My Kid Could Paint That

Vincent Van Gogh, Painter on the Road to Tarascon, 1888

An Expressionist in the 20th century, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner committed suicide in 1938. The previous year, Kirchner’s art, numbering around 600 pieces, was taken from public museums in Germany. They were all auctioned off or destroyed. All this in the name of the “cleansing of German culture,” which Adolf Hitler implemented when he came into power in 1933. Keen on tracking down corrupt art, including books, Hitler’s movement resulted in the destruction of mass amounts of paintings and literature.

The Entartete Kunst exhibit (the Degenerate Art exhibit) showcased art pieces temporarily spared from the burnings that were meant to provoke greater disgust toward everything unlike the German vision, specifically the Jews. Once labeled as a degenerate artist you were not allowed to paint, a law enforced by Nazi soldiers who would visit artist’s homes. Of the artists deemed degenerate, Kirchner was a victim to Hitler’s strict and enthusiastic control over art within Germany.

Other victims include Ensor, Matisse, Picasso, and Van Gogh. Painted in 1888, the Painter on the Road to Tarascon depicts Vincent Van Gogh, a lonely traveler on an empty road. Thought to be one of most cherished pieces lost in the war, it fell victim to German theft, resulting in its doom. Though it is unknown exactly how it was destroyed, many believe it to be a casualty in the allied bombings of Germany during the war.

Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, La Goulue Arriving at the Moulin Rouge, 1892

She walks into the room. Everyone turns their heads. The sound of her swishing skirts seem to drown out the music of the band, the loud salon music that reverberates off of the Moulin Rouge's crowded interior. The Belle Epoque is in full swing, and La Goulue reigns over Paris as its high-kicking queen.

Louise Weber would not have achieved such celebrity without some help from her artistic friends, especially Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. He adopted La Goulue ("the glutton") as his muse, immortalizing her image in paintings that lined gallery walls and posters that littered the streets of Paris, advertising her as the forward dancer with free-flowing skirts. Lautrec glorifies the movement that La Goulue embodies in her dance. This mastery of subject is the product of years spent together, considering he followed the starlet from her debut to the end of her fame. Even when La Goulue isn't dancing in his depictions, Lautrec manages to evoke a sense of lively movement and a certain unrestrained spirit.

Lautrec combines the sense of grand entrance with a spirited personality in La Goulue Arriving at the Moulin Rouge. The lady occupies most of the portrait's space, framed by her gentleman dance partner to the left and her sister to the right. The viewer can admire both her wily red hair and unmissable decolletage from beyond the painting. However, if the viewer dares to stare too long, s/he may encounter the gaze of the subject. Her eyes appear tired, but once combined with the pursed lips, an appearance of a smirk begins to emerge on her famed countenance. In regards to movement, Lautrec achieves a sense of chaos ready for release by painting furiously brushstrokes across the fabric of her dress, criss-crossing every which way. Obviously, La Goulue cannot be contained. Let the entertainment begin.

Paul Gauguin, The Midday Nap, 1894

Vincent van Gogh was a post-impressionist painter who was best known for the famous story that is taught in early elementary school art class. Throughout his painting career, he met and painted with interesting artists, including Paul Gauguin. Paul Gauguin was also a post-impressionist painter who specialized in simplified shapes and color harmonies. Gauguin was invited to stay with Van Gogh in Arles. When he arrived, the two artists started to paint vigorously together. They even painted portraits of each other and recreated each others paintings.

In recent years, German art historians claim that the old story of Van Gogh cutting off his own ear is false.  These historians claim that the true story never arose because the two, very close, painters kept a pact of silence. Hans Kaufmann and Rita Wildegans claim that it was a violent sword attack executed against Van Gogh, not Gogh's madness that led him to his death. The old story claims that the artist cut off his own ear, wrapped in cloth, and then handed it to a prostitute the same night Gauguin fled from him after an unhappy visit. The German art historians claim that Gauguin exited Van Goghs house while carrying his fencing sword in hand. Gogh followed Gauguin  and tried to make things right after a recent fight they had which resulted in Gogh throwing a glass dining piece at him. As Gogh starts to approach Gauguin in a rapid pace, these historians claim that Gauguin turned and cut off his ear with his sword, in either a fit of rage, or in self defense. It is not known which story is true, but it is probably safe to say that the classical story most closely represents the actual situation.

