Claude Monet captured time by working in series—Haystacks, Poplars, Rouen Cathedral, and Water Lilies—painting the same motif across seasons and times of day. With several canvases at hand, Monet followed shifting light and used complementary contrasts so the eye “mixes” color, revealing change. The result is time made visible on canvas.

Time Studies Begin with Claude Monet’s Haystacks

In 1883, 40-year-old Claude Monet, the leader of French Impressionism, relocated to Giverny, Normandy. His art took a unique turn in 1890 when he devoted himself to painting what would become several famous series. This artistic period began with Haystacks, a series consisting of more than twenty paintings. As early as 1888, Monet began to paint the haystacks near his Giverny home. The goal of this repetitive series was to show the different effects of light and atmosphere during various days, seasons, and weather conditions. With this new goal, Monet abandoned landscapes. He started focusing on fragments of the landscapes instead.

These paintings perfectly illustrate the Impressionists’ perception of color. Knowing that every color has an opposite, Impressionist painters paired each tone with its complementary color to highlight it. The eye, then, on its own, reduces the disturbance of contrast and operates an optical mixture based on complementary tones. This allows the painter’s palette to disappear, with the eye performing the mixing of colors itself. This idea was theorized by French scientist Michel-Eugène Chevreul in his law of simultaneous color contrast, which inspired both Impressionists and Pointillists.

Haystacks: Light by the Hour

Painting serially allowed Monet to experiment with color theory. He studied the variations in light throughout the day: the morning glow, afternoon sunbeams, and the evening sky. In some paintings, Monet also painted the effects of light and colors specific to each season and weather condition. In Grainstacks (W1273), the application of Chevreul’s color theory is undeniable. The blue used for the haystack’s tip in the shadows complements the various orange tones used to represent the sun’s rays and their reflections.

Some canvases still retain a certain degree of naturalism, a fidelity to painted reality, as in the first painting in the series, Haystacks, End of Summer (W1266). But over time, Monet’s technique begins to reject volume and detail, becoming solely interested in tactile and luminous effects. The brush strokes thicken and the forms dissolve.

Seasons on a Single Riverbank in Monet’s Poplars

Between the summer and autumn of 1891, one year after Haystacks, Monet produced a new series of twenty-three paintings called Poplars. While the Haystacks series varied considerably in terms of angles, framing, and canvas formats, this series is much more consistent. The canvases emphasized the trees rising to the sky.

Like Haystacks, this new series picks up the Impressionist principles that Monet never ceased to defend and to illustrate: open-air painting in which one could draw directly from the subject at a given moment. Monet sought to capture the moment in this series by painting shadows, marking the sun’s movement, and expressing the cycle of days and seasons through variations in color.

Effects of Light and the Ephemeral Moment in Monet’s Poplars

By observing the changing hours, days, and seasons in his series, Monet focused on what captivated him the most: the effects of light. By trying to paint these effects, he sought to capture the ephemeral. This is why the subjects he chose were always simple and why details were absent from his paintings. Only light and color mattered. The subjects can even appear blurred, and a few brush strokes were sometimes enough to sketch a shape.

For Monet, a landscape is not immutable but subject to infinite atmospheric variations. He explained this to Dutch librarian Willem Byvanck in 1891: “Here is what I proposed to myself: above all, I wanted to be true and exact. A landscape, for me, does not exist as a landscape, since its aspect changes at every moment; but it lives by its surroundings, by the air and the light, which vary continuously […]. You have to know how to seize the moment of the landscape at the right time, because that time will never come back and you will always wonder if the impression you captured was the real one.”

The Changing Light of the Cathedral in Rouen

The Rouen Cathedral series comprises 30 paintings by Claude Monet, executed between 1892 and 1894. He mainly painted the western portal of the Notre-Dame de Rouen Cathedral, from different angles and at different times of the day. Monet wanted the paintings of the cathedral to be seen together, as an ensemble.

In 1895, Monet selected 20 of these works to be exhibited in his art dealer’s gallery in Paris, as he had done with Haystacks several years before. Monet’s choice to study and paint the facade of Rouen Cathedral, a very elaborate and complex piece of architecture, seems unusual. He generally preferred sticking to simple subjects, devoid of detail, to devote himself to the study of light and color.

In London

These paintings, however, recall the way Monet treated the chalk cliffs of Étretat a few years earlier. To capture the atmosphere and light hitting the stone surface, Monet experimented with pigments to achieve the desired colors. The facade of the Cathedral was carved from monochromatic stone, but Monet’s paintings display many colors, ranging from shades of mauve and green to pink and orange.

A few years after the Rouen Cathedrals, Monet once again put aside rural subjects and chose the Parliament of London as the motif for a new series of 19 paintings. These two series are his most in-depth studies of light and color in architecture.

Obsession with Water Lilies

Following Japan’s opening to Westerners in 1853, a wave of Japonisme swept Europe. Monet’s prolonged interest in serial painting was at least partially inspired by his keen interest in Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints and paintings. The Japanese artist Hokusai, for example, notably produced the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji between 1831 and 1833.

Water Lilies is a series consisting of approximately 250 oil paintings produced by Monet during the last 31 years of his life. Water Lilies is also the final and largest project of his life. These paintings show the pond of water lilies from the flower garden of Monet’s house in Giverny, which now houses the Claude Monet Foundation. Designed by the painter himself, this garden serves as a testament to his love for Japanese culture, featuring a wisteria-covered footbridge, water lily ponds, weeping willows, and bamboo forests.

Monet explored the full potential of reflections in water. But the real subject of these paintings is, again, light. Monet painted it with a rich palette of colors that brought its reflections in the water to life. He juxtaposed complementary colors like yellow and purple, which accentuated the sensation of a luminous radiance and expansion of space in the spectator’s eye.

Monet’s Late Water Lilies

As in the Haystacks series, the initially figurative Water Lilies paintings became increasingly abstract over the years. Many of these canvases were painted while Monet was suffering from cataracts and slowly losing his eyesight. His increasingly cloudy vision produced paintings that were unreal and dreamlike. His garden’s Japanese footbridge was the subject of many of his paintings, but the way he depicted it changed considerably over time.

In 1899, Monet painted a very realistic version of the bridge in The Water Lily Pond (W1516) with serene shades of green. The Japanese Footbridge, Giverny (W1932), painted about twenty years later, on the other hand, shows an amalgam of bright red, orange, and yellow shapeless colors in which the spectator can hardly make out the shape of a bridge.

Echoing his Impressionist theory that landscape painting should focus on the correlation between light and color, Monet could no longer see the details of the subjects he was painting. In his Water Lilies, the strength of his creative gesture and the broad treatment of the entire canvas without distinguishing different planes.

The mysterious painter Giorgio de Chirico constructed his own nonexistent cities in the middle of nowhere based on his childhood memories, dreams, and experiences. His paintings were intriguing and slightly disturbing, with sunlit squares and deserted streets evoking strange anxiety and terror. He was one of the founding fathers of Italian modernism yet hated modern art with passion, looking for inspiration in the works of the Old Masters. Read on to familiarize yourself with the most important works by Giorgio de Chirico.

1. The Child’s Brain: The Influential Work of Giorgio de Chirico

Giorgio de Chirico was born in 1888 in Greece into a family of Italians of Greek origins. His parents were hereditary nobility, and the artist proudly admitted that his father, Sicilian baron Evariste de Chirico, was the only sibling in his family who expressed the desire to work in his life. De Chirico’s father passed away when the artist was only seventeen, but he remained a lasting and recognizable figure in his mature works. According to de Chirico’s memoirs and the recollections of family friends, the future artist admired his father, yet their relationship was never as close as he wished it to be. He craved affection, which his father, an educated and intelligent man raised in an upper-class environment, was unable to express.

The Child’s Brain lingers between a childhood memory and a Freudian nightmare. The father is present yet passive, with his eyes closed. His nude torso and the position of a book on a table in front of him suggest possible sexual connotations of the scene, possibly accidentally witnessed by the artist in his early years. Like many artists of his time, de Chirico read Sigmund Freud and reflected upon his theories of childhood and sexuality.

Apart from the significance of the father figure to the artist, the painting had a remarkable life of its own. Soon after its completion, the future leader of the Surrealists, Andre Breton, saw it from the bus window and was so impressed that he jumped off at the next stop to buy it immediately. Despite de Chirico’s later scorn for modern art, Breton’s encounter with his work helped establish Surrealism as we know it.

2. Gare Montparnasse (The Melancholy of Departure)

Trains and railway stations were among the most popular motifs used by de Chirico in his works. Like the paternal figure with a recognizable mustache, they occurred from the artist’s family history. His father was a railroad engineer who worked on railway construction in Greece. His projects were meant to reorganize and reconstruct the vast and empty spaces of Thessaly province. In a similar manner, Giorgio de Chirico reorganized his imaginary spaces. To him, engineering was the method of perceiving and studying deep space. Apart from the philosophical perspective, drafts and instruments from his father’s desk have certainly affected de Chirico’s technical skill and inclination.

A railway station represents a liminal space—the point of transition and transformation. Unlike other spaces occupied by humans, stations, and airports are designed not to be inhabited or interacted with in any productive manner but only to be left behind for a more promising, desirable, or important location. This status grants liminal spaces an uncanny feeling of impermanence and blurred identity. De Chirico reinforces these feelings by leaving these spaces empty. Designed to contain moving and transforming human beings, empty railway stations evoke anxiety and identity crises caused by the inability to define one’s state of existence.

3. The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street

Unlike most other paintings by de Chirico, The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street contains a surprisingly dynamic and lively element: a small dark figure of a little girl running with her hoop. Some art experts believe that de Chirico borrowed the figure from another iconic pointillist painting by Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. Most likely, de Chirico recognized the hallucinatory qualities of Seurat’s technique. Images created by thousands of small primary-colored dots seemed to move on their own, nauseating the viewer.

However, de Chirico’s running girl could not for sure be categorized as a living being. In the contrasting deserted cityscape, the figure seemed to be nothing but a deceptive shadow, luring the unsuspecting viewer into a trap. The shadow moves from one dark corner to another, as if afraid to be captured and dissolved by light. The menacing presence of something yet unsees is intensified by another silhouette. An immobile tall figure hides behind the corner, casting a dark shadow on a sunlit piazza.

