Paule Gobillard, a Post-Impressionist painter of the French School, was born in Quimperlé, Brittany, in 1869.  She was the niece of the Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot, who painted at least ten portraits of her. She grew up in the presence of Morisot and her husband, Eugene Manet, brother of Edouard Manet, as well as Renoir, Degas, and Odilôn Redon.  She was painted by Degas twice (an oil and a pastel, both now in the Metropolitan Museum, NYC), and by Odilôn Redon (private collection). To those familiar with Impressionist works, Paule is well known, even from childhood, in Morisot’s “Woman and Child on the Balcony,” with her well-worn high top shoes and white apron, peering out over the balcony awaiting the evening car.

From her youth, Gobillard painted with her aunt, Berthe Morisot, from whom she learned the disciplines of oil and pastel (the latter bringing much praise from the hard-to-please Degas). Upon Berthe Morisot’s recommendation, Paule studied painting in the atelier of figure painter Henri Gervex (1852-1929). Morisot also encouraged her to spend time in the Louvre studying the old masters. Paule made several quite fine copies at the Louvre; but her faithful copy of Titian’s “Concert in the Fields” represented a feeling present in all her future work.

Paule spent much time at Mézy, where Eugene Manet and Berthe Morisot had a country house. She painted in the gardens alongside her aunt. While in Mézy, she executed a number of very beautiful pastels, characterized by the typical light found only in the lIe de France, and by the subtlest use of color graduations.

Following the death of her parents and later her aunt, Paule and her sister Jeannie, lived with their cousin Julie Manet under the guardianship of Pierre August Renoir They lived at 40 rue de Villejust (today called rue Paul Valéry) in the house built by Morisot and Manet. There they were surrounded by the greatest painters, and one of France’s most famous poets, Stéphane Mallarmé, who was Julie’s tutor, as Renoir was Paule’s. They also often visited the Renoir family in Normandy at the village of Essoyes.

In 1900, there was a double marriage: Paule’s cousin, Julie Manet, to Ernest Rouart (son of Henri Rouart, the famous collector and painter), and Paule’s younger sister, Jeannie, to writer Paul Valéry. The double marriage ceremonies symbolized the couple’s friendship, which lasted a lifetime. Paule, who was like a daughter to the Valérys, lived most of her adult life with them in the house built by Berthe Morisot. She also spent her summers with her sister at the Rouart family’s exquisite Château Le Mesnil.  The paintings from that period, considered to be her best, exhibit the soft palette and influence of Morisot.”

In 1906, Paule Gobillard became a senior member of the Salon d’Automne, where she exhibited regularly. She also exhibited at Durand Ruel, Petit Druet and Galerie Bernbeim Jeune. She was part of a group that included D’Espagnat, Maurice Denis, Vuillard, Bonnard, Marquet and Valtat. She was also a close friend of the art critic Felix Fénéon. She exhibited in Japan, the United States and Denmark. During all her trips, Paule continued painting using living models during concerts and lectures and sometimes depicting them with a caustic sense of humor.
Paule Gobillard died in Paris in 1946 at the age of 77, after a long illness.

In 1948, the poet Leon-Paul Fargues wrote a very eulogistic article on her on the first page of Figarounder the heading, “The Friend of Painters and Poets.” The same year, D’Espagnat wrote the preface to the catalog of her retrospective exhibition at Durand-Ruel.

More than a century after his death, Vincent van Gogh has become a legend. So many myths surround his name today that his major place in the development of modern art is often overshadowed. Despite his turbulent life, Van Gogh pursued throughout his career a clear artistic goal: to create images of great emotional intensity based on a careful study of the effects of color and composition.

Notwithstanding the clichés that endure in the popular imagination, Van Gogh was neither a mad genius, nor a starving, misunderstood artist. His art belonged to the avant-garde of his time, and as such was not accepted by the public at large; but Van Gogh had the support of an entire circle of friends, artists, and critics. He received financial help from his brother Theo, and by the end of his short career his paintings were exhibited in several major group shows in Paris and Brussels.

Most of the paintings in these exhibition remained in Van Gogh’s family after his death and are now housed in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Among them are several key works from each phase of the artist’s career, together with some less well-known paintings, providing an opportunity to rediscover the artist’s creative range beyond his most familiar images.

HOLLAND AND BELGIUM
Van Gogh was twenty-seven years old when he decided to become an artist, after unsuccessful attempts at being an art dealer, a teacher, and a clergyman. Although he attended a few drawing classes and received some instructions from a cousin, Van Gogh mostly taught himself art by studying prints and reproductions he collected. His early work, which includes rural landscapes, still lifes, and images of working peasants, is marked by a great sense of immediacy and a bold execution.

Van Gogh’s first major painting, The Potato Eaters of 1885, reflects his ambition to be “a painter of peasant life.” At the time the artist was living in the small village of Nuenen, in southern Holland, and found inspiration in the harsh experience of workmen and laborers, with whom he identified. Following standard academic practices, Van Gogh based his painting on more than forty studies of peasant heads and several sketches of the entire composition. Although the theme of the evening meal belongs to an established tradition that includes such biblical scenes as the Last Supper, Van Gogh’s coarse treatment is unconventional. Emulating the French realist authors Emile Zola and Guy de Maupassant, whom he read avidly, Van Gogh eschewed sentimentality in his representation of country life. “What I have tried to do,” he wrote, “is convey the idea that those people, eating their potatoes by lamplight, have dug the earth with the very hands they put into their bowls.” Hoping to make a career as a figure painter, Van Gogh left Nuenen in 1885 for Antwerp, where he briefly attended the academy. A few months later he suddenly decided to move to Paris.

PARIS
The two years Van Gogh spent in Paris, exposed to the recent trends of the French avant-garde, were crucial to his artistic development. A Pair of Shoes, perhaps painted soon after his move, still shows the dark colors of his Dutch works. The frontal, close-up view of the worn-out shoes — often interpreted as a symbolic self-portrait — also recalls the studies of peasant heads from the previous year. But Van Gogh’s discovery of impressionism and postimpressionism, and the friendships he formed with artists such as Gauguin and Signac, led to a dramatic change in his palette and brushwork. Interested in color theories, Van Gogh began experimenting with the use of bright, pure colors to heighten the expressiveness of his work. By 1887 he had also adopted the broken brushstrokes of the impressionists in several views of Paris and the hill of Montmartre, where he lived.

When Vincent and Theo lived there, Montmartre was still semi-rural. There was farmland and allotment gardens; three of the celebrated windmills were still standing. The latter were a favorite destination for day-trippers from the city. The largest mill in the painting, Le Blute-Fin, had a pavement café affording a magnificent view over Paris; at the top of the mill, there was a viewing platform. Round the mills there were also various catering establishments and dance halls.

Here Van Gogh stresