art lessons about vincent van gogh

Bedroom in Arles (1888), Van Gogh Museum

      Vincent Willem van Gogh  ( March 30, 1853 – July 29, 1890) was a Dutch post-Impressionist painter whose work had a far-reaching influence on 20th century art as a result of its vivid colors and emotional impact. Suffering from anxiety and increasingly frequent bouts of mental illness throughout his life, he died largely unknown at the age of 37 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Van Gogh did not begin painting until his late twenties, most of his best-known works dating from his last two years. In less than a decade, he produced more than 2,000 artworks, consisting of around 900 paintings and 1,100 drawings and sketches. His work included self portraits, landscapes, portraits, and paintings of cypresses, wheat fields and sunflowers.

      Van Gogh spent his early adulthood working for a firm of art dealers, traveling between The Hague, London and Paris, after which he taught for a time in England. One of his early aspirations was to become a pastor and from 1879 he worked as a missionary in a mining region in Belgium where he began to sketch people from the local community. In 1885, he painted his first major work The Potato Eaters. His palette at the time consisted mainly of somber earth tones and showed no sign of the vivid coloration that distinguished his later work. In March 1886, he moved to Paris and discovered the French Impressionists. Later he moved to the south of France and was taken by the strong sunlight he found there. His work grew brighter in color, and he developed the unique and highly recognizable style which became fully realized during his stay in Arles in 1888.

      The extent to which his mental illness affected his painting has been a subject of speculation since his death. Despite a widespread tendency to romanticize his ill health, modern critics see an artist deeply frustrated by the inactivity and incoherence brought about by his bouts of illness. According to art critic Robert Hughes, Van Gogh's late works show an artist at the height of his ability, completely in control and "longing for concision and grace".

Art Lessons About Vincent Van Gogh: 

• “StarryNight” It’s Elementary!
• Oil andChalk Pastel Art in Grade Four
• Van Gogh’sSunflower Ceramic Relief
• The 1stGrade Sun Flower Painting Art Gallery (Dedicated To Vincent Van Gogh)
• Van GoghSunflower Art Lesson In Oil Pastel
• Van Gogh’sShadowbox Bedroom
• Hangin’ WithVincent 

More Links About Vincent Van Gogh:

• Vincent van Gogh Biography, Style and Critical Reception.
• Vincent van Gogh Gallery. The complete works and letters of Vincent van Gogh.
• Van Gogh Letters – The complete letters of Van Gogh, translated into English and annotated. Published by the Van Gogh Museum.
• Memoir of Vincent van Gogh. By Johanna Gesina van Gogh-Bonger, Vincent's sister in law.
• Van Gogh's Letters, unabridged and annotated.
• Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
• Works by or about Vincent van Gogh in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Vincent van Gogh at the Museum of Modern Art
• Van Gogh at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., United States.
• 'Drama at Arles new light on Van Gogh's self-mutilation' from Apollo, September 2005 by Martin Bailey.
• Painted with Words: Vincent van Gogh's Letters to Emile Bernard, New York Times, 9 September 2007
• Painted with Words: Vincent van Gogh's Letters to Emile Bernard – Facsimiles at The Morgan Library & Museum
• Art Historians Claim Van Gogh's ear 'Cut Off by Gauguin' by Angelique Chrisafis, The Guardian, 4 May 2009
• Union List of Artist Names, Getty Vocabularies. ULAN Full Record Display for Vincent Van Gogh. Getty Vocabulary Program, Getty Research Institute. Los Angeles, California.
• Admiel Kosman, Treading toward sanctity. Musings and meditations on close to a century's worth of discussions occasioned by Van Gogh's series of paintings of worn shoes. Was the artist's statement primarily aesthetic, or political, or was it religious?

art lessons about matisse

The Dessert: Harmony in Red, 1908, 
Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg

Henri Matisse. 31 December 1869 – 3 November 1954) was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter. Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture. Although he was initially labelled a Fauve (wild beast), by the 1920s he was increasingly hailed as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting. His mastery of the expressive language of color and drawing, displayed in a body of work spanning over a half-century, won him recognition as a leading figure in modern art.

