Alina 2018-06-17 14:05:00 painters biographies
René Magritte was born in Belgium in 1898. After attending art school in Brussels, he worked in commercial advertising to support himself while he experimented with his painting. In the mid 1920s he began to paint in the surrealist style and became known for his witty and thought-provoking images and his use of simple graphics and everyday objects, giving new meanings to familiar things. With a popularity that increased over time, Magritte was able to pursue his art full-time and was celebrated in several international exhibitions. He experimented with numerous styles and forms during his life and was a primary influence on the pop art movement. He died in 1967.
René François Ghislain Magritte was born in Lessines, Belgium, on November 21, 1898, the oldest of three boys. His father’s manufacturing business at times allowed the family to live in relative comfort, but financial difficulties were a constant threat and forced them to move about the country with some regularity. Magritte’s young world was dealt a far more destructive blow in 1912, when his mother committed suicide by drowning herself in a river.
Magritte found solace from the tragedy in films and novels and especially through painting. His earliest surviving works from this era were accomplished in the impressionist style. However, in 1916 he left home for Brussels, where for the next two years he studied at Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts. Although he was ultimately unimpressed with the institution, he was nonetheless exposed to emerging styles such as cubism and futurism, which significantly altered the direction of his work. Indeed, many of Magritte’s paintings from the early 1920s owe a clear debt to Pablo Picasso.
In 1921 Magritte began his one year of compulsory military service before returning home and marrying Georgette Berger, whom he had known since he was a boy and with whom he would stay for the rest of his life. After a brief stint in a wallpaper factory, he found work as a freelance poster and advertisement designer while he continued to paint. Around this time Magritte saw the painting The Song of Love by Italian surrealist Giorgio de Chirico and was so struck by its imagery that it sent his own work off in the new direction for which he would become known.
Placing familiar, mundane objects such as bowler hats, pipes and rocks in unusual contexts and juxtapositions, Magritte evoked themes of mystery and madness to challenge the assumptions of human perception. With early works such as The Lost Jockey and The Menaced Assassin Magritte quickly became one of the most important artists in Belgium and found himself at the center of its nascent surrealist movement. But when his first one-man show—in 1927 at the Galerie le Centaure—was poorly received, a disheartened Magritte left his homeland for France.
Settling in the Perreux-sur-Marne suburb of Paris, Magritte quickly fell in with some of surrealism’s brightest lights and founding fathers, including writer André Breton, poet Paul Éluard and artists Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst and Joan Miró. Over the next few years he produced important works such as The Lovers and The False Mirror and also began to experiment with the use of text, as seen in his 1929 painting The Treachery of Images.
But despite the progress Magritte was making in his art, he had yet to find significant financial success, and in 1930 he and Georgette returned to Brussels, where he set up an ad agency with his younger brother Paul. Though the demands of their studio left Magritte little time for his own work over the next few years, interest in his paintings began to grow and soon he was selling enough to leave his commercial work behind.
In the late 1930s Magritte’s newfound popularity resulted in exhibitions of his work in New York City and London. But the onset of World War II would soon alter the course of his life and art. His decision to remain in Belgium following the Nazi occupation caused a split between him and André Breton, and the suffering and violence caused by the war led him away from the often dark and chaotic moods of surrealism. “Against widespread pessimism,” he said, “I now propose a search for joy and pleasure.” Works from this period, such as The Return of the Flame and The Clearing, demonstrate this shift, with their brighter palettes and more impressionistic technique.
After the war, Magritte finalized his break with Breton’s branch of surrealism when he and several other artists signed a manifesto titled “Surrealism in Full Sunlight.” A period of experimentation during which Magritte’s created garish and provocative paintings followed before he returned to his more familiar style and subject matter, including a 1948 reimagining of his Lost Jockey, painted the same year as his first one-man exhibition in Paris.
With the arrival of the 1950s, Magritte enjoyed ongoing international interest in his work and continued his prolific output. In 1951 he was commissioned to paint a cycle of murals for the casino at Knocke-le-Zoute, a town on the Belgian coast. Completed in 1953 and titled The Enchanted Domain, they were a celebration of some of his best-known images. More commissions around Belgium followed, as did major exhibitions of his work in Brussels and the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York. Some of his most important works from this period include the paintings Golconda and The Glass Key. He also introduced the now-iconic apple into his work, most recognizably in 1964’s The Son of Man.
Despite having been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 1963, Magritte was able to travel to New York City for a 1965 retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art. Magritte also explored other media during this time, making a series of short films that featured his wife, Georgette, as well as experimenting with sculpture. After a period of prolonged illness, on August 15, 1967, René Magritte died at the age of 68. His work proved to be a primary influence on pop artists such as Andy Warhol and has since been celebrated in countless exhibitions around the world. The Magritte Museum opened in Brussels in 2009.
Alina 2018-06-16 14:05:00 painters biographies
Lili Elbe was born Einar Wegener in Vejle, Denmark in 1882 and moved to Copenhagen to study art at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts as a teenager. After marrying Gerda Gottlieb, Elbe realized her true gender identity and began to live her life as a woman. After undergoing four risky surgical procedures to transform her body from male to female, Elbe died from post-operative complications in Dresden, Germany, just shy of her 49th birthday. The story of her life was made into two books, Man into Woman, and the international bestseller The Danish Girl, as well as the 2015 film of the same name starring Eddie Redmayne.
Born on December 28, 1882 in the small fjord-side town of Vejle, Denmark, Einar Mogens Wegener was an artistic and precocious young boy. As a teenager, he traveled to Copenhagen to study art at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. There, Einar met Gerda Gottlieb and they fell in love and married in 1904 at the young ages of 22 and 19. The two artists enjoyed painting together. While Einar specialized in landscape paintings, Gerda was a successful book and fashion magazine illustrator. In fact, Gerda even asked Einar to sit as her model and don women’s clothing for her art-deco portraits of high-fashion women.
Gerda’s portraits transformed Einar into the beautiful woman he knew he always wanted to be. Through these experiences, Einar began to envision living life as a woman. After traveling through Italy and France, the couple eventually settled in Paris in 1912 and Einar transitioned his public identity to Lili and lived openly as a woman for the last two decades of her life. She chose the surname “Elbe” after the river in Central Europe that flows through Dresden, the location of the last of her sex reassignment operations.
