Van Gogh’s True Palette Revealed

By NINA SIEGAL
Published: April 29, 2013

A NEW LOOK A version of “The Bedroom” shows what may be the original violet walls.

AMSTERDAM — “The Bedroom,” Vincent van Gogh’s 1888 painting, with its honey-yellow bed pressed into the corner of a cozy sky-blue room, is instantly recognizable to art lovers, with his signature contrasting hues. But does our experience of this painting change upon learning that van Gogh had originally depicted those walls in violet, not blue, or that he was less a painter wrestling with his demons and more of a deliberate, goal-oriented artist?

A FAMILIAR LOOK The painting as we know it, with blue walls perhaps caused by faded pigment.

"Self-portrait," from 1887-1888

These questions are raised by a new analysis, eight years in the making, of hundreds of van Gogh’s canvases as well as his palette, pigments, letters and notebooks by scientists at Shell, the oil company, in collaboration with the Dutch Cultural Heritage Agency and curators at the newly renovated Van Gogh Museum here, which owns the world’s largest collection of works by that Dutch Post Impressionist.

The research did not lead to “earth-shattering new insights” that rewrite van Gogh’s life story, said the director of the Van Gogh Museum, Axel Rüger, but it could shift the understanding of van Gogh’s temperament and personality. The results of that study will be revealed in an exhibition, “Van Gogh at Work,” which opens on Wednesday and features about 200 paintings and drawings, 150 of them by van Gogh and others by contemporaries, including Paul Gauguin and Émile Bernard.

“You discover more clearly that van Gogh was a very methodical artist, which runs counter to the general myth that he was a manic, possibly slightly deranged man who just spontaneously threw paint at the canvas,” Mr. Rüger said. “He was actually someone who knew very well about the properties of the materials he used, how to use them, and also he created very deliberate compositions. In that sense it’s a major insight in that it gives us a better notion of van Gogh the artist. He was very goal-oriented.”

By using an electron microscope and X-ray fluorescence spectrometry, which reveals the parts of pigments without taking invasive samples, researchers found that early on van Gogh used perspective frames as a guide and drew on the canvas to correctly render proportions and depth of field in his landscapes. Later, as he gained mastery, he abandoned these grids. Like many artists, he reworked certain paintings repeatedly to perfect his desired effect. The most important insight was into his palette, said Nienke Bakker, curator of the show.

“We now know much more about the pigments van Gogh used and how they might’ve changed color over time,” Ms. Bakker said. “That’s crucial to our understanding of his works, and to know better how to treat them. The colors are still very vibrant, but they would have been even brighter — especially the reds. Some of the reds were much brighter or have completely disappeared since he painted them.”

Ralph Haswell, principal scientist at Shell Global Solutions here, which made its lab facilities and researchers available to the museum, said that at the turn of the 20th century artists had just started buying pigments off the shelf rather than mixing them in the studio. “One of the disadvantages of living in a very changing environment where pigments were very new was that they didn’t always know how things would turn out,” he said. “The chemical industry was growing hugely and they came up with all kinds of colors, but you never knew how long they would remain stable. Some pigments weren’t stable.” That was the case with van Gogh’s violet, used to depict the walls of his room in Arles. Because the red in the purple paint faded prematurely, probably even during van Gogh’s lifetime, it left behind only the blue with which it had been mixed.

That may have been fine with van Gogh, Ms. Bakker said, since the largely self-taught artist didn’t regard any of his work as final. He saw pieces as studies that helped him find his style.

“He wanted to express his individual way of seeing the world, and every work of art he made was moving him toward that goal,” Ms. Bakker said, “but he was never satisfied.”

The original hue — seemingly a minor change — presents a more soothing image, said Marije Vellekoop, head of collections, research and presentation for the Van Gogh Museum. The purple and yellow are “not a harsh contrast as we think of now,” she said. “That was something he wanted to express in that picture — tranquillity and a sense of rest.”

In color theory, Ms. Vellekoop said, purple and yellow are complementary contrasts. “Theoretically they have to reinforce each other,” she said. “For me, the purple walls in the bedroom make it a softer image. It confirms that he was sticking to the traditional color theory, using purple and yellow, and not blue and yellow.”

In other paintings the disappearance of the reds had different consequences. For example, in images of blossoming fruit trees,  blossoms are now white that were once pink because the red faded away. That might lead to changing the identification of the type of tree depicted, Ms. Vellekoop said.