Art Lesson Plans About Matisse:

• MatisseInspired “Dancers” Paper Art Lessons
• HenriMatisse Multimedia
• A Paper-CutCollage Lesson Plan
• MatisseInspired Collages in Grade Three
• Meet Matisse
• Matisseinspired window pictures with second grade
• We LoveMatisse

More Links About Matisse:

• The Dance II. 1932. The Barnes Foundation, Merion Station
• Musée Matisse Nice
• Henri Matisse at the Museum of Modern Art
• Henri Matisse Gallery at MuseumSyndicate
• Artchive
• Matisse-Picasso
• Dance (I) in the MoMA Online Collection
• The Morozov-Shchukin collections
• Flam, Jack. Matisse in the Cone Collection, Baltimore Museum of Art, 2001 ISBN 0-912298-73-1
• Matisse at Statens Museum for Kunst ("The Danish National Gallery")
• Henri Matisse: Life and Work 500 hi-res images
• Artists Rights Society, Matisse's U.S. Copyright Representatives
• Hillary Spurling, Matisse's pajamas, online article
• The nude in Matisse
• Union List of Artist Names, Getty Vocabularies. ULAN Full Record Display for Henri Matisse. Getty Vocabulary Program, Getty Research Institute. Los Angeles, California.
• Matisse and Rodin
• Matisse's ‘Bathers by the River’ – interactive slideshow by The New York Times
• Matisse: Radical Invention NPR, audio

teaching art movements: fauvism

André Derain, Charing Cross Bridge, London, 1906, 
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

      Fauvism is the style of les Fauves (French for "the wild beasts"), a short-lived and loose group of early twentieth-century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism. While Fauvism as a style began around 1900 and continued beyond 1910, the movement as such lasted only a few years, 1904–1908, and had three exhibitions. The leaders of the movement were Henri Matisse and André Derain.     

      Besides Matisse and Derain, other artists included Albert Marquet, Charles Camoin, Louis Valtat, the Belgian painter Henri Evenepoel, Maurice Marinot, Jean Puy, Maurice de Vlaminck, Henri Manguin, Raoul Dufy, Othon Friesz, Georges Rouault, the Dutch painter Kees van Dongen, the Swiss painter Alice Bailly, and Georges Braque (subsequently Picasso's partner in Cubism).

       The paintings of the Fauves were characterised by seemingly wild brush work and strident colours, while their subject matter had a high degree of simplification and abstraction. Fauvism can be classified as an extreme development of Van Gogh's Post-Impressionism fused with the pointillism of Seurat and other Neo-Impressionist painters, in particular Paul Signac. Other key influences were Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin, whose employment of areas of saturated color—notably in paintings from Tahiti—strongly influenced Derain's work at Collioure in 1905.

Links to Fauvism Art Lesson Plans

• ExploringPainting With The Fauves
• FacialProportions Lesson Plan meets Fauvism
• Meet Matisse
• A Paul KleeInspired Children’s Art Lesson Plan
• “WildBeasts” Creating a Still Life Inspired by The Fauves
• “FauveFauves” by grade 3

teaching art movements: orphism

Sonia Delauney "Prismes Electrique"

      Orphism or Orphic Cubism.  (1910-13) The term coined by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, was a little known art movement during the time of Cubism that focused on pure abstraction and bright colors influenced by Fauvism and the dye chemist Eugène Chevreul. This movement was pioneered by the Delaunays, a couple who relaunched the use of color during the monochromatic Cubist movement.

      The Orphists were rooted in Cubism but moved toward a pure lyrical abstraction, seeing painting as the bringing together of a sensation of bright colors. This movement is seen as the key in the revolution of Cubism to Abstraction. More concerned with the expression and significance of sensation, this movement retained recognizable subjects but was absorbed by increasingly abstract structures. Orphism aimed to gradually dispense with recognizable subject matter and to rely on form and color alone to communicate meaning. The movement also aimed to express the ideals of Simultanism-the existence of an infinitude of interrelated states of being. Pioneers in the movement, the Delaunays painted in response to Cubism, giving it their own spin.

Links to Orphism Art Lesson Plans

• 15-Review of Lines, Overlapping, Space, Color & Pattern
• Sonia Delaunay Shape and Line Drawings
• Abstract Design with Markers
• Sonia Delaunay: French Abstract Artist
• A 5^th Grade Analogous Orphism Gallery
• Turning around with circles, in the style of Sonia Delaunay
• Delauney Marker Drawing
• Arc and Sector
• Home schooled students also study Orphism