Yet, despite allegedly borrowing the figure from one of the most significant paintings in the history of Modern art, de Chirico despised modernism with his entire heart. He even called it one of the two most disastrous aspects of contemporary civilization, rivaled only by Nazist ideology. In his art and studies, de Chirico relied mostly on the works of the Italian Old Masters and their centuries-long traditions. In his later years, he even attempted to destroy most of his early paintings, which were much more experimental than those of his mature period. He even confronted art historians and rejected the attribution of some paintings. Fortunately, Giorgio de Chirico did not succeed, with enough of his old works still preserved in museums and private collections.

De Chirico’s scorn for modern art was personal. His early works, presented at the time when Cubism and early abstraction dominated the scene, were often dismissed as ‘decorative’ by pro-avant-garde critics. Over the years, he distanced himself from the rest of the Modernists, constructing the myth of the misunderstood and isolated painter.

Ironically, despite this intense hatred, it was de Chirico who played the decisive role in forming one of the two most important movements in the history of Italian modernism—the Metaphysical painting. The second crucial movement was Futurism, which soon cross-contaminated with de Chirico’s theory. One of the most influential futurists of his era, Carlo Carra, briefly worked with de Chirico in 1917 before moving to more archaic forms of painting inspired by Giotto.

4.  The Disquieting Muses

This Metaphysical painting focused on representing the unseen and unreal while using familiar objects and classical architecture. There were no fantastic creatures, strange forms, or fairytale actions involved. The surreal effect of deceit was created by elements that would not raise any suspicion in any other setting. Deserted spaces and contrasting light question the purpose and appropriateness of these objects and blur the line between the animate and the inanimate. The mannequins, depicted in one of the many versions of the famous Disquieting Muses painting, evoke terror because of the blurred distinction between life and death. The painting later inspired the famous poet Sylvia Plath to write a poem with the same name.

Relying on Italian architecture and memories of his Greek childhood, de Chirico found another inspiration in German philosophy. The keys to his oeuvre can be found in the writings of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. In his writings, Nietzsche often suggested a hidden meaning behind everyday objects, an unseen life underneath the existing reality. Apart from sharing ideas, the philosopher and the artist had one more thing in common: both found physical reflections of their concepts in the Italian city of Turin. There, Nietzsche spent his final years calling it the only suitable place for him. Giorgio de Chirico found his dramatic contrast of light and shadow created by the arches and covered walkways of Turin.

5. Giorgio de Chirico’s Self-Portrait

Self-portrature was particularly important for de Chirico, especially in his 1920s period. Then, he started to doubt his previous artistic beliefs and connections and began further distancing himself from other artists. This self-portrait remains a perfect illustration of the company in which de Chirico wanted to see himself: the angle and pose of his portrait were copied directly from sixteenth-century paintings. Next to it is a painted sculptural bust of the artist in profile—an homage to the art of Classical Antiquity.

At that time, de Chirico adopted not only compositional but also technical methods of the old masters. Apart from his usual oil paint, he began to use tempera—an egg-based medium widely employed by painters before the 1500s. Tempera dried quickly and did not allow for mixing colors, so artists had to paint gradients with small strokes of unmixed colors. Starting from the 1920s and until his death in 1978, Giorgio de Chirico saw his mission in reviving the principles of traditional techniques and iconography. Still, his early period of work remains his most famous and influential.

Salvador Dali was the most famous of all Surrealists, most closely associated with the movement’s visual codes and ideology. Yet, he was not the most pleasant person to deal with. He was aggressive and violent, mostly towards women, and openly expressed his admiration for Adolf Hitler, later trying to turn it into a joke. In 1939, the Surrealist group had enough of it and officially banished Dali from their circles. Read on to learn more about Salvador Dali’s dramatic breakup with other Surrealists.

Salvador Dali: Controversial Since Childhood

Salvador Dali’s immense popularity is a phenomenon that keeps both art experts and museum visitors astonished and puzzled. Apart from his obvious artistic accomplishments, many aspects of his personality were too shocking to ignore as byproducts of creative eccentricity. In fact, the Surrealist group officially expelled him from their ranks after tolerating his behavior for several years.

Most accounts of Dali’s personality and his escapades came from his 1942 autobiography. Although its credibility remains debatable, it nonetheless painted a sufficient picture of Dali’s public persona. At the age of five, he pushed his friend off a suspension bridge. As the boy lay bleeding below, little Dali sat nearby, eating cherries and watching the boy suffer. Later, he admitted to being delighted by the adults’ shock and panic while the doctors treated the injured child. A year later, he kicked his three-year-old sister in her head, believing it was a ball. Dali recounted the stories of his childhood cruelty with obvious joy, if not pride, savoring every detail.

As he got older, his behavior turned worse. In his late twenties, he ‘trampled’ a woman who complimented the beauty of his feet. Dali’s friends had to physically remove him from his bleeding victim. The artist’s entire life was filled with terrible stories of attacks on women, including his wife Gala, who suffered several broken bones after arguing with Dali.

In 1929, after his successful solo exhibition, Dali became a member of the Surrealist movement in Paris. Although the group recognized his outstanding artistic skill, his aggressive behavior and bizarre jokes often caused discomfort to others. Gradually, Dali’s opinions became even more concerning. After the Nazis came to power in Germany, he started to publicly express his fascination with Adolf Hitler, even claiming that he fantasized about him in erotic terms. These claims shocked other group members, who largely shared left-wing views. Many of them were devoted communists and victims of Fascist regimes in Spain and Germany. Still, that did not stop Dali from praising Hitler while being in the same room with people who suffered from his actions.

Dali Versus Surrealists

Dali’s disturbing behavior and outrageous political views had long stirred discomfort inside artistic circles. No other artist was more aware of the depths of Dali’s views and aspirations than the ideological leader of the Surrealist movement, Andre Breton. Breton was a devoted anti-fascist and a member of the French Communist Party, radically intolerant of any form of pro-fascist discourse. Over the years of Dali’s presence in Surrealist circles, Breton amassed a collection of letters shocking and disturbing enough to lead him to action.

In fact, Breton subjected Dali to semi-public trials not once but twice. For the first time, in 1934, the leader of the Surrealists accused the Spanish painter of supporting a then-new phenomenon of Hitlerian fascism. Dali claimed that the new violent regime was Surrealist in its nature and defended its methods as the latest and original artistic expression. In his earlier writings, Breton himself called for artists to “work outside all aesthetic and moral preoccupations,” yet Dali seemed to take it too literally.

Some art historians even believe that Dali’s insistence on the matter was merely a methodical effort to offend Breton and destabilize his position as the group’s leader. The 1934 trial did not lead to any substantial result. Dali managed to deflate the tension with another string of pretentious and absurd jokes and win the sympathies of several prominent Surrealists like Paul Eluard and Tristan Tzara. The trial ended with a collective warning that did little to contain Dali’s creative pursuits.

In 1939, Breton’s limit of patience was finally exhausted. By that time, he had amassed a collection of shocking letters that served as evidence of either Dali’s insanity or immense cruelty. These letters were lost over the years of Breton’s travels, and only recently they were suddenly rediscovered—partially in Breton’s archive and in private collections of art critics close to the Surrealist circles. In them, Dali praised Hitler and Francisco Franco, the Spanish fascist dictator who forced thousands, including some Surrealist artists, to flee the country, fearing for their lives. He expressed his bizarre plans to create a new world religion based on white people enslaving all other races, establishing human sacrifice as the cultural norm, and turning Surrealists into priests. In other letters, he praised Hitler and expressed admiration for racist violence in the United States. He explained that although he felt a certain pity for the lynching victims, these scenes filled him with “real pleasure and considerable sexual excitement.” Breton preserved these letters to use in the second trial that finally made Dali unwelcome among the Surrealists and formally expelled him from the group.

Dali’s Life After Surrealism

After his dramatic expulsion, despite Breton’s efforts, not much changed for Dali and his career. If anything, this isolated him from the rest of the Surrealist community and cemented his reputation as an independent and unique eccentric genius. Dali had no intention of apologizing or clarifying his views—instead, he stated that he was the only real Surrealist anyway and did not need any associates.

Dali’s hyperinflated ego and talent for commerce effectively turned his isolation into an artistic monopoly. Without the constraints of other members’ opinions, he developed his own brand of Surrealism—highly commercialized, populist, and shocking just enough to impress but not repulse. Single-handedly, Dali became the emblem of the movement, striving further and further away from the initial principles laid by Andre Breton. Among his ex-colleagues, Dali was known as Avida Dollars—an anagram of his name, loosely translated as “eager for dollars.” Dali starred in TV commercials, designed product packaging, and sold every bit of his expressive effort for large sums.

The Secret Life of Salvador Dali

In 1942, Salvador Dali published an autobiography The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, which soon became the most cited account of both his creative accomplishments and wrongdoings. To accept this book as entirely truthful would be a great misunderstanding of Dali’s character. Some critics praised it, writing the book off as a satirical comedy rather than an actual account of the artist’s life.

Among the most prominent critics of the book was the famous writer George Orwell. Two years after the publication, he published a book review that was essentially a prolonged essay on morals, obscenity, and the debatable right of an artist to transgress the norms of the larger society they inhabit. Although his account may seem overly conservative and even prudish, one of Orwell’s points remains too accurate to debate: Dalí’s exceptional artistic skill and ability to work hard have set him apart from ordinary people.

The crowd eagerly forgave the most shocking, repulsive, and dangerous instances of his expression under the umbrella of the presupposed genius. In Orwell’s eyes, Dali was simultaneously a good artist and a “disgusting human being,” with both characteristics hardly contradicting or invalidating each other. Even if, as Orwell insisted, some of Dali’s wild stories were completely fictional, nonetheless, the artist intended them to be perceived as truth. And that, in itself, was enough to question Dali’s public prominence.

Was Salvador Dali Really a Fascist?

Some critics insist that at the core of Dali’s eccentricity lay not genuine political beliefs but the artistic desire to shock. Moreover, they see the infamous letters as a provocation aimed to enrage Andre Breton by questioning his staunchest beliefs. As we know, that goal was effectively reached, infuriating not only Breton but the entire Surrealist circle.

