4. Vincent Willem van Gogh
30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890.
was a Dutch Post-Impressionist
painter who is among the most
famous and influential figures in
the history of Western art. In just
over a decade he created
approximately 2100 artworks,
including around 860 oil paintings,
most of them in the last two years
of his life. They include
landscapes, still lifes, portraits
and self-portraits, and are
characterised by bold, symbolic
colours, and dramatic, impulsive
and highly expressive brushwork
that contributed to
the foundations of modern art. He
sold only one painting during his
lifetime and became famous after
his suicide, aged 37, which f
ollowed years of poverty and
mental illness.
Born into an upper-middle-class
family, Van Gogh drew as a child
and was serious, quiet and
thoughtful, but showed signs of
mental instability. As a young man
he worked as an art dealer, often
travelling, but became depressed
after he was transferred to London.
He turned to religion, and spent
time as a missionary in southern
Belgium. Later he drifted in ill-
health and solitude. He was keenly
aware of modernist trends in art
and, while back with his parents,
took up painting in 1881. His
younger brother, Theo, supported
him financially, and the two of
them kept up a long
correspondence by letter.
Van Gogh's early works, mostly still
lifes and depictions of peasant
labourers, contain few signs of the
vivid colour that distinguished his
later work. In 1886 he moved to
Paris and discovered the French
Impressionists. As his work
developed he created a new
approach to still lifes and local
landscapes. His paintings grew
brighter in colour as he developed
a style that became fully realised
during his stay in Arles in the south
of France in 1888. He lived there in
the Yellow House and, with the
French artist Paul Gauguin,
developed a concept of colour that
symbolised inner emotion. During
this period he broadened his
subject matter to include olive
trees, cypresses, wheat fields and
sunflowers.
5. Van Gogh suffered from psychotic
episodes and delusions and,
though he worried about his
mental stability, he often
neglected his physical health, not
eating properly and drinking
heavily. His friendship with
Gauguin came to an end after a
violent encounter when he
threatened the Frenchman with a
razor, and in a rage, cut off part of
his own left ear. While in a
psychiatric hospital in Saint-Rémy
his condition stabilised, leading to
one of the more productive
periods of his life. He moved to the
Auberge Ravoux in
Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris under
the care of the
homeopathic doctor and artist,
Paul Gachet. During this time, his
brother Theo wrote that he could
no longer support him financially.
A few weeks later, on 27 July 1890,
Van Gogh shot himself in the chest
with a revolver. He died from his
injuries two days later.
Considered a madman and a
failure in his lifetime, Van Gogh
exists in the public imagination as
the quintessential misunderstood
genius, the artist
"where discourses on madness and
creativity
converge." His reputation began to
grow in the early 20th century as
elements of his painting style came
to be incorporated by the Fauves
and German Expressionists. He
attained widespread critical,
commercial and popular success
over the ensuing decades, and is
remembered as an important but
tragic painter, whose troubled
personality typifies the romantic
ideal of the tortured artist
Early years
Vincent Willem van Gogh was born
on 30 March 1853 in Groot-
Zundert, in the predominantly
Catholic province of North Brabant
in the southern Netherlands.He
was the oldest surviving child of
Theodorus van Gogh, a minister of
the Dutch Reformed Church, and
Anna Cornelia Carbentus. Van Gogh
was given the name of his
grandfather, and of a brother
stillborn exactly a year before his
birth.[note 2] Vincent was a
common name in the Van Gogh
family: his grandfather, Vincent
(1789–1874), who received a
degree in theology at the University
of Leiden in 1811, had six sons,
6.
7. three of whom became
art dealers. This Vincent may have
been
named after his own great-uncle,
a sculptor (1729–1802).
Van Gogh's mother came from a
prosperous family in The Hague,
and his father was the youngest
son of a minister.The two met
when Anna's younger sister,
Cornelia, married Theodorus's
older
brother Vincent (Cent).
Van Gogh's parents married in
May 1851 and moved to
Zundert.His brother
Theo was born on 1 May 1857.
There was another brother, Cor,
and three sisters: Elisabeth, Anna,
and Willemina (known as "Wil").
In later life Van Gogh remained in
touch only with Willemina and
Theo.Van Gogh's mother
was a rigid and religious woman
who emphasised the
importance of family to the
point of claustrophobia for those
around her. Theodorus's salary
was modest, but the Church
supplied the family with a
house, a maid, two cooks, a
gardener, a carriage and horse,
and Anna instilled in the
children a duty to uphold the
family's high social position.
Black-and-white formal head shot
photo of the artist as a boy in jacket
and tie. He has thick curly hair and
very pale-coloured eyes with a
wary, uneasy expression.