The Card Players, Paul Cezanne, 1890-92 (The First)

Things are not always as they appear – a fact, which is evident in Paul Cezanne’s The Card Players. The painting is simple and beautiful, the colors are captivating, and the composition uses simple lines to create shapes and order in the painting. There are two different versions of The Card Players. The first and simpler version lacks the detail that the second does. It lacks the painting on the wall and the shelf with the vase. There is a young boy present in the second painting that is not in the first.

The Card Playrers, Paul Cezanne, 1890-92, (The Second)

The second painting is better. The colors are far more inviting and the wall makes the painting seem more full. This feeling of fullness contrasts with the child’s empty look. In the second painting the curtain takes on a larger compositional role. The first painting is clearly an unfinished work. Not only are there compositionally necessary parts missing, but also the young man who completes the story that the painting is telling is not present.

This young boy looks substantially different from the other three men in the painting. His skin is far more pale, and his clothes are not as worn. Cezanne included this boy to create a full circle. Compositionally the boy sits outside the group of men playing, his skin is less worn than the others and he stands out from the background.
He is the predecessor to the lives that these men lead, much like the painting
 without the background and without the wear is the predecessor to the one
with the background and wear.

James Ensor, The Bad Doctors, 1892

A hysterically violent image of medical blunders and poor bedside manner, The Bad Doctors by James Ensor satirizes practitioners of medicinal "healing." The helpless patient, or rather, victim, sits to the right of the painting on what appears to be a gaudy yellow and blue bed, mouth open in a howl of agony. He raises a single fist to the air, a gesture which typically denotes anger more than pain. Around his neck there seems to be a noose of some sort, which pulls him sharply off toward the right of the painting, and his guts hang out of various open wounds, likely made by the doctors in an attempt to "cure" him of his original ailment.

Geroge Seurat, Bathers at Asnieres, 1884

During the later parts of the 1870s, Seurat was a student of the French School of Fine Arts. It was this school that taught him to create sketches and drawings of subjects before putting them directly on a painting. It was thought that this method would allow a smooth preparatory phase in which artists could identify issues so that they could fix these problems and make the final painting closer to perfection.

Asnières is an industrial suburb west located at the Seine River. It is west of Paris. Seurat used live models and created 10 drawings as well as 14 oil sketches. Using these as reference, he created the painting. This painting was the first of Seurat's large scale compositions and came out of a long process.

Painted in 1884, Bathers at Asnières was created before Seurat came up with his pointillist technique. However, after a few years Seurat reworking the painting to include several dots of contrasting color to instill a more luminous effect.

Edvard Munch, The Death of Marat, 1907

Jean-Paul Marat has been immortalized on canvas by the likes of Jacques-Louis David, Pablo Picasso, and Edvard Munch. Depicting Marat on his deathbed, these artists see the event with unique perspectives, each bringing inimitable technique, experience, and emotion to the work of art. Munch, in his 1907 painting The Death of Marat, violently depicts the politician’s death, bringing his signature, horrific elements to a hackneyed subject.

A Modern Olympia, Paul Cezanne, 1874.

The idea of the full-frontal nude painting was nothing new when Edouard Manet created his infamous Olympia. Titian, Giorgione, Goya, and Ingres had also painted a naked female, seductively stretched across a casually disheveled bed. So why did the painting received such brash criticism at its 1865 debut at the Paris Salon? Just like many artists of the period, Manet also sought to depict the life of the lower class, yet he took a slightly different route than the pastoral images of Millet, Courbet, and Daumier. Manet seduced his bourgeois and upper class audiences with an image of an attractive female, who simply happened to be a member of the proletariat. The idea of a poorer woman having such mystery and intrigue as Olympia disturbed viewers of the painting, and many were shocked at the prospect of such a woman having an abundance of partners sending her flowers and gifts.

