Monet and van Gogh
No two artists can alone be considered responsible for the modern art movement, but both Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) and Claude Monet (1840-1926) led two very distinct groups of artists out of the world we know as classical art. Though their styles differ greatly, they are both equally responsible for helping to shape the direction painting would go over the following century. Monet and van Gogh both left us with prolific bodies of work each representing their own view of life through their work on canvas and in their thoughts and words. Through their paintings, writings and letters we have been fortunate enough to understand both men's struggle for recognition as artists in a period when classicism was still held as the highest form of art. Aside from their shared struggle for acceptance as progressive artists-and perhaps an equal fascination with Japanese block prints-they are no closer to being alike than an apple and a grapefruit. Though Monet did not come from a wealthy family, he became involved with a group of peers that were well educated or part of the French aristocracy. The group, consisting of Degas, Manet, Renoir, Pissarro among others, all had one thing in common.
The grass in the lower left is painted with broad strokes of medium to dark greens and light yellow greens for the sunny areas. Unlike van Gogh, he would even see Impressionism and Post Impression embraced and accepted as real and valid forms of artistic expression. Rather than create just a true image of what he saw, he exaggerated it and with the patterning created something that was completely energized and had a very tactile quality to it. Van Gogh, like Millet and Daumier, could better relate to the peasants and their struggles than he could to the bourgeois or upper class. And neither did van Gogh, in his brief career, ever give up his vision of eloquently elaborating on the world he saw in order to take us into his world of almost child like, but mature and psychologically charged drama. In the lower right sits a lone man on a chair (possibly a friend of the artist) just before the path hits the edge of the canvas. On the right side of the path are benches, which are filled mostly with women and children playing at their feet. The trees going up both sides of the canvas are mostly dark greens with some browns. Monet's friend Geffroy spoke of his compositional arrangements saying, "Monet seeks the aspect of nature which by its arrangement, form and horizon best suits the play of light, shadow and colouring in front of him. Not that nature was any less important to van Gogh, in fact it was possibly more important, but he felt that the realist approach the Impressionists took left out much of the richness he saw in the world. This is probably due to his earlier years, which were spent looking toward becoming a man of the cloth. The painting, unlike many of van Gogh's others, is almost monochromatic and very cool. The mother, who bends over and holds her child while it tries to make its first steps, is set fairly central in the composition. Together with their contemporaries they represent the transitional or pivotal point at which the language and sentence structure of art would forever change. Like Daumier, who must have been a very big influence, he relied very much on the outline and contour to describe form, even going so far as to exaggerate the contour in much of his work.
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Acceptance Essays