In a way, his use of complementary colors places van Gogh strictly in the traditions of his time. Although he was radical in his use of bright colors, she said, “he follows the traditional color theory that was already written down in the first half of the 19th century,” she said, adding, “A lot of his artist friends were reading those books,” but didn’t use the pigments so boldly.

Van Gogh experimented with different techniques to applying color that were used by his contemporaries, including Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who thinned out his paints and used flat colors. Van Gogh also briefly followed the Pointillists, whose images were built up from many dabs of color. The high-contrast colors of van Gogh’s later paintings are associated with the moment when he came into his own as an artist, developing his own style, in the last couple of years of his life.

The fact that he may have used an even brighter palette, with more reds and purples, indicates that his work may have been closer to that of his friend Paul Gauguin. In that sense, his color choices might have been safer and less iconoclastic than we might imagine.

But, she said, the new color insights don’t necessarily change our view of his psychology. “I don’t think it says anything about his state of mind,” she said. “In Arles, he was using a lot of colors and he was very optimistic about life and his future and his possibilities of selling his work.”

He was also looking forward to Gauguin’s coming to Arles, Ms. Vellekoop said, but he was almost manic about it. “When the cooperation with Gauguin failed, and he was in the asylum, and he becomes more somber and depressed, his colors changed, he goes more towards the ochers, different shades of green and browns,” she said. “A more subdued palette. We do associate color with his state of mind, of course, but it’s not like the more blue, the more depressed he was.”

Starting in September two of van Gogh’s renditions of “The Bedroom” will be displayed side by side at the exhibition, one from the Van Gogh Museum and the other borrowed from the Art Institute of Chicago. Van Gogh painted three versions of the room in 1888 and 1889, and all now have those pale-blue walls. Scientists and conservators have also created a digital reconstruction of what the painting might have looked like when van Gogh first painted it, with those violet walls, which will also be part of the exhibition.

“It looks just, different, and a bit strange,” Ms. Bakker said.




The New York Times: April 29, 2013

Barbara Hepworth - Sculptor

Compare these three sculptures created  by Barbara Hepworth. What do they have in common and how are they different?  How do you think this artist's style  changed over time? Does the change in style reflect a change in culture/history or just in her own life? Explain your answer. You may have to do some research about what was happening in the world during the times she created the three sculptures.
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Barbara Hepworth
English sculptor (1903-1975)

• Best known for her carvings in stone and wood.
• Her later work used metals, primarily bronze.
• Born in 1903 near the industrial city of Leeds in Yorkshire, England.
• Oldest of four children.
• Interested in art at very early age. Encouraged both at home and at school. She first knew she was interested in sculpture at age 7 when she saw a slide show and lecture about Egyptian sculpture. She understood it and began focusing on learning about it.
• As a child, viewed her world with a sculptor’s eyes. She was aware of the shapes and forms of the countryside, and of the movements and behaviors of people.
• Growing up in a dark, dirty, depressing city, she was very impressed by the countryside…its beauty, unspoiled landscape and uplifting atmosphere. The powerful contrast between city and country – and the human moods those environments brought forth – were a driving force in her art throughout her life.

Mother and Child, Hoptonwood stone, 1927

"I have always been interested in oval or ovoid shapes. The first carvings were simple realistic oval forms of the human head or of a bird. Gradually my interest grew in more abstract values - the weight, poise, and curvature of the ovoid as a basic form. The carving and piercing of such a form seems to open up an infinite variety of continuous curves in the third dimension, changing in accordance with the contours of the original ovoid and with the degree of penetration of the material. Here is sufficient field for exploration to last a lifetime."
"Before I can start carving the idea must be almost complete. I say 'almost' because the really important thing seems to be the sculptor's ability to let his intuition guide him over the gap between conception and realization without compromising the integrity of the original idea; the point being that the material has vitality - it resists and makes demands."
"I have gained very great inspiration from Cornish land- and sea-scape, the horizontal line of the sea and the quality of light and colour which reminds me of the Mediterranean light and colour which so excites one's sense of form; and first and last there is the human figure which in the country becomes a free and moving part of a greater whole. This relationship between figure and landscape is vitally important to me. I cannot feel it in a city."