Cezanne hastily created his response to the scandalous Olympia, painting something that gave the critics what they desired in the original by Manet, yet clearly mocking the level at which the painting was criticized. Though Cezanne's A Modern Olympia still portrays a woman sprawled upon an unmade bed, she seems ashamed of her seductive presence, and cowers in the white, cloud-like sheets. The servant, instead of bringing her flowers from one of Olympia's many lovers, tries to cover the poor, naked woman with the bedsheets, hiding her away from the critics to prevent another attack on the illegitimacy of a sultry member of the lower class.

A rich, older man sits on the sofa directly across from Olympia, watching as the servant cloaks the weak woman. Could it be her lover, finished with his work, relaxing on the couch and waiting for his next appointment for the day? Perhaps the man is a critic, happily watching as the low-class courtesan of Manet's Olympia becomes hidden away in the fetal position. The framing of Olympia in Cezanne's version of the painting draws the eye directly to her unclothed, shameful position, and regardless of the backstory of the image, Cezanne proves that the critics and bourgeoisie are still drawn to the mysterious story of the brazen woman originally portrayed in Manet's Olympia.

Edouard Manet, Le Suicide, 1877

"Singer left his luggage in the middle of the station floor. Then he walked to the shop. He greeted the jeweler for whom he worked with a listless turn of his hand. When he went out again there was something heavy in his pocket. For a while he rambled with bent head along the streets. But the unrefracted brilliance of the sun, the humid heat, oppressed him. He returned to his room with swollen eyes and an aching head. After resting he drank a glass of iced coffee and smoked a cigarette. Then when he had washed the ash tray and the glass he brought out a pistol from his pocket and put a bullet in his chest." 
- Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Beautiful in its own morbidity, Manet's Le Suicide significantly departs from the delicate forms of his well known nudes, such as Olympia, and replaces them with a horrific, yet calm, image of self-destruction. The man's position on the edge of the bed, and his decision to fire into his gut as opposed to his head denote a reluctance in the act. However, his facial expression seems to be one of bewilderment, more so than pain or regret. He gazes up at the ceiling, towards the sky, and thus towards "heaven." These elements, combined with what is believed to be a painting of a monk on the back wall, and the placing of his body, have led some to believe that the piece represents the crucifixion of artists, with possible autobiographical sentiments from Manet.

Manet had a fondness for creating portraits of Jesus being accosted, such as in his piece Jesus Mocked by the Soldiers. His fascination with such scenes seemed to go hand in hand with the poor reviews that he received throughout his career. The constant flow of negative reviews and the stress from not meeting expectations led Manet to sympathize with to figures such as Christ, who took on unspeakable pain for others. Manet, some claim, seems to be suggesting through works such as Jesus Mocked by Soldiers and Le Suicide that the burden of the artist was similarly painful. John Singer, the deaf-mute protagonist from Carson McCullers masterpiece The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, feels this same burden when he is given care of the trust, hopes, and downfalls of four people in a Georgia town. In the end, the burden, as well as his loneliness lead him to take his own life. In much the same way, Manet seems to suggest that the burden on artists to create meaningful and popular works creates a weight that few can truly carry.
  

Edouard Manet, The Balcony, 1868-1869

Paul Gauguin, Day of the God, 1893

Paul Gauguin returned to France from Tahiti in 1893, his declining health and financial situation greatly impacted his painting in the years to follow. In 1894, Gauguin painted a mere sixteen pictures. One of those paintings was Day of the God (Mahana No Atua), which depicts a Tahitian beach and a religious ceremony.

The painting represents a universal religion, with the idol Hina centered in the middle. The images all derive from Gauguin’s personal experiences in Tahiti and culminate in the landscape. Along the pool’s edge are three women, each representing the “Ages of Man” which include birth, life, and death. The birth stage has the woman in fetal position with her toes barley grazing the water. While, the life stage include the woman sitting up straight and feet fully immersed into the water. Finally the death stage has the woman completely turned away from the viewer, and the source of life in the picture, which is water.

Gauguin doesn’t show the viewer the exact purpose of this painting instead he incorporates numerous symbols and meaning throughout. “Don't paint too much direct from nature. Art is an abstraction! Study nature then brood on it and treasure the creation which will result, which is the only way to ascend towards God - to create like our Divine Master” a quote by Gauguin illustrates that painting was a religious meditation and a way to navigate through the questions he had. He allows for the painting to mean what the viewer wants and doesn’t attempt to impose his own idea on religion and philosophy on the viewer.

