trend in the rest of Western countries, but in Sweden, it only began to develop. Hilma af Klint’s profound interest in spiritualism began with a tragedy. In 1880, her younger sister Hermina, with whom Hilma was particularly close despite the age gap, suddenly died. Devastated and traumatized, Hilma began searching for ways to contact her deceased sister through the realm of the spirits.

During her entire life, Hilma af Klint identified as a Lutheran. Her deep interest in the occult did not interfere with her conventional faith. For many occultism-related figures of the time, Christianity and spiritualism were closely related to each other. In fact, spiritual philosophies like Theosophy stated that all religions had a shared core wisdom in them and that occult practices could offer a deeper insight into the mysteries of the world. In fact, Hilma af Klint was a member of the Swedish branch of the Theosophical Society. Her personal library had a vast collection of occult literature that she studied thoroughly and often incorporated into her work.

In 1896, af Klint and four of her friends gathered into a Bible study group called De Fem (meaning The Five). All five women were Lutheran and combined their faith with a profound interest in mediumship. During the gatherings, one of them would enter a state of trance and either draw or verbally pass messages from “other worlds” to her friends. During one of such seances, the women allegedly contacted a group of “higher beings” that instructed one of them to become a mediator between them and the human realm. Hilma af Klint was the only one who agreed, and from that moment on, she began her path as an abstract painter.

Paintings for the Temple

After her alleged initial contact with otherworldly beings in 1904, Hilma af Klint began preparing for her higher mission. The beings told her she was the messenger intended to pass the message from the higher worlds to humanity through images. She was supposed to build a spiral-shaped temple to some higher power and knowledge, although she never understood the complete purpose of it. The series that would later become known as Paintings for the Temple.

The first stage of the Temple project began in November 1906 and lasted until April 1908. During this period, she produced 111 paintings, all known today as Paintings for the Temple. Some were more than 10 feet tall, and many were divided into subseries. The paintings were mostly automatic and had no preliminary drawings of any sort, produced in the same unconscious way as the previous images by De Fem, but now made only by af Klint and her assistant.

At the time, Hilma af Klint admitted she had no idea what she was painting. She relied entirely on automatic drawing and the guidance of her “spirits” and could not decode her work. Still, their iconography bore the influence of Buddhism and Hinduism, as well as forms conceived during the De Fem seances. She was in dire need of spiritual guidance and sought help from one of the most influential men of her generation.

Hilma af Klint and Rudolf Steiner

Rudolf Steiner, German philosopher and mystic, was an important influence at that stage of Hilma af Klint’s life. At the time, Steiner was the head of a German branch of the Theosophical Society, a philosophical and quasi-occult movement that aimed to uncover the universal truth behind world religions and bring humanity towards a new stage of spiritual development. Steiner was one of the most active members of society who advocated for bringing together science and spirituality. A well-trained and convincing speaker, he toured Europe with lectures on the spiritual function of art, the interpretation of evolution, the origins of humankind, and other similar topics. Steiner’s teaching was a blend of actual scientific knowledge, an empathetic approach toward nature, and highly questionable occult ideas. Still, he was extremely influential, with his lectures attended and read by Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Joseph Beuys, and other famous artists.

Steiner presented an astonishing number of lectures throughout Europe, including Sweden. Hilma af Klint attended several of them and even kept Steiner’s publications, marked with her own commentaries and musings, in her personal library. Unlike many of his colleagues from the Theosophical movement, Steiner avoided a narrow focus on Eastern religions and based his ideas on Christian concepts. In Rudolf Steiner, Hilma af Klint wanted to find a spiritual teacher to help her decode her work.

During Steiner’s 1908 visit to Stockholm, Hilma af Klint invited him into her studio. Neither af Klint nor Steiner left a detailed record of the meeting, but it most likely did not go the way Hilma af Klint had expected. Steiner was unable to help her and he openly disapproved of her way of creating art. In the vague second-hand accounts of the meeting published by Hilma af Klint researchers, it is sometimes mentioned that Steiner did not believe af Klint’s art could be appreciated in their era.

After the unfortunate visit, which af Klint did not record in her diaries, she entered a period of artistic hiatus. From 1908 to 1912, she stopped painting entirely—or at least left no trace of any work she may have created. Some art historians attribute this sudden break to her disappointment with Steiner or, perhaps, to some upsetting commentary he made about her work. Others, however, highlight another important reason: at the same time, af Klint’s mother went completely blind and required care and assistance.

Forging Her Own Spiritual Path

After her radical four-year break, af Klint returned to painting with new enthusiasm and transformed ideas. Her visual language and aesthetic choices took an entirely different form. Instead of the fluid organic abstraction that often featured elements of mandalas, lotuses, and other elements borrowed from the East, she switched her practice towards more strict and somber geometry. At the same time, she made a shift towards Christian iconography, incorporating crucifixes, figures of saints, and other Christian symbols into her work. One of her most famous series of paintings from the period was Parsifal, a collection of square images directly inspired by Richard Wagner’s opera of the same name.

In his writings, Rudolf Steiner often referred to Wagner in general—and Parsifal in particular—as examples of spiritually charged artworks that illustrated and accompanied the transition of a human soul toward higher levels of conscience. Wagner’s Parsifal is a young man who transforms himself into a bearer of higher wisdom through acts of compassion and rejection of earthly temptations. Steiner regarded it as not simply an opera, but as a religious ritual of awakening the spirit.