And yet, even if we somehow ignore Dali’s penchant for violence and a shocking lack of self-awareness, would it really matter what his true beliefs were? The stories of injured children and attacks on women could have been products of his imagination, but that does not make them any more acceptable. Dali’s support of Franco and Hitler had very real and tangible consequences for the people affected by these men’s politics. If anything, Dali’s story is a remarkable example of how easily the public can let go of the greatest atrocities, not hidden but proudly paraded in front of them, to willingly fall for the charm of a “great genius” with all eccentricities and peculiarities.

Vincent van Gogh is a world-renowned artist known for works such as Starry Night and The Sunflowers, as well as the infamous incident of him cutting off his ear during a psychotic episode. But there is more to him—Van Gogh had a very interesting and eventful life. He dealt with many hardships and had complex relationships with his family and peers. His personal life had a profound impact on his art, making it all the more important to fully understand and experience what he created.

1. Vincent Van Gogh’s Father Was a Minister

Van Gogh’s father, Theodorus van Gogh, was a Protestant minister in the Netherlands. Theodorus’ father, Van Gogh’s grandfather, was also a pastor who confirmed Theodorus. For most of Van Gogh’s life, his father remained a preacher in the province of North-Brabant in the Netherlands, primarily in Zundert, Etten-Leur, and Nuenen. Vincent had a strained relationship with his father. He was unable to hold a job, earn a living, and even gave up his training to become a pastor to become an artist instead. He did not succeed as an artist during his lifetime, which added to the tension.

To add to that, Vincent fell in love with his cousin Kee Vos-Stricker when he was 28 years old, which was disapproved of by his parents. Most of Vincent’s adult life was spent with a rift between him and his father, as the former felt misunderstood while the latter wanted his son to follow a conventional path. Theodorus van Gogh passed away in 1885 due to a stroke, long before Vincent’s success.

2. He Had an Older Brother Who Died at Birth

While Van Gogh was the oldest of six children, he was not the first child of his parents. In 1852, one year before Van Gogh was born, his parents had a baby who unfortunately did not survive. The baby was also named Vincent Willem van Gogh, and the family decided to bury him in their hometown of Zundert, North-Brabant, in the cemetery of the church where Theodorus was the minister. Vincent van Gogh, the artist, was born exactly one year later, on March 30, 1853, and was named after his stillborn brother. Several researchers have even speculated that the psychological problems that Van Gogh suffered from were linked to his stillborn brother. The grave of his brother can still be visited today in Zundert, located next to the Vincent van GoghHuis museum, which preserves Van Gogh’s childhood home and legacy in Zundert.

3. He Was a Missionary Before Becoming an Artist

For the early part of his adult life, Van Gogh followed in his father’s footsteps to join the church. He was studying to become a minister in 1877 under the guidance of his uncle, but he wasn’t interested in studying for the theology entrance exam, which resulted in him taking up a lower position as a lay preacher in a Belgian mining village called the Borinage in 1879. He was eager to continue his passion to serve God and performed his duties as a preacher to the villagers.

Van Gogh was an empathetic man. He witnessed extreme poverty in the Borinage and recognized the hardships of the villagers, as many people died in the mines and families lived on scraps. Whatever Van Gogh could give away, he did. He shared his food and clothes and started living extremely frugally. This lifestyle was not acceptable to his superiors, who believed it portrayed a negative image for a preacher to be living like a man in poverty. Van Gogh was eventually removed from his position at the Borinage, but he still carried his religious teachings with him as an artist, as well as a desire to help others.

4. His Family Was Involved in Art

Vincent van Gogh had an uncle named Vincent Willem van Gogh (nicknamed ‘Uncle Cent’) who ran the branch of the art dealership Goupil & Cie in The Hague. The dealership had branches in London, Brussels, The Hague, and Paris. Van Gogh’s introduction to art started with his family’s involvement in the industry. As a sixteen-year-old boy, he started working as an art salesman in The Hague and familiarized himself with famous artists and the developments in the art world. His younger brother Theo also started to work in the Brussels branch of Goupil & Cie in 1873. Van Gogh was transferred to the London branch that year and to Paris in 1875.

Van Gogh’s opinions on art were strong and not always conventional, which is why it became difficult for him to connect with customers. Eventually, he was told to leave the dealership, while his younger brother Theo went on to become a successful art dealer in Paris. Theo’s connections in the art world encouraged Van Gogh to pursue a life as an artist—he sold his works to Theo, who in turn attempted to sell them in Paris, albeit with little success.

5. He Only Became an Artist at the Age of 27

Van Gogh’s decision to become an artist was made quite unexpectedly. He tried several career directions, including teaching and religion, but eventually settled on art. By 1877, he was set to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a clergyman. He had become incredibly religious and wished to serve God by becoming a preacher. He was posted in the Belgian village of Borinage as a missionary, but halfway through his work, he decided to switch to art. The catalyst of this decision was his brother Theo’s advice—Vincent often included small sketches of the Borinage miners in the letters he sent to Theo.

Theo, seeing a real potential and passion in his brother’s work, advised him to continue with drawing and take it more seriously. In 1881, Van Gogh sought his cousin’s husband, the painter Anton Mauve, for training. Apart from this, Van Gogh did not receive any formal artistic training. He learned to work with oil paints and watercolors under Mauve’s tutelage, and the latter had a great impact on Van Gogh’s early practice.

6. He Created More Than 2,000 Artworks in His Lifetime

Despite being an artist for only the last 10 years of his life, Van Gogh managed to create over 2,000 artworks, including both drawings and oil paintings. This is an extraordinary number, as many artists spent weeks or months on a single painting. However, Van Gogh worked quickly and intuitively, which made it possible for him to produce such a large number of works. He wrote to Theo in September 1888 explaining how he was able to finish one painting a day by spending all day out in nature working at his easel—“Today I worked again from 7 o’clock in the morning until 6 o’clock in the evening without moving except to eat a bite a stone’s throw away. And that’s why the work’s going fast.”

His particularly productive period was the 15 months he spent in Arles, southern France, between 1888 and 1889. Here, Van Gogh produced around 200 paintings and 100 drawings. The decision to move to Arles was rooted in his longing for the peace of the countryside, having spent two years in Paris. The quietness and slow life of the country, as well as the bright, almost blinding sunlight in Arles, resulted in some of the best and most luminous works that Van Gogh painted throughout his entire career, such as the series of orchards in blossom, The Harvest (1888), and The Sunflowers (1888-89).

7. Van Gogh Also Painted From Memory

Van Gogh had a recurring argument with his artist friend Paul Gauguin about the correct manner to paint. Van Gogh took his inspiration from nature, while Gauguin insisted on painting from memory or the imagination. The latter followed a Symbolist manner of painting that was poetic and decorative. However, there are instances where Van Gogh also painted from memory. For example, the painting titled “Memory of the Garden at Etten (Ladies of Arles),” created in November 1888, was painted from memory, incorporating some imaginative elements.

Van Gogh explained how he was inspired by Gauguin to paint from the imagination, writing: “Gauguin gives me courage to imagine, and the things of the imagination do indeed take on a more mysterious character.” Van Gogh’s portrait titled La Bercuse, completed in January 1889, was also created from memory, with only a few studies from a model as a reference. Although he dabbled in Symbolist painting, Van Gogh remained connected with nature and took his inspiration from reality for the majority of his career.

8. He Signed His Works as Vincent

Being a Dutchman, Van Gogh’s last name was—and still is—difficult to pronounce correctly for most people. It is pronounced “Van Gokh” in Dutch, but the pronunciation has several variations today. During his life, he was hoping to gain recognition as an artist but feared that his difficult last name would be a hindrance. This led him to decide to sign his paintings only as Vincent. Another reason for this was his wish to separate himself from the family name. His father and uncle were both preachers, and another uncle ran the successful art dealership branch of Goupil & Cie in The Hague. Having been constantly rebuked for his life decisions and career choices, Vincent wanted to follow his own path and be known for his efforts, rather than his family name.

9. He Had a Serious Relationship With a Woman Named Sien

While it is known that Van Gogh never married, he did have a serious relationship with a woman named Sien Hoornik in 1882. Sien was a seamstress and a sex worker. She had a young daughter and was pregnant with another, and Van Gogh wanted to help her. Eventually, the two formed a mutual understanding of each other’s struggles and decided to live together. This was greatly disapproved of by Van Gogh’s family, but he empathized with Sien and believed that they could fulfill the need for a family for each other through their relationship.

He wrote in May 1882: “She and I are two unfortunates who keep each other company and bear the burden together, and it’s in that way that unhappiness is turned into happiness and the unbearable is made bearable.” However, they never got married. Eventually, Van Gogh and Sien separated as they both felt dissatisfied with the relationship. For Sien, the life of an artist was not very attractive, and Van Gogh’s feelings for Sien were not as strong as they had been for Kee Vos-Stricker. He also caved under the pressure of his family, especially Theo, to end the relationship.

10. Van Gogh Became Famous Because of His Sister-In-Law

Van Gogh did not gain any fame during his lifetime despite producing a great number of paintings and drawings. But today, he is one of the most famous artists from Europe. The story of his posthumous success was possible only because of his sister-in-law, Theo’s wife, Jo van Gogh-Bonger. After both Vincent and Theo passed away, Jo took it upon herself to make the name of Van Gogh known in the Netherlands.

She worked alongside Theo’s contacts in the art world and successfully organized multiple exhibitions and sales of Van Gogh’s paintings. In 1905, Van Gogh’s works were exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, marking a significant milestone. Jo also worked tirelessly to compile the letters shared between Vincent and Theo into a book in order to share Vincent’s thoughts and emotions. She believed that to understand Van Gogh’s art, people needed to understand the artist first. Her efforts were clearly successful, and the name of Van Gogh is known worldwide because of Jo.

Today, the Van Gogh Museum is one of the most famous museums in the world. It stands as a well-preserved legacy of the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh who has become a symbol of national pride for the Netherlands. The museum, located in Amsterdam, attracted almost two million visitors in 2024 and can easily be spotted due to the long queues of people outside the entrance. A trip to Amsterdam always calls for a visit to the Van Gogh Museum.