Edvard Munch, Madonna (Conception), 1895-1902

The bare Madonna twists and turns while in the throes of ecstasy. Sperm cells line the red border of the painting. A fetus-Jesus looks on his creation with a melancholy face. Mary has been stripped of all her holiness. What has life devolved into that would even make Christ wish He wasn’t born?

Edvard Munch, The Storm, 1893

In 1893, a large storm hit Aasgaardstrand, Norway causing a huge stir. In a more expressionist, than post-impressionist painting, Edvard Munch recreates this psychologically damaging scene (much like his other paintings). Positioned similarly to The Scream, the women, faceless, stand awestruck in horror, giving off as much coldness as surrounds them. In contrast, the bright windows give "off the only source of light and warmth."

His representational way of painting comes through clearly in the surrounding objects. The woman's hair, a mere slash of oil, blows frantically back with the huge gusts of wind. Perhaps their anguish can come from the society in which they don't want to participate, or are excluded from. Standing apart from sea and the house, almost lost between land and ocean, the women clump together in fear and disillusion. The encasing-like black line that surrounds the further back women make them into one. They blend together, much like society did giving them no more than a name and a husband to care for. As for the woman in white, her dress acts to lift her off the ground and float further away from society and become more refined.

The harsh brush strokes combine both expressionism and symbolism into a rough, but fluid tableau. While the sky is dusk and dreamlike, the harsh strokes still evoke the emotion of dread and fear. The sky mimics the rocky shore leading the viewer still towards away from society with the woman in white. Many later expressionists would later look to Munch for inspiration in a way to manipulate the scenery into jagged emotional trauma.

Munch evokes a nightmarish scene full of personal psyche drama and ideas that may be surfacing from his past and present life.

Claude Monet, On the Banks of the Seine, Bennecourt, 1868

Camille Pissarro, The Garden of Les Mathurins at Pontoise, 1876

Camille Pissarro was a French Impressionist painter. Although he was born on St. Thomas, an island in the US Virgin Islands, he moved the Venezuela at the age of 21. The Garden of Les Mathurins at Pontoise was painted in 1876, while Pissaro was living in France. This painting is primarily a landscape, noted for its definitive division of color. Joachim Pissarro, Camille Pissarro’s great grandson is a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. With regard to The Garden of Les Mathurins at Pontoise he stated, “Essentially complex, his work made use of a phenomenal imagination, an unusually rich, innovative visual mind, a vast curiosity about techniques of all sorts, a profound poetic sensitivity, and an unquenchable passion for painting, as well as a strongly defined set of intellectual positions.”

Pissarro had a unique set of interests and talents that are all apparent in The Garden of Les Mathurins at Pontoise, the most interesting of which is his imagination. This scene is breathtaking, the use of color, and the whimsical nature of the subject matter all allow the viewer to be swept into a world of wonder and beauty. The woman who stands in the right half of the painting twirls what seems to be a fan. This is the most captivating part of the composition. The mystery that it creates in the painting kept me sitting in front of it at the Nelson for hours. It could be simply a fan that shows the woman’s status in society, or it could be a ball that symbolizes the mystery of 19th century French life. The circle glows and creates an aura around the woman that is paralleled in the sky, which only adds to the light feeling of the painting.

It seems that at any moment the woman could place the mysterious circle above her head and fly away, leaving all her worries behind. Her feeling of freeness and serenity in the moment of flight would be much like the feeling of calm and relaxation I felt sitting with this work.

Mary Cassatt, Lydia Leaning on Her Arms, Seated in Loge, 1879

Edgar Degas, At the Races in the Countryside, 1869

Back in the 1870s day, Cassatt and Degas were a dynamic duo. The American full of spitfire and creative urges fell in love with his paintings and later wrote, “The first sight of Degas’ pictures was the turning point in my artistic life.” The two maintained a lasting friendship that provided artistic and mental support, despite their often clashing personalities.