Hilma af Klint’s goal was not to retell Wagner’s story or Steiner’s interpretation of it. Instead of illustrating the plot, she coded the stages of Parsifal’s spiritual development into diagrams and followed his path in a quasi-scientific way. This artistic period marked a time when Klint’s grasp of control over her practice: instead of relying on “spirits” and automatic drawing, she became fully involved in the process and moved to a more familiar iconography. She also added elements symbolizing Parsifal’s dual-gender, representing his transcendence of human boundaries between the sexes.

Return to Her Roots: Hilma af Klint’s Take on Botany

By the 1920s, Hilma af Klint became confident in her own methods and ideas. Contrary to popular belief, she was not isolated from the rest of the world: she eagerly communicated with other spiritualists and even visited the famous Goetheanum—the headquarters of the Anthroposophical Society, founded by Rudolf Steiner after his breakaway from the Theosophists. She even sent Steiner a collection of her works on botany, which still belongs to the collection of the Goetheanum. The Goetheanum was a complex of buildings that acted as the intellectual center of the movement and a gathering place for all Anthroposophists. It also provided space for research and creative practice with its vast libraries and gardens. Hilma af Klint spent weeks and months there, working on her new series of watercolors.

Starting from the late 1910s, she made a full circle and came back to her original artistic domain—botanical illustration. However, after years of spiritual exploration, she focused not only on the appearance of plants and their biological characteristics, but also on their spiritual portraits, or diagrams of energetic fields they produced. This field of spiritualist research was not new and closely corresponded to the ideas of Steiner and other mystics of the time. For Steiner, plants were the sense organs of the entire planet, which he treated as a single complex organism. Different plants, thus, were receptive to different forms of energies and forces.

Photography is a relatively new artistic medium compared to others. Nonetheless, it already has a long history full of great names, distinctive styles, and even ethical dilemmas. Photography evolved so fast that we often struggle to truly appreciate the skills of its pioneers, who continue to teach and inspire new creatives. Read on to get familiar with the most influential cameramen and women—from war reporters to fashion photographers.

1. Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004)

Henri Cartier-Bresson is perhaps the most famous and influential photographer of all time. He laid the foundations for the present-day understanding of photography as both art and a journalistic instrument. Like many of his colleagues and friends, Cartier-Bresson went through all the tragic and significant events of the 20th century with a camera in his hands. He documented Nazi war crimes and studied post-war trauma, recorded the horrors of African colonialism, and even managed to depict life in the post-war Soviet Union, which largely did not allow foreigners. Cartier-Bresson had a strong connection to art and artists, as he created portraits of Henri Matisse, Leonor Fini, Man Ray, and many others.

2. Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946)

The legendary photographer Alfred Stieglitz was famous not only for his work (which he refused to sell) but also for his promotion of modern art. He ran a gallery that showcased the work of young artists, including his partner Georgia O’Keeffe. Her portraits remained one of his most famous works.

Stieglitz was the photographer behind the iconic image of the artwork that changed the world of art once and for all, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. The image made in Stieglitz’s studio became synonymous with the work, with the sharply contrasting light making the usual object more mysterious and complex. To a certain extent, Alfred Stieglitz was Duchamp’s collaborator, especially after the original work was lost.

3. Brassai (1899–1984)

Brassai was born Gyula Halász in the then-Hungarian city of Brasso, which later gave him his pseudonym. After leaving his home country, he worked as a journalist in France and Germany. Settling in Paris, he became enamored with the city’s dark side and its dangerous nightlife. Brassai set up a trend of going outside of the respectable limits to study human life and character. He always created his works at night, so the sharp contrast between light and shadow would make images more dramatic. He visited underground queer clubs, bars frequented by criminals, and brothels.

Brassai was intelligent, charming, and tactful, which made him welcome even in the most dangerous places. Apart from dark Parisian alleys and sketchy bars, he also frequented artists’ studios. One of Brassai’s close friends was Pablo Picasso. In the 1960s, the photographer turned their conversations into a book.

4. Nan Goldin (1953–present)

Nan Goldin is an outstanding photographer who built an artistic oeuvre from the realities of her life. After running away from her troubled home in her early teens, she found a community of other creative outcasts: artists, performers, and poets who lived in communes or even on the streets together. Goldin created a painfully sincere autobiographical account of love, friendship, abuse, and dependency. Enclosed within their chosen family, her community suffered losses and breakups, lived through personal and collective traumas, raised children, and buried loved ones. Not all of these scenes, actually almost none of them, were picture-perfect and glossy. Yet, the basis for Goldin’s works was always the love she felt toward these people and a deep sense of belonging.

5. Robert Capa (1913–1954)

Robert Capa was one of the most important fathers of documentary photography and photojournalism. Born in Hungary, he was forced to flee to avoid political repressions and settled in Paris. His first encounter with photography happened when he found a job as a darkroom assistant. He soon started shooting and became a prominent war correspondent. Together with Henri Cartier-Bresson, Capa founded the photographic cooperative Magnum Photos.

Robert Capa covered many international conflicts and frequently worked in war zones, including the Spanish Civil War and World War II. Capa died on duty while documenting the First Indochina War in Vietnam. Moving through a dangerous area with a group of journalists and a French regiment, he decided to step out of the car to take several images of the road and stepped on a landmine. He was only 40 years old.

6. Man Ray (1890–1976)

Man Ray, a pioneering artist of Dada and Surrealism, hardly needs an introduction. A son of Russian Jewish immigrants, he rose to fame in his early thirties both in the US and in Europe. Man Ray considered himself primarily a painter, yet his most outstanding work was either entirely photographic or at least featured elements of it. Just like his close friend Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray was open to experimenting, and the two frequently collaborated.

