Fauvism was an art movement that celebrated pure color over realistic imagery. Like the Impressionists and most other modern painters, Fauvists focused on scenes taken from daily life instead of showing heroic stories in their pieces. Among the most famous Fauvists were artists like Henri Matisse, Andre Derain, Georges Braque, and others. Read on to learn more about these Fauvist masters and their colleagues.

1. The Most Famous Fauvist Artist: Henri Matisse

The name Fauvists originates from the 1905 Autumn Salon. This was an annual exhibition organized by artists as a protest against the conservative and rigid values of the main Paris Salon. A group of artists, most of whom you will find on this list, united in their interest in bold color and painterly quality of images, exhibited their pieces together. They were inspired by the Impressionists in their treatment of urban scenes, but they preferred expressive brushwork to apparent realism. Their works were displayed in a room with one of Donatello’s sculptures. Entering the room, a conservative art critic called Louis Vauxcelles exclaimed that he saw Donatello among wild beasts (les Fauves in French), thus giving the name to the movement.

The most famous of all Fauvists was Henri Matisse, who ditched a promising career in law to pursue painting. Starting from Impressionism and Pointillism, he gradually moved to his own style. Matisse rarely used traditional perspective and illusion of depth, preferring to rely on color as his main instrument. Matisse was incredibly prolific and versatile, working with ceramics, textiles, and stage design. He even designed a chapel.

2. Andre Derain

Together with Matisse, Andre Derain was considered the father of the Fauvist movement. His artistic style was based on the technique of Divisionism, when artists applied paint on small separate strokes of pure color. From Fauvism, Derain soon moved to geometric landscapes, similar to but not exactly like Cubist ones. Derain’s reputation suffered greatly during World War II. Unlike many of his colleagues who left France, he chose to stay in Paris. The Nazi occupants saw him as a valuable asset, demonstrating the eagerness of French creatives to accept the new order. He even made several official visits to Germany, which earned him a post-war label of a Nazi collaborator.

3. Georges Braque

Although Georges Braque was more famous as a Cubist, his Fauvist period was no less remarkable. Braque was not a pioneer of the style, as he adopted it only after seeing the works of Matisse and Derain, yet nonetheless created work that was innovative enough. His Fauvist work became the starting point for Cubist thinking. His bold work with color and expressive form, combined with the influence of Paul Cezanne, soon led to the gradual geometrization of his form. These angels and shapes would soon become sharper and lead to the development of an entirely new type of art.

4. Kees van Dongen

Kees van Dongen was a Dutch artist who started his career in Rotterdam as an illustrator. In 1899, he moved to Paris, where he quickly became part of the progressive artistic establishment. His works were exhibited in the famous 1905 Salon. Portraiture was van Dongen’s signature genre. Apart from the Fauvist circle, he also worked among Expressionists, preferring expressive, bold colors and lines to realistic precision. He also created a lot of erotic works, which Henri Matisse allegedly hated, thinking they overstepped the boundaries of good taste.

Kees van Dongen’s portraits were popular among affluent commissioners. In particular, he often painted wives of the rich and had a clear formula when creating a portrait that should be loved by many. He painted elongated silhouettes and enlarged the jewels the ladies were wearing. However, despite this commercial success, van Dongen’s works occasionally stirred up scandals. In 1913, a nude portrait of his wife was removed from the Paris Salon on the grounds of indecency. The issue was not with nudity itself but the fact that the model was the artist’s wife and not an unknown person or a sex worker.

5. Maurice de Vlaminck

Maurice de Vlamick was considered the third greatest Fauvist after Matisse and Derain. Before moving to art, he was trained as a violin player. One of the decisive moments in Vlaminck’s career was his visit to a 1901 retrospective exhibition of Vincent van Gogh’s work. For years, his art retained the influence of the underestimated Dutch master. Vlaminck claimed he wanted to burn down the conservative Ecole des Beaux-Arts with his colors and create art without considering the artistic traditions that came before him. He was also not enthusiastic about numerous art theories created by his colleagues: he compared them to doctors’ prescriptions in the sense that one had to be really sick to follow them.

6. Albert Marquet

Albert Marquet was a student of the famous Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau. Moreau saw painting as a free play of imagination, completely detached from reality, and thus encouraged his students’ experiments with form and color, however unconventional they were. Marquet painted mostly landscapes and preferred to work with unmixed, pure colors. Unlike many of his fellow artists, he was not afraid of using pure black, painting bold contours and shadows. Albert Marquet learned to master colors out of necessity: in his early years, he was poor and could afford only the cheapest pigments. He learned how to balance the browns, grays, and other muted tones.

7. Georges Rouault

Georges Rouault was born into a working-class family and had to tailor his artistic inclinations to practical needs. As a teenager, he worked as a stained glass maker and restorer. Later, Rouault studied at Gustave Moreau’s studio and became Moreau’s museum curator after the artist passed away. Unlike many of his Fauvist friends, Rouault often painted allegorical and religious scenes, usually in dark tones. His early practice with glass left a lasting mark on his oeuvre: even after moving to oil painting, he kept the thick black contours and jewel-toned planes of color typical for glass.

Rouault designed his works to be “expressive, not beautiful.” His first oil paintings were heavily inspired by Gustave Moreau and Titian. Strictly speaking, he had little in common with the rest of the Fauvists: his works were dark, often with a mystical undertone or a tone of a bitter social satire.

8. Raoul Dufy

Raoul Dufy grew up in a poor family and had to quit school to earn a living in a coffee company. Working a full-time job as a 14-year-old, he managed to save money to attend private painting classes after work. Dufy’s office windows faced a seaport, so he frequently painted boats and sailors. The decisive shift in his career happened when he won a scholarship based in Paris, which allowed him to move and create art professionally.