Van Gogh Museum as a Symbol of Success

It is not possible to talk about the establishment of the Van Gogh Museum without mentioning Van Gogh’s sister-in-law, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger. The museum was a mark of success culminating from years of efforts that Jo had put into making Van Gogh famous through exhibitions and sales. After the death of the artist in 1890, and of his brother Theo six months later, Jo was left with all of Vincent’s canvases, drawings, letters, and collection of works by other artists in her Paris apartment. She preserved these for years before they were officially owned by the Vincent van Gogh Foundation in 1962.

While Jo died in 1925, her son, Vincent Willem van Gogh, continued her work in order to preserve the memory of his uncle. He made an important decision to keep the remaining artworks within the family and cease any further sales. Eventually, he felt the need to preserve all of Van Gogh’s artworks under one roof, and the nephew made a deal with the Dutch state wherein all artworks were to be owned by the Van Gogh Foundation as state property and kept in a museum dedicated to Van Gogh.

The decision to open a museum was also rooted in the nephew’s desire to make Van Gogh’s art accessible for all to see. Previously, the paintings had only hung in the homes of families or in temporary exhibitions. Finally, the Van Gogh Museum was opened on the 2nd of June in 1973, by Queen Juliana of the Netherlands, and Van Gogh’s works have been permanently displayed for public view ever since. Who would’ve thought that the artist who could not sell a single painting during his lifetime would have one of the most important Dutch museums dedicated to him?

Today, it is not only a world-famous tourist attraction but also a major center for research and education. The museum not only preserves Van Gogh’s artworks, but also his letters and other documentation that holds a wealth of information about his life. The institution has published several collection catalogs and digitally compiled, annotated, and translated all surviving letters that Van Gogh exchanged. The head office of the museum, along with the museum library, is located in a different building on the Gabriel Metsustraat, where curators and researchers develop new ways to enrich Van Gogh’s legacy.

Where Is It?

The Van Gogh Museum is located at Museum Square in Amsterdam, between two of the biggest Dutch museums—the Rijksmuseum and the Stedelijk Museum. The Van Gogh Museum building has two parts, one designed by the Dutch designer Gerrit Rietveld and the other by a Japanese architect named Kisho Kurokawa. The Rietveld building is where the permanent collection is housed. This is the building that takes you through the life of Van Gogh through his artwork and his relationship with his contemporaries.

The Kurokawa building is specifically used as a temporary exhibition space, which separates it from the permanent collection that is focused on Van Gogh alone. The separation of the two sections offers visitors the opportunity to explore both the permanent collection and follow the narrative of the temporary exhibitions without interruptions. You can always stop by their café or the gift shop after visiting one building and view the other one after a break.

Highlights From the Collection

Most of Van Gogh’s artworks are housed in the Van Gogh Museum, and the collection portrays a detailed narrative of his life. The first floor is dedicated to all the self-portraits by the artist throughout his artistic career, along with a timeline of his life. This room is incredibly interesting as it shows the development of Van Gogh’s style from realist, somber colors and smooth brushstrokes to bright hues and modernist brushwork after 1886, the year he spent in Paris learning about the modernist theories and techniques of art.

As you go up to each floor, a different period of Van Gogh’s life is on display. You see his first serious painting, The Potato Eaters, in the center of one of the rooms, always hidden behind a crowd of curious visitors. This painting requires a slow and patient observer who can unravel the details of this composition, shrouded in its dark color palette, such as the clock in the background and the features of the subjects.

As you move along your journey, you witness some of Van Gogh’s most famous paintings, such as Sunflowers and Bedroom in Arles. These are big canvases, and the rooms are curated in a manner that attracts attention to these works. The period he spent in Arles between 1888-89 resulted in his most luminous works, such as The Harvest and The Yellow House, which is a pleasure to witness in this extensive collection. Apart from these masterpieces, Van Gogh’s repetitions of Japanese prints, from which he derived a lot of inspiration, are displayed alongside his original works. They offer a wonderful comparison of style and how the former influenced the latter. And finally, one of Van Gogh’s most special works, Almond Blossom, is also on display in this museum. It is a big canvas that demands attention from the entire room.

Despite being largely dedicated to one artist, the Van Gogh Museum displays a considerable number of artworks. This is because of the extremely productive career of Van Gogh, wherein he produced nearly 2,100 drawings and paintings in ten years. All these works were painted at different stages of his life, and the museum wonderfully takes you through them to unravel the evolution of his style, techniques, and perspectives on art. Every wall of the museum displays quotes from Van Gogh’s letters in both Dutch and English that beautifully summarize the period of his life that the paintings showcase in each room. In addition to art pieces, the Van Gogh Museum also displays drawings, letters, and even some of the painting supplies used by Van Gogh.

A Platform for Contemporaries

Apart from Van Gogh, the Van Gogh Museum displays paintings and drawings by some of his contemporaries. Both Vincent and Theo were avid collectors of art by their contemporary artists, and left behind this collection after they passed away. It included works by artists such as Edouard Manet, Adolphe Monticelli, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, George Hendrik Breitner, and Eugène Boch, among others.

The most important figure displayed in this category is Paul Gauguin, the French avant-garde artist who transformed the world of modernist art and deeply influenced Van Gogh. One particular painting by Gauguin, called The Painter of Sunflowers, is especially relevant. It is a portrait of Van Gogh painting one of the versions of the Sunflowers with a vase of sunflowers sitting in front of him. Van Gogh considered sunflowers as representative of his own oeuvre, and the reaffirming acknowledgment by Gauguin through this painting was a significant moment in their friendship.

At the same time, it was a point of tension between the two. Through this painting, Gauguin implied that Van Gogh only paints by imitating nature, as the latter can be seen copying the sunflowers in the vase. However, the version of the Sunflowers Van Gogh is painting in Gauguin’s portrait was painted from memory. This piece of history makes The Painter of Sunflowers a very interesting addition to the museum’s collection. It shows a nuanced view of Van Gogh’s relationship with Gauguin and their differing views on art.

Another artist in the collection is Emile Bernard, a younger but equally significant contemporary of Van Gogh and Gauguin. The museum displays certain works by Bernard, which he sent to Van Gogh with the title For Vincent’s Eyes Only. Drawings by Emile Bernard. This section offers a peek into the artists’ friendship as well as the works Bernard thought would be appreciated by Van Gogh. While Gauguin is considered Van Gogh’s closest artist friend, Bernard also worked alongside the two. In fact, in 1887, Van Gogh was learning to paint in the cloisonnist style of Bernard, which was characterized by flat tones placed alongside each other, sectioned off by bold outlines.

Bernard’s influence was significant in developing Van Gogh’s decorative paintings, and the influences of cloisonnism can be seen in the Sunflowers, Bedroom in Arles, and The Yellow House. The Van Gogh Museum also displays certain works by Edvard Munch, Maurice Denis, Odilon Redon, and Georges Seurat, among others. Including works by Van Gogh’s contemporaries in the collection offers a well-rounded view of the developments in the modernist era and how the Dutch artist shaped his style in this context.

Things to Do at the Van Gogh Museum

The Van Gogh Museum consistently organizes temporary exhibitions related to Van Gogh that focus on certain periods or people in the artist’s life. As the Van Gogh Museum is also an important modern art museum, it organizes exhibitions about artists from the late-19th and early-20th centuries. A recent exhibition at the museum titled ‘Vive l’impressionnisme!’ celebrated 150 years of Impressionism by displaying works by various Impressionist artists that are a part of Dutch collections. This included paintings, sketches, and sculptures by Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, and Camille Pissarro, among others.

If you want to learn more about Van Gogh while you look at his artwork, the Van Gogh Museum offers 50-minute guided tours as well as private tours of the museum collection. A Van Gogh expert accompanies you through the museum and shares stories about his life and his work in great detail. These tours are excellent for art and culture enthusiasts or if you just want to immerse yourself in Van Gogh’s work and make the most of your museum visit. If you would rather explore the museum at your own pace, you can also book an audio tour online or at the front desk that takes you through Van Gogh’s life stories as you enjoy the paintings.

It’s always a good idea to book your tickets for the Van Gogh Museum at least a week in advance because it is a tourist favorite, and time slots for visitors fill up quickly. If you’re visiting Amsterdam with kids, you can also enroll them in a children’s workshop that the museum organizes regularly. Here, the children learn about the life of Van Gogh and can also unleash their creative side by painting their own masterpieces. These workshops last for a couple of hours, giving you plenty of time to browse the museum in the meantime.

Apart from that, the Van Gogh Museum also has a great collection of gifts at the museum shop, including books, catalogs, postcards, and prints, as well as a cafe where you can enjoy a cup of coffee or a meal during your visit. The museum is a must-visit site if you are in Amsterdam and want to experience the world of Vincent van Gogh.

Vincent van Gogh is best known for his bright, colorful paintings showing the night sky, sunflowers, and landscapes. Long before these vibrant canvases came somber, muted paintings inspired by realists such as Rembrandt and Jean-François Millet. These paintings, mostly painted in 1885 in Nuenen, are in stark contrast to the paintings he created in the last five years of his life, when he was on a path toward becoming a colorist. These works marked the beginnings of his career and built his technical knowledge on light and shadows.

1. Van Gogh’s “Loom with Weaver,” 1884

Van Gogh was familiar with several linen weavers in Nuenen and painted numerous works depicting them at work after 1883. One of the reasons for choosing this subject was to capture the complicated mechanism of the loom on canvas. This was especially difficult to do, as these weavers worked in small, dark rooms within their homes that admitted limited light. It was also not possible to stand at a distance to capture the machinery accurately.

Working with dedication on the looms in such cramped situations to earn a livelihood made Van Gogh see them with great respect and fascination. He would often visit their homes in Nuenen to study them. He made several drawings of weavers working, developing a strong connection with their community and an admiration for their technical and physical labor.