In the 1920s, Man Ray worked with cameraless photographs, which he called rayographs. He placed a variety of objects on photosensitive paper and exposed them to light, creating a printed monochrome image. Man Ray’s most famous photographic works featured his then-partner Kiki de Montparnasse, a famous model, performer and artist. Kiki embodied the creative freedom of Man Ray’s era, and images of her became familiar even to those who did not know her name.

7. Helmut Newton (1920–2004)

German-Australian Helmut Newton was one of the most famous photographers associated mostly with fashion photography in its most refined sense. As a teenager from a Jewish family, he had to flee Germany in 1938 to avoid being sent to a concentration camp. In the 1940s, as a German citizen, he was interned in Australia. After the war, he opened a fashion photography studio in Melbourne. His rise to fame started in 1955 when the Australian edition of Vogue magazine commissioned a photoshoot from him. Five years later, he moved to Paris with his wife and began to work for the most prominent global fashion magazines.

Helmut Newton’s style of photography presented refined eroticism, sometimes borderline with fetishism. He worked primarily in black and white, with stark contrast and permanent provocation. The sexualization of his feminine characters never stood in the way of their agency and assertiveness.

8. Juergen Teller (1964–present)

Since the late 1980s, Juergen Teller has worked at the intersection of art and fashion photography. His characters are not only celebrities and models but also members of his family and even Teller himself. For Teller, self-portraits represent a sobering break from refined shots of perfect models and also a way of studying and accepting his own body, which changes with age.

Juergen Teller is known for dismantling glossy standards of beauty. The photographer himself defines his genre as dirty realism with shabby cafes, dusty roads, torn stockings, and chipped nail polish.

9. Dorothea Lange (1895–1965)

New Jersey-born photographer Dorothea Lange had a long artistic career, yet she became famous after a single shot. During the Great Depression, she traveled through the US and stopped near a pea-pickers’ camp. One of the settlers there was the 32-year-old Florence Owens Thompson, mother of seven. Crushed by poverty in the collapsed economy, she picked beets and peas and worked in bars and hospitals to feed her children, but it was not enough. After the images were published, the camp almost immediately received food and supplies from local authorities.

Other notable works by Dorothea Lange included a series of photographs taken in Japanese internment camps during World War II. Americans of Japanese descent were forcibly moved there after the 1941 Pearl Harbor strike.

In the late 1880s, a series of horrible murders shook London. Five sex workers were slaughtered at night and mutilated, with their murderer fleeing without a trace. The perpetrator sent numerous letters to the police, mocking their efforts to find him. Decades later, a British Impressionist Walter Sickert became one of the suspects. Could it be true that the famous painter was the murderer all along? Read on to examine the evidence against Walter Sickert.

Who Was Walter Sickert?

Once dubbed the most important British painter of all time, today Walter Sickert is an almost obscure figure, known mostly to those deeply invested in the history of European Impressionism. A student of Edgar Degas and James Whistler, he was a successful and recognized painter and a former actor, who brought his dramatic ambitions on canvas. His preferred subject matter was music hall stages and intimate domestic scenes that always implied much more context than was demonstrated.

Sickert’s identity was notoriously fluid and prone to sudden transformations, just like his appearance, tastes, and habits. No one could pinpoint his political views since he kept giving out extremely contradictory information. In his routine, he was secretive, too. He simultaneously rented several studios in different parts of London, with the addresses often unknown even to his wife. He had an unnerving habit of disappearing for days without warning, sometimes unexpectedly leaving her alone at the cafe table. Sickert was comfortable enough in both high society gatherings and in the poorest slums, fueled by his well-known misanthropy.

The Whitechapel Murders

In the 1880s, London was a bustling, overgrown city. Due to overpopulation, crime and disease were rampant in poor neighborhoods. From 1888 to 1891, a series of five murders shook the impoverished Whitechapel district, in which Walter Sickert had one of his studios. Five sex workers were slaughtered and mutilated, with their intestines exposed.

One of the most disturbing details of the Whitechapel murders was the fact that some of the victims’ body parts, like ears or kidneys, soon ended up in newspaper offices of police stations, sent there as gruesome souvenirs from the murderer. The police received more than 200 letters from the alleged murderer, describing the details of his crimes, future plans, and bitter jokes. One of the letters was signed with the name Jack the Ripper, thus creating the image of the killer. However, after extensive analysis, most were labeled as hoaxes, organized either by news reporters or random attention-seekers. At some point, writing Ripper’s letters became a popular hobby. The moral panic in the city reached an all-time high, with women refusing to leave their homes. Several suspects were arrested, but the murderer was never identified.

Sickert’s name occurred in the Jack the Ripper investigation for the first time in the late 1950s, among a long list of other suspects. The main motivation to include him on the list was his strange series of paintings he created two decades after the murders. There were, however, other unnerving details. As reported by his friends, he once introduced himself as Jack the Ripper to a group of women passing by, causing them to flee in horror.

Camden Town Murder

Less than two decades after the first string of murders, another tragedy occurred that reminded Londoners of the nightmare that was seemingly over. A 22-year-old Emily Dimmock and her boyfriend Bertram Shaw rented two rooms in the Camden Town neighborhood. Shaw knew that Dimmock used to make money from sex work, but he believed she quit after the couple moved in together. September morning, coming back from a night shift at the train kitchen, he was surprised to find the room doors locked. After asking the landlady for keys, he was shocked to find their bedroom in disarray, with closets and drawers opened. Emily lay on their bed nude and lifeless, with her throat slit.