Dufy deliberately avoided emotionally tense subjects and excessive drama. His works were joyful and uplifting, exploding with bold colors. His favorite color was blue, as he believed it was the only one that maintained its expressive independence when surrounded by others. Apart from fine arts, Dufy worked with furniture, stage design, and public art. He also collaborated with the legendary fashion designer Paul Poiret, designing textiles for his brand.

9. Jacqueline Marval: The Woman Fauvist Artist

Unfortunately, women artists were rare among Fauvists. Jacqueline Marval was an exception, and her male colleagues encouraged her. Although she demonstrated artistic inclinations as a child, her parents, who were both school teachers, envisioned a similar career and a conventional marriage to a salesman for her.

Her artistic career began when she divorced her husband and moved in with a new partner, the Parisian painter Francois Joseph Girot, a student of Gustave Moreau and friend of many prominent Fauvists. Fellow artists and critics appreciated Marval’s work for its boldness of color and subject matter and confident brushwork. She mostly painted women—either nude in their bedrooms surrounded by precious objects and draperies or in groups spending time together on beaches and in living rooms. Marval was an active member of the artistic community and was one of the leaders of the campaign against prosecuting Kees van Dongen for the alleged indecency of his paintings.

Although Abstract Expressionism, with its capacious, splattered, and stained canvases and its heroic, larger-than-life artists wielding their brushes like their lives depended on it, was still the most famous art movement of the 1950s, and painting was certainly the most esteemed medium, a few artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns challenged its sway over the art world, offering subversive and oftentimes amusing works that refused to identify themselves as painting or sculpture. Neo-Dada artists also collaborated with dancers and composers, finding inspiration in the dialogue between the disciplines.

What Is Neo-Dada? A Primer

To understand what “neo-dada” means, it’s necessary to first understand “Dada.” Dada art was a style that originated in Europe during and just after the WWI years, flourishing in cities such as Zurich, Paris, and Berlin. (Although in German “da da” is translated to “there, there” and in French it means “hobbyhorse,” the term “dada” as used here is nonsense; it was simply intended to be as anti-art a name as possible.)

Hugo Ball, its founder, stated, “Revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War, we in Zurich devoted ourselves to the arts. While the guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might.” Dada was flamboyant, irreverent, nonsensical, and piquant, offering critiques of its bellicose and soulless society through performance, sculpture, poetry, and text.

Neo-Dada, then, was the label given to the 1950s American artists who also eschewed traditional boundaries between the mediums of painting and sculpture and who refused to jettison real life from their works like the Abstract Expressionists endeavored to do. Rauschenberg claimed that he worked in the “gap between art and life,” and Johns, for example, included real beer cans and images of maps and flags, while Cy Twombly evoked the scrawls of graffiti in his pieces.

Neo-Dada artists found inspiration in the quotidian and the commonplace, the base and the banal. They were experimental, and their work was often challenging to the lay viewer, who struggled with symphonies of silence and paintings of pure white. Nevertheless, their works permeated the consciousness of the art world and facilitated important conversations about art’s telos.

Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008)

Rauschenberg is perhaps the most famous of the Neo-Dada artists. A prolific, dexterous, and endlessly inventive creator, his “combines” challenged the traditional separation of mediums. Critic Brian O’Doherty wrote of the combines in 1963, “For many years Mr. Rauschenberg has been pointed steadily towards an annihilation of conventions in a new freedom. His main characteristic is a conquest of common, everyday reality from a bridgehead of abstract expressionism. He is trying to materialize an ambiguous limbo between high art and low life.”

In these works, such as Monogram (1954-1959), he combined found objects in the mode of the “readymade”—Dada artist Marcel Duchamp’s term for the found object that became a work of art when activated by the artist and the exhibition space—painted surfaces, and collage. In Canyon (1959), he combined a taxidermied eagle his friend found in the trash, paintings, a photo, and other printed matter. In Bed (1955), he took an actual bed with a wooden frame, sheets, and a pillow, scribbled and splattered paint on it, and then hung it from the wall like a traditional painting.

Rauschenberg refused to be confined by any label or fall prey to the assumption advocated by the Abstract Expressionists that an artist must be cerebral, stoic, and removed from the vicissitudes of life. Rather, Rauschenberg said, “I always wanted my work—whatever happened in the studio—to look more like what was going on outside the window.” This meant that he was also engaged in other avant-garde scenes, such as music and dance.

Scholar Brandon Joseph wrote, “Throughout his career, Rauschenberg was most inventive when in intense, dialogic, and collaborative contexts, from Black Mountain to the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (for which he provided sets, lighting, and costume design) to the Judson Dance Theater (which he lit and performed with) and beyond.” Joseph claimed that “none of Rauschenberg’s contemporaries…would maintain the artist’s multiplicitous and inherently deconstructive interest in combining mediums (and media) into amalgams that would exist simultaneously within all of the media they straddled—and at the same time none.”

Jasper Johns (1930-)

If there is a figure who came close to Rauschenberg’s inventiveness, it was his friend, lover, and collaborator Jasper Johns. It’s hard to even sum up his oeuvre, and anyone hard-pressed to name his most famous piece would have to choose between the flags, the maps, the numbers, the cross-hatch paintings, the beer cans, the plaster heads, and so on. Johns was an erudite, serious, and accomplished artist, but he chose to incorporate quotidian objects and imagery, “things the mind already knows,” as he put it.

Johns had started off as a painter but struggled with the legacy of Abstract Expressionism. He destroyed all his previous work and moved into recognizable objects like the flag and the alphabet. He preferred to use primary colors and while he did use paint, he mixed it with encaustic to create a quick-drying material that had almost sculptural qualities.

The Broad Museum says of Johns’ early encaustic paintings that “Johns presents images that move into the realm of objects and wrestle with the validity of representation as a philosophical concept. The targets and flags, in the words of critic Leo Steinberg, were ‘co-extensive’ with their canvases, existing somewhere between a symbol and a thing in the world. Not only did these paintings begin Johns’s successful dismantling of modern art through his ironic analysis of structures and rituals, but they also became the innovative new ground on which a generation of painters and sculptors made their work.”

