Monday, January 10, 2011

Impressionists: Part 2

This weekend I saw the second half of the Impressionist’s exhibit at the De Young Museum in San Francisco. I like the first half I saw a couple months back, but the second part was easily a hundred times better. I got up close and personal with greats like Van Gogh, Cezanne, Gauguin, Rousseau, and many more.


I definitely loved the “Tahitian Girls” by Gauguin, as well as “The Snake Charmer” by Rousseau. But I also found the personal lives of the artists equally intriguing, such as the fact that Van Gogh only painted professionally for a period of 10 years, and how Cezanne struggled as a relative unknown for most of his lifetime. The human element really helped bring these pieces of artwork to life.

As a would-be writer I find such pieces of art inspiring and the lives of the artists themselves equally fascinating, not so much for their successes and failures, but for their struggles and everyday lives. It’s easy to imaging painters living in an artist’s colony somewhere, but when you realize they too had day jobs and families and other responsibilities in their lives it gives you a new found respect for them and their work. If you haven’t had a chance, checkout some of these impressive exhibits in San Francisco, or simply look them up online to learn a little more about the painters themselves.

3 comments:

  1. I love Van Gough's work, there is so much emotion and vitality in it. You can almost see his nerosis', depression and insanity growing in his art as he gets toward the end of his career (and life). Very intense.

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  2. Guess what. Speaking of researching painters lives...

    As I postulated, Toulouse Lautrec did in fact die of syphilis (age 36)! He was also uncommonly short, suffered from congenital health problems that resulted from inbreeding, and was a dirty perv.

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  3. Leia - funny I thought the opposite, that the last works of Van Gogh were very bright and cheery for a guy contemplating suicide.

    Stacy - Interesting info on Lautrec. Your scientific and unbiased analysis really speaks to me ;)

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