READ OUR REVIEW ON 'THE DANISH GIRL,' A FILM INSPIRED BY LILI ELBE'S TRANSGENDER JOURNEY
In the 1920s, Elbe learned of the possibility of permanently transforming her body from male to female at the German Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld founded the clinic in 1919 and coined the term “transsexualism” in 1923 (although some reports indicate that Elbe was the very first sex reassignment surgery recipient, she was not). There she underwent the first of four operations in 1930, a surgical castration procedure. The next three surgeries were conducted in 1930 and 1931 by Dr. Kurt Warnekros at the Dresden Municipal Women's Clinic and included a penectomy, the transplantation of human ovarian tissue (some reports indicate that Elbe already had rudimentary ovaries in her abdomen and may have been intersex), and a subsequent unspecified surgery some weeks later that involved the insertion of a cannula. These surgeries permitted her to legally change her name and her sex allowing her to receive a passport as Lili Elbe (female).
Elbe described her change as a rebirth into the woman she knew she always was. She was now able to live her life as Lili, however, because she was now legally recognized as a woman, the King of Denmark ruled her marriage to Gerda to be null and void in 1930. The two parted ways amicably and another door opened when an old friend requested her hand in marriage. Elbe was elated and she planned a final surgery that involved a uterus transplant and the construction of an artificial vagina in hopes that this procedure would allow her to have intercourse with her fiancé and eventually become a mother. But this dream would never be realized. Elbe died from paralysis of the heart shortly after at the Women’s Clinic in Dresden while recovering from her final surgery in 1931, just shy of her 49th birthday.
Elbe’s story was published after her death by Ernst Ludwig Harthern-Jacobson (under the pen name Niels Hoyer) who compiled her life history from her personal diaries in accordance with her last wishes. The book, Man into Woman, was first published in 1933 in Danish and German and English editions quickly followed (including reissues of the English version in 1953 and 2004). Man into Woman was one of the first widely-available books about a transgender person’s life and because of this, it was inspirational. In fact, Jan Morris (who chronicled her own gender transition and sex reassignment surgery in the 1975 book Conundrum) notes that she was inspired to pursue surgery to transition her gender after reading Elbe’s story. More recently Elbe’s life inspired The Danish Girl (2000), an international bestselling novel by David Ebershoff, and a major feature film by the same name (2015) starring Eddie Redmayne.
Alina 2018-06-15 14:05:00 painters biographies
John Singer Sargent was born in 1856 in Florence, Italy. He earned early acclaim for his promise as a portraitist, although he drew harsh reviews for his exhibition of Madame X at the Paris Salon of 1884. He reclaimed a favorable reputation by the end of the decade, and by the early 20th century he was devoting more time to war-themed paintings, landscapes and watercolors. Sargent died in 1925 in London, England.
Artist. John Singer Sargent was born January 12, 1856, to American parents living in Florence, Italy. Although he spent most of his life in Europe, both of his parents were raised in the United States and the artist considered himself to be an American. His father, Fitzwilliam Sargent, was a physician who came from an early colonial family and grew up in Philadelphia. His mother, Mary Newbold Singer, married Fitzwilliam Sargent in 1850. While the couple was enamored of Europe, they initially arrived there due to tragic circumstances, taking a tour as a means of escape following the tragic death of their first child. The Sargents had originally intended to return to the United States, but instead became expatriates.
John Singer Sargent began demonstrating his artistic talents at a young age, and soon took up the study of painting in a formal setting. His first known enrollment in art classes took place in Florence at the Accademia delle Belle Arti, in his late teens. During the winter of 1873-74, Sargent honed his skills, convincing his father that it was well worth encouraging his artistic pursuits. Father and son traveled together to Paris in the spring of 1874 so that John Singer Sargent could continue his studies in the art capital of Europe.
While in Paris, Sargent studied under a relatively young teacher named Carolus-Duran, who was teaching his students to break free of the rigidity of the old masters' style. Carolus-Duran's method emphasized skipping the step of making detailed sketches and heading straight to the canvas with a paintbrush. Sargent internalized these techniques; his later works would come to be recognized for their immediacy, emotional depth and refined technique.
In May 1876, when Sargent was in his early 20s, he made his first trip to the United States, accompanied by his mother and sister, Emily. The family visited Philadelphia and Niagara Falls, among other places. Much like his mother, Sargent found that he was intensely drawn to travel. When he got back to Europe, he continued traveling, using his voyages as opportunities to study great works of art and try his hand at portraying diverse locations. In Spain, Sargent admired and copied the works of Diego Velásquez; in Venice, he cultivated an appreciation for its picturesque canals, to which he would return many times. Travel scenes would form a major element of his work.
Back in Paris, Sargent submitted a portrait of his teacher, Carolus-Duran, to the Salon of 1879. It won him an honorable mention, and his reputation as a portraitist was given a boost. Between the years of 1877 and 1882, Sargent submitted many types of paintings to the Salon, though his portraits generally won the most positive attention.
Sargent's reputation took a turn for the worse with the exhibition of Madame X at the Salon of 1884. Because it defied many of the accepted standards of the day, and was slightly risqué in its portrayal of a woman in a low-cut, nearly sleeveless dress, it turned many of his admirers against him. The mother of the woman who had sat for the portrait, Madame Gautreau (who was actually American), even asked Sargent to remove it. Today, Madame X is considered one of his most celebrated works.
Rather than stay in a city in which public opinion had turned against him, Sargent left Paris and began spending much of his time in England, making it his permanent home in 1886. The country he had adopted had not quite adopted him, though; the English were reluctant to sit for Sargent's portraits because of the scandal of Madame X. Not wanting their own portraits to turn out the same way, they refrained from giving him commissions.
Sargent was not discouraged. On a pair of trips to the United States in 1887 and 1890, he found that Americans were not averse to being painted by him, and many members of American high society sat for his portraits. He often painted his subjects as if they were caught in the middle of motion, with faces both highly individualized and expressive.