Claes Oldenburg (1929-2022)

Claes Oldenburg made the case, as emphatically as Warhol with his soup cans, that food could be art. A hamburger, a piece of pie, french fries and ketchup—Oldenburg took American comfort food and made it into rather uncomfortable art. The pieces were grotesquely large, made of either plaster or vinyl. The vinyl pieces, or the “soft sculptures,” flopped, sagged, and sighed, while the plaster pieces maintained a brittle rigidity.

Oldenburg opened The Store in 1961, recreating the look and feel of neighborhood shops but with a spin. He had numerous small art pieces displayed like normal wares, but they were made of plaster-dipped muslin over wire and covered with garishly bright paint and had something uncanny about them. Like Rauschenberg and Johns, as well as the Pop artists, Oldenburg was interested in the banal, in the disposable, in the detritus of late-capitalist society.

In a 1961 artist’s statement, Oldenburg elucidated his feelings about art: “I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, / that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum. / I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting / point of zero. / I am for an art that embroils itself with the / everyday crap and still comes out on top. / I am for an art that imitates the human, that is / comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is / necessary.”

Cy Twombly (1928-2011)

Cy Twombly’s scrawls and scratches represented a new type of gesture in visual art. Gagosian Gallery explains that “he produced works that [were] simultaneously personal and mythological, allowing narrative, language, and inner visions to erupt from his intimate, abstract notations,” doing so through painting’s traditional tenets, such as using canvas and hanging works from the wall, but ultimately deviating from many of the medium’s other characteristics.

He made marks and then erased them, referenced calligraphy and graffiti, left gaps and fragmented lines, traversed centuries, and conflated civilizations. He brought in sex, dirt, and violence, dialoguing between the ancient and the contemporary.

In 1962’s Leda and the Swan, he took the ancient myth of Jupiter turning into a swan and raping Leda and abstracted it into a cacophony of line and splotch and smear. The violent assault of Leda comes across through the violent assault on the canvas by crayon, pencil, and paint. The colors suggest semen, blood, feathers, and feces; the few discernible images of a window, heart, and phallus suggest the outlines of the story, but it is the feeling produced by the piece that gives it its power. Academy (1955) is sparser, using oil-based house paint (which Twombly smeared with his fingers), pencil, colored pencil, and pastel on canvas to create what looks simply like gray pencil scrawlings on canvas.

Critic Ann Temkin remarked that for Twombly, “the canvas was a field for mark-making that shouted and whispered, surged and slowed, swirled and skittered. The approach harked back to the automatism of the Surrealists…but now it had traded biomorphic elegance for a seemingly untutored rawness.” Temkin concluded that “Academy alludes to a tradition, a school, a set of accepted practices. Yet it is attached to a painting that writes itself out of art school and finds instead a territory unoccupied by official precepts or proscriptions,” and indeed, Academy is certainly something that its namesake would not have (initially) accepted.

John Cage (1912-1992)

John Cage was a composer who studied with modernist, atonalist composer Arnold Schoenberg. Like all composers, he sought to communicate through music, but he abandoned hierarchy and order in his pieces, not to mention the heroism and ego that came with being a composer. He valued the senses, chance, and spontaneity, and was also inspired by Duchamp’s readymade, looking for ways to interpret that pulled from real life in music. Cage said of Duchamp’s famous The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915-1923) that the thing he liked so much is that “I can focus my attention on wherever I wish. It helps me blur the distinction between art and life and produces a kind of silence.”

And it was silence for which Cage became famous (or infamous). In his piece 4’33, a piano player sits down on the bench before the instrument but does not touch the keys for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. In that time span, what seems to be silence is instead filled with sounds—people coughing, shuffling their feet, whispering to their companions, moving their chairs, tapping their heels. The first time this was staged, the audience’s consternation was palpable, but Cage didn’t care; he was asking his audience what music really meant—what the limits of silence and sound really were.

The composer and scholar Kyle Gan suggested that the piece “begged for a new approach to listening, perhaps even a new understanding of music itself, a blurring of the conventional boundaries between art and life.”

Judson Dance Theater: Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and More

The Judson Dance Theater was a collective of dancers, choreographers, and visual artists headquartered at the Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan’s West Village. The Church was a well-known performance space where Judson staged numerous works that challenged prevailing notions of dance. The main figures, including Yvonne Rainer (1934-), Trisha Brown (1936-2017), Lucinda Childs (1940-), and Simone Forti (1935-), wanted to democratize dance by emphasizing “task movement”—the commonplace, anti-expressionistic gesture.

The New York Times said of the movement in 1982, “following their own creative hunches, the Judson dancers experimented with structures ranging from the most rigid to the most improvisatory and incorporated many kinds of movements into compositions. To simplify what resulted, it could be said that these choreographers tended to emphasize the physical reality of the here and now and to maintain that any kind of movement can serve as a dance movement.”

We Shall Run, a 1963 piece, consisted of dancers simply running across the stage. They wore ordinary clothing and did simple, repeated actions. In Trio A, Yvonne Rainer’s 1966 masterpiece, there was a solo performer with no music—another thing Judson wanted to do was separate dance from music, the former being usually subordinated to the latter—who performed everyday movements. It was an exploration of action, not storytelling, and avoided any dramatic gestures like leaps or pirouettes. Though it was a difficult piece for a dancer to perform, it looked deceptively simple.

Rainer’s 1965 “No Manifesto,” a text she penned to articulate the new type of dance she promulgated, can describe much of neo-dada art as a whole:

“No to spectacle. / No to virtuosity. / No to transformations / and magic and / make-believe. / No to the glamour / and transcendence / of the star mage. / No to the heroic. / No to the anti-heroic. / No to trash imagery. / No to involvement of / performer or spectator, / No to style. / No to camp. / No to seduction of / spectator by the wiles / of the performer. / No to eccentricity. / No to moving or being / moved.”

