This is the same study guide that you have in your Course Packet.
Van Gogh |
Gauguin |
Seurat |
Cézanne | |
Subjects: |
Landscapes, still lifes (sunflowers, irises), interiors, portraits, self-portraits. | Landscapes and people in Brittany and later Tahiti, self-portraits, religious scenes, symbolic elements. | Park settings, circus, dance halls, bathers. | Still lifes, Mont. St.-Victoire, landscapes, bathers. |
Style: |
Dynamic, agitated, swirling brushstrokes. Bright, sometimes arbitrary color; used color to express certain moods or feelings (ex.: blue = spirituality). | Rich, sometimes arbitrary color, dark flowing outlines. | Pointillism technique (small dots of pure color), repetitive forms (verticals, horizontals, up-turned lines), very organized and studied compositions. | Short, controlled brushstrokes reveal his belief that everything in nature was based on geometric shapes; simplified forms, contours outlined; composition broken-up into wedges of color. |
Quote: |
"Instead of trying to render what I see before me, I use color in a completely arbitrary way in order to express myself powerfully." | "A meter of green is greener than a centimeter if you wish to express greeness....How does that tree look to you? Green? All right then, use green, the greenest on your palette. And that shadow, a little bluish? Don't be afraid. Paint it as blue as you can." | "If, with the experience of art, I have been able to find scientifically the law of pictorial color, can I not discover an equally logical, scientific and pictorial system to compose harmoniously the lines of a picture just as I can compose its colors?" | "Treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything in proper perspective so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point." |