Among other evidence in the room, the policemen found a postcard from a friend or a client (as it turned out, Emily did not abandon sex work after all), offering to meet the night before the murder occurred. The card’s sender was soon identified and arrested; it was an artist Robert Wood, who had a habit of sending handmade postcards to sex workers he frequented. Still, Wood was acquitted due to lack of evidence.

Sickert’s Ripper Series

No one paid any extraordinary attention to the fact that Walter Sickert was present both at the Wood’s train and at the crime scene on the day of the murder. Soon after the news of Emily Dimmock’s murder reached the police, Sickert, who rented a studio nearby, showed up at the doorstep and asked to see the gruesome scene. A famous artist known for his penchant for the dark and the macabre, he was not an entirely unexpected guest on the scene. Moreover, the bohemian London circles were obsessed with the murder, linking it to the unsolved Whitechapel series, so the public interest was high enough.

Soon after the murder, Sickert completed a series of paintings titled Camden Town Murder, a sequence of images showing a fully-dressed man seated next to a nude woman. There is no blood visible on the painting, but the title suggests the woman is dead. Some researchers noticed the unsettling similarities between the details from the Ripper crime scenes and Sickert’s compositions. Another, even more disturbing work was revealed slightly before the murder. The canvas Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom also depicted Sickert’s studio.

Patricia Cornwell’s Investigation

In the early 2000s, a former crime reporter and successful novelist, Patricia Cornwell, set out to prove that Walter Sickert was the man behind the unsolved murders. She came up with this version after reading a biography of Sickert and studying his works. In 2002, she published the results of her investigation, followed by a 2017 re-edition with extra evidence. The book caused a stir in the art world and provoked many controversies.

Cornwell believed that Sickert’s motivation to kill developed from an early childhood trauma. According to the author, Sickert was born with a genital fistula that was treated by a series of painful and dangerous surgeries while he was still a child. This pain could allegedly lead to impotence and fear of intimacy, further developing into aggressive and violent misogyny. As stated by Cornwell, Sickert hated women, especially sex workers, since their profession was centered around something Sickert could not have.

Aimed to prove Walter Sickert’s involvement with the murders, Cornwell accidentally became one of the most prominent collectors of the artist’s work worldwide. Allegedly, she even destroyed one of his works in search of the artist’s DNA samples. However, Cornwell vehemently denied this fact and insisted she would never sacrifice an artwork for her research. Walter Sickert was cremated, meaning that no DNA evidence could be extracted from his body. Yet, Cornwell’s team used his personal belongings to collect samples and compare them to those found on stamps and envelopes of various letters allegedly sent by Jack the Ripper.

While studying Sickert’s whereabouts during the Whitechapel murder series, Patricia Cornwell found several of his letters that stated he was in Paris at the time. However, knowing Sickert’s secretive and manipulative habits, she suspected he might have lied about his location to cover his role in the murders. Moreover, she discovered that some of the letters sent by Jack the Ripper were written on expensive paper that Sickert also owned and used frequently.

Another piece of evidence was Sickert’s work itself. Some parts of it, mostly portraits of unnamed women, had striking similarities in angle in composition to newspaper photographs of Jack the Ripper’s victims. Although the interest in the case was shared by many at the time, Cornwell linked possible similarities to serial killers’ frequent obsession with their deeds and their public recognition.

Could Walter Sickert Really be the Killer? Researchers Doubt

Despite the many details painstakingly recited and written by Cornwell, most other art experts believe her version is too far-fetched and fictionalized to be true. As a crime writer, Cornwell seemed to turn Sickert into a character, with motivations and thoughts artificially inserted into his actions. Her emotion and a personal, although understandable, dislike for Sickert make the revelation look too good to be real.

Most importantly, many facts from her story do not match the evidence from Sickert experts. The story about Sickert’s birth defect that could have triggered deep trauma and homicidal tendencies is highly contestable since this information came from a rather distant relative of the artist. Claims of impotence were also questionable since contemporaries often gossiped about swarms of illegitimate children Sickert had fathered. Generally, the long list of negative traits compiled by Cornwell mostly painted a picture of Sickert as an extremely unpleasant human being, which does not necessarily make him a serial killer.

The DNA analysis referred to by Cornwell’s supporters as the definitive proof of Sickert’s guilt is also very questionable evidence. The quality of DNA extracted by the investigators was not nearly enough to offer a clear result. What it did show, however, was that the DNA on one of the Ripper letters matched the DNA of Walter Sickert and also to the DNA of up to 10% of the world population. Cornwell herself admitted that the DNA test result was not as effective proof as she expected it to be.

Moreover, other investigators pointed out that the letter used for the analysis was largely considered a forgery. Thus, even if the DNA match was accurate, this could mean that Sickert was one of the legions of Ripper imposters who flooded newspaper offices and police stations with forged letters. The matching stationery was always doubtful evidence: although the paper Sickert used was rather expensive, it was never too exclusive.

Contemporary American artist Janine Antoni defies the borders of conventional art by challenging human perception and physical senses. Through her complex installations and photographic projects, Antoni explores the transformation of materials and the physical presence of a body in space. Many of her works relate to notions of femininity and motherhood. Read on to get familiar with seven remarkable works by Janine Antoni.