— Extract from 'Approach to Sculpture', The Studio, London, vol. 132, no. 643, October 1946

Mother and Child, Cumberland alabaster, 1934 , Tate

Child with Mother, White marble, 1972, Hepworth Estate

Barbara Hepworth was almost as old as this century: born in 1903, she died in 1975 aged 72. She came from a comfortable Yorkshire family in Wakefield, and both her parents and her art teacher at school supported her interest in art. She attended Leeds School of Art at the same time as Henry Moore, with whom her work has often been compared. Hepworth had set her sights on the Royal College of Art in London, and so spent only a year in Leeds, leaving or London at the same time as Moore.

Both Moore and Hepworth were to achieve notoriety for their carving, for to carve in the 1920s was to make a point of doing things differently. The conventional academic training for the would-be sculptor involved learning how to model in clay or plaster. If the work was then commissioned, the artist would have it cast in bronze or carved by a craftsman. The new creed was altogether different: the artist carried their own work through from beginning to end, in the material of their choice. In Hepworth’s early carving you can quite clearly see her getting to know the limits of her material, revealing the original character of the block and the texture of the stone or wood.

In the mid-1920s a county scholarship enabled Hepworth to spend time in Italy.

‘Italy opened for me the wonderful realm of light - light which transforms and reveals, which intensifies the subtleties of form and contours and colour … To my Northern conception it added a knowledge of the grace of the Mediterranean approach which imparts a richness and gaiety into the ‘living’ material of marble and stone.’

By 1930, Hepworth’s work was beginning to change. She looked less to the figure and was interested in more abstract forms of expression. This change coincided with the collapse of her marriage to her first husband, the sculptor John Skeaping with whom she had worked in the 1920s, and her new friendship with another artist, Ben Nicholson. Nicholson introduced her to artists in Paris such as Brancusi, Arp, Mondrian and Naum Gabo. Together Hepworth and Nicholson became involved in a new international crusade for abstract art.

Such was the novelty of abstract art at this time that artists and critics felt the need to define their beliefs and explain their position. Much of Hepworth’s time was spent in discussing terms, writing statements, and promoting abstraction in publications and exhibitions. In her own work, she pushed abstraction to its limits, making purely geometrical shapes with no starting point in perceived reality.
Sculpture is made in several ways and from many different materials. Hepworth used a variety of materials and methods throughout her career. Carving directly into wood and stone gave her the most satisfaction as a sculptor, although it is often by her large-scale, outdoor work in bronze that she is best known. This exhibition concentrates on Hepworth’s carvings, with a smaller selection of bronzes to mark her public work.

‘I am basically and primarily a carver, and the properties of stone and wood and marble have obsessed me all my life.’

When war broke out, Hepworth and her children moved to St Ives in Cornwall. Life in Cornwall was very different from that in London, and during the war years a different Hepworth emerged. She developed a much more individual style which opens up the form, exploring the interiors of round or pointed oval shapes with strings and coloured paint. She worked with a much lighter touch, using wood in preference to stone.

‘I used colour and string in many of the carvings of this time. The colour in the concavities plunged me into the depth of water, caves, or shadows deeper than the carved concavities themselves. The strings were the tension I felt between myself and these, the wind or the hills.’
After the war Hepworth remained in Cornwall, and her style changed again. She began to look to the figure and the relationships of groups of figures in space and in landscape.
With her renewed interest in the figure, Hepworth took up life drawing again. One of her most significant projects at this time was a series of drawings made in a hospital operating theatre. The opportunity arose during Hepworth’s visits to the hospital where her daughter underwent several operations.

Although Hepworth was extremely active until the late 1960s, from the mid-1960s onwards she was increasingly affected by throat and mouth cancer. A bad fall affected her mobility, and her carving seemed to turn inwards, to become more private, more experimental. She made pieces which explore stacked vertical forms or arrangements of forms at the same level. These late works have a semi-rough quality which reveals both the quarryman’s preparation and the mark of the artist’s tools on the stone.

Fallen Images was Hepworth’s last major sculpture. She died in a fire in her studio in 1975. Work like Fallen Images reminds us quite forcibly of the magic stones and menhirs of the hills and fields of Yorkshire and Cornwall. In pieces such as this Hepworth seems to return to the magic, to the arcane, to the mystery of stone.

Portrait Printmaking

Compare these two printmakers. What do they have in common and how do they differ? Look at their lives, time they lived, what they were influenced by and their artistic style. Which do you like better? Explain your answers fully.