The turning point for Sargent's career in England came when he showed his Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (painted 1885-86) at the London Royal Academy. The piece, undeniably one of Sargent's masterpieces, incorporated Victorian themes and a calculated impressionist influence that depicted two girls lighting lanterns among flowers in spring. The English recognized the painting's greatness, and members of the elite were soon lining up to commission their own likenesses.
Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose was important, too, as an example of the impact that Impressionism had made on Sargent's style. He had become acquainted with and learned from both Claude Monet and Edgar Degas, masters of the movement. Sargent, like Monet, was particularly fascinated with light, and became highly skilled at portraying it. However, in contrast to the French painters' work, Sargent's paintings remained fairly literal, retaining crisp forms and not dissolving entirely into streaks of color.
Although his portraits were highly praised, Sargent eventually grew tired of painting them — they took up a large amount of his time, and there seemed to be no end to his new commissions. Sargent backed away from the portrait business between 1907 and 1910 to leave himself time to focus on other projects, in particular a set of murals for the Boston Public Library. He also increasingly turned his attention to watercolors around this time, forging a strong reputation for his work in that medium.
The coming of World War I changed Sargent's subject matter, for a time. Visiting the Western Front at the request of the British government, which had asked him to paint a scene commemorating the war, Sargent created Gassed, an appropriately dark work, which depicted soldiers enduring the deplorable conditions that marked life in the Great War.
Sargent was also commissioned to create murals in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. His creations span the museum’s grand staircase and rotunda. Additionally, more of his works can be seen at Harvard University's Widener Library — a tribute to those who died in World War I.
Sargent passed away in his sleep on April 14, 1925, at the age of 69. He left behind a large body of work, including portraits, travel scenes, watercolors and impressionistic masterpieces that have defined his reputation into the current century; his works are still exhibited around the world. Although the artist and his portrait sitters are all gone, his admirable skill has given future generations a glimpse into the lives and characters of people long gone — certainly a gift to future generations, and one that those future generations have so far recognized as precious.
Alina 2018-06-14 14:05:00 painters biographies
Born in Switzerland in 1901, Alberto Giacometti received his early foundation in art from family members before pursuing formal training in Geneva and Paris. In the 1920s he began to develop his personal style, creating abstracted sculptures that showed the influence of Cubism and tribal art. During the 1930s he became a part of the Surrealist movement, with his work becoming more dreamlike in nature, but he later split with the group when he became focused on new ways to express the human form. Influenced by the emergence of Existentialism, his small, thin figurative sculptures resonated with the atmosphere of suffering that followed World War II, and they were soon highly sought after. Giacometti’s work continued to evolve in the 1950s and 1960s, during which time he also produced an extensive series of portraits and provided illustrations for numerous books. After receiving several awards, honors and retrospective exhibitions, and achieving international fame, Giacometti died in 1966.
Alberto Giacometti was born on October 10, 1901, in the small mountain village of Borgonovo, Switzerland, near the Italian-Swiss border. His father, Giovanni, was an accomplished painter who worked in the Post-Impressionist style, and both his godfather and an uncle were artists as well, providing Giacometti with his earliest instruction. When his family moved to the nearby town of Stampa in 1906, Giacometti was already showing an interest in drawing, and by his early teens he had begun painting, sculpting and making wood etchings.
In 1919, Giacometti moved to Geneva, where he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and École des Arts et Métiers. However, perhaps more important to his development as an artist were the trips he took to Italy during the next two years. In 1920 he accompanied his father to the Venice Biennale—where his father’s paintings were included in the exhibition and Giacometti first encountered the work of abstract sculptor Alexander Archipenko—and in 1921 he visited Rome, Florence and the surrounding areas, during which time he became enthralled with African and Egyptian art.
In 1922, Giacometti settled in Paris, where for the next four years he studied sculpture at the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière. At the same time, he was falling under the influence of Cubists such as Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso and nurturing his newfound love for primitive art, both of which began to show in his work, with his representations of the human body becoming steadily more abstracted. By the time he completed his studies, Giacometti was resolved to abandon realism entirely, convinced of its inadequacy to convey the essence of his subject matter. Two of his most important and representative works from this period, Spoon Woman and The Couple, were exhibited at the Salon des Tuileries in 1927.
In the early 1930s, Giacometti’s emerging style endeared him to some of the Surrealist movement’s most important figures, such as André Breton, Man Ray and Georges Bataille. Their influence on his work can be seen in such dreamlike, metaphorical pieces as Suspended Ball (1931), Walking Woman I (1932) and The Palace at 4 a.m. (1932). The impact of these and similar sculptures would lead to his first solo exhibitions in Paris (1932) and New York (1934).
Despite Giacometti’s growing notoriety as a member of the Surrealist movement, his personal inquiry into the nature of existence would ultimately lead him away from the group, and during the latter half of the decade he would focus his energies on a series of head sculptures meant to convey his own physical relation to his models in space.
However, with the outbreak of World War II and the advance of the German army into France, in 1941 Giacometti was forced to flee Paris and return to Switzerland, where he would work until the conflict’s end. During that time, his art would take yet a new direction, with his sculptures of the human for becoming elongated and thin and increasingly small in size, lending the figures an air of loneliness and suffering. When Giacometti returned to Paris, he soon found that the anguished presence of works like Man Pointing (1947) and City Square (1948)—informed by his grasp of the existentialist philosophies emerging at the time—struck a chord with the pervasive postwar feelings of despair and loneliness. Now highly sought after by both museums and collectors, his work earned him solo exhibitions in New York in 1948 and 1950, one of which featured an introductory text by Jean Paul-Sartre, who described Giacometti’s work as “always halfway between nothingness and being.”
During the 1950s, Giacometti’s work continued to evolve, with his sculptures becoming larger, thinner, and more complicated. He also undertook a series of dark, intense portraits of family members—primarily his wife, Annette (whom he married in 1949), and his brother Diego—and well-known friends such as Jean Genet, Henri Matisse and Igor Stravinsky. Later in the decade he began a lengthy period of illustration work for books by contemporary authors such as Paul Eluard and revered writers of the past like Cervantes and Balzac.