1. Gnaw, 1992: The First Groundbreaking Work by Janine Antoni

Born in the Bahamas, Janine Antoni moved to Florida in her teens and received her artistic training there. As a foreigner, she paid extreme attention to the acts and motions that made her different from others. She also noticed the interaction of the body with space, known or unfamiliar. Upon discovering the works by Ana Mendieta in her student years, Antoni was anxious about the potential of her artistic career. She believed Mendieta, as well as other, then almost unknown, feminist artists working with their own bodies and natural materials, have said it all already. Still, she realized how unjustly ignored artists like Mendieta were, and continued to develop her expressive language.

One of the first works by Janine Antoni that made her a recognized contemporary artist was the 1992 installation Gnaw. The artist took two cubes of lard and chocolate, 600 pounds each, and reshaped them using her teeth. Antoni then melted the chewed chocolate to cast 27 heart-shaped packages, and the chewed lard to create 135 tubes of bright red lipstick by mixing it with beeswax and pigment.

Despite her obvious tactile involvement in the work, Antoni never shared images of her actually chewing the chocolate. This was a deliberate gesture: an image of the artist crouched on the floor with her teeth sunken into the 600 lb cube of chocolate would irreparably ruin the viewer’s focus. Antoni’s idea was to concentrate her audience on the tactile qualities of the piece, imagining their own interaction with it and observing the bite marks.

Gnaw is the exercise in tactile perception, referencing the way babies perceive the world by chewing objects, and exploring the borders of the desired and the repulsive. Chocolate, lipsticks, and heart-shaped trinkets are all associated with femininity as something desirable and appealing, while lard and saliva, inevitably present in the installation, tend to repulse the onlooker. Moreover, Antoni marks lard as the feminine-coded material due to a higher fat percentage than men. By chewing on lard and turning it into makeup, the artist reflects on the cannibalistic side of beauty standards and desire.

2. Lick and Lather, 1993

Similarly to Gnaw, Lick and Lather explored the concept of transformation—both material and conceptual. She cast a series of life-sized bust self-portraits, seven from chocolate, and seven from soap. Identical at first, soon they became nothing alike, as the artist reshaped them through the natural intended use of their materials. She licked chocolate and bathed with soap, and soon the figures lost their precise contours and gained individuality. By reshaping her face and body, the artist distanced herself from her self-portraits. Traditionally, cast sculptures have been perceived as the direct reflection of the natural world, but in Antoni’s case, they keep living and transforming independently.

Both eating and bathing are regarded as self-care practices. Through them, Antoni destroys and alters her own reproduced images: caring for her real self, she compromises the copies. The traditional bust form is as important as the transformation of materials: the licked chocolate surface resembles patina and scratches on aging bronze sculptures. Decades later, Antoni would use the molds left from the Lick and Lather project in her installations, reinventing not only her old art but her old self, in appearance and identity.

3. Loving Care, 1993

Unlike the previous two works mentioned on this list, Loving Care required the artist’s presence and direct observation of her actions. During the performance, the artist dipped her hair in Loving Care hair dye and painted the floor with it as a brush. Gradually, she covered the entire floor with paint, pushing the visitors out of the gallery room. Thus, the artist was not only present in the scene but actively claimed the space for her work and expression. The act was not only about painting but also mopping: she recalled how her mother wiped the kitchen floor, pushing everyone outside. For a few minutes, the kitchen space was entirely hers—reclaimed and occupied.

Loving Care also referenced iconic works of art and styles of the 20th century. The broad strokes made by Antoni’s hair looked too familiar to monumental Abstract Expressionist canvases. Another reference was the art of Nouveau Realisme master Yves Klein. Klein used female models as his brushes, covering their nude bodies in paint and asking them to roll on the stretched canvas. These models were passive instruments that helped realize the idea of a great male artist and were stripped of their agency. Antoni, on the contrary, takes the initiative in her own hands and uses her own body on her own terms.

4. Slumber, 1994

One of the most famous and critically renowned works by Janine Antoni, Slumber once again blended public with private and explored the activities traditionally identified as feminine. For several weeks, Antoni spent her nights inside the art gallery space with an electroencephalograph attached to her head to record her eye movement during sleep. Each morning, she weaved the REM data from the machine into a blanket she would cover herself with the following night. The blanket could never be finished completely, only interrupted by the artist’s conscious choice or her death. In Slumber, Antoni both crafted her dreams and let them comfort her sleep. Since the piece was essential performative, she made a very private and individualized act public and visible using both traditional techniques and modern technology.

5. 2038, 2000

This photographic print features the artist lying down in a bathtub next to a group of cows, one of which Antoni is seemingly nursing. The number 2038 is seen on the cow’s ear tag and it’s the only piece of information about the animal. The anonymous existence of 2038 is completely subject to the desires and needs of human beings who see her as a source of milk, meat, and hide. This way, Janine Antoni brings her relationship with a cow full circle—the roles of a wet nurse and her surrogate child are reversed.

The topic of nurture and the physical and mental connection between mother and child have long preoccupied Antoni. Antoni’s mother was an experienced midwife who kept models of bones and organs in their home. The artist was always fascinated with the ways human physicality shaped their mental states and conventions and vice versa. Her experience became augmented with the birth of her daughter in 2004, after which Antoni dived further into works relating to pregnancy and childbirth.

6. Like Lazarus Did, 2013

Like Lazarus Did was a collaborative project centered around a dance performance by a New York choreographer Stephen Petronio. The principal subject matter revolved around the Biblical myth of Jesus resurrecting Lazarus of Bethany four days after his death. The choreography was centered around concepts of rebirth, resurrection, and ascension to the higher plane of spiritual existence.

