The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. (William Faulkner)
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgianorigin
in poetry and other arts. Symbolism in painting took its direction from
the poets and literary theorists of the movement, but it also represented a
reaction against the objectivist aims of Realism and the increasingly
influential movement of Impressionism. In contrast to the
relatively concrete representation these movements sought, Symbolist painters
favoured works based on fantasy and the imagination. Moreover, Symbolism can be seen as a revival of
some mystical tendencies in the Romantic tradition, and was close to the
self-consciously morbid and private decadent movement.
Paul Gauguin“Riders on the Beach”, (1902)
The symbolist painters used mythological and dream
imagery. The symbols used by
symbolism are not the familiar emblems of mainstream iconography but
intensely personal, private, obscure and ambiguous references. More a
philosophy than an actual style of art, symbolism in painting influenced the
contemporary Art Nouveau style and Les Nabis.
Mikhail Nesterov (May 31 [O.S. May 19] 1862, Ufa –
18 October 1942, Moscow) was a major representative of
religious Symbolism in Russian art. He
was a pupil of Pavel Tchistyakov at the Imperial Academy of
Arts, but later allied himself with the group of artists known as
the Peredvizhniki. His canvas The Vision of the Youth Bartholomew (1890–91),
depicting the conversion of medieval Russian saint Sergii Radonezhsky, is
often considered to be the earliest example of the Russian Symbolist style.
From 1890 to 1910,
Nesterov lived in Kiev and St Petersburg, working
on frescoes in St. Vladimir's Cathedral and the Church
on Spilt Blood, respectively. After 1910, he spent the remainder of his life
in Moscow, working in the Marfo-Mariinsky Convent. As a
devout Orthodox Christian, he did not accept the Bolshevik
Revolution but remained in Russia until his death, painting the portraits
of Ivan Ilyin, Ivan Pavlov, Ksenia Derzhinskaia, Otto Schmidt,
and Vera Mukhina, among others.
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel ( March 17, 1856 – April 14, 1910, all n.s.) is usually regarded amongst the Russian painters of the Symbolist movement. In reality, he deliberately stood aloof from contemporary art trends, so that the origin of his unusual manner should be sought in Late Byzantine and Early Renaissance painting.
Vrubel was born in Omsk, Russia, into a military lawyer's family. His father was of Polish ancestry (Polish: Wróbel), while his mother who was Danish died when he was three years old. And though he graduated from the Faculty of Law at St Petersburg University in 1880, his father had recognized his talent for art and had made sure to provide, through numerous tutors, what proved to be a sporadic education in the subject. The next year he entered the Imperial Academy of Arts, where he studied by direction of Pavel Chistyakov. Even in his earliest works, he exhibited great talent for drawing and an idiosyncratic style. He would later develop a penchant for fragmentary composition and an "unfinished touch".
In 1884, he was summoned to replace the lost 12th-century murals and mosaics in the St. Cyril's Church of Kiev with new ones. In order to execute this commission, he went to Venice to study medieval Christian art. It was here that, in the words of an art historian, "his palette acquired new strong saturated tones resembling the iridescent play of precious stones". Most of his works painted in Venice have been lost, because the artist was more interested in creative process than in promoting his artwork.
In 1886, he returned to Kiev, where he submitted some designs to the newly-built St Volodymir Cathedral. The jury, however, failed to appreciate the novelty of his works, and they were rejected. At that period, he executed some illustrations for Hamlet and Anna Karenina which had little in common with his later Demon and Prophet themes.
In 1905 he created the mosaics of the hotel "Metropol" in Moscow, of which the centre piece of the facade overlooking Teatralnaya Ploschad is occupied by the mosaic panel, 'Princess Gryoza' (Princess of Dream).
While in Kiev, Vrubel started painting sketches and watercolours illustrating the Demon, a long Romantic poem by Mikhail Lermontov. The poem described the carnal passion of "an eternal nihilistic spirit" to a Georgian girl Tamara. At that period Vrubel developed a keen interest in Oriental arts, and particularly Persian carpets, and even attempted to imitate their texture in his paintings.
In 1890, Vrubel relocated to Moscow where he could best follow the burgeoning innovations and trends in art. Like other artists associated with the Art Nouveau style, he excelled not only in painting but also in applied arts, such as ceramics, majolics, and stained glass. He also produced architectural masks, stage sets, and costumes.