Internationally famous by the early 1960s, Giacometti was commissioned by Samuel Beckett to create a tree sculpture for a production of his Waiting for Godot, and in 1962 he was awarded the Grand Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale. Amidst failing health, in 1964 he also received the Guggenheim International Award for Painting, followed by retrospectives of his work at the Tate Gallery in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Alberto Giacometti died of cardiac exhaustion on January 11, 1966, in Chur, Switzerland, and was buried in Borgnovo cemetery.
Alina 2018-06-13 14:05:00 painters biographies
Marc Chagall was born in Belarus in 1887 and developed an early interest in art. After studying painting, in 1907 he left Russia for Paris, where he lived in an artist colony on the city’s outskirts. Fusing his own personal, dreamlike imagery with hints of the fauvism and cubism popular in France at the time, Chagall created his most lasting work—including I and the Village (1911)—some of which would be featured in the Salon des Indépendants exhibitions. After returning to Vitebsk for a visit in 1914, the outbreak of WWI trapped Chagall in Russia. He returned to France in 1923 but was forced to flee the country and Nazi persecution during WWII. Finding asylum in the U.S., Chagall became involved in set and costume design before returning to France in 1948. In his later years, he experimented with new art forms and was commissioned to produce numerous large-scale works. Chagall died in St.-Paul-de-Vence in 1985.
Marc Chagall was born in a small Hassidic community on the outskirts of Vitebsk, Belarus, on July 7, 1887. His father was a fishmonger, and his mother ran a small sundries shop in the village. As a child, Chagall attended the Jewish elementary school, where he studied Hebrew and the Bible, before later attending the Russian public school. He began to learn the fundamentals of drawing during this time, but perhaps more importantly, he absorbed the world around him, storing away the imagery and themes that would feature largely in most of his later work.
At age 19 Chagall enrolled at a private, all-Jewish art school and began his formal education in painting, studying briefly with portrait artist Yehuda Pen. However, he left the school after several months, moving to St. Petersburg in 1907 to study at the Imperial Society for the Protection of Fine Arts. The following year, he enrolled at the Svanseva School, studying with set designer Léon Bakst, whose work had been featured in Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. This early experience would prove important to Chagall’s later career as well.
Despite this formal instruction, and the widespread popularity of realism in Russia at the time, Chagall was already establishing his own personal style, which featured a more dreamlike unreality and the people, places and imagery that were close to his heart. Some examples from this period are his Window Vitebsk (1908) and My Fianceé with Black Gloves (1909), which pictured Bella Rosenfeld, to whom he had recently become engaged.
Despite his romance with Bella, in 1911 an allowance from Russian parliament member and art patron Maxim Binaver enabled Chagall to move to Paris, France. After settling briefly in the Montparnasse neighborhood, Chagall moved further afield to an artist colony known as La Ruche (“The Beehive”), where he began to work side by side with painters such as Amedeo Modigliani and Fernand Léger as well as the avant-garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire. At their urging, and under the influence of the wildly popular fauvism and cubism, Chagall lightened his palette and pushed his style ever further from reality. I and the Village (1911) and Homage to Apollinaire (1912) are among his early Parisian works, widely considered to be his most successful and representative period.
Though his work stood stylistically apart from his cubist contemporaries, from 1912 to 1914 Chagall exhibited several paintings at the annual Salon des Indépendants exhibition, where works by the likes of Juan Gris, Marcel Duchamp and Robert Delaunay were causing a stir in the Paris art world. Chagall’s popularity began to spread beyond La Ruche, and in May 1914 he traveled to Berlin to help organize his first solo exhibition, at Der Sturm Gallery. Chagall remained in the city until the highly acclaimed show opened that June. He then returned to Vitebsk, unaware of the fateful events to come.
In August 1914 the outbreak of World War I precluded Chagall’s plans to return to Paris. The conflict did little to stem the flow of his creative output, however, instead merely giving him direct access to the childhood scenes so essential to his work, as seen in paintings such as Jew in Green (1914) and Over Vitebsk (1914). His paintings from this period also occasionally featured images of the war’s impact on the region, as with Wounded Soldier (1914) and Marching (1915). But despite the hardships of life during wartime, this would also prove to be a joyful period for Chagall. In July 1915 he married Bella, and she gave birth to a daughter, Ida, the following year. Their appearance in works such as Birthday (1915), Bella and Ida by the Window (1917) and several of his “Lovers” paintings give a glimpse of the island of domestic bliss that was Chagall’s amidst the chaos.
To avoid military service and stay with his new family, Chagall took a position as a clerk in the Ministry of War Economy in St. Petersburg. While there he began work on his autobiography and also immersed himself in the local art scene, befriending novelist Boris Pasternak, among others. He also exhibited his work in the city and soon gained considerable recognition. That notoriety would prove important in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution when he was appointed as the Commissar of Fine Arts in Vitebsk. In his new post, Chagall undertook various projects in the region, including the 1919 founding of the Academy of the Arts. Despite these endeavors, differences among his colleagues eventually disillusioned Chagall. In 1920 he relinquished his position and moved his family to Moscow, the post-revolution capital of Russia.
In Moscow, Chagall was soon commissioned to create sets and costumes for various productions at the Moscow State Yiddish Theater, where he would paint a series of murals titled Introduction to the Jewish Theater as well. In 1921, Chagall also found work as a teacher at a school for war orphans. By 1922, however, Chagall found that his art had fallen out of favor, and seeking new horizons he left Russia for good.
After a brief stay in Berlin, where he unsuccessfully sought to recover the work exhibited at Der Sturm before the war, Chagall moved his family to Paris in September 1923. Shortly after their arrival, he was commissioned by art dealer and publisher Ambroise Vollard to produce a series of etchings for a new edition of Nikolai Gogol's 1842 novel Dead Souls. Two years later Chagall began work on an illustrated edition of Jean de la Fontaine’s Fables, and in 1930 he created etchings for an illustrated edition of the Old Testament, for which he traveled to Palestine to conduct research.
Chagall’s work during this period brought him new success as an artist and enabled him to travel throughout Europe in the 1930s. He also published his autobiography, My Life (1931), and in 1933 received a retrospective at the Kunsthalle in Basel, Switzerland. But at the same time that Chagall’s popularity was spreading, so, too, was the threat of Fascism and Nazism. Singled out during the cultural "cleansing" undertaken by the Nazis in Germany, Chagall’s work was ordered removed from museums throughout the country. Several pieces were subsequently burned, and others were featured in a 1937 exhibition of “degenerate art” held in Munich. Chagall’s angst regarding these troubling events and the persecution of Jews in general can be seen in his 1938 painting White Crucifixion.