Vincent c. 1866, about 13 years old
Van Gogh was a serious and
thoughtful child. He was taught at
home by his mother and a
governess, and in 1860 was sent to
the village school. In 1864 he was
placed in a boarding school at
Zevenbergen, where he felt
abandoned, and campaigned to
come home. Instead, in 1866 his
parents sent him to the middle
school in Tilburg, where he was
deeply unhappy.His interest in art
began at a young age; encouraged
to draw as a child by his mother,his
early drawings are expressive, but
do not approach the intensity
developed in his later
work.Constantijn C. Huysmans, who
had been a successful artist in Paris,
taught the students at Tilburg. His
philosophy was to reject technique
in favour of capturing the
impressions of things, particularly
nature or common objects.
8. Van Gogh's profound
unhappiness seems to have
overshadowed the lessons, which
had little effect.In March 1868, he
abruptly returned home. Later he
wrote that his youth was "austere
and cold, and sterile."
In July 1869 Van Gogh's uncle
Cent obtained a position
for him at the
art dealers Goupil & Cie in The
Hague.After completing
his training in 1873, he was
transferred to Goupil's London
branch, at 17 Southampton
Street, and took lodgings at 87
Hackford Road, Stockwell.
This was a happy time for Van
Gogh; he was successful at work,
and at 20 was earning more than
his father. Theo's wife later
remarked that this was the best
year of his life. He became
infatuated with his landlady's
daughter,
Eugénie Loyer, but was rejected
after confessing his feelings; she
was secretly engaged to a former
lodger. He grew more isolated,
and religiously fervent. His father
and uncle arranged a transfer to
Paris in 1875, where he became
resentful of issues such as the
degree to which the firm
commodified art, and was
dismissed a year later.
In April 1876 Van Gogh returned to
England, taking unpaid work as a
supply teacher in a small boarding
school in Ramsgate. When the
proprietor moved to Isleworth in
Middlesex, Van Gogh went with
him. The arrangement did not work
out and he left to become a
Methodist minister's assistant.His
parents had meanwhile moved to
Etten; in 1876 he returned home at
Christmas for six months and took
work at a bookshop in Dordrecht.
He was unhappy in the position and
spent his time doodling or
translating passages from the Bible
into English, French and German.
He immersed himself in religion,
and became increasingly pious and
monastic.According to his flat-mate
of the time, Paulus van Görlitz, Van
Gogh ate frugally, avoiding meat.
Photo of a two-storey brick house
on the left partially obscured by
trees with a front lawn and with a
row of trees on the right
9. Van Gogh's home in Cuesmes in
1880; while there he decided to
become an artist
To support Van Gogh's religious
convictions and his desire to
become a pastor, in 1877 the
family sent him to stay with his
uncle Johannes Stricker, a
respected theologian, in
Amsterdam.Van Gogh prepared
for the University of Amsterdam
theology entrance examination;
he failed the exam, and left his
uncle's house in July 1878. He
undertook, but also failed, a three-
month course at a Protestant
missionary school in Laken, near
Brussels.
In January 1879 Van Gogh took a
post as a missionary at Petit-
Wasmes in the coal-mining
district of Borinage in Belgium.
To show support for his
impoverished congregation, he
gave up his comfortable
lodgings at a bakery to a
homeless person, and moved
to a small hut where he slept on
straw.His squalid living conditions
did not endear him to church
authorities, who dismissed him
for "undermining the dignity of
the priesthood". He then walked
the 75 kilometres (47 mi) to
Brussels, returned briefly to
Cuesmes in the Borinage, but gave
in to pressure from his parents to
return home to Etten. He stayed
there until around March
1880,which caused concern and
frustration for his parents. There
was particular conflict between Van
Gogh and his father, who
considered committing him to the
lunatic asylum at Geel.
Returning to Cuesmes in August
1880, Van Gogh lodged with a
miner until October.He became
interested in the people and scenes
around him, and recorded them in
drawings after Theo's suggestion
that he take up art in earnest. He
travelled to Brussels later in the
year, to follow Theo's
recommendation that he study
with the Dutch artist Willem
Roelofs, who persuaded him – in
spite of his dislike of formal schools
of art – to attend the Académie
Royale des Beaux-Arts. He
registered at the Académie in
November 1880, where he studied
anatomy and the standard rules of
modelling and perspective
10.
11. Artistic development
A view of a dark starry night with
bright stars shining over the River
Rhone. Across the river distant
buildings with bright lights shining
are reflected into the dark waters
of the Rhone.
Starry Night Over the Rhone,
1888. Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Van Gogh drew and painted with
watercolours while at school, but
only a few examples survive and
the authorship of some has been
challenged.When he took up art
as an adult, he began at an
elementary level. In early 1882,
his uncle, Cornelis Marinus,
owner of a well-known gallery of
contemporary art in Amsterdam,
asked for drawings of The Hague.