Wassily Kandinsky’s path toward abstraction was a complex one. He decided to become a painter at the age of thirty and, for several years, searched for his own expressive language. He found it at the intersection of science and spirituality, studying Theosophy, religious texts, and recent scientific discoveries. Kandinsky saw abstract art as the necessary tool to develop humanity’s spiritual consciousness and elevate their souls to a new state of being. Read on to learn more about Wassily Kandinsky’s thoughts on the spiritual power of abstract art.

Wassily Kandinsky & the Impressionists: First Steps Toward Abstraction

An important event that moved Wassily Kandinsky towards abstract art was his first encounter with Impressionist painting, particularly, a work by Claude Monet. In 1891, Moscow had its first exhibitions of the Impressionists, which included one of the paintings from Monet’s Haystack series. Later, Kandinsky remembered how unnerved he was with the composition at first, believing that he would not have guessed the work’s subject without the aid of a wall text. He felt acute discomfort because the painter chose to work in a way that was so unclear and confusing.

However, confronted with an unfamiliar experience, he soon realized that the painting, so vague and messy at first, appeared in his mind again and again, in every small detail. Looking at the Haystack, Kandinsky realized that the subject matter as the supposed core of every painted work was already compromised, with the painterly qualities and emotional effect taking charge of the viewer’s experience instead.

Kandinsky believed his generation was living in a time of profound cultural shock and a crisis of outdated values, and he believed it was the perfect time to direct one’s gaze from the phenomena of the material world toward aspects of the invisible inner life of every being. By skipping the imitation of the physical world, art could have launched a spiritual transformation, affecting the complex system of the human soul.

Kandinsky and Rudolf Steiner

Among the figures that left the most lasting effect on Wassily Kandinsky’s oeuvre was the German philosopher and spiritualist figure Rudolf Steiner. At the time of their first encounter, Steiner was the leader of the German branch of the Theosophical Society, a philosophical movement aimed at bridging the gap between art and science through the exploration of the spiritual. Theosophists based their ideology on the idea that all world religions had a single set of basic world principles ingrained into them. Still, most of them relied on Hinduism and Buddhism as the main sources for their conceptual framework. Steiner was more Western-centered, insisting that Christianity already had all the necessary answers. He frequently toured Europe with lectures on the transformative power of art, the underexplored aspects of natural science, and highly questionable theories on the spiritual evolution of human races.

Theosophy was immensely popular in Kandinsky’s time, with many famous artists attending Steiner’s lectures or even meeting him personally. Apart from Kandinsky, two other pioneers of abstract art Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian met Rudolf Steiner. It is possible that Hilma af Kint even played a decisive role in the development of Kandinsky’s abstraction. Although there is no direct proof of a link between the two artists, it is possible that Steiner shared at least part of his experience in Stockholm, potentially influencing Kandinsky’s own exploration of the non-figurative.

Concerning the Spiritual in Art: Kandinsky’s Theoretical Oeuvre

Apart from being a prolific painter and talented musician, Kandinsky was an outstanding writer. His years of thorough and diverse education, as well as his law practice, developed his habit of putting thoughts into verbal form. His occupation as a lawyer allowed him to theoretically justify his artistic practice, building it within a certain theoretical and practical framework. The work that expressed his ideas the most thoroughly was his famous essay Concerning the Spiritual in Art.

Kandinsky explained that every work of art was a product of its time that carried unique aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual connotations that characterized its era and both expressed and shaped the perception of its contemporaries. That being said, by mindlessly imitating the principles of art of previous eras, artists created works that are dead and dysfunctional, even if technically successful. For Kandinsky, the era of post-Renaissance materialism had a detrimental impact on both the art and the souls of his contemporaries. Instead of focusing on emotions, feelings, and spiritual experiences, art turned towards imitating nature, either in its entirety or through certain aesthetic interpretations. As an example of such interpretations, Kandinsky cited Impressionism, which, despite its progressive visual form, remained committed to the supposedly accurate reflection of reality.

In that environment, art lost its transformative power and turned into a decoration and a commodity to be discussed only in the context of its material value. To find its way out of the deep creative crisis caused by the materialist worldview, the art of Kandinsky’s era had to abandon any attempts at legitimizing itself through theories and reason (which is ironic, given Kandinsky’s own way of expressing and justifying his ideas), and focus on uplifting the spirit of its audience. To find that focus, artists had to learn from their predecessors whom Kandinsky called the primitives—the artists who worked before or outside the dominant artistic tradition of the Western world. Instead of imitating these people, contemporary artists had to study the expressive and spiritual potential of their lines and colors.

The Spiritual Triangle

Kandinsky envisioned spiritual growth as an acute triangle constantly moving upward. Its upper section was reserved for progressive thinkers, artists, and creatives, who led entire generations toward new spiritual heights, despite often being misunderstood by their contemporaries. The lower sections were inhabited by less talented and progressive souls. Gradually, these individuals learned to appreciate the intellectual and spiritual ideas from the top and passed them down. In this way, the triangle continually ascended, even though the majority of its inhabitants remained unaware of the process.

In Kandinsky’s mind, the unpopular yet necessary idea from the triangle’s top of his time was to leave behind figuration in images and focus entirely on the properties of color and form. He insisted on the search for the inner objective beauty that was not tied to any natural object or event. Moreover, he believed that this inner beauty sometimes contradicted the conventional visual one and thus provoked outrage among the public. As an example of an artist producing exactly that kind of beauty, Kandinsky named the famous composer Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg was known for rejecting the traditional rules of musical composition and tones. Instead of relying on perfect harmonies, he extracted the emotional potential of dissonance. Despite public criticism of Schoenberg’s work, Kandinsky and his peers saw the ways in which he expanded traditional notions of musical beauty and turned them from purely acoustic into psychological.