With the eruption of World War II, Chagall and his family moved to the Loire region before moving farther south to Marseilles following the invasion of France. They found a more certain refuge when, in 1941, Chagall’s name was added by the director of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City to a list of artists and intellectuals deemed most at risk from the Nazis’ anti-Jewish campaign. Chagall and his family would be among the more than 2,000 who received visas and escaped this way.
Arriving in New York City in June 1941, Chagall discovered that he was already a well-known artist there and, despite a language barrier, soon became a part of the exiled European artist community. The following year he was commissioned by choreographer Léonide Massine to design sets and costumes for the ballet Aleko, based on Alexander Pushkin’s “The Gypsies” and set to the music of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
But even as he settled into the safety of his temporary home, Chagall’s thoughts were frequently consumed by the fate befalling the Jews of Europe and the destruction of Russia, as paintings such as The Yellow Crucifixion (1943) and The Juggler (1943) indicate. A more personal blow struck Chagall in September 1944, when his beloved Bella died of a viral infection, leaving the artist incapacitated with grief. His sadness at the loss of his wife would haunt Chagall for years to come, as represented most poignantly in his 1945 paintings Around Her and The Wedding Candles.
Working through his pain, in 1945 Chagall began the set design and costumes for a production of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Firebird, which premiered in 1949, ran until 1965 and has been staged numerous times since. He also became involved with a young English artist named Virginia McNeil, and in 1946 she gave birth to their son, David. Around this time Chagall was also the subject of retrospective exhibitions at MOMA and the Art Institute of Chicago.
After seven years in exile, in 1948 Chagall returned to France with Virginia and David as well as Virginia's daughter, Jean, from a previous marriage. Their arrival coincided with the publication of Chagall's illustrated edition of Dead Souls, which had been interrupted by the onset of the war. The edition of Fables featuring his work was published in 1952, and after Chagall completed the etchings he had begun in 1930, his illustrated bible was published in 1956.
In 1950, Chagall and his family moved south to Saint-Paul-de-Vence, on the French Riviera. Virginia left him the next year, but in 1952 Chagall met Valentina “Vava” Brodsky and married her shortly thereafter. Valentina, who became Chagall's no-nonsense manager, is featured in several of his later portraits.
Settling into life as an established painter, Chagall began to branch out, working in sculpture and ceramics as well as mastering the art of stained glass windows. Much of his important later work exists in the form of large-scale commissions around the world. Among the highlights from this period are his stained glass windows for the synagogue at the Hadassah Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem (completed 1961), the Saint-Étienne Cathedral in Metz (completed 1968), the U.N. building in New York City (completed 1964) and the All Saint’s Church in Mainz, Germany (completed 1978); the ceiling of the Paris Opéra (completed 1964); and murals for the New York Metropolitan Opera (completed 1964), for whom he also designed the sets and costumes for a 1967 production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s The Magic Flute.
In 1977 Chagall received the Grand Medal of the Legion of Honor, France’s highest accolade. That same year, he became one of only a handful of artists in history to receive a retrospective exhibition at the Louvre. He died on March 28, 1985, in Saint-Paul-de-Vence at age 97, leaving behind a vast collection of work along with a rich legacy as an iconic Jewish artist and pioneer of modernism.
Alina 2018-06-12 14:05:00 painters biographies
Born on August 6, 1928, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Andy Warhol was a successful magazine and ad illustrator who became a leading artist of the 1960s Pop art movements. He ventured into a wide variety of art forms, including performance art, filmmaking, video installations and writing, and controversially blurred the lines between fine art and mainstream aesthetics. Warhol died on February 22, 1987, in New York City.
In his later life, Warhol suffered from chronic issues with his gall bladder. On February 20, 1987, he was admitted to New York Hospital where his gall bladder was successfully removed and he seemed to be recovering. However, days later he suffered complications that resulted in sudden cardiac arrest and he died on February 22, 1987 at the age of 58. Thousands of people attended a memorial for the artist at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City.
When he graduated from college with his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1949, Warhol moved to New York City to pursue a career as a commercial artist. It was also at this time that he dropped the "a" at the end of his last name to become Andy Warhol. He landed a job with Glamour magazine in September, and went on to become one of the most successful commercial artists of the 1950s. He won frequent awards for his uniquely whimsical style, using his own blotted line technique and rubber stamps to create his drawings.
Campbell's Soup CansIn the late 1950s, Warhol began devoting more attention to painting, and in 1961, he debuted the concept of "pop art" — paintings that focused on mass-produced commercial goods. In 1962, he exhibited the now-iconic paintings of Campbell's soup cans. These small canvas works of everyday consumer products created a major stir in the art world, bringing both Warhol and pop art into the national spotlight for the first time.
British artist Richard Hamilton described pop art as "popular, transient, expendable, low cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, big business." As Warhol himself put it, "Once you 'got' pop, you could never see a sign the same way again. And once you thought pop, you could never see America the same way again."
Warhol's other famous pop paintings depicted Coca-cola bottles, vacuum cleaners and hamburgers.
PortraitsHe also painted celebrity portraits in vivid and garish colors; his most famous subjects include Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Mick Jagger and Mao Zedong. As these portraits gained fame and notoriety, Warhol began to receive hundreds of commissions for portraits from socialites and celebrities. His portrait "Eight Elvises" eventually resold for $100 million in 2008, making it one of the most valuable paintings in world history.
In 1964, Warhol opened his own art studio, a large silver-painted warehouse known simply as "The Factory." The Factory quickly became one of New York City's premier cultural hotspots, a scene of lavish parties attended by the city's wealthiest socialites and celebrities, including musician Lou Reed, who paid tribute to the hustlers and transvestites he'd met at The Factory with his hit song "Walk on the Wild Side" — the verses of which contain descriptions of individuals who were fixtures at the legendary studio/warehouse in the '60s, including Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling, "Little Joe" Dallesandro, "Sugar Plum Fairy" Joe Campbell and Jackie Curtis. (Warhol was a friend of Reed's and managed Reed's band, the Velvet Underground.)