Van Gogh's work did not live up to
expectations. Marinus offered a
second commission, specifying the
subject matter in detail, but was
again disappointed with the result.
Van Gogh persevered; he
experimented with lighting in his
studio using variable shutters,
and with different drawing
materials. For more than a year he
worked
on single figures – highly elaborate
studies in black and white,
which at the time gained him only
criticism.
Later, they were recognised as his
first masterpieces.
In August 1882 Theo gave Vincent
money to buy materials for working
en plein air. Vincent wrote that he
could now "go on painting with
new vigour".From early 1883 he
worked on multi-figure
compositions. He had some of
them photographed, but when his
brother remarked that they lacked
liveliness and freshness, he
destroyed them and turned to oil
painting. Van Gogh turned to well-
known Hague School artists like
Weissenbruch and Blommers, and
received technical advice from
them, as well as from painters like
De Bock and Van der Weele, both
artists of the Hague School's
second generation.When he moved
to Nuenen after the period in
Drenthe he began several large
paintings but destroyed most of
them. The Potato Eaters and its
companion pieces are the only
ones to have survived. Following a
visit to the Rijksmuseum, Van Gogh
was aware that many of his faults
were due to lack of experience and
technical expertise,
12. so in November 1885
he travelled to Antwerp and later
Paris to learn and develop his
skills.
A squarish painting of green
winding olive trees; with rolling
blue hills in the background and
white clouds in the
blue sky above.
Olive Trees with the Alpilles in the
Background, 1889. Museum of
Modern Art, New York
Theo criticised The Potato Eaters
for its dark palette, which he
thought unsuitable for a modern
style.During Van Gogh's stay in
Paris between 1886 and 1887, he
tried to master a new, lighter
palette. His Portrait
of Père Tanguy (1887) shows his
success with the brighter palette,
and is evidence of an evolving
personal style. Charles Blanc's
treatise on colour interested him
greatly, and led him to work with
complementary colours.
Van Gogh came to believe
that the effect of colour went
beyond the descriptive;
he said that "colour expresses
something in itself". According to
Hughes,
Van Gogh perceived colour as
having a "psychological and moral
weight", as exemplified in the
garish reds and greens of The Night
Cafe, a work he wanted to "express
the terrible passions of
humanity".Yellow meant the most
to him, because it symbolised
emotional truth. He used yellow as
a symbol for sunlight, life, and God.
Throughout his career Van Gogh
strove to be a painter of rural life
and nature,and during his first
summer in Arles he used his new
palette to paint landscapes and
traditional rural life.His belief that a
power existed behind the natural
led him to try to capture a sense of
that power, or the essence of
nature in his art, sometimes
through the use of symbols.His
renditions of the sower, at first
copied from Jean-François Millet,
reflect Van Gogh's religious beliefs:
the sower as Christ sowing life
beneath the hot sun. These were
themes and motifs he returned to
often to rework and develop
13. His paintings of flowers are filled
with symbolism, but rather than
use traditional Christian
iconography he made up his own,
where life is lived under the sun
and work is an allegory of life.In
Arles, having gained confidence
after painting spring blossoms
and learning to capture bright
sunlight, he was ready to paint
The Sower.The juxtaposition of
saturated complementary colours
and the single figure in the
landscape represent a unique and
innovative style.
A squarish painting of a closeup
of two women with one
holding an umbrella while the
other woman holds flowers.
Behind them is a young woman
who is picking flowers in a large
bed of wildflowers. They appear
to be walking through a garden on
a winding path at the edge of a
river. Memory of the Garden at
Etten (Ladies of Arles), 1888.
Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg
Van Gogh stayed within what he
called the "guise of reality", and
was critical of overly stylised
works. He wrote afterwards that
the abstraction of Starry Night had
gone too far and that reality
had "receded too far in the
background".Hughes describes it as
a moment of extreme visionary
ecstasy: the stars are in a great
whirl, reminiscent of Hokusai's
Great Wave, the movement in the
heaven above is reflected by the
movement of the cypress on the
earth below, and the painter's
vision is "translated into a thick,
emphatic plasma of paint."
Between 1885 and his death in
1890, Van Gogh appears to have
been building an oeuvre,a
collection that reflected his
personal vision, and could be
commercially successful. He was
influenced by Blanc's definition of
style, that a true painting required
optimal use of colour, perspective
and brushstrokes. Van Gogh
applied the word "purposeful" to
paintings he thought he had
mastered, as opposed to those he
thought of as studies.He painted
many series of studies; most of
which were still lifes, many
executed as colour experiments or
as gifts to friends.The work in Arles
contributed considerably to his
oeuvre: those he thought the most
important from that time were The
Sower
14. Night Cafe, Memory of the Garden
in Etten and Starry Night. With their
broad brushstrokes, inventive
perspectives, colours, contours and
designs, these paintings represent
the style he sought. He considered
The Bedroom his best work of that
period, because of the inventive
use of perspective, combined with
Impressionist techniques.