2. The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring, 1884

Most of Van Gogh’s early works were created in the Dutch countryside. The artist had learned from the style of the Old Masters and sought to emulate it in his work before he was introduced to avant-garde circles in Paris during 1886-87. While living with his parents in Nuenen, Van Gogh often went into the countryside to explore natural and peasant subjects. This painting depicts an old church tower, almost in ruins, in the background. Van Gogh paid special attention to it in 1885, as it appears as the central subject in The Old Church Tower at Nuenen. The artist made several paintings and sketches of this parsonage garden to capture the effect of changing seasons.

This painting, belonging to the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands, had an eventful history: it was stolen while on loan for an exhibition in 2020. It was retrieved in 2023 in fairly good condition but underwent a thorough investigation and restoration, and was finally displayed in an exhibition in 2024.

3. The Potato Eaters, 1885

The Potato Eaters was one of Van Gogh’s first major projects that he considered a real success. This oil painting was made in Nuenen, the Netherlands, in April of 1885. It depicts a peasant family having potatoes and coffee after a long day’s work in the field. Van Gogh held deep admiration for peasant life and people who performed difficult physical labor.

This is visible in his depictions of the figures at the dinner table. They have bony faces and fingers, which are enhanced in the composition through harsh shadows with a single source of light on top of the table. A serving of steaming potatoes sits at the center of the table with a few cups of coffee next to it. One of his greatest inspirations, the French artist Jean-François Millet, was famous for his peasant paintings, and Van Gogh attempted to follow in his footsteps by depicting the reality of peasant life, albeit in his own style.

This painting was not only a symbol of life in rural Netherlands, but also a technical achievement for Van Gogh. This painting was particularly difficult to compose because it required depicting five figures under a single oil lamp, and Van Gogh made numerous sketches in preparation. The purpose of selecting such a subject shows Van Gogh’s intention to prove that he was developing into a serious artist who could be a successful figure painter. Still, he received harsh criticism for his manner of representing the figures. Today, The Potato Eaters is on display at the Van Gogh Museum as one of his most famous works and an excellent example of his early style.

4. Head of a Woman (Gordina de Groot), 1885

This woman, Gordina de Groot, belonged to the peasant family depicted by Van Gogh in The Potato Eaters. He painted several such portraits of the family members in the same manner, as they served as useful studies for him to practice figure painting, which he wanted to master. While many of his peasant paintings depicted people at work and documented the physical labor of their lives, these portraits with neutral backgrounds showed the simplicity of their clothing and the typical white headdresses worn by women.

In fact, these headdresses, worn by peasant women in the province of North Brabant in the 19th century, were one of the major compositional reasons Van Gogh was interested in making these portraits. The artist found that they formed a contrast that was both difficult to paint but looked beautiful against a dark, neutral background.

5. Still Life with Bible, 1885

Van Gogh was introduced to religion at an early age through his father, Theodorus van Gogh, a Protestant minister. The Bible depicted in this still life belonged to his father and it was painted as a kind of portrait after his death. Next to the Bible lies another book, La joie de vivre by Émile Zola, creating a stark contrast, as it represents Zola’s views, which were considered progressive for 19th-century French society. Van Gogh valued both religion and avant-garde thought, and Still Life with Bible depicts the duality of his views and the contrast between him and his father. Their strained relationship did not resolve, as his father rejected his son’s career choice as an artist, deeming it an unstable profession.

In terms of composition, this still life is a great example of Van Gogh’s early color palette. He uses dark colors throughout, including black to cover the entire background, with the white pages of the open Bible in the foreground, which is highlighted due to the contrast. Compared to his still life paintings made in Paris that display a juxtaposition of bright blues, yellows, pinks, and greens, the colors in Still Life with Bible are dark and muted, representing a somber emotion.

6. Peasant Woman Cooking by a Fireplace, 1885

This intimate scene of a woman cooking after a day of working in the fields fits perfectly into Van Gogh’s series of peasant paintings depicting their daily lives. Inspired by life in the countryside, the artist sought to depict its reality, however harsh, rather than presenting an idealized image of peasants. He valued this life for its simplicity and honesty, which is reflected in his paintings of these subjects.

Painted in Nuenen in 1885, Peasant Woman Cooking by a Fireplace depicts a particularly mundane aspect of everyday life. While it was already a well-established tradition to paint everyday activities of private life among other Dutch artists, such as Rembrandt and Vermeer, their works rarely focused on capturing the lives of the poorest communities. This, along with a style that captured the essence of his subjects, made Van Gogh stand apart artistically. The posture of the woman, the blaze of the fire, and the utensils lying around on the floor make this scene dynamic and real in a manner that could not be captured by an accurate depiction of each detail.

7. Basket of Potatoes, 1885

Van Gogh painted many still-life canvases. During his colorful phase, they mostly consisted of flowers, capturing the effect of bright colors placed next to each other. However, Basket of Potatoes is an example of how he captured a simple subject with great character. This still-life shows the use of multiple shades of brown. Van Gogh created the entire composition, including the surface, background, basket, and potatoes, using shades of the same color.

Van Gogh depicted light falling on the subject from above, with the potatoes’ shadows on the right side of the composition. The painting does not follow the traditional realist style, but Van Gogh still managed to capture small details, such as the imperfect weave of the basket, which brings the painting closer to the way reality is experienced. This is characteristic of the artist who intended to capture character and honest reality over an idealized image, regardless of the subject. Van Gogh continued painting the same subjects, depicting fruits and vegetables in baskets, plates, and bowls later in his career, but his approach to color and line shifted as he matured artistically.

8. Bird’s Nests, 1885

Even during his early phase, when Van Gogh was working with a darker, more somber color palette, his underlying desire to be a colorist was peeling through. He was particularly interested in painting Birds’ Nests, along with other compositions of the same subject, to capture the combination of natural colors, particularly the browns and greens. Being surrounded by nature all his life, first in the small town of Zundert in the south of the Netherlands and later in Nuenen and Etten-Leur in North Brabant, Van Gogh’s oeuvre at large revolved around it.

Even so, his works focused on the side of nature that was often overlooked. For example, in paintings of birds’ nests, rather than depicting young birds in the nest, he would gather nests around Nuenen that had been abandoned to avoid causing harm or disrupting the rhythm of nature.

9. The Old Church Tower at Nuenen, 1885

Before becoming an artist, Van Gogh aimed to join the church. He was deeply involved in religion and, as an artist, found ways to incorporate his faith into his work. Painted in June 1885, Van Gogh captures the essence of this old, abandoned church with gloomy colors, similar to the paintings of peasants whose connection to the earth was reflected in the dark palette of the composition. Next to this church tower lay a graveyard where peasants were buried. He had been planning to paint this tower since April of that year because it was scheduled for demolition.

This painting depicts the tower under a greyish-blue sky after its spire has already been removed. Van Gogh considered this painting successful enough to sign it, but was still unsure about its value. However, the artist composed this painting with colors that symbolize the fading of memory and life, embodied by the partially demolished church tower.

10. Van Gogh’s “Three Pairs of Shoes,” 1886-87

There are a total of six paintings of worn-out shoes that Van Gogh painted when he was visiting his brother Theo in Paris. He was particularly interested in painting still lifes from 1886 onward and used them to study color theory. Here, shoes that were worn by laborers in Paris act as their portraits, similar to how Still Life with Bible represents Van Gogh’s father.

Three Pairs of Shoes, depicting shoes arranged in pairs over a white cloth, is one of Van Gogh’s last paintings from his early phase, when he was still working in the traditional Dutch color palette. In Paris, after being introduced to Impressionists and other modern artists such as Georges Seurat and Paul Gauguin, he completely transformed his style to incorporate lighter and more vibrant colors.

One of Elsa Schiaparelli’s most iconic pieces is the Skeleton Dress (1938). Real bones and white silk hugged the woman’s curves. Ribs shaped her torso, and a spine rippled down the back. This piece was not just a dress; it was a vision, an entire story. At a time when couture was all about elegance and restraint, Schiaparelli turned it into visual storytelling, into art. Let’s explore Schiaparelli’s groundbreaking designs, feminist resonance, and enduring legacy revived today by Daniel Roseberry’s visionary reinterpretations.

Elsa Schiaparelli: Fashion’s Surreal Genius

Nicknamed fashion’s “mad genius,” Schiaparelli was the darling of 1930s Paris, a provocateur who moved easily among artists like Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau, and Man Ray. They all shared the same visions about transformation, illusion, and they blurred the boundaries between reality and imagination.

However, Elsa Schiaparelli’s fashion went well beyond mere visions. Her art reimagined how a woman’s body could be treated; she did not just dress it or decorate it. In her hands, surrealism escaped the gallery and entered daily life. The question her work still poses is radical: how can fashion, that most intimate of arts, transform the body from an object into imagination itself?

Surrealism Meets Fashion: Paris in the 1930s

Paris in the 1930s was the place to be for the avant-garde scene. Surrealism, an avant-garde movement founded by André Breton, was on the rise at that time. In salons, ateliers, and cafés, Surrealists met and discussed ideas about challenging the perceptions of reality, dreams, the subconscious, eroticism, the inexplicable, and the bizarre. Elsa Schiaparelli fit right into this circle not as a visitor, but as a prominent figure. Under these influences, she managed to transform her ideas into wearable pieces of art.

The movement drew attention to automatism, juxtaposition, and the irrational. Furthermore, it explored erotic fantasies, ethereal dreamscapes, and disturbing visual associations. The male Surrealists depicted women as muses and objectified them. Even though Schiaparelli was deeply involved in the movement and its social circle, her approach towards women was completely different. She clearly understood Surrealism’s principles and applied them to the body, turning the female silhouette into a canvas of conceptual exploration.

She worked closely with many Surrealists to bring her visions to life. For example, Salvador Dalí painted lobsters on her gowns. Man Ray captured the fantastical universes of her designs, and Jean Cocteau designed dramatic motifs. Schiaparelli’s atelier became a cauldron boiling with ideas. She tested Surrealist philosophy with experiments on materials. Thus, zippers became statements, silk became an element of surprise, and garments became performative objects.

However, like any true artist, Schiaparelli drew inspiration from many sources, such as contemporary exhibitions and artworks. For instance, the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London left a huge mark on her. The exhibition presented shocking contrasts and disturbing sculptures that she would later introduce into her own designs. She was the only couturier of that time who could incorporate such eccentric surrealist elements into fashion and actually make it both wearable and intellectually provocative.