According to Kandinsky, the cultural and intellectual state of the era called for a thorough and radical transformation of all forms of art. Visual artists particularly needed to find new forms and leave the figurative imitation of reality behind. The required instruments for it, in his opinion, could be found in another form of art—music, which was the least of all connected to physical reality. Like composers using sounds of music, painters had to learn to reach their audiences’ perception with form and color. Such transformation, wrote Kandinsky, was required by the inner necessity of both a single soul and humanity to progress spiritually.

Wassily Kandinsky & the Spiritual Power of Abstraction

Abstract art for Kandinsky was akin to ritualistic movement with no apparent practical purpose: its inexplicable mystery created a sense of grandeur and attracted attention to something that would otherwise be ignored. In the artist’s opinion, the human soul, compassion, and creative potential would progress when fueled by such mystical experiences. Particularly, in his writings Kandinsky paid extensive attention to the correspondence of color and form, and how one could diminish or elevate another. For example, he described a yellow triangle and a blue circle as the two opposing forces that balance each other.

Abstract painting was supposed to develop humankind’s empathetic and spiritual potential by triggering various emotions in its audience as if calibrating its settings. Kandinsky compared the human soul to an intricate piano in need of tuning, colors to keys, and human eyes to hammers. In that context, artists acted as piano players, forcing the whole instrument of the soul to vibrate and produce inspiring sounds.

In the summer of 1886, the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh painted 35 still life paintings portraying flowers in vases, painted in brilliant colors. At that time, the artist was living in Paris in an apartment with his younger brother Theo who was working at the international art dealership Boussod, Valadon & Cie. Van Gogh’s sudden commitment to the subject of floral still lifes marked an important moment in the development of the artist’s style through which he was later able to paint masterpieces such as Starry Night and Almond Blossom.

Van Gogh in Paris: New Discoveries and Financial Trouble

Van Gogh decided to move to Paris in 1886 after spending a few months enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium. He had spent his early development as an artist learning from the tradition of Dutch realist painting, but was aware that new developments in the world of art were burgeoning in Paris. Naturally, he wanted to participate in this dynamic environment and learn the artistic approaches of his contemporaries in order to develop his own style and technique. But more importantly, he wanted to take lessons at the studio of the artist Fernand Cormon. Van Gogh arrived in Paris at the end of February 1886 and soon enrolled in Cormon’s studio, although he only stayed there a few weeks. Nevertheless, his trip to Paris was far from fruitless.

Paris was a major turning point in Van Gogh’s artistic career. Discovering the light, colorful canvases of Impressionist artists such as Claude Monet and Edgar Degas showed him a brand new side of painting, while at the same time forcing him to face the growing reputation of realism as outdated. Not only did he witness avant-garde paintings, but he also became friends with a number of artists, such as Paul Gauguin, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Emile Bernard, and Paul Signac. He called this group the Painters of the Petit Boulevard. Each artist had a different theory and style of painting, and Van Gogh learned something from all of them. At the same time, woodblock prints from Japan called ukiyo-e had gained immense popularity in Europe during the 19th century, and the role of these prints in shaping Van Gogh’s style cannot be overstated.

But while the artist was living in the midst of one of the greatest art historical developments in Europe, his financial reality was less glamorous. Sharing the apartment with his brother saved him some money, but the reality was that Van Gogh did not hold a stable job and therefore relied on selling paintings as his source of income. He had hoped that Paris would be a suitable market for his work, but his work was not yet up to date with the modernist taste.

And so Theo took care of the finances, and Vincent focused all his time and energy on painting. He had hoped to develop his skill in figure painting, something that he had worked on both at the Royal Academy in Antwerp and in Cormon’s studio, but models were expensive, and Van Gogh had to look for another way. It was then that the artist turned to painting still lifes of flowers. Flowers were readily available and proved to be incredibly useful subjects for Van Gogh, particularly for his development as a colorist.

Flowers as a Means to Study Color Theory

In 1884, Van Gogh read a book by Charles Blanc that laid out a scientific theory of color. The theory proposed the concept of complementary colors: colors that intensify each other when placed together, providing maximum contrast. Blanc included a color wheel in his publication that depicted the complementary colors placed opposite each other: yellow and purple, red and green, and blue and orange. Color theory changed Van Gogh’s approach to color even before he set foot in Paris. “Color expresses something in itself,” he wrote to Theo in 1885, and expressed his admiration for the works of the French Romantic artist Eugène Delacroix who applied color theory in his paintings.  Learning about color theory changed Van Gogh’s approach to color in his early days, but it was only in Paris that he could unleash the full potential of this theory by using bright and bold colors.

Flower still lifes were a helpful way to practice color theory in Paris. As mentioned above, lacking the money for models, Van Gogh started painting flowers in vases to practice his understanding of color theory. He painted 35 such works, including Vase with Gladioli and Chinese Asters and Vase with Zinnias and Geraniums. Flower still lifes took up a large portion of his summer during 1886, and he took up the project with enthusiasm, as he explained in a letter from October 1886:

“And now for what regards what I myself have been doing, I have lacked money for paying models, else I had entirely given myself to figure painting but I have made a series of color studies in painting simply flowers, red poppies, blue corn flowers and myosotys. White and rose roses, yellow chrysanthemums – seeking oppositions of blue with orange, red and green, yellow and violet, seeking THE BROKEN AND NEUTRAL TONES to harmonise brutal extremes. Trying to render intense COLOR and not a grey harmony.”

The artist explained his goals with these paintings at length, focusing on harmonizing a set of colors in a composition. Another notable point is that he called these still life paintings of flowers color studies, clearly stating his intentions with these works. These paintings also demonstrate the artist’s interest in different stylistic techniques. For example, the painting Fritillaries in a Copper Vase shows Van Gogh’s experimentation with the Pointillist technique pioneered by the Neo-Impressionist artist Georges Seurat. This style consisted of painting with dots and small dashes, something that Van Gogh implemented primarily in the background of this painting.