It is the large painting of Seated Demon (1890) that brought notoriety to Vrubel. Most conservative critics accused him of "wild ugliness", whereas the art patron Savva Mamontov praised the Demon series as "fascinating symphonies of a genius" and commissioned Vrubel to paint decorations for his private opera and mansions of his friends. Unfortunately the Demon, like other Vrubel's works, doesn't look as it did when it was painted, as the artist added bronze powder to his oils in order to achieve particularly luminous, glistening effects.
During 1896, he met the famous opera singer Nadezhda Zabela. Half a year later they married and settled in Moscow, where Zabela was invited by Mamontov to perform in his private opera theatre. While in Moscow, Vrubel designed stage sets and costumes for his wife, who sang the parts of the Snow Maiden, the Swan Princess, and Princess Volkhova in Rimsky-Korsakov's operas. Using Russian fairy tales, he executed some of his most acclaimed pieces, including Pan (1899), The Swan Princess (1900), and Lilacs (1900).
In 1901, Vrubel returned to the demonic themes in the large canvas Demon Downcast. In order to astound the public with a spiritual message, he repeatedly repainted the demon's ominous face, even after the painting had been exhibited to the overwhelmed audience. At the end he had a severe nervous breakdown and was hospitalized in a mental clinic. Vrubel's mental illness was initiated or complicated by tertiary syphilis.While there, he painted a mystical Pearl Oyster (1904) and variations on the themes of Alexander Pushkin's poem The Prophet. In 1906, overpowered by mental disease and approaching blindness, he ceased painting. Vrubel died on April 14, 1910.
A size of the picture is 100x130 cm, so it looks very impressive. This picture is an allegory of the death of the Artist's wife. This fact is displayed very vividly in the picture. Viewers can see the artist's pain and torment through composition, colours and subject matter's image. The subject of the painting is the oak riven by lightning. It is depicted very expressively, a violent storm bends its firm branches and the lighting breaks its trunk in half. Dark and cold colours predominate here: dark oak, grey waves breaking on the black rocks and a lavish use of black, grey and brown in the background. The only bright line dividing the picture space nearly diagonally is the lighting. It personifies a sudden and dazzle blow for the artist. This is his wife's death. Speaking about composition, it is slightly asymmetrical. The oak is placed in the right side, and the left side represents a solid black area of storm. In the lower right-hahd conner a viewer can see rocks and waves. The whole picture creates a very depressing and oppressive impression. Looking at the picture we can feel that artist was hard hit and his statement of deep depression.
Impressionism can be considered the first distinctly modern movement in painting. Developing in Paris in the 1860s, its influence spread throughout Europe and eventually the United States. Its originators were artists who rejected the official, government-sanctioned exhibitions, or salons, and were consequently shunned by powerful academic art institutions. In turning away from the fine finish and detail to which most artists of their day aspired, the Impressionists aimed to capture the momentary, sensory effect of a scene - the impression objects made on the eye in a fleeting instant. To achieve this effect, many Impressionist artists moved from the studio to the streets and countryside, painting en plein air.
Key Ideas Impressionism was a style of representational art that did not necessarily rely on realistic depictions. Scientific thought at the time was beginning to recognize that what the eye perceived and what the brain understood were two different things. The Impressionists sought to capture the former - the optical effects of light - to convey the passage of time, changes in weather, and other shifts in the atmosphere in their canvases. The Impressionists loosened their brushwork and lightened their palettes to include pure, intense colors. They abandoned traditional linear perspective and avoided the clarity of form that had previously served to distinguish the more important elements of a picture from the lesser ones. For this reason, many critics faulted Impressionist paintings for their unfinished appearance and seemingly amateurish quality. Impressionism records the effects of the massive mid-nineteenth-century renovation of Paris led by civic planner Georges-Eugène Haussmann, which included the city's newly constructed railway stations; wide, tree-lined boulevards that replaced the formerly narrow, crowded streets; and large, deluxe apartment buildings. Often focusing on scenes of public leisure - especially scenes of cafes and cabarets - the Impressionists conveyed the new sense of alienation experienced by the inhabitants of the first modern metropolis.
John Constable was born on the 11th of June in 1776.
He was an English Romantic painter. His mother town is Suffolk.Although he is known primarily as a landscape
painter, Constable was quite accomplished as a portrait artist as well. John Constable died on the 31st of March in 1837.
"I should paint my own places best", he wrote to his friend John Fisher in 1821, "painting is but another word for feeling".
Constable quietly rebelled against the artistic culture that taught artists to use their imagination to compose their pictures rather than nature itself. Although Constable produced paintings throughout his life for the "finished" picture market of patrons and R.A. exhibitions, constant refreshment in the form of on-the-spot studies was essential to his working method. He was never satisfied with following a formula. "The world is wide", he wrote, "no two days are alike, nor even two hours; neither were there ever two leaves of a tree alike since the creation of all the world; and the genuine productions of art, like those of nature, are all distinct from each other."