The style Van Gogh found was
revolutionary "in the very look of
his pictures, their coarseness and
deliberately unfinished quality,
[and] the vigor with which they
were painted."His art, with its
emphasis on the common people
and a wish for a better world,
presages the 20th century and
modernism.
18. Iran Darroudi born September 2,
1936 in Mashhad is a
contemporary Iranian artist, living
between Tehran and Paris.Her
art consists of surreal paintings
dealing with Iranian themed
imagery and strong lighting.
Early life
Born in Mashhad, Iran to a family
consisting of traders from
Khorasan on her fathers side and
on her mothers side the family
was Caucasian merchants who
had settled in Mashhad.Her
family moved to Hamburg,
Germany for her fathers
business in 1937 and by the early
1940s they were forced to leave
because of the beginnings of
World War II. By 1945 her family
returned to Mashhad.
Darroudi studied at
Ecole Superier des Beaux-Arts in
Paris, history of art at the École du
Louvre in Paris, stained glass at the
Royal Academy of Brussels,and
television direction and production
at the RCA Institute in New York.
Career
Darroudi's first solo exhibition was
held in Miami in 1958 at the
invitation of the Florida State Art
Center.
She wrote articles on the history of
art and art criticism for the
conservative Iranian newspaper,
Kayhan.
In 1966 in New York, she met and
married Parviz Moghaddasi, who
was studying television direction.
The couple worked at the newly
established Iranian television
organization as producer and
director for six years.
In 1968 she made 55 minute long
documentary about the 1968
Venice Biennial. She was appointed
as an honorary professor at the
Industrial University of Tehran,
teaching art history. In 1969 the ITT
Corporation commissioned her to
paint Iranian Oil. She held
successful exhibitions in Paris and
at the Atrium Artist Gallery,
Geneva, and a month later at
Galarie 21, Zurich.
.
19. In 1976 she exhibited at the
Mexican Museum of Art, where
Antonio Rodriquez praised her as
one of the world's four greatest
painters.In 1978 she moved to
France
Her husband died in 1985 and her
first artwork after his death was
Assumption of Parviz
solo exhibitions
2008 - Tehran Museum of
Contemporary Art
1999 - L.A. University, Los Angeles
1999 - Virginia Tech University,
Blacksburg, Virginia
1994 - United Nations, New York
1975 - La Galleria Gallery, Mexico
1960 - Farhang Hall, Iran
1958 - Miami Beach Art Center,
Miami, Florida
Bibliography
In 1974 a film on Darroudi's life
directed by Victor Stoloff was
broadcast on American television.
In 1997, her autobiography, In the
Distance Between Two Points, was
published.
In 2009 a documentary Iran
Darroudi: The Painter of Ethereal
Moments produced by Bahman
Maghsoudlou, focused on the life
and art of Darroundi
20. Win a featured showcase as TheArtList.com's
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Featured Artist interview page on TheArtList.com website that showcase several
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Featured on the homepage of TheArtList.com website for the month of
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Artwork featured on TheArtList.com's Facebook page cover image during the
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18
22. Jamshid Mashayekhi born 26 November 1934 is an Iranian actor in
Iranian cinema.
Mashayekhi began professional acting on stage in 1957. His first feature
film role was Brick and Mirror (1965, Ebrahim Golestan). After a four-
year break, he acted in The Cow (1969, Darius Mehrjui) and Kaiser
(Qeysar) (1969, Masoud Kimiai). Mashayekhi commonly appears as an
elderly grandfather because of his white hair and charismatic face and
figure. He received a best performance award for The Grandfather
(1985, Majid Gharizadeh) from the First Festival of Non-aligned
Countries in North Korea.
Selected filmography
Adobe and Mirror (1964)
Kaiser (Qeysar, 1969)
The Cow (Gaav, 1969)
The Curse, 1973
Prince Ehtedjab, 1974
Brefts of Hope, 1977
Hezar Dastan, (1978-1987, TV series)
Kamalolmolk, 1983
The Lead, 1988
Honeymoon, 1992
The Fateful Day, 1994
Khane'i Rooy-e Āb (A House Built on Water), directed by Bahman
Farmān'ārā, 2001
Rising (Tolooa, 2001) directed by Hossein Shahabi
Abadan, 2003
Pol-e Siz'da'hom (The Thirteenth Bridge), directed by Farhad Gharib,
2005
Yek Bus-e Ku'chu'lu (A Teensy Kiss), directed by Bahman Farmān'ārā,
2005