Van Gogh would be sent flowers regularly from his acquaintances, and he would paint them almost as soon as they arrived. The genre of floral still lifes offered the opportunity to test a wide range of colors and their interaction with light on the canvas, all the while being cost-effective. This project is today recognized as an important step in the transformation of Van Gogh’s palette from the dark and dull colors of his Dutch period to the bright and intense paintings from his mature years.

Floral Still Lifes, Adolphe Monticelli, and Impasto

A significant figure who influenced Van Gogh’s style in Paris was the French artist Adolphe Monticelli. Van Gogh witnessed Monticelli’s works in Paris during the summer of 1886 and soon discovered a different way to approach brushwork in his paintings. Monticelli worked with rough and fierce brushstrokes, but more importantly, he applied his paint thickly. Viewing Monticelli’s paintings, such as Flowers in a Blue Vase, resonated deeply with Van Gogh, and his thickly painted color studies of flowers marked the beginning of his experimentation with impasto. This technique is a crucial aspect of Van Gogh’s oeuvre and was never abandoned by the artist. Apart from his bold approach to color, his passionate brushwork featuring thick impasto is what sets Van Gogh apart in the history of European art.

For example, Van Gogh’s Vase with Chinese Asters and Gladioli not only features a wider and lighter palette than works from his Dutch period, but it also shows his impassioned brushstrokes and a generous application of paint. The petals of the flowers are almost three-dimensional, with each individual brushstroke clearly visible. The red background also shows an interesting use of the impasto technique through a basketweave pattern, something that also appears in many of his later still lifes.

The entire painting appears much more dynamic and intense than his works from the previous year, such as The Potato Eaters. The choice of flowers as a subject complemented this newfound stylistic practice as painting flowers required a speedy brush to capture fresh blooms before they wilted. Later in 1888, Van Gogh described his approach to brushwork in a quite straightforward way: “I follow no system of brushwork at all; I hit the canvas with irregular strokes which I leave as they are, impastos, uncovered spots of canvas . . .”

The Commercial Benefit of Paintings of Flowers

Van Gogh also chose to focus on flower still lifes in Paris because of their commercial appeal. This genre was in high demand in the contemporary art market, and many young artists made their living selling still life paintings of flowers. Facing a financial impediment due to the lack of any sales both in Antwerp and Paris, Van Gogh was eager to find buyers for his paintings. This was, however, difficult as the artist was only beginning to understand the taste of the modern market and had not yet discovered a style that was both modernist and unique to him. Flower still lifes appeared as a way out of this issue, but his goals with this project eventually shifted as he discovered the potential of this genre to experiment with color theory and brushwork. Nevertheless, Van Gogh was not able to sell these paintings during his lifetime.

While the decision to paint flowers in Paris was linked both to economic concerns and his technical development as a colorist, Van Gogh continued painting flowers long after leaving Paris. In fact, the still life series of sunflowers that he painted between 1888 and 1889 in Arles became one of his most famous masterpieces. These were made as decorations that he hung in the Yellow House where he lived during his time in Arles and were also meant as saleable paintings.

With Sunflowers, Van Gogh had found a flower that was his. The practice of picking one signature flower was common among artists as it distinguished them in the art market and helped establish their identity among the masses. Not only did Van Gogh place his signature in two of his Sunflowers on the vase, but he also clearly declared his ownership of the flower in a letter to Gauguin from January 1889: “if Jeannin has the peony, Quost the hollyhock, I indeed, before others, have taken the sunflower.”

How Flower Still Lifes and Color Theory Shaped Van Gogh’s Art

The experiments with floral still lifes in Paris were foundational to Van Gogh’s artistic development in the later years. Equipped with the knowledge of new stylistic techniques and color theory, Van Gogh left Paris in February 1888, longing for the peace of the countryside after spending two years in the busy environments of the French capital. He arrived in Arles, a town located in the south of France, that offered him the brilliant natural light, variety of colorful landscapes, and serenity that he needed to continue his work with renewed focus. His letters were now full of detailed descriptions of the color he saw around him under the Provençal sun, such as in this letter to Theo from May 1888: “Many of the subjects here are just — in character — the same as in Holland — the difference is in the color. There’s sulphur everywhere where the sun beats down.”

Some notable flower still lifes from his later years include Oleanders, Irises, and Roses. The time in Arles, however, also offered him the opportunity to work with models. These were usually people he knew personally instead of professional models, such as the postman Joseph Roulin, his wife Augustine Roulin, and the Belgian artist Eugène Boch. Nevertheless, portraits of these subjects are a testament to Van Gogh’s mastery of color and brushwork and show his success as a modernist painter who developed one of the most unique styles in European art history.

Many of the world’s most famous artists, like Claude Monet, Salvador Dali, and Pablo Picasso, fall under the umbrella of Modernism, even though their styles vary widely. So, how exactly do we define the Modernist era? Modern art is defined by its rejection of traditional academic standards. While historians debate the exact starting point, the 1863 Salon des Refusés marked a clear break, giving artists new freedom from the Academy’s rigid rules. Over the following hundred years, a succession of visionaries abandoned perspective, emotional restraint, physical representation, and artistic craft itself to create something new. Understand art in the Modernist era with ten pivotal works from modern masters.

1. Édouard Manet, Luncheon on the Grass, 1863

Édouard Manet is often seen as the artist who cracked open the door to Modernism. His Luncheon on the Grass wasn’t just a painting. It was a provocation that sparked a movement. The scene shows two clothed men casually picnicking with a nude woman. She isn’t Venus or a goddess, but a modern-day figure, unidealized, staring directly at the viewer. That blunt realism, combined with rough brushstrokes, flat lighting, and an awkward sense of depth, shocked 19th-century Salon-goers accustomed to polished historical scenes.

Rejected by the official Salon, Luncheon on the Grass found its home in the Salon des Refusés. Its inclusion there marked a turning point in art history. Manet had rewired tradition, replacing old myths with modern-day reality. That shift toward the present, the personal, the provocative is what made Manet the father of Modern art.