Constable painted many full-scale preliminary sketches of his landscapes in order to test the composition in advance of finished pictures. These large sketches, with their free and vigorous brushwork, were revolutionary at the time, and they continue to interest artists, scholars and the general public.
Constable's watercolours were also remarkably free for their time: the almost mystical Stonehenge, 1835, with its double rainbow, is often considered to be one of the greatest watercolours ever painted. When he exhibited it in 1836, Constable appended a text to the title: "The mysterious monument of Stonehenge, standing remote on a bare and boundless heath, as much unconnected with the events of past ages as it is with the uses of the present, carries you back beyond all historical records into the obscurity of a totally unknown period."
In addition to the full-scale oil sketches, Constable completed numerous observational studies of landscapes and clouds, determined to become more scientific in his recording of atmospheric conditions. The power of his physical effects was sometimes apparent even in the full-scale paintings which he exhibited in London.
To the sky studies he added notes, often on the back of the sketches, of the prevailing weather conditions, direction of light, and time of day, believing that the sky was "the key note, the standard of scale, and the chief organ of sentiment" in a landscape painting.
Constable's best artworks:
Wivenhoe-Park, Essex (1816)
His Wife Maria Bicknell (1816) The Hay Wain (1821)
The painter John Constable was born on June 11, 1776 in East Bergholt,
Suffolk. Until 1799 he worked in the shop of his father, Golding
Constable, but then entered the Royal Academy in London, where he became
a student of Joseph Farington. He was strongly influenced by Jacob van
Ruisdael and Claude Lorrain, before he found his own style of painting,
based on the immediate observation of nature.
In spite of his
studies at the academy, John Constable largely remained self-taught. In
1802 Constable had his first exhibition in London. That same year, he
bought a studio in his home town. In 1809 he met his future wife, Maria
Bricknell, the daughter of a civil servant. In 1816, one year after his
mother's death, Constable married Maria Bricknell, with whom he had 7
children. John Constable was particularly interested in landscape
paintings, in which he tried to capture the phenomena and the
variability of nature.
Initially, John Constable's paintings only
seemed to meet with little interest in England. After he had
participated in the Paris Salon, however, they became very successful in
France. Constable's picture "The Hay Wain", which was shown at the
Paris Salon, for example, influenced Delacroix's palette.
With an
animated brush stroke and spatula, John Constable tried to capture the
atmosphere of the moment, thereby anticipating the Impressionists'
interpretation of nature. In 1824 John Constable even received a gold
medal from the French king. Among his most important works are "Malvern
Hall" (1809) and "The Cornfield" (1826). Constable's series of
watercolors are also very famous.
John Constable is regarded as the
most important English landscape painter of the 19th century, at a par
with William Turner. On November 23, 1828, Maria died from tuberculosis
at the age of 41.
John Constable died unexpectedly in the night of March 31, 1837
A portrait of Maria Bicknell
painted in 1816 by John Constable
Constable Country is a small
area along the valley of the river Stour consisting of East Bergholt, Flatford
and Stratford St Mary on the Suffolk side and Dedham and Langham on the Essex
side. Throughout his life Constable kept returning to scenes he loved around
this small area. To this day much of the countryside would easily be recognised
by Constable, and at Flatford, (now owned by the National Trust), the sites of
seven of his major paintings can be located with precision. One problem with
seeing the views is that there are far more trees today than there were 200
years ago!
Constable painted a number
of pictures from the top of the hill by Langham Church, usually looking along
the Stour Valley. Some of these paintings
are:
Painted in about 1800 this shows the view towards Stratford St Mary
This was called The Glebe Farm and was painted in 1830
The Vale of
Dedham, 1828, shows Dedham Church in the middle distance and Harwich in the far
distance
In
many of Constable’s paintings barges appear on the river and they were a major
feature of the river 200 years ago. Following an Act of Parliament in 1705 the
Stour had been made navigable from the coast, at Manningtree, up to Sudbury.
The main purpose of the barge traffic was to take coal up to Sudbury returning
with bricks and agricultural produce from the mills. The Stour Navigation was
very successful during the late 18th century and early 19th century but after
the coming of the railways it declined although it did continue until the first
World War. The picture above is a good example of the Constable's attention to
detail and his very accurate presentation of trees, sky and the posture of the
people.