Warhol, who clearly relished his celebrity, became a fixture at infamous New York City nightclubs like Studio 54 and Max's Kansas City. Commenting on celebrity fixation — his own and that of the public at large — Warhol observed, "more than anything people just want stars." He also branched out in new directions, publishing his first book, Andy Warhol's Index, in 1967.
In 1968, however, Warhol's thriving career almost ended. He was shot by Valerie Solanas, an aspiring writer and radical feminist, on June 3rd. Warhol was seriously wounded in this attack. Solanas had appeared in one of Warhol's films and was reportedly upset with him over his refusal to use a script she had written. After the shooting, Solanas was arrested and later pleaded guilty to the crime. Warhol spent weeks in a New York hospital recovering from his injuries and underwent several subsequent surgeries. As a result of the injuries he sustained, he had to wear a surgical corset for the rest of his life.
In the 1970s, Warhol continued to explore other forms of media. He published such books as The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) and Exposures. Warhol also experimented extensively with video art, producing more than 60 films during his career. Some of his most famous films include Sleep, which depicts poet John Giorno sleeping for six hours, and Eat, which shows a man eating a mushroom for 45 minutes.
Warhol also worked in sculpture and photography, and in the 1980s, he moved into television, hosting Andy Warhol's TV and Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes on MTV.
Born Andrew Warhola on August 6, 1928, in the neighborhood of Oakland in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Andy Warhol's parents were Slovakian immigrants. His father, Ondrej Warhola, was a construction worker, while his mother, Julia Warhola, was an embroiderer. They were devout Byzantine Catholics who attended mass regularly, and maintained much of their Slovakian culture and heritage while living in one of Pittsburgh's Eastern European ethnic enclaves.
At the age of eight, Warhol contracted Chorea — also known as St. Vitus's Dance — a rare and sometimes fatal disease of the nervous system that left him bedridden for several months. It was during these months, while Warhol was sick in bed, that his mother, herself a skillful artist, gave him his first drawing lessons. Drawing soon became Warhol's favorite childhood pastime. He was also an avid fan of the movies, and when his mother bought him a camera at the age of nine, he took up photography as well, developing film in a makeshift darkroom he set up in their basement.
Warhol attended Holmes Elementary school and took the free art classes offered at the Carnegie Institute (now the Carnegie Museum of Art) in Pittsburgh. In 1942, at the age of 14, Warhol again suffered a tragedy when his father passed away from a jaundiced liver. Warhol was so upset that he could not attend his father's funeral, and he hid under his bed throughout the wake. Warhol's father had recognized his son's artistic talents, and in his will he dictated that his life savings go toward Warhol's college education. That same year, Warhol began at Schenley High School, and upon graduating, in 1945, he enrolled at the Carnegie Institute for Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) to study pictorial design.
Warhol's enigmatic personal life has been the subject of much debate. He is widely believed to have been a gay man, and his art was often infused with homoerotic imagery and motifs. However, he claimed that he remained a virgin for his entire life.
Warhol's life and work simultaneously satirized and celebrated materiality and celebrity. On the one hand, his paintings of distorted brand images and celebrity faces could be read as a critique of what he viewed as a culture obsessed with money and celebrity. On the other hand, Warhol's focus on consumer goods and pop-culture icons, as well as his own taste for money and fame, suggest a life in celebration of the very aspects of American culture that his work criticized. Warhol spoke to this apparent contradiction between his life and work in his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, writing that "making money is art and working is art, and good business is the best art."
Alina 2018-06-11 14:05:00 painters biographies
Henri Matisse was born December 31, 1869, in Le Cateau in northern France. Over a six-decade career he worked in all media, from painting to sculpture to printmaking. Although his subjects were traditional—nudes, figures in landscapes, portraits, interior views—his revolutionary use of brilliant color and exaggerated form to express emotion made him one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.
Henri Matisse was born on December 31, 1869, and was raised in the small industrial town of Bohain-en-Vermandois in northern France. His family worked in the grain business. As a young man Matisse worked as a legal clerk and then studied for a law degree in Paris in 1887-89. Returning to a position in a law office in the town of Saint-Quentin, he began taking a drawing class in the mornings before he went to work. When he was 21, Matisse began painting while recuperating from an illness, and his vocation as an artist was confirmed.
In 1891 Matisse moved to Paris for artistic training. He took instruction from famous, older artists at well-known schools such as the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts. These schools taught according to the “academic method,” which required working from live models and copying the works of Old Masters, but Matisse was also exposed to the recent Post-Impressionist work of Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh while living in Paris.
Matisse began to show his work in large group exhibitions in Paris in the mid-1890s, including the traditional Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, and his work received some favorable attention. He traveled to London and to Corsica, and in 1898 he married Amélie Parayre, with whom he would have three children.
By the turn of the 20th century, Matisse had come under the more progressive influence of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, who painted in a “Pointillist” style with small dots of color rather than full brushstrokes. He stopped exhibiting at the official Salon and began submitting his art to the more progressive Salon des Indépendants in 1901. In 1904 he had his first one-man exhibition at the gallery of dealer Ambroise Vollard.
Matisse had a major creative breakthrough in the years 1904-05. A visit to Saint-Tropez in southern France inspired him to paint bright, light-dappled canvases such as Luxe, calme et volupté (1904-05), and a summer in the Mediterranean village of Collioure produced his major works Open Window and Woman with a Hat in 1905. He exhibited both paintings in the 1905 Salon d’Automne exhibition in Paris. In a review of the show, a contemporary art critic mentioned the bold, distorted images painted by certain artists he nicknamed “fauves,” or “wild beasts.”
Painting in the style that came to be known as Fauvism, Matisse continued to emphasize the emotional power of sinuous lines, strong brushwork and acid-bright colors in works such as The Joy of Life, a large composition of female nudes in a landscape. Like much of Matisse’s mature work, this scene captured a mood rather than merely trying to depict the world realistically.
In the first decade of the century, Matisse also made sculptures and drawings that were sometimes related to his paintings, always repeating and simplifying his forms to their essence.