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Käthe Kollwitz, Superprintmaker

Woman in the Lap of Death, woodcut by Käthe Kollwitz, 1921

Speaking of making the world a better place, Käthe Kollwitz was an artist who tried to do just that…  And unfortunately, her world was in need of an awful lot of bettering.  Born in Germany in 1867, one of Kollwitz's sons was killed in World War I and a grandson was killed in World War II.  Her husband was a doctor who worked with the poor, providing her with a constant view of the suffering caused by social injustice, as well as a respect for the beauty and bravery of these hard-working people.  In 1920 she became the first woman elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts, but she

Hunger, woodcut by Kollwitz, 1925

was forced to resign by the Nazis when they came to power.  She died in 1945 just before the end of World War II.

Kollwitz's radical father encouraged his daughter's drawing talent and arranged for her to have art lessons.  When she went to an art school for women in Berlin she decided that painting was not her strength, and began doing etchings and other printmaking techniques.  A little later, looking for more strength and power in her images, she also took up woodcuts.  Her prints were widely acclaimed, and her international fame and popularity were such that although the Nazis threatened her, they did not arrest her.

Mary and Elisabeth, woodcut by Kollwitz, 1928

        

Although so much of her work focusses on tragic themes, Kollwitz's art is not unrelieved doom and gloom.  Here is a lovely one showing Elizabeth and Mary from the gospel of Luke, two pregnant woman greeting each other and sharing their profound awe and joy.  (Of course, both these mothers lost their sons, a theme Kollwitz knew all too well.)

Self-Portrait, woodcut by Kollwitz, 1924

        Kollwitz also made self-portraits throughout her life, so that we can see her in different moods and as she ages.  Sometimes she looks beautiful, sometimes bleak.  I particularly like this one, done in 1924 when she was around 57.

        Although Kollwitz suffered from periodic bouts of depression and had so much cause for despair in the world she saw around her, she never stopped trying to use her art to wake people up to the tragedies of injustice and cruelty.

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Andy Warhol

American painter, printmaker, sculptor, draughtsman, illustrator, film maker, writer and collector. After studying at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh from 1945 to 1949, he moved to New York and began working as a commercial artist and illustrator for magazines and newspapers. Warhol continued to support himself through his commercial work until at least 1963, but from 1960 he determined to establish his name as a painter. Motivated by a desire to be taken as seriously as the young artists whose work he had recently come to know and admire, especially Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, he began by painting a series of pictures based on crude advertisements and on images from comic strips. These are among the earliest examples of Pop Art.

In the 1960s a new artistic style overtook New York. Known as Pop Art and defined by its cool impersonality, this style embraced American popular culture, utilizing comics, tabloid photographs, and movie stills as artistic inspiration. Perhaps the best-known Pop artist was Andy Warhol, who conceived a new idea of the artist as celebrity.

Andy Warhol

1966. Silkscreen ink on synthetic polymer paint on nine canvases

Each canvas 22 1/2 x 22 1/2" (57.2 x 57.2 cm), 

overall 67 5/8 x 67 5/8" (171.7 x 171.7 cm)

Self-Portrait (1966) was constructed in what would become one of Warhol’s signature styles—a grid of bright, repeated silkscreenedprimary and secondary colors as well as different shades of the same color. portraits. An expert colorist, Warhol paired

ANDY WARHOL
American, 1928 - 1987
Self-Portrait , 1986
Acrylic screen print on canvas 80 x 80 inches

In the latter part of his career, Warhol focused more and more on portraiture.  He created portraits of people he admired—musicians Michael Jackson and Grace Jones, athletes O.J. Simpson and Muhammed Ali—as well as wealthy socialites he met on the New York social circuit. By the mid-1960s, Warhol had amassed a huge public following of artists, filmmakers, performers, writers, and art patrons seduced by his persona. Engaging in the painting of self-portraits only further cultivated his fame. In time, Warhol’s self-portraits became as famous as the iconic portraits of Marilyn Monroe or Elizabeth Taylor. The artist had himself become a celebrity. He used these portraits not only to question the originality of the artistic image but also to explore themes of death, celebrity, and postwar culture.

In this ghost-like self-portrait, produced a few months before his death, Warhol stares out at the viewer with an impenetrable glare. The artist’s disembodied head floats against an inky black background, his image silkscreened in a pale violet. Slack-jawed and wearing a platinum fright wig, Warhol likens his face to a skull or death mask.