2. Eugène Bataille (Sapeck), Mona Lisa Smoking a Pipe, 1887

An early Modern group that headlined the beginning of the period was Les Arts Incoherents, French for “Incoherent Art.” Led by writer Jules Lévy, this group was defined by humor, satire, and accessibility of art, seen in the fact that most of their graphic artworks were cartoons published in widely distributed journals. While most of their works were made in the form of poetry or performance art, there were also some graphic artists, particularly Eugène Bataille.

Also known under the pseudonym Sapeck, his illustration of Mona Lisa Smoking a Pipe for the journal Le Rire remains a virtually unknown piece of Modernism. Here, he draws the all-famed Mona Lisa with one simple addition: a pipe. Satirical images like this are still recreated today. Bataille appropriates the famous Mona Lisa by putting a phallic object in her mouth, poking fun at her renowned status.

Modernism is usually referred to as revolutionary, a title that makes all too much sense for someone like Bataille, living in the aftermath of the French Revolution. As rebellions spread throughout Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, it only made sense that the same ideas would integrate themselves into the art world. The works of the Modern era can even be argued to be a broad act of iconoclasm, defined as the destruction of images. While this term typically refers to the damaging of religious icons (such as the Byzantine Iconoclasm) or political images (seen during the French Revolution), its general idea can be applied to the Modern period. Artists were working to destroy the established concepts of art on a large scale, rejecting everything put in place before them.

3. Vincent van Gogh, Starry Night, 1889

Vincent van Gogh created The Starry Night in June 1889 while seeking treatment at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, just a year before his death. Rather than a direct observation, the canvas is a composite of the view from his east-facing bedroom window, memory, and emotional imagination. Swirling waves of cobalt, indigo, and white surround eleven exaggerated, glowing stars and a crescent moon, applied with thick impasto brushstrokes.

The Starry Night stands as a pivotal bridge between late 19th-century Post-Impressionism and 20th-century Modernism. Where Impressionists sought to capture light as it fell in objective reality, van Gogh used color and form to express subjective psychological states. His approach influenced many subsequent Modernist artists. German Expressionists drew heavily on van Gogh’s dramatic brushwork and exaggerated forms to convey anxiety and internal conflict, while Henri Matisse and the Fauves built on van Gogh’s use of liberated, non-naturalistic color palettes.

4. Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907

Painted in 1907, Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is widely considered the single most decisive rupture in 20th-century art history, single-handedly firing the starting gun for Modernist abstraction. The massive 8-foot canvas portrays five prostitutes in a brothel on Carrer d’Avinyó in Barcelona. Shattering Renaissance perspective, human bodies are reduced to jagged, razor-sharp planes and overlapping geometric forms rather than soft, naturalistic contours. The two figures on the right wear stylized facial features derived directly from African tribal masks.

The radical flattening of space in Demoiselles directly laid the foundation for Cubism, which Picasso developed alongside Georges Braque over the following years. By incorporating non-Western artistic motifs as equal visual tools rather than mere exotic decor, Picasso changed how European artists approached abstraction. Even Picasso’s closest avant-garde peers, including Henri Matisse and Georges Braque, were initially horrified by the painting’s aggression, proving just how far past the established boundaries of art it pushed.

5. Wassily Kandinsky, Untitled, 1915

An artist like Wassily Kandinsky leaned into abstraction and took it a step further, turning abstraction into non-representation. That is, the form is so deconstructed that there is hardly anything recognizable anymore. Kandinsky started Der Blaue Reiter group along with Franz Marc, where together they pioneered the German Expressionist movement. An artwork like Untitled (1915) confuses the viewer at first. The first question viewers ask sounds simple, but is deceptively complex: What is Kandinsky trying to show?

In his artworks, it’s not the what that’s important, but the how. Kandinsky is an expressionist who focuses on expressing or conveying emotions. What’s being shown on the canvas gives way to how it’s being shown. Kandinsky does this primarily through his colors. He considered himself a synesthete, so for him, color had sound, typically denoted by a certain instrument. For example, red was aggressive, and as a warm color, it moved out toward the viewer. On the other hand, blue was calming and receding in its cool qualities. Juxtaposing these two together created chaos and disharmony. If you look in the upper corners, you’ll see large splotches of red across from blue, which make the canvas almost tilt in imbalance. Keep this concept in mind when viewing Kandinsky’s works, and their meanings might come a little easier.

6. Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1919

More than anyone or any movement, Duchamp and the Dadaists truly embody what Modernism means. Established in the early 20th century, Dadaism isn’t so different from Les Arts Incoherents. They focus on satire and appropriation, making fun of the elitism of the art world. Ironically, little did they know they’d become a symbol for what we consider elite art today.

Marcel Duchamp was a forerunner of Dadaism, with his most famous work, Fountain. In this piece, Duchamp took a manufactured urinal, flipped it on its side, and submitted it to be exhibited. Fountain created an outrage. If artists can take ready-made objects and call them art, then what does art really even mean? This question was the exact one Duchamp was trying to elicit.

7. Jackson Pollock, Number 1A, 1948

Jackson Pollock’s Number 1A, 1948 represents a seminal moment in late Modernism, marking the full emergence of Abstract Expressionism and shifting the center of the international art world from Paris to New York after World War II. Created in his Long Island barn, Number 1A, 1948 completely abandoned the traditional easel, palette, and brush-to-canvas contact.

Pollock laid raw, unprimed canvas flat on the floor, using his entire body to fling, drip, and pour liquid industrial enamel paint from sticks, trowels, and stiff brushes. Near the top right edge of the canvas, Pollock stamped his own paint-covered handprints directly onto the surface—an intimate signature linking the artist’s physical body to the recorded action. The painting lacks a central focal point, horizon line, or hierarchy. The dynamic web of black, white, grey, and metallic paint extends uniformly across the massive canvas, drawing the viewer’s eye endlessly around the surface.