The Surreal Body: Schiaparelli’s Key Designs

Schiaparelli’s designs were the meeting point of surrealist art and fashion. The Lobster Dress (1938) is an iconic example of that. Dalí painted the lobster, an erotic symbol in the surrealist vocabulary, across the skirt of a simple evening gown made of silk. The dress transformed the body into something playful yet provocative. On the one hand, having a sea creature on a formal dress was something original and amusing. On the other hand, it was shocking, as Surrealism meant to be in all its notions.

In the same spirit, she created the Tears Dress. She rendered shimmering tears in embroidery and appliqué, from the top to the bottom of the dress. It was the designer’s own way to capture the fragility and the violence of this human state. Next, she made another shocking piece, the Skeleton Dress. That is, a dress with white silk stitching that outlines the human anatomy. Hence, the body itself becomes the ornament, the decoration that merges scientific precision and theatricality.

Another piece Elsa Schiaparelli created was iconic and surrealist to its core: The Shoe Hat (1937). Working with Dalí on the design, she basically turned footwear into headwear. It was her way to transform an everyday object into a wearable absurdity. Her Butterfly Dress (1938) had delicate wings printed or appliquéd onto the skirt. It evoked a sense of movement with metamorphosis, inviting the wearer to inhabit the delicate boundary between human and creature.

Schiaparelli embroidered and painted on silk, taffeta, and velvet with extra attention to detail. Every little thing on her garments was thoughtfully placed there. These designs are just a few examples of what she offered to the fashion and art world. Elsa transformed the female body into a canvas, ready to present surrealist concepts. Her persistence in intellectual engagement is what made her fashion so special and original. It proved that this art form was much more than just decoration and frivolity. It was a way to explore one’s identity, cultural inquiries, and psychological expeditions.

Redefining Femininity

Surrealism was generally a male-dominated movement, even though several female artists were part of its social circles. The male general consensus was that women were passive objects of desire. However, Elsa Schiaparelli actively opposed this predicament and treated women as they truly were: smart, intelligent, and beautiful in all possible and bizarre ways. Socialites and actresses of the time adored her creations and wore them constantly. They became Schiaparelli’s embodiments of theatricality and wit, and transformed the act of dressing up into a statement of empowerment. The dress itself became a performative act, challenging the boundaries of conventional femininity and beauty.

This transformation has been noticed by several scholars. Whitney Chadwick spoke of the female Surrealist artists and designers who, through humor, fantasy, and irony, restored the woman’s position. On a similar note, Xavière Gauthier explored how women critiqued and destabilized the male gaze using the Surrealist language. Thus, erotic imagery became a scene of female empowerment and self-determination. Both Chadwick and Gauthier made very accurate observations that applied to Elsa Schiaparelli; her work indeed reflects all these principles, as she reimagined the female body both as aesthetic pleasure, but for itself, no one else, and intellectual involvement.

These qualities were expanded through humour, spectacle, and theatricality. Her pieces provoked surprise, laughter, and curiosity, providing women with the chance to attract attention on their own terms. Once again, she redefined femininity as something other than passive or purely decorative. The woman who wore her designs became an active participant in an extensive discussion on fashion, art, and philosophy.

Reception and Cultural Impact

Elsa Schiaparelli’s designs were eccentric for their time. Naturally, this raised criticism, as not everyone understood Schiaparelli’s originality and boldness. Some said her creations were shocking but whimsical, while others said they were controversial and not elegant enough for the world of fashion. In popular magazines, such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, journalists and editors saw her audacity and praised her originality. At the same time, they wondered about the wearability of some of her theatrical pieces. The combination of Surrealism, humor, intellectuality, and impeccable tailoring earned her the title of fashion’s “mad genius,” capturing both admiration and awe.

The designer’s influence went well beyond Paris. Women of the high society, as well as cinema icons, such as Wallis Simpson and Marlene Dietrich, often wore Schiaparelli designs. The general public was quite fascinated too. They loved the Lobster Dress and the Shoe Hat, and they wanted to be part of the artist’s surrealist world. Moreover, museums and collectors acknowledged the innovative character of her garments. So, they began acquiring her clothes and preserving them as cultural artifacts and works of great artistic importance. Right from the start, Schiaparelli’s clothes were not made only for commercial purposes.

The critical discourse surrounding Schiaparelli also highlighted the gender dynamics of the fashion industry at the time. Male designers paid attention to technical skill and exotic elements. Schiaparelli, on the other hand, told a story. Of course, this made her both respected and scrutinized by her colleagues for breaking traditions. Yet no one can deny that she was acknowledged, even from the early stages of her career. Quickly, she became a prominent figure in the fashion world, a status that inspires to this day.

Reinvention: Schiaparelli Today

In the 21st century, her influence and reputation are still strong. This is evident in the reinvention of her fashion house under the creative direction of Daniel Roseberry. In 2019, when he took over, Roseberry resurrected the brand’s surrealist and theatrical DNA. His haute couture collections, especially Spring/Summer 2022 and Fall/Winter 2023, are characteristic of his ability to emulate Elsa Schiaparelli’s creative genius in the contemporary era.

Roseberry has revisited many of Schiaparelli’s original designs and transformed them into new, contemporary garments. To do so, he has used new materials and technologies. For example, while revisiting the Skeleton Dress, he created anatomical corsets and bone elements from gilded metal and bronze, giving a more robust feel to the design. Another recurring symbol of Schiaparelli that Roseberry revamped is the dove, a symbol of freedom and transformation. He created a bodice with a golden dove that Lady Gaga wore at the 2021 U.S. presidential inauguration, making it iconic.

The 2023 fashion show featured models wearing hyper-realistic animal heads inspired by Dante’s Inferno. It sparked a global conversation that echoed similar themes from Schiaparelli’s 1930s collections: shock, beauty, and playfulness. Therefore, Roseberry’s success lies in his ability to channel Schiaparelli’s surreal sensibility into contemporary designs. His personal interpretation revolves around the same dualities as Elsa Schiaparelli: discipline and delirium, humor and grandeur. In our time, fashion is becoming increasingly minimal, clean, and maybe even conceptual. Roseberry for Schiaparelli brings back the notion that fashion can be wearable sculpture too.

Elsa Schiaparelli’s Enduring Influence

Elsa Schiaparelli’s art remains relevant today because it reminds us that fashion is not just about attire. It is a means of empowerment and a cultural commentary. Her designs are testaments to an outlook that sees the female body as an actively engaged presence, occupying space in ways the owner wants, not as the male gaze usually sees it. Contemporary designers, most notably Daniel Roseberry, but also Iris van Herpen, and others, are inspired by Schiaparelli’s surrealist vision. In the end, Elsa Schiaparelli’s fashion was an audacious, intelligent, and playful assertion that the imagination need not remain confined to canvas, gallery, or text. She showed, decades ago, that the female body could be re-envisioned as art, spectacle, and story, a lesson that continues to inspire both wearers and creators alike.

Born in the small town of Zundert in the province of North Brabant, the Netherlands, Van Gogh grew up around nature. In his later years, he lived in other areas, such as Nuenen and Etten-Leur, surrounded by fields and gardens. The years spent here instilled in him a deep love of the land that lay the foundation for his art. Not only was he fascinated by nature itself, but also the people who worked closely with it. Continue reading to find out more about Van Gogh’s “Head of a Peasant.”

Before Van Gogh’s “Head of a Peasant”: The Borinage

Before becoming an artist, Van Gogh had decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and join the church. His father, Theodorus van Gogh, was a Protestant minister working in North Brabant. Van Gogh was a religious man and wished to dedicate his life to the service of God, which led him to work as a preacher in the mining village of Borinage in Belgium. This experience was transformative for him and guided him toward art and service to those in need, as he befriended miners living in extreme poverty and helped them whenever he could. He would share his own food and clothing with the families. However, failing at his work as a preacher, the church did not renew his contract, so Van Gogh left the Borinage in 1880.

In 1882, he wrote a letter to his brother Theo from The Hague recalling his experiences during the time he spent in the village: “Once I nursed a poor burnt miner for six weeks or 2 months—I shared my food with an old man a whole winter long . . . But to this day I don’t believe that this was foolish or bad, I see it as so natural and self-evident that I can’t understand how people can be so indifferent to each other normally.” Van Gogh’s attentiveness to people leading difficult lives stemmed from his religious inclinations. He carried this dedication into his life as an artist, particularly as a peasant painter.

Life in North Brabant

After the stay in Borinage, Van Gogh had to leave the church, which led him to move back in with his parents in Nuenen. He had already decided to become an artist and had set up his studio at the back of his parents’ house. This was not easy because Van Gogh’s relationship with his parents became strained after he was rejected from the church. His decision to become an artist heightened the tension, as earning a living in this profession was difficult, which his parents found disappointing. However, Van Gogh was determined to follow this path, even if it meant living in poverty. He relied on his brother Theo, an art dealer in Paris, for financial support throughout his life as an artist.

Nuenen provided an ideal setting for Van Gogh to develop his practice as a peasant painter. He wrote in April 1885, “After all, I desire nothing other than to live deep in the country and to paint peasant life.” He also wrote: “I’ve become so absorbed in peasant life by continually seeing it at all hours of the day that I really hardly ever think of anything else.” Due to the rural environment of Brabant, there was no shortage of subject matter to sketch or paint, and Van Gogh took advantage of this.

He would go out in search of working peasants to draw or paint them, such as Peasant Woman Digging and Woman Lifting Potatoes. Apart from peasants, he also befriended several weavers in the region who worked on looms inside their small houses. Van Gogh sketched and painted numerous works depicting the weaver at work, capturing the complicated structure of the loom impressively. Together, peasants and weavers form the majority of his works from Nuenen, as he also hinted in a letter from January 1884 to Theo, “I don’t think there’s been a day since I’ve been here when I haven’t sat working with the weavers or peasants from morning till night.”