Edouard Manet, Luncheon on the Grass, 1863

The painting, ironically, exudes a level of tranquility that seems unfit considering the subject matter. Manet juxtaposes the figures by clothing the men while scantily dressing the woman bathing and leaves the works foremost figure completely bare. Manet challenges the audience to judge the women, as if they are saying, “Yes, we are enjoying our perfectly peaceful picnic naked, what are you going to do about it?” By choosing a serene forest scene, Manet illustrates that the real abnormality comes from the clothed men. Indeed the nude women seem to belong more in this setting.

Claude Monet, Gare Saint Lazare, 1877

Gare Saint Lazare, with its iron beasts emitting clouds of smoke and steam, was an ideal location for Monet to paint the effects of light on surfaces. Monet painted the station differently from his contemporaries, although the technique of painting subjects at different times was not implemented until the 1890s. Monet painted at least seven canvases of Gare Saint Lazare at different angles. The Paintings appeared in the third impressionist exhibition in 1877.

Monet’s representations of Gare Saint Lazare depict his turn to urban landscapes while painting the modern life that Zola encouraged artists to portray. Before moving to England, Monet lived in the suburbs of Paris and took the train into this station. He attempted to create the atmosphere that he felt in the presence of this new industrial terminal. Monet focused less on the iron of the building or train, but showed the altered light of the skylights reactivity with its surfaces amongst the steam. Eliminating line and details, Monet focused most on capturing the smoke that escaped the trains' furnaces.

Although Monet would later paint structures, Gares Saint Lazare was his last depiction of an urban setting. He would continue to experiment with the effects of light on his subjects until his death.

Vincent Van Gogh, Père Tanguay, 1886

Van Gogh's painting of Julien "Père" (or father, as he was called by younger artists) Tanguay shows an elderly man sitting in his shop's gallery of art.

The wall contains quite the collection of Japanese art, which Tanguay loved. In his shop, Tanguay sold a multitude of objects to artists. These included canvas, paints, brushes, and other materials. Vincent Van Gogh, through the help of Julien Tanguay, met a variety of famous painters, such as Seurat, Cezanne, and Gaugin (with whom he formed a much discussed friendship).

Tanguay sometimes even helped Van Gogh and other financially limited painters by giving them art supplies. Van Gogh always appreciated and respected Tanguay, and thus painted him as a kind-hearted man living life in a laid back style.

Van Gogh actually painted Julien Tanguay three times. Critics said of the first painting that it makes Tanguay look like a workman rather than an art dealer, as Van Gogh primarily used brown throughout the painting to create Tanguay's image along with a touch of red on his lips and green on his apron.

Van Gogh later started to experiment with brighter colors and applied this new trend to his second and third paintings of Tanguay. Julien Tanguay himself decided to keep the first of the paintings, perhaps due to a preference for the use of brown. He may have seen himself as a workman.

Georges Pierre Seurat, The Gardener 1882

Jules Breton, The End of the Working Day, 1886-1887

Gustave Caillebotte, Paris Street; Rainy Day, 1877.

With the rise of Realism and photography in the realm of nineteenth century art, painters turned to what they knew to create: miraculous works of art. This is exactly what Gustave Caillebotte executed with his 1877 oil-on-canvas piece Paris Street; Rainy Day. The painting portrays a couple walking along the rue de Turin in Paris, France, located just around the corner from the Saint-Lazare train station. Not so coincidentally, this spot could be viewed from the window of Caillebotte's Paris study.

Though the setting of the painting provides interesting historical background, the technique makes the painting incredibly captivating. At first glance, the brushstrokes differ drastically from the strategically placed geometric splotches of Cezzane or the smoothed figures of Degas, yet his sweeping brushstrokes (as evident in the cobblestone road) uniquely emphasized the exactness of the Parisian architecture.  However the most interesting aspect of the painting is his use of focus to simulate photography with his painting. Caillebotte creates symbiosis between the architectural accuracy of the scene (such as the detailed scaffolding of the newly renovated buildings in the background) and experimentation with optics. The couple in the foreground of the painting has a slightly unfocused appearance, drawing the eye to the other complexities of the painting.

Caillebotte's Paris Street; Rainy Day represents a bold response to the changing artistic realm, and brought an interesting and wildly different perspective of a modernizing Paris. The painting strayed away from many of the brightly colored paintings of the Impressionist movement and instead used a fisheye effect to create complexity. As far as many reactions to photography were concerned, Paris Street; Rainy Day epitomized this Impressionist goal.