After finding his own style, Matisse enjoyed a greater degree of success. He was able to travel to Italy, Germany, Spain and North Africa for inspiration. He bought a large studio in a suburb of Paris and signed a contract with the prestigious art dealers of Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris. His art was purchased by prominent collectors such as Gertrude Stein in Paris and the Russian businessman Sergei I. Shchukin, who commissioned Matisse’s important pair of paintings Dance I and Music in 1909-10.
In his works of the 1910s and 1920s, Matisse continued to delight and surprise his viewers with his signature elements of saturated colors, flattened pictorial space, limited detail and strong outlines. Some works, like Piano Lesson (1916), explored the structures and geometry of Cubism, the movement pioneered by Matisse’s lifelong rival Pablo Picasso. Yet despite his radical approach to color and form, Matisse’s subjects were often traditional: scenes of his own studio (including The Red Studio of 1911), portraits of friends and family, arrangements of figures in rooms or landscapes.
In 1917 Matisse began spending winters on the Mediterranean, and in 1921 he moved to the city of Nice on the French Riviera. From 1918-30, he most frequently painted female nudes in carefully staged settings within his studio, making use of warm lighting and patterned backgrounds. He also worked extensively in printmaking during these years.
The first scholarly book about Matisse was published in 1920, marking his importance in the history of modern art as it was still taking place.
In his later career, Matisse received several major commissions, such as a mural for the art gallery of collector Dr. Albert Barnes of Pennsylvania, titled Dance II, in 1931-33. He also drew book illustrations for a series of limited-edition poetry collections.
After surgery in 1941, Matisse was often bedridden; however, he continued to work from a bed in his studio. When necessary, he would draw with a pencil or charcoal attached to the end of a long pole that enabled him to reach the paper or canvas. His late work was just as experimental and vibrant as his earlier artistic breakthroughs had been. It included his 1947 book Jazz, which placed his own thoughts on life and art side by side with lively images of colored paper cutouts. This project led him to devising works that were cutouts on their own, most notably several series of expressively shaped human figures cut from bright blue paper and pasted to wall-size background sheets (such as Swimming Pool, 1952).
In one of his final projects, Matisse created an entire program of decorations for the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence (1948-51), a town near Nice, designing stained-glass windows, murals, furnishings, and even sacred vestments for the church’s priests.
Matisse died on November 3, 1954, at the age of 84, in Nice. He was buried in nearby Cimiez. He is still regarded as one of the most innovative and influential artists of the 20th century.
Alina 2018-06-10 14:05:00 painters biographies
Vincent Willem van Gogh (March 30, 1853 to July 29, 1890) was a post-impressionist painter whose work, notable for its beauty, emotion and color, highly influenced 20th-century art. He struggled with mental illness, and remained poor and virtually unknown throughout his life. Van Gogh died in France at age 37 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Vincent van Gogh completed more than 2,100 works, consisting of 860 oil paintings and more than 1,300 watercolors, drawings and sketches. Several of his paintings now rank among the most expensive in the world; "Irises" sold for a record $53.9 million, and his "Portrait of Dr. Gachet" sold for $82.5 million. A few of van Gogh’s most well-known artworks include:
Van Gogh painted "The Starry Night" in the asylum where he was staying in Saint-Rémy, France, in 1889, the year before his death. “This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big,” he wrote to his brother Theo. A combination of imagination, memory, emotion and observation, the oil painting on canvas depicts an expressive swirling night sky and a sleeping village, with a large flame-like cypress, thought to represent the bridge between life and death, looming in the foreground. The painting is currently housed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, NY.
Van Gogh painted two series of sunflowers in Arles, France: four between August and September 1888 and one in January 1889; the versions and replicas are debated among art historians. The oil paintings on canvas, which depict wilting yellow sunflowers in a vase, are now displayed at museums in London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Munich and Philadelphia.
Over the course of 10 years, van Gogh created more than 43 self-portraits as both paintings and drawings. "I am looking for a deeper likeness than that obtained by a photographer," he wrote to his sister. "People say, and I am willing to believe it, that it is hard to know yourself. But it is not easy to paint yourself, either. The portraits painted by Rembrandt are more than a view of nature, they are more like a revelation,” he later wrote to his brother. The works are now displayed in museums around the world, including in Washington, D.C., Paris, New York and Amsterdam.
On July 27, 1890, Vincent van Gogh went out to paint in the morning carrying a loaded pistol and shot himself in the chest, but the bullet did not kill him. He was found bleeding in his room. Van Gogh was distraught about his future because, in May of that year, his brother Theo had visited and spoke to him about needing to be stricter with his finances. Van Gogh took that to mean Theo was no longer interested in selling his art.
Van Gogh was taken to a nearby hospital and his doctors sent for Theo, who arrived to find his brother sitting up in bed and smoking a pipe. They spent the next couple of days talking together, and then van Gogh asked Theo to take him home. On July 29, 1890, Vincent van Gogh died in the arms of his brother. He was 37 years old.
Vincent van Gogh was born Vincent Willem van Gogh on March 30, 1853, in Groot-Zundert, Netherlands.
Vincent van Gogh’s father, Theodorus van Gogh, was an austere country minister, and his mother, Anna Cornelia Carbentus, was a moody artist whose love of nature, drawing and watercolors was transferred to her son. Van Gogh was born exactly one year after his parents' first son, also named Vincent, was stillborn. At a young age — his name and birthdate already etched on his dead brother's headstone — van Gogh was melancholy. The eldest of six living children, van Gogh had two younger brothers (Theo, who worked as an art dealer and supported his older brother’s art, and Cor) and three younger sisters (Anna, Elizabeth and Willemien).
At age 15, van Gogh's family was struggling financially, and he was forced to leave school and go to work. He got a job at his Uncle Cornelis' art dealership, Goupil & Cie., a firm of art dealers in The Hague. By this time, van Gogh was fluent in French, German and English, as well as his native Dutch.
In June of 1873, van Gogh was transferred to the Groupil Gallery in London. There, he fell in love with English culture. He visited art galleries in his spare time, and also became a fan of the writings of Charles Dickens and George Eliot. He also fell in love with his landlady's daughter, Eugenie Loyer. When she rejected his marriage proposal, van Gogh suffered a breakdown. He threw away all his books except for the Bible, and devoted his life to God. He became angry with people at work, telling customers not to buy the "worthless art," and was eventually fired.