By the time he was in Nuenen, the artist not only aspired to paint the reality of peasant life, but also hoped to develop himself as a figure painter. Painting peasants working in the fields enabled him to capture the proportions of the human body as well as the complexities of their movements. In 1885, Van Gogh painted his first large-scale painting depicting a family of peasants sitting around a small table with steaming potatoes and coffee, titled The Potato Eaters. He considered this work a personal success. Today, The Potato Eaters is in the permanent collection of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and is considered one of Van Gogh’s first masterpieces.

Head of a Peasant (Woman)

To prepare himself to undertake the project of painting The Potato Eaters, Van Gogh made numerous studies of the peasant family. These included sketches of the scene depicted in the painting and portraits of individual family members. These paintings, which also allowed Van Gogh to improve his skills in portraiture, depict the subject in front of a dark background in plain clothing.

The portrait titled Head of a Peasant Woman (Gordina de Groot) was described by Van Gogh as “simply a peasant woman who came back from planting potatoes, still covered in dust from the field.” The painting has a rustic character that does not idealize the woman; instead, it focuses on the reality of her life as someone who performs difficult physical labor and lives in poverty.

Van Gogh held strong opinions about such depictions, as he wrote 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.” He went on to describe the beauty of a peasant woman over a lady, as well as the importance of honest representations over depicting a ‘perfect’ version of peasant life: “If a peasant painting smells of bacon, smoke, potato steam—fine . . . But a peasant painting mustn’t become perfumed.” The artist expressed his intention to paint 50 peasant heads in Nuenen in multiple letters. In total, 47 such paintings survive today, affirming the artist’s dedication to the subject. However, these portraits were not intended to capture individual identities but to represent types.

Van Gogh did not discuss his subjects as individuals in his letters, but always referred to them as ‘peasants’ because he wanted to capture their very character as people who work on the earth: “They remind one of the earth, sometimes appear to have been modelled out of it.” This characterization of the peasants may be why none of the people in the portraits are known, except Gordina de Groot.

Artistically, the peasant portraits from Nuenen were a crucial step in Van Gogh’s development as a figure painter. This was a challenging skill to master, and the artist even enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium, to deepen their technical knowledge of figure painting. Drawing heads of peasants was particularly helpful for him as he could exaggerate their facial features to signal the effect of their daily physical labor in the fields. He described them as belonging to “the old Brabant stock through and through.” In Head of a Woman (Gordina de Groot), the lines on the peasant woman’s face, as well as the angles, are highlighted by playing with shadows along with using a muted, somber color palette dominated by shades of browns and greens.

Further, the artist considered the white headdresses worn by Brabant women in the 19th century both a challenge to paint, but he also found them visually interesting because they created a beautiful contrast to the dark background: “It’s precisely the chiaroscuro—the white and the part of the face in shadow, that has such a fine tone.” Van Gogh had already started experimenting with color theory while painting these heads. The white headdresses of the peasant women are not painted white; they contain shades of dark green, appearing white only due to the contrast with the dark background. This play of colors is particularly visible in two other paintings titled Head of a Woman, one depicting an older member of the De Groot family and another depicting a woman seated in front of a window.

Both portraits are darker than that of Gordina de Groot, which shows how skillfully Van Gogh employed color theory in the work. The woman seated in front of a window is especially complex as the artist managed to depict her facial features and the white headdress in front of a lighter background. He employed a color resembling “dark green soap” that he had used to describe an interior scene he had witnessed in a cottage in Nuenen. Not only did the dark color palette of these portraits serve to emphasize the connection between the land and the peasants, but it was also the only palette he was familiar with through his exposure to the art of the Old Masters.

Impressionism had established its position in Paris, but its impact was not as well known beyond the city. Van Gogh was familiar with the emergence of new ideas in painting, but had not witnessed these ideas in motion until he left for Paris in 1886. Nevertheless, his choice of earth tones adds symbolic value to the peasant paintings.

This practice of instilling symbolism through color is also evident in works from later in his career, such as the Sunflowers, which use vibrant shades of yellow to symbolize the sun. This intentional choice of subjects and their colors is what makes Van Gogh’s art stand out today. His paintings are highly recognizable because they do not depict perfection but rather a strong character, captured through color and line that embody the essence of the subject.

Van Gogh’s Goodbye to the Netherlands

After spending nearly two years in Nuenen, Van Gogh moved to Antwerp, never to return to the Netherlands again. He hoped to sell his work, experience the city’s rich culture, and enroll in the art academy to study figure painting. In a few short months, he moved to Paris to live with his brother. This period revolutionized his art and transformed his palette from the dark, earthy tones of Brabant to the luminous colors of the Impressionists. Despite this experience of vibrant urban culture, the artist longed for the rural life he had left behind in Brabant.

He wrote to Theo in 1885, “I so often think that the peasants are a world in themselves, so much better in many respects than the civilized world.” Eventually, Van Gogh’s longing for the countryside led him to the south of France and later to Auver-sur-Oise, where he was surrounded by the simplicity and honesty of peasant life once again.

From its earliest days, the Soviet state made its attitude towards religion and faith clear. Denounced as prejudice, activities of churches of any denomination were ceased or strictly limited. In the dark 1930s, thousands of people were executed on charges related to their religious beliefs. However, faith persisted, and the Orthodox Christian church managed to maintain its traditions and even gain new followers during these troubled decades.

The USSR’s Beginning: Churches After the Revolution

By the beginning of the 20th century, Orthodox Christianity was an integral part of the Russian Empire’s life and culture, closely connected to monarchy and governmental institutions. Above all, the official bodies of the church served as yet another branch of power that strengthened the monarchy’s position and offered it resources. Still, some churches and priests opposed some of the governmental decisions and even formed isolated cults and movements with political ambitions, but they rarely avoided prosecution. The clergy was a closed community with almost non-existent chances for those not related or otherwise affiliated with incumbent bishops and priests.

During the Russian Civil War, the majority of clergymen supported the anti-communist White Movement, which received its name in opposition to the Bolsheviks’ signature red. After the White Movement’s defeat, many prominent clergymen fled to Europe, establishing the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad.

The clergymen who decided to stay in Russia expected radical changes and reforms from the new government that actively announced itself as secular. One of the first documents signed by the Bolshevik government led by Vladimir Lenin in 1917 abolished all ethnic and religious privileges of limitations. Publicly, the new officials called for the elimination of all “religious prejudice.” Newspapers published caricatures of priests, framing them as lazy and corrupt enemies of the working class, preying on their weaknesses and exploiting their labor.

By the 1920s, the government began the nationalization of all church property and confiscation of works of art and religious artifacts. Some of these objects were moved to museums (paradoxically, the move saved many Medieval artworks from destruction in humid and tightly-packed churches), and others fell into the private hands of governmental officials. Partially, this measure was a provocation aimed at identifying the most active and dangerous actors of the religious scene who would lead an expected insurrection. As a result, around two thousand clergymen and practicing Christians were executed.

Among the early Soviet Christians, the attitude towards the new authority varied. Some decided to comply and collaborate with the officials, following all orders to avoid bloodshed. Others were more radical. Among more conservative branches of Orthodox Christianity, the clergy directly identified the Soviets with the Antichrist, who would come before the Last Judgment disguised as the Savior of all. In 1926, a group of rural conservative priests announced that the upcoming All-Soviet census was a sign of the upcoming Apocalypse. As a result, dozens of people committed suicide, either burying or burning themselves alive.

The 1930s: The Darkest Decade

The 1930s in Soviet Russia were known as the time of great terror, violence, and persecution. The paranoid government led by Joseph Stalin ruthlessly punished even those of their own ranks fighting for power. The church did not manage to stay out of it. In 1929, the Central Executive Committee adopted a law banning all religion-related activities except for church service. Education, social work, child care, and other functions were left to governmentally approved secular bodies. From around one thousand churches of all denominations that existed in pre-revolutionary Moscow, only forty remained functional.

If, during the 1920s, the Orthodox Christian clergymen were the main targets of repressions, a decade later, the focus shifted to practicing believers, including Muslims, Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Buddhists, and others. According to historians’ evaluations, around 300,000 people were arrested during the Great Purge, with about a third of them executed. Still, the exact number of those persecuted for religious reasons is almost impossible to pinpoint since many of them were formally arrested on other charges.

However, faith persisted among those who needed it. Despite oppression and threats, monks from shut-down monasteries organized underground convents disguised as shared houses for workers with no families. According to the 1937 Census, almost 50% of Soviet citizens still identified as Orthodox Christians, even if they were not actively practicing.

Communism as the New Religion

By forcefully tearing the religious component from the daily practices and worldviews of their citizens, the Soviet government left a gaping hole that needed to be filled. The new ideology became a perfect substitute: with the same enthusiasm, earlier reserved for religious rituals, citizens were expected to participate in regime-related activities. In 1931, the famous Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow was demolished using dynamite. The cathedral was relatively new; it was consecrated only in 1883, but it nonetheless became an important symbol of monarchy and faith, which were interconnected.

The cleared plot of land within walking distance from the Kremlin was meant to become a place for the new kind of temple—the monumental Palace of the Soviets. The Palace project, designed by Ukrainian-Jewish architect Boris Iofan, was a tall ziggurat-like structure of columns with a hundred-meter statue of Vladimir Lenin on top. It was meant to house mass demonstrations celebrating the USSR and regular sessions of the Supreme Soviet—the highest organ of state authority. The ambitious and borderline absurd project was never realized due to Nazi Germany invading the Soviet Union in 1941. In 1960, Nikita Khrushchev ordered the construction of a public swimming pool using the Palace’s abandoned foundation. In 1995, however, the pool was demolished, and the new Cathedral of Christ the Savior was constructed instead.

Personality cults of leaders replaced the cult of Jesus and Christian saints. The mythologized figure of Joseph Stalin as the father of the nation, successful in every deed and competent in any sphere of human knowledge, became a sacred symbol. Despite hundreds of thousands killed during the 1930s repressions, Stalin’s funeral in 1953 had around two million attendees, with hundreds (or, according to some evaluations, thousands) of people dying in a crowd clash.