Recovering Gardner Heist Stolen Artworks Is Likely, Experts Say 

By DENISE LAVOIE 

BOSTON -- Now that authorities believe they know who stole $500 million worth of art from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in the largest art heist in U.S. history, what are the chances they'll actually recover the stolen works by Rembrandt, Vermeer and Manet after 23 years?
Surprisingly good, art recovery experts say.

Christopher Marinello, general counsel for The Art Loss Register, a London-based organization that keeps a database of stolen and missing artwork, recently recovered a Matisse oil painting stolen from a Stockholm museum in 1987.

"A quarter of a century is not that unusual for stolen paintings to be returned," Marinello said. "Eventually they will resurface. Somebody will rat somebody else out. It's really only a matter of time."

The FBI announced Monday that it knows but is not disclosing the identities of two men who posed as police officers and stole 13 works of art from the museum in 1990. The theft remains the largest art heist in U.S. history.

Bob Wittman, a retired FBI agent from Philadelphia who specialized in art crimes, said he helped recover a set of seven Norman Rockwell paintings stolen from a Minneapolis museum in 1977. The paintings were found in Rio de Janeiro in 2001. Wittman said he also helped recover an original copy of the Bill of Rights that had been stolen more than 130 years earlier.

"I think that the chances are that if they still exist, there's a 95 percent chance they are going to get the paintings back," Wittman said.

"At some point, they are going to come back to market. Whoever is holding them illicitly is going to get old. An heir or a child is going to find it and try to sell it."

The FBI, which made its announcement on the 23rd anniversary of the heist, also launched a new publicity campaign aimed at generating tips on the whereabouts of the artwork, including a dedicated FBI website on the heist, video postings on FBI social media sites and digital billboards in Connecticut and Philadelphia. They also re-emphasized a $5 million reward being offered by the museum for information leading to the return of the artwork.

Damon Katz, a spokesman for the FBI's Boston office, said tips were already coming in Tuesday. He would not say how many.

"We are analyzing them and we will act on those as appropriate," he said. "The goal is not to generate the largest number of tips, but to generate the best tips that will lead us to the art."

Richard DesLauriers, an FBI agent in Boston, said investigators believe the thieves belonged to a criminal organization based in New England and the mid-Atlantic states. They believe the art was taken to Connecticut and the Philadelphia region in the years after the theft and offered for sale in Philadelphia a decade ago. After that, the FBI does not know what happened to the artwork, DeLauriers said.

Empty frames still hang on the walls of the museum as a reminder of the loss of precious works of art, including "The Concert" by Johannes Vermeer and several Rembrandts, "A Lady and Gentleman in Black" and "Storm on the Sea of Galilee," his only seascape.

The statute of limitations has expired on crimes associated with the actual theft. But prosecutors say anyone who knowingly possesses or conceals the stolen art could still face charges.

Second brazen art theft in one week 

3:04 PM Thursday Mar 21, 2013

The sword thief was captured on camera. Photo / supplied

A second brazen thief has struck at a New Zealand museum this week, with police now looking for a man who stole a sword from an art installation.

Police are looking for a man who made off with the plastic letter opener made to look like a sword from a statue at Pataka Art and

Museum on Tuesday afternoon.
Museum staff noticed it was missing soon after and went back through their CCTV security footage to find out what happened.

They found vision of the man swiping the sword from the Apocalypse Vanitas - an artwork showing a human skeleton riding an animal skeleton while carrying a sword and shield by artist Niki Hastings-McFall.

He put the sword in his pocket and left through the front doors. A group of art students were in the gallery at time of incident, police say.

Police were told on Wednesday and were now asking if anyone recognised the man in the CCTV footage, or had any information, to phone them on 04 238 1401 or Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.

The plastic letter opener was 10cm long, Porirua City Council spokeswoman Barbara Bercic said.

The theft comes after an English tourist stole a silk kimono from the Lakes District Museum in Arrowtown on Monday.

She was arrested in Te Anau last night.

Police say the tourist, who had been travelling on a bus trip, admitted stealing the kimono but says she put it in a rubbish bin in Arrowtown.

It's not yet been found.

She's paid reparation over the theft of the $625 work and will leave the country tomorrow.
The case had widespread coverage after police released CCTV footage of the woman stealing Alison Naylor's one-off, handmade piece. The cameras showed her touching several of the pieces on display before lifting Mrs Naylor's piece from the wall.

She then rolled it up and put it in her bag before casually leaving the museum through the front doors.
- APNZ