Georges Seurat, Le Chahut, 1888-89

Edgar Degas, The Millinery Shop, 1879-84

In The Millinery Shop, Edgar Degas looks through a window at a young girl busy at work. Just like his other paintings of dancers, jockeys and laundresses, Degas gazes into the world of an average person doing an extraordinary thing: living life. Both Degas and his subject become fully invested in their artistic job.

Between the 1860s and 1890s Paris was facing a financial crisis in part due to the Franco-Prussian War. The sinking popularity of small specialty shops to larger mall-type stores caused millinery shops such as these to shut down. This large period of change transformed Paris into what it is today, even going from 12 to 20 arrondisements. Leading up to La Belle Epoque was full of demolition as seen in photos by Charles Marville and reconstruction.

Setting up the scene for Degas's Millinery Shop, X-rays show that Degas had first starting painting the girl as a fancy dressed customer. By, instead, setting the girl as a working class hat maker with pride, Degas shows the pride in the progress of Paris, and it doesn't hurt to say that Degas thought that hats were the utmost sign of the bourgeois woman. The making of hats for the bourgeois in a failing economy shares a unity between the past and the future. Like both Paris and the painting, what was once all egocentricity, becomes "creation and consumption."

By the 1870s, Degas's eyesight began to fail him, and he used more pastels. He did a series of millinery and jockey paintings, but this one gained the most recognition. The two contrasting sides, the finished hats on display and the girls unfinished work, have a beautiful flow of progress. In The Millinery Shop, Degas scraped and repainted the girls hand and hat-in-the-making multiple times to put it in motion. Sort of like the painting, neither piece of work gets completely finished.

Berthe Morisot, Hide and Seek, 1873

Georges Seurat, Parade de Cirque, 1887-88

Claude Monet, Morning on the Seine near Giverny, 1897

Georges Pierre Seurat, Parade de Cirque , 1887-1888

One of Seurat's only night paintings, Parade de Cirque, or Circus Sideshow, explores Parisian circus life, a subject of many paintings and sketches at the time.  Using his trademark pointillist technique, Seurat documents the scene in an almost scientific fashion, as if he somehow knew that light exists in the form of tiny particles and wavelengths and wanted to document its effect on the crowd. 


Each dot serves to illustrate the smallest part of such a larger whole. The performers seem to glow from the halo of spots that emanate from the gaslights placed above them. The audience falls under the shadow of the stage, enthralled with the show of spectacular music and skill unfolding before them. The performers give off a haughty, almost distant, tone, like they truly are elevated above those watching them from below. This scene pulsates in front of the viewer in a hazy form, like a lens slightly out of focus. 


Pointillism embodies an almost obsessive search for the perfect color combinations. The act of painting in this style is geared entirely towards the viewer. The artist takes it upon himself to construct the most visually stimulating scene with pinpoint accuracy. The amount of energy and perseverance that goes into creating such a piece is mind-boggling. Viewing a painting like this, one can't help but feel grateful for the opportunity to witness such genius and innovation. In an age of automatic results, effort like this is sometimes lost on those who view it. But thumbing through any color theory textbook, one can see that ever dot of color is there for a purpose, and it's relative to those colors around it. Seurat's skillful management of such a busy medium garners him rightfully earned acclaim. He challenges the viewer to not only study the details, but also appreciate the big picture. 

John Evertt Millais, The Ransom, 1860

Sir John Evertt Millais was a major Pre-Raphaelite painter. Millais, D.G Rossetti, and William Holman Hunt founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) in 1848. The PRB can be seen as one of the most important art movements during the nineteenth century, even though it only lasted a couple years. Millais points to the new movement of the PRB by displaying a lack of emotion and rich colors that are exhibited in the painting.


The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood set certain goals such as emphasizing precise, almost photographic display of even still life objects, attempting to transform realism. They also focused on groupings of figures This was perfectly displayed in his painting The Ransom. Millais paints extraordinary detail on the subjects and focuses most of them on the center knight. A second part of Pre-Raphaelitism grew from the first part. The second part focused mostly on pictorial techniques that helped develop a more realistic atmosphere in the painting.