Orthodox Church During World War II

However, the Soviet state never resorted to a complete and radical elimination of all remnants of religious life. After the Nazi Germany opened the Eastern Front in June 1941, the government decided to do the contrary—revive the country’s religious life under the officials’ strict guidance. In April 1942, Moscow authorities lifted a curfew for one night to let the locals attend Easter service. Given the circumstances, the Soviet officials decided to once again make the church their instrument, this time to maintain the spirits of those who had to fight.

In 1943, right before the Tehran conference, focused on the issue of opening the second front among others, Stalin appointed the Russian Orthodox Church patriarch and several bishops to various parts of the Soviet Union. While some believe that this was a sign of Stalin’s change of heart towards faith, historians insist it was a political move aimed at showing Churchill and Roosevelt that the Soviet state could be tolerant and ready for compromise. As for the clergy, many of them volunteered for service during the war, mostly working as doctors and nurses. On the territories occupied by Nazi forces, they communicated with partisan forces, sheltering them or supplying information.

USSR After the War: Scientific Atheism  

Despite the evident change of tone in the relationship between the church and the state, after Stalin’s death in 1958, Soviet clergymen and followers were prosecuted once again, although less violently. This time, the main restrictive measures concerned the churches’ funds and the amount of paid taxes. The 1960s and 1970s were decades of emphasized atheism, not in the least provoked by the rapid advancements in secular social welfare, science, and space exploration. One of the most popular propaganda posters of the time featured the image of Yuri Gagarin happily reporting that he hadn’t seen any God while in space.

Still, despite propaganda and oppressive measures, the new generation of Soviet people started to attend churches. Although executions and prison sentences became extraordinary, citizens still risked their jobs or social status by attending services or baptizing their children. These norms remained in place until the Soviet Union’s ultimate collapse in 1991 when churches of all confessions gradually restored their rights and privileges.

Hans Bellmer was a lesser-known member of the Surrealists who focused on dollmaking and photography. Bellmer’s unsettling, deformed dolls emerged partially as a reaction to the standards of Aryan beauty and health promoted by the Third Reich. However, soon, the dolls turned into a lifelong project that both supported and tormented Bellmer for decades. Read on to learn more about Hans Bellmer, the forgotten dollmaker.

1. Hans Bellmer: Expression Through Opposition

Hans Bellmer, born in 1902 into a rather prosperous middle-class family from present-day Germany, could have enjoyed a comfortable life as an engineer or a civil servant. Instead, from his early years, the dominating force in his life was his opposition to his violent, aggressive, and despotic father. After finding a job in a coal mine (upon his father’s insistence), Hans was soon fired and almost imprisoned for spreading left-wing ideas among other workers. His studies of engineering in Berlin, again forced upon him, were equally unsuccessful—less than a year after enrolling, Bellmer quit and immersed himself into art, exhibiting with German Dadaists and Surrealists. Still, Bellmer was not as impractical as he seemed: soon, he opened a successful advertising agency, designing posters and creating illustrations for major German companies.

It all changed after the Nazis came to power. In 1933, Bellmer shut his agency for good, unwilling to contribute to this government’s wellbeing in any form. Needless to say, his eternal nemesis, the Bellmer family patriarch, turned out to be an ardent Nazi supporter. Around that time, Hans Bellmer started to conceive his lifelong project that would make him one of the most influential artists of his time and a pariah in his country. Horrified by the Nazi propaganda about the perfect Aryan body and ideal beauty, Bellmer invented an opposition to it.

He modeled his ideal from the figure of an adolescent girl in a transitional state between girlhood and womanhood, falling outside of strict categories of age and societal expectations. Some believe the imaginary figure was a product of Bellmer’s obsession with his teenage cousin Ursula—a forbidden relationship that could never be fulfilled. Ursula was either unaware of her role or fully content with it: a few years later, she, a Sorbonne student, brought Hans’ photographs to Andre Breton, introducing him to the Surrealists.

Bellmer’s first doll was a half-assembled carcass with deliberately unfinished body parts. A few years earlier, while visiting one of Berlin’s museums with his Dadaist friends, he found the technique for assembling movable dolls. There, he found articulated wooden dolls from the 16th century, with ball joints allowing for movement and fixation of limbs and torso.

2. Bellmer’s Projects Maturing

Bellmer’s first projects were financed and otherwise supported by his mother and brother, unbeknownst to his oppressive father. Franz, an accomplished engineer, even took part in building them. He designed movable eyes and rotating miniature panoramas inside the dolls’ abdomens. Pressing on one of the doll’s nipples, the viewer would see six scenes demonstrating lace handkerchiefs, tiny boats, or sweets. However, Bellmer soon abandoned the panoramas project to focus on more complex and erotic photographic arrangements of his dolls.

Part of Bellmer’s inspiration came from a short story by Ernst Hoffmann called The Sandman. There, a man falls in love with an automaton, a moving doll he mistakes for a real woman. Realizing his mistake, the romantic hero loses his mind and commits suicide. Similar dramatic tension and fear reveal themselves in the tableaux vivants of Bellmer, with dolls transgressing the boundaries of the animate and inanimate. Bellmer positioned his dolls in enclosed settings of rooms and cabinets, with their joints rearranged and bodies partially assembled. They look both seductive and threatening, representing the deepest desires and the worst nightmares.

3. Femininity

Bellmer’s mother represented all things the father was incapable of expressing: gentleness, understanding, support, and comfort. In fact, adopted femininity became Bellmer’s principal instrument long before he started to work on his dolls. According to the memories of Bellmer’s brother Fritz, Hans sometimes wore dresses and wigs and even signed his letters with female names. Moreover, both Hans and Fritz adopted, as they called it, a girl-like way of behaving around their father, mostly to confuse and destabilize him, avoiding possible attacks.

In 1957, Bellmer met Unica Zurn, a German writer and artist who shocked him with her resemblance to his dream dolls. Bellmer was already a widower with two children but was never truly content with his personal life, haunted by his dreams and doll figures. With Zurn’s enthusiastic consent, he progressed in his art, moving from photographs of dolls to a series of images and montages featuring Zurn’s body, similarly positioned and arranged.

Bellmer’s self-identification with his dolls never went away. Some photographs of his later period include a photomontage of his head inside Zurn’s abdomen as if he was both possessed by her and controlling her from within her body.

4. Modernist Grotesque

Modernist art has a long and detailed history of exploring grotesque bodies and their limits. The works of Egon Schiele, Bellmer’s contemporary, distorted human anatomy almost beyond recognition, and Futurists blended it with heavy industrial machinery. All of them were concerned with the limits of the human body. At what point does the inanimate come alive, and when does a living thing cease its conscious existence?

Bellmer similarly explored the body limits, although in the context of desire and eroticism turning into threatening presences. On the one hand, his dolls were the ultimate creations of the male gaze—they were sexualized bodies devoid of personality. On the other hand, while losing all non-essential parts, they turn from desirable to haunting, possessing a threat to the one who built them for his pleasure. A destructive relationship between a man and his creation is an archetypal story found in many cultures. In 1919, the famous Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka created a life-sized doll of his ex-lover Alma Mahler before ritually decapitating it.

5. Hysteria as an Aesthetic Phenomenon

One of the peculiarities of the Surrealist movement was its exploration of hysteria—an old phenomenon and pseudomedical diagnosis that mostly referred to women. Hysteria was expressed through prolonged mental disturbance, fits of emotional distress, or simply the refusal to comply with the normative rules of feminine behavior. Prior to the development of psychiatry, hysteria was considered a physical disease but was reclassified as mental in the early 20th century. The origins of hysteria, according to some experts of the time, lay either in prolonged stress or in repressed sexual trauma.

Surrealists, namely their ideological leader Andre Breton, considered hysteria an aesthetical rather than a medical phenomenon. Reading medical reports and observing protographs of hysteria patients in epileptic or catatonic fits, they regarded it as the ultimate expression of the unconscious. Repressed desires finding their way out through hysterical episodes for them represented the highest possible state of automatism. Bellmer’s works explore this concept of hysteria as self-expression. His four-legged creatures, devoid of heads or even torsos, express their torments through convulsions, similar to those of a child during a temper tantrum.

6. Body as Text

In his writings explaining the logic behind his creations, Bellmer mentioned a medical case of two teenagers, both diagnosed with hysteria in their puberty. According to their medical files, the girls were convinced they went blind, and yet one insisted she could see objects through her nose and the other through her right hand. Following the idea of the hysterical body displacing and moving its sense organs, Bellmer further developed the idea. What if the human body could move and concentrate its senses in areas unrelated to its immediate sensory organs? And what if sexual pleasure could be experienced by the entire body rather than by its part?

In his writings, Bellmer formulated the concept of a body as an erotic palindrome or an anagram—a phrase or a word with its letters mixed and reassembled to form another or similar idea. Moreover, Bellmer’s constructions were meant to be not only easy to transform but interchangeable. Many photographs showed disassembled dolls with their torsos and hips made from identical details and breasts turning into buttocks.

What Is Hans Bellmer’s Legacy?

Although Bellmer’s creations and story were too unsettling to make him a superstar artist, his influence on the artistic scene was immediate and transformative. After receiving several photographs from Ursula, Andre Breton almost immediately published them in a Surrealist periodical Minotaure. Figures on dolls and mannequins were already popular among Surrealist painters, but Bellmer’s series launched a new wave of obsession. The issue was not only in the dolls themselves but in the way the artist modeled artificial spaces within his photographs.

For the first time in history, surrealist experiments with collage and montage separated photography from reality, allowing it to create its own alternative realms. One of the most prominent exhibits of the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition was The Mannequin Alley—a gallery of life-sized mannequins, each decorated by one of the artists present on the show and inspired by Bellmer’s fetishistic figures.

Bellmer continued to work on his dolls and photographs until 1970. That year, Unica Zurn died by suicide, exhausted by her years-long fight with schizophrenia. Historians and medical professionals still argue whether her collaboration with Bellmer was therapeutic or destructive for her. Bellmer died five years later, succumbing to bladder cancer.

Despite its relative obscurity, Bellmer’s work continued to influence creatives of all kinds. In 1997, fashion designer Alexander McQueen released a collection inspired by Bellmer’s designs. Some garments’ proportions were distorted to fit Belmeer’s monstrous creations, while others featured metal cages as parts of their structures.