Janine Antoni’s role in the dance performance was counterintuitive, as she lay motionless in a helicopter stretch fixed above the stage. Over the artist’s head, casts of her own body parts were hung as ornaments in an infant’s crib. For hours, Antoni closely observed her physical body detached and suspended. The idea to create these elements came to the artist through her exploration of Catholic religious objects. In some regions, mostly Spanish-speaking devoted Catholics would purchase or create small copies of body parts that related to their prayer’s intention or desired result, both literally and metaphorically. A person would buy a leg-shaped charm to both heal an injured leg and ask for good luck for an upcoming trip.

7. Janine Antoni’s Cemetery Installation: I Am Fertile Ground, 2019

Janine Antoni designed this complex and site-specific installation for the Green Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Under the cemetery, vast, uninviting, and cold catacombs stretch. As Antoni stated, the catacombs are the place where bodies are aware of their mortality and dread it. Instead of unraveling the terror, the artist chose to represent our mortal bodies as sacred by positioning images of their parts over the catacombs’ labyrinth.

Antoni decorates her work in the form of gilded Baroque altarpieces, yet keeps them distinctively small and delicate. Painted images of hands, feet, torsos, and hips, celebrate the body as something mysterious and sacred. Each body part performs a gesture that Antoni developed through her own dance practice, adding a ritualistic component to the work. The title hints at the inevitable return of the body into the ground that produced the union that should be revered, not feared. The original exhibit of the artwork in 2020 featured a dance performance that united the dancers’ bodies with the natural elements.

Talented artists’ unique eye for form and color often manifests itself in their personal choices of clothes, interior design, or lifestyle. Still, some artists went further than most, leaving substantial marks on the history of fashion and design through their wardrobe choices and collaborations. Read on to get inspired by famous artists who were also fashion icons, inspiring both designers and fashion lovers.

1. Famous Artist Frida Kahlo: Iconic Fashions, Protest and Disability

Mexican Surrealist Frida Kahlo is perhaps the most famous artist turned fashion icon. She was known for wearing traditional Mexican dresses from the Tehuana region to both manifest her identity and protest against colonial rules. Protesting Western-centered beauty standards, she refused to remove her facial hair, making it part of her signature look together with braids and flower crowns.

Another factor that contributed to Frida Kahlo’s fashion choices was her disability. As a teenager, she had a bus accident that left her with numerous broken bones and a pierced abdomen. She never fully recovered from the trauma, and suffered from chronic pains and side effects of it. As a child, she also suffered from polio, which left one of her legs slightly shorter than the other. Kahlo wore shoes with differing heel heights to compensate for the difference and cut off the toes of her shoes to make room for her swollen feet.

The voluminous Tehuana dresses also served as coverage for medical corsets and metal braces Kahlo had to wear. Another feature that says a lot about Kahlo’s resilience, as well as her style choices, was her prosthetic leg decorated with red leather and Chinese embroidery, which the artist had to wear after an amputation in 1953.

2. David Hockney

David Hockney has always been an unconventional artist. His fashion choices went hand in hand with his art—bright and a bit chaotic. He always had a certain childlike appeal to his look, with bold colors, carefree combinations, messy hair, and images of pools and dachshunds peeking from the background. Hockney mixed athletic wear with tailored trousers and jackets, wore mismatched colorful socks, oversized glasses, and a mix of all patterns and colors possible way before the emergence of street style blogs. Hockney was never afraid to appear strange or ridiculous, and that confidence helped him to pull off the most bizarre combinations of tones and garments. In the 1960s he dyed his hair bright yellow blonde, making it one of his signature traits.

Today, David Hockney is an 87-year-old patriarch of Pop Art and one of the last creatives of his generation still standing. He continues to work, although preferring an iPad application to a physical brush and canvas. His personal style, however, is as vivid as ever, with reds, greens, yellows, and purples still shining from his signature striped rugby shirts, ties, and cardigans.

3. Jean-Michel Basquiat

According to friends and family, Neo-Expressionist Jean-Michel Basquiat had an interest in fashion long before the launch of his artistic career. Before becoming famous, he used to sell t-shirts and sweatshirts with his paintings on the streets of Downtown New York. The real transformation of Basquiat into a fashion icon happened in the 1980s when the artist, barely in his twenties, suddenly achieved commercial success. He used to spend insane amounts of money on suits from Giorgio Armani, Christian Dior, and Versace. Nonetheless, he treated them with little respect, like a worker’s overalls.

After returning from nightclubs in his fancy suits, he never changed them in the studio, spilling paint over his trousers and wiping it off with jacket sleeves. After a while, Basquiat became used to the silhouettes of Western designers and turned his attention towards Japanese names that were just conquering the market. He wore clothes by Yohji Yamamoto, Issey Miyake, and, most importantly, Rei Kawakubo of the COMME des GARÇONS brand. In 1986 and 1987, Rei Kawakubo even invited Basquiat to walk on the runway for her New York and Paris shows. Basquiat’s favorite item designed by Kawakubo was a simple oversized black coat that frequently appeared in the artist’s photographs.

4. Georgia O’Keeffe’s Refined Wardrobe

The famous Modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe was known for her distinctive personal style and curated wardrobe. Her style transformed with her throughout her life. As a student, she wore exclusively black and white and rejected corsets and heels. Her looks made her stand out from the conventional fashions of the time, as she chose unbraided hair, free-flowing tunics, and flat shoes. Often, her outfits with minimalist details and pointed collars were interpreted as masculine by her contemporaries. Indeed, O’Keeffe’s fashion sense and appearance made a tangible impact on breaking the gender boundaries of conventional fashion.