Pollock made the act of creation the primary subject matter of his work. He treated the canvas as a record of kinetic movement, paving the way for modern Happenings, Performance Art, and Minimalist art movements in the mid-to-late 20th century.

8. Willem de Kooning, Woman I, 1950-52

Kandinsky’s Expressionism shouldn’t be confused with the later movement of Abstract Expressionism. Yes, he’s making abstract works in the expressionist style, but these movements are defined separately. One of the largest differences between the two is that Abstract Expressionism took place in the 1940s and 1950s, in the new art capital of New York City. A trailblazer in this style was the Dutchman Willem de Kooning. Artists like de Kooning were looking back a few decades, inspired by creators like Van Gogh and Munch. De Kooning’s Woman I takes a very traditional European subject, the female nude, and flips it on its head, not in a way entirely dissimilar from Bataille or Duchamp.

The figure depicted in Woman I is grotesque and disturbing, though it is still clear she is a woman through her prominent breasts. De Kooning was appropriating the female form, much like Duchamp or Sapeck did with the Mona Lisa, but on a broader scale. He reduced this woman down to her basic body parts, emphasizing the most important aspect of his movement: abstraction.

His dynamic, dramatic brushstrokes created a similar sense of chaos that Kandinsky depicted in his Untitled work. The colorful palette of pinks and greens gets drowned out by the large swatches of gray that create the woman’s form. We can’t tell if she’s standing or sitting, where her arms or legs are, or if she’s clothed or naked. The disorder of the form reflects the post-war world. Working in the United States, de Kooning and other Abstract Expressionists distanced themselves from European tradition to forge a new, distinctly American art.

9. Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1962

Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962) marked the arrival of Pop Art, a decisive shift that challenged late Modernism’s obsession with heroic individualism and interior emotion. Debuted at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, the artwork comprises 32 individual canvases; one for each variety of soup sold by Campbell’s at the time. Warhol utilized synthetic polymer paint applied partly via screen printing, mimicking the mechanical precision of commercial graphic design rather than traditional brushwork. The canvases were displayed horizontally on shelves, directly mimicking how grocery stores stock mass-produced consumer goods.

10. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Three Quarters of Olympia Minus the Servant, 1982

Modernism informally ended around the 1970s, ushering in a new era of Postmodernism. Artists like Duchamp and Kandinsky became household names. The context of the Cold War flipped the world upside down once again, and artists, doing what artists do, had to modify their works to keep up with the times.

This idea is exactly what the early Modernists were trying to do. For example, Manet took the traditional subject of a female nude in his Olympia and unveiled something deeper, something gritty, not unlike what de Kooning did with Woman I. His depiction of a sex worker astounded the Salon-goers in the 1860s, paving the way to the shocking early-Modern artworks of the Impressionists and beyond.

The neo-expressionist Jean-Michel Basquiat did what Duchamp did with L.H.O.O.Q. to Manet’s Olympia: he appropriated her iconic status as a symbol of the Modern art world. In Three Quarters of Olympia Minus the Servant, Basquiat took abstraction to an extreme, breaking apart all forms until everything was virtually unrecognizable.

It’s hard to tell where Olympia is meant to be. There’s some kind of face in the middle, but it looks nothing like Manet’s courtesan. Instead, it more accurately reflects the woman in de Kooning’s work: bald, ugly, and disturbing. Basquiat rejected the mainstreaming of modernism, reshaping its values into something that reflected his experience as a Black artist in New York.

Every artwork he made was an assault on the elitist art world. His graffiti medium portrayed the same idea of accessibility as Les Arts Incoherents did with their journals. Basquiat was painting identity, not just figures and bodies. He was evocative, just like the expressionists, forcing the viewer to analyze and interpret, not just observe.

Modern Art: How Did It Lead Us To Today?

The Modern era allowed artists to experiment with new forms, styles, and subjects. Without them, we might still be stuck in the stagnant tradition of academic formality. Imagine if every artwork looked just like a work made by Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo. Sure, they’re beautiful pieces to look at, but doesn’t it get quite boring? Shouldn’t we prefer a wide range of styles, enticing us with each new work we look at?

While Modern art can be hard to get, it’s still important to understand its place within art history. Without Modern artists, we could very well be trapped in the cycle of history without an escape. Their satirical takes on iconic artworks—and their abstract pieces that shattered traditional form—let audiences see something new each time. So, the next time you’re at a museum and feel overwhelmed by the complexity of Picasso or Matisse, remember: artists like them gave the art world freedom. That freedom opened the door to the full range of expression we enjoy today.

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

Van Gogh’s Love of Rembrandt

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

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

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

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

Millet and the Origin of a Peasant Painter

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

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

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

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

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

The Colors of Eugène Delacroix

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

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

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

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

Adolphe Monticelli and Van Gogh’s Use of Impasto

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hockney’s Californian Period

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

Hockney’s Swimming Pool Series

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

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

David Hockney’s Portraits

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

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

Hockney’s Multi-Panel Landscapes: Bigger Grand Canyon

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

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

Hockney-Falco Thesis

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

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

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

David Hockney’s iPad Paintings

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

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

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

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

Art Nouveau and Dance

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

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

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

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

The Transformation of Modern Dance

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Serpentine Dance

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

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

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

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

Dance by Alphonse Mucha

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Panorama of Scheveningen (1881)

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

2. George Hendrik Breitner (1857-1923)

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

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

The Singel Bridge at the Paleisstraat in Amsterdam (1896)

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

3. Richard Roland Holst (1868-1938)

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

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

A Socialist Artist

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

4. Johann Georg van Caspel (1870-1928)

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

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

5. Isaac Israëls (1865-1934)

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

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

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

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

6. Jan Toorop (1858-1928)

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

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

Dutch Modern Artist’s Slaolistijl

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kandinsky’s Trip to Vologda

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

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

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

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

Kandinsky & Orthodox Icons

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

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

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

Wassily Kandinsky in Germany: His Abstract Art and German Heritage

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

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

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