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Inspiration from Artist's Week 13 : Vincent Van Gough and Kandinsky.
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Posted
The sunflower paintings have suffered horribly from his use of an early form of Chrome Yellow, which has faded to a brown - the paintings in which he used predominantly earth colours, browns, ochres, black, have fared very much better. The Iris painting has also lasted well, as has the apple-blossom picture, the portrait of M. Roulin, and, for the most part his self-portraits.
Chrome Yellow was an experimental pigment back then, which offered a brilliant yellow that he needed for his sunflowers - but van Gogh was distinctly unlucky with it - it reacted with his lead white: what we're seeing is not what he painted, though I don't actually care for those paintings, by comparison with his other work, very much either. But then, I'm not hugely fond of sunflowers....
Edited
by Robert Jones, NAPA
Posted
Interesting background on the paints he used Robert. I didn’t realise that about the chrome yellow. I know from his book of letters mainly to his brother, that he was constantly asking for supplies of canvas and paint which Theo would send. Without his financial support Vincent probably wouldn’t have been nearly so prolific.
Posted
Like Denise I thought the sunflowers were originally painted a dull colour and thought it odd. I can now look at then differently thanks to Robert explaining how the colours have deteriorated, mind you I’m looking at his work differently due to this thread anyway. I like some of his paintings but I do really like his sketch’s , thanks for the introduction to his work Tessa.
Posted
To continue on Robert’s comments, certainly Chrome yellow did oxidise and go brown, so not the best choice for sunflowers and it was probably laid on straight from the tube!
I’m not sure in the 1800’s what choice of yellows were available, obviously it was lead based so obsolete today…
It was widely used of course, Turner himself used it, he loved it apparently, but one can perhaps assume that he used it slightly more sparingly than our friend van Gough.
It’s been replaced by Cadmium yellow in the main, problem solved one would think.
Posted
I saw the Sunflwers in Amsterdam and was underwhelmed. So thank you Robert for the explain...BUT why in that case are the lovely yellows so bright and vivid in the other pic I posted , the Crow and Cornfield also other yellows in other paintings. Did he just use his naff yellow on the Sunflowers and there were alternatives.
Glad your kitty is ginger Helen...and I think I'm lovely as wellTessa. .
Posted
Wassily Kandinsky was born 1866 in Moscow to upper middle class parents. He learnt to play the cello and piano at an early age and after University he was offered a professorship at Derpt University and began a teaching career at the Moscow Faculty of Law. In 1895, he attended an impressionist exhibition displaying works by Manet, Degas, Monet, and Renoir which inspired him to study art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. He returned to Moscow after World War I had started in 1914.
During the Russian Revolution (1917), which overthrew the czar, the ruler of Russia, he held an important post at the Commissariat (government bureau) of Popular Culture and at the Academy in Moscow. He organized twenty-two museums and became the director of the Museum of Pictorial Culture. In 1920 he was appointed professor at the University of Moscow and in the following year he founded the Academy of Arts and Sciences and became its vice president. In 1928 he became a German citizen following which he held many solo exhibitions and his reputation went from strength to strength.
Wassily’s early pieces are similar to Impressionism and the works of the Fauves and in 1910 he produced his first abstract watercolour. In that work all elements of representation (the actual look of a subject) seem to have disappeared. In continuing his early abstract works he used strong straight-line strokes combined with powerful patches of colour. He is often referred to as the Father of Abstract Art.
He became a French citizen in 1939 and died in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1944.
I paste below two of his early works, the first painted in 1911 influenced by the work of Monet and called Der Blaue Riter which was also the name of a group of avant garde artists which was formed in 1911 in Munich and led by Kandinsky and Franz Marc. They shared an interest in abstracted forms and put the artists, especially Kandinsky, on the path toward abstraction. The second painting painted in 1923 called On White II is an early example of Kandinsky’s geometric abstractions.