Today, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum still preserves the artist’s wardrobe. In her mature years, black and white were accompanied by blue and occasional light pink. According to O’Keeffe, limiting the need for color-picking and arranging her wardrobe freed time for painting. The collection included Japanese haori jackets and Peruvian brooches, accompanied by silk blouses and wool skirts. Still, the principal concept that made Georgia O’Keeffe’s personal style stand out was the artist’s personality, which was completely and effortlessly in sync with the tones and silhouettes she wore.

5. Robert Mapplethorpe

Photographer Robert Mapplethorpe is rarely mentioned in the list of best-dressed artists, but nonetheless, he greatly contributed to the fashion scene of his era and continues to inspire designers decades after his death. Mapplethorpe’s black-and-white self-portraits were filled with refined aestheticism and were inspired by cultural contexts mostly ignored by conventional fashion at the time, such as BDSM clubs and queer communities. In many of his self-portraits, Mapplethorpe blurred the line between femininity and masculinity through makeup and styling.

Mapplethorpe himself adopted a style that included elements of fetishwear—a uniform consisting of an all-leather jacket, trousers, cap, and turtleneck. This look was familiar to those who frequented New York gay clubs but not to those who read fashion magazines. As a photographer, Mapplethorpe was at the center of the fashion scene and inspired designs directly and indirectly. After Mapplethorpe’s untimely death in 1989, designer Carolina Herrera, the photographer’s close friend, created a tribute collection of velvet motorcycle jackets with gold studs, inspired by Mapplethorpe’s style. Belgian designer and incumbent creative director of Prada Raf Simons frequently referenced Mapplethorpe’s photographs in his creations.

6. Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso did not exactly preoccupy himself with high fashion. Still, his outfit of choice—a striped Breton shirt, a beret, a pair of worn-out trousers—has left an imprint on art history and became part of the myth of a great artistic genius. It is not that Picasso did not care about clothes. On the contrary, he was well aware of what he was wearing and what he could wear. He was a regular client of Savile Row tailors, and personally designed costumes for one of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.

He also had his personal tailor, Italian master Michel Sapone. Sapone worked for Picasso for almost two decades and recounted how precise the artist was about the fit and structure of his garments. He specifically asked for some pieces to be made smaller or larger to subvert the conventional silhouette. Occasionally, he also commissioned clothes with deeper references: one of the pairs of his striped trousers was made from fabric similar to Gustave Courbet’s shirt in his Self-Portrait with a Striped Collar. Generally, Picasso was well aware of the power of image and silhouette in curating his personal myth and establishing his reputation.

7. Famous Artist Andy Warhol: Curated Fashion

Andy Warhol did not have a flamboyant personal style but rather a uniform that became his trademark. His wardrobe palette was mostly limited to black, navy, and white. Most often, he was seen in dark straight trousers, a dark jacket (leather or tailored), and his signature clear-brimmed glasses, which were occasionally swapped for a dark pair of identically shaped pieces. Another key feature was Warhol’s silver wig that he never took off even in the privacy of his own home. Warhol’s appearance was his brand packaging, consistent with his performed identity as a mastermind of the art world. The famous Warhol wig was born out of necessity, yet became one of the most recognizable aspects of the artist’s appearance and was even turned into his merchandise.

Andy Warhol has always struggled with his appearance, discontent with his face and body. In his late twenties, he underwent plastic surgery to change his nose but was not satisfied with the result. He began losing hair in his early twenties, adding one more insecurities to the list. His early works reflected these concerns, as some of them featured images of hair loss treatments or wig makers’ ads.

Many famous artists found their soulmates among their colleagues. They exchanged ideas and collaborated, yet sometimes, their impact is not considered equal. Particularly, women artists were often dismissed as muses, while they were, in fact, unique artists in their own right. Read on to learn more about seven artist couples of modern art who left their mark on art history.

1. Artist Couple: Camille Claudel & Auguste Rodin

Unfortunately, Camille Claudel’s relationship with Auguste Rodin, in part, robbed her of her own artistic triumph. She entered Rodin’s workshop as his assistant, soon becoming his model, lover, and fellow sculptor. She developed her own style, similar to Rodin’s but also more rooted in fantasy and symbolism. She was praised as one of the few women geniuses of her time, yet the triumph was short-lived.

The end of Claudel’s career coincided with the end of her ten-year-long relationship with Rodin. Soon after their breakup, Claudel started to show symptoms of paranoia and extreme anxiety. She believed that Rodin was following her, stealing her ideas, and breaking into her workshop. She destroyed almost all her work and locked herself in her studio, so Claudel’s brother Paul decided to put her into an insane asylum.

Camille Claudel spent thirty years there, completely disconnected from the outside world. After being forcefully committed to these walls, she never made any artworks again and died quietly, without anyone in the vast French art world noticing. The most heartbreaking thing was that she might not have been paranoid at all—several recent studies have shown that Rodin sometimes sold Claudel’s artworks signed with his name.

