Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Van Gogh painted these during his stay in southern France, a time of frenzied creativ-
ity, when he hovered between despair and delight, bliss and madness. A year later, he shot
himself.
In his day, Van Gogh was a penniless nobody, selling only one painting in his whole
career. In 1987, a different
Sunflowers
painting (he did a half-dozen versions) sold for $40
million (a salary of about $2,500 a day for 45 years), and that's not even his highest-priced
painting. Hmm.
Cézanne—
Bathers
(c. 1894-1905)
These bathers are arranged in strict triangles à la Leonardo—the five nudes on the left form
one triangle, the seated nude on the right forms another, and even the background trees and
clouds are triangular patterns of paint.
Cézanne uses the Impressionist technique of building a figure with dabs of paint
(though his “dabs” are often larger-sized “cube” shapes) to make solid, 3-D geometrical
figures in the style of the Renaissance. In the process, his cube shapes helped inspire a
radical new style—Cubism—bringing art into the 20th century.