Van Gogh then taught in a Methodist boys' school, and also preached to the congregation. Although raised in a religious family, it wasn't until this time that he seriously began to consider devoting his life to the church. Hoping to become a minister, he prepared to take the entrance exam to the School of Theology in Amsterdam. After a year of studying diligently, he refused to take the Latin exams, calling Latin a "dead language" of poor people, and was subsequently denied entrance.
The same thing happened at the Church of Belgium: In the winter of 1878, van Gogh volunteered to move to an impoverished coal mine in the south of Belgium, a place where preachers were usually sent as punishment. He preached and ministered to the sick, and also drew pictures of the miners and their families, who called him "Christ of the Coal Mines." The evangelical committees were not as pleased. They disagreed with van Gogh's lifestyle, which had begun to take on a tone of martyrdom. They refused to renew van Gogh's contract, and he was forced to find another occupation.
Van Gogh had a catastrophic love life. He was attracted to women in trouble, thinking he could help them. When he fell in love with his recently widowed cousin, Kate, she was repulsed and fled to her home in Amsterdam. Van Gogh then moved to The Hague and fell in love with Clasina Maria Hoornik, an alcoholic prostitute. She became his companion, mistress and model.
When Hoornik went back to prostitution, van Gogh became utterly depressed. In 1882, his family threatened to cut off his money unless he left Hoornik and The Hague. Van Gogh left in mid-September of that year to travel to Drenthe, a somewhat desolate district in the Netherlands. For the next six weeks, he lived a nomadic life, moving throughout the region while drawing and painting the landscape and its people.
In the fall of 1880, van Gogh decided to move to Brussels and become an artist. Though he had no formal art training, his brother Theo offered to support van Gogh financially. He began taking lessons on his own, studying books like Travaux des champs by Jean-François Millet and Cours de dessin by Charles Bargue.
Van Gogh's art helped him stay emotionally balanced. In 1885, he began work on what is considered to be his first masterpiece, "Potato Eaters." His brother, Theo, by this time living in Paris, believed the painting would not be well-received in the French capital, where impressionism had become the trend. Nevertheless, van Gogh decided to move to Paris, and showed up at Theo's house uninvited. In March 1886, Theo welcomed his brother into his small apartment.
In Paris, van Gogh first saw impressionist art, and he was inspired by the color and light. He began studying with Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Camille Pissarro and others. To save money, he and his friends posed for each other instead of hiring models. Van Gogh was passionate, and he argued with other painters about their works, alienating those who became tired of his bickering.
Van Gogh became influenced by Japanese art and began studying eastern philosophy to enhance his art and life. He dreamed of traveling there, but was told by Toulouse-Lautrec that the light in the village of Arles was just like the light in Japan. In February 1888, van Gogh boarded a train to the south of France. He moved into the "yellow house" and spent his money on paint rather than food.
In December 1888, van Gogh was living on coffee, bread and absinthe in Arles, France, and he found himself feeling sick and strange. Before long, it became apparent that in addition to suffering from physical illness, his psychological health was declining. Around this time, he is known to have sipped on turpentine and eaten paint.
His brother Theo was worried, and he offered Paul Gauguin money to go watch over Vincent in Arles. Within a month, van Gogh and Gauguin were arguing constantly, and one night, Gauguin walked out. Van Gogh followed him, and when Gauguin turned around, he saw van Gogh holding a razor in his hand. Hours later, van Gogh went to the local brothel and paid for a prostitute named Rachel. With blood pouring from his hand, he offered her his ear, asking her to "keep this object carefully."
The police found van Gogh in his room the next morning, and admitted him to the Hôtel-Dieu hospital. Theo arrived on Christmas Day to see van Gogh, who was weak from blood loss and having violent seizures. The doctors assured Theo that his brother would live and would be taken good care of, and on January 7, 1889, van Gogh was released from the hospital. He was alone and depressed. For hope, he turned to painting and nature, but could not find peace and was hospitalized again. He would paint at the yellow house during the day and return to the hospital at night.
Van Gogh decided to move to the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence after the people of Arles signed a petition saying that he was dangerous. On May 8, 1889, he began painting in the hospital gardens. In November 1889, he was invited to exhibit his paintings in Brussels. He sent six paintings, including "Irises" and "Starry Night."
On January 31, 1890, Theo and his wife, Johanna, gave birth to a boy and named him after van Gogh. Around this time, Theo sold van Gogh's "The Red Vineyards" painting for 400 francs. Also around this time, Dr. Paul Gachet, who lived in Auvers, about 20 miles north of Paris, agreed to take van Gogh as his patient. Van Gogh moved to Auvers and rented a room. In July of that year, Vincent van Gogh committed suicide.
Theo, who was suffering from syphilis and weakened by his brother's death, died six months after his brother in a Dutch asylum. He was buried in Utrecht, but in 1914 Theo's wife, Johanna, who was a dedicated supporter of van Gogh's works, had Theo's body reburied in the Auvers cemetery next to Vincent.
Theo's wife Johanna then collected as many of van Gogh's paintings as she could, but discovered that many had been destroyed or lost, van Gogh's own mother having thrown away crates full of his art. On March 17, 1901, 71 of van Gogh's paintings were displayed at a show in Paris, and his fame subsequently grew enormously. His mother lived long enough to see her son hailed as an artist and a genius. Today, Vincent van Gogh is considered the greatest Dutch painter after Rembrandt.
In 1973, the Van Gogh Museum opened its doors in Amsterdam to make the works of Vincent van Gogh accessible to the public. The museum houses more than 200 van Gogh paintings, 500 drawings and 750 written documents including letters to Vincent’s brother Theo. It features self-portraits, “The Potato Eaters,” “The Bedroom” and “Sunflowers.”
In September 2013, the museum discovered and unveiled a van Gogh painting of a landscape entitled "Sunset at Montmajour.” Before coming under the possession of the Van Gogh Museum, a Norwegian industrialist owned the painting and stored it away in his attic, having thought that it wasn't authentic. The painting is believed to have been created by van Gogh in 1888 — around the same time that his artwork "Sunflowers" was made — just two years before his death.