2. Leonora Carrington & Max Ernst

Max Ernst was famous for his list of affairs and marriages with the most important women of the Surrealist movement and the art scene, including Peggy Guggenheim and Dorothea Tanning. He met Leonora Carrington in London when she was only 19 and he was 47. The age gap did not stop the couple, and neither did Carrington’s wealthy upper-class parents, who were shocked by her behavior. Carrington fell in love with Ernst’s art before even meeting the man, and soon the couple moved to Paris. Her family never forgave her for running off with Ernst. For decades, she remained an undesirable member of the family that no one talked about.

The relationship was artistically prolific but lasted only three years. In 1940, Max Ernst was arrested in France as a German citizen under suspicion of Nazi ties. Soon after his release, the Nazis captured Paris and arrested him again, this time for being an anti-fascist degenerate artist. Distraught, Carrington was soon admitted to a psychiatric hospital and treated with experimental drugs and electroshocks.

Soon, the couple managed to flee Europe separately. Carrington arranged a marriage of convenience with a Mexican diplomat, and Ernst married the heiress Peggy Guggenheim. The couple never met again, but according to Guggenheim, Carrington was the only woman Max Ernst truly loved in his life, and for many years, she remained the principal character of his paintings.

3. Niki de Saint Phalle & Jean Tinguely

Niki de Saint Phalle was a famous French sculptor who focused on the exploration of femininity, patriarchy, and the opposition to it. One of the most remarkable relationships in her life was with a fellow artist, Jean Tinguely. Tinguely was preoccupied with kinetic sculpture, and both artists shared the same approach to art, which relied on absolute dramatic rebellion against any existing norms.

The couple met in 1956 while both were still married to other people. Niki de Saint Phalle had recently moved to Paris and needed help from an established local artist. She had an ambition to move from small-scale projects to something monumental, and Tinguely’s experience with mechanical sculptures was useful. Five years and two divorces later, the couple moved in together. Their relationship lasted for thirteen years and was pivotal for both of their artistic careers. Many of their works were created in close collaboration. Even after the divorce, they maintained contact and continued working together.

4. Lee Krasner & Jackson Pollock

Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, one of art history’s most dramatic and famous couples, shared a tragic story. When they met, Krasner was already a talented and respected abstract artist, while Pollock was still relatively unknown. Initially, they didn’t like each other but soon discovered a profound connection through their art. They married in 1942 and maintained a turbulent relationship until Pollock’s death in a car accident in 1956.

Jackson Pollock, an immensely talented but equally troubled artist, became Krasner’s main artistic project. To maintain his sanity and develop his career, Krasner had to sacrifice her own. She desperately tried to combat his addictions, get used to his infidelity, and get him professional therapy. Years later, she remembered the embarrassing details of their first meeting with Peggy Guggenheim. Krasner managed to arrange a visit from the famous collector to their shared studio, yet Pollock showed up late and so drunk he could barely stand. Only by a miracle did Krasner convince Guggenheim to stay, getting Pollock one of his most important patrons.

5. Robert Rauschenberg & Jasper Johns

Robert Rauschenberg met Jasper Johns in 1953, soon after breaking up with another famous artist, Cy Twombly. Johns was only starting his artistic career, while Rauschenberg was already established in the art world. They had a lot to take from each other: new ideas, important connections, and unbiased opinions. They saw each other as the only artists who were not charmed by Abstract Expressionism, instead searing for their own artistic paths.

In the case of Rauschenberg and Jones, the mutual artistic inspiration and scrutiny were even more intense than in the majority of other cases on this list. In the 1950s, homosexuality was both criminalized and treated as a mental disorder. For couples who managed to maintain their relationship in such a hostile climate, emotional dependency on each other was even more intense than usual, as they were effectively isolated from the majority of the society around them. At the same time, both had to present their art publicly, leaving it available for speculation and guesses. In that sense, some art historians interpreted Jasper Johns’s Target series as a metaphor for being socially and politically vulnerable.

6. Georgia O’Keeffe & Alfred Stieglitz

The two famous Americans had an age gap of 23 years and a notable class difference: Georgia O’Keeffe was the daughter of Midwest farmers, while Alfred Stieglitz came from a family of successful New Jersey merchants. One of O’Keeffe’s friends sent Stieglitz several of her charcoal paintings. Stieglitz, who ran an independent art gallery, was so impressed he decided to exhibit them before even meeting the artist.

The relationship was passionate and incredibly prolific. O’Keeffe became the main character of many photographs by Stieglitz and gradually developed a more distinctive artistic style. Over the years, the relationship turned sour as Stieglitz kept pushing his partner’s art in directions she disliked. He warned her against watercolor painting, as he believed this medium was too feminine. Moreover, he clearly felt uncomfortable because of O’Keeffe’s rapid rise to fame. In the 1930s, the couple stopped living together but still maintained contact through letters.

7. Artist Couple: Dora Maar & Pablo Picasso

Dora Maar was much, much more than Picasso’s Weeping Woman. Although Maar is mostly discussed as Picasso’s muse and one of his many partners, not only was she a unique artist in her own right, but she also had a much bigger influence on him than it usually seems to be noticed. Being a person deeply involved in politics, she taught him about left-wing ideology. She was a painter, a photographer, and even a successful reporter who went to America to cover the effects of the Great Depression.

Picasso also learned photography from Maar while still leaving a not-so-slightly condescending comment that “inside of every photographer there is an artist struggling to come out.” Some art historians believe that he forbade Maar from painting, being afraid of competition from her side. The details of their relationship were unpleasant, to say the least. Despite the romantic status of muse and companion, Maar was frequently abused by Picasso, who at the same time had an affair with a seventeen-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter. Picasso, amused by the jealousy of the two women, once made them fight each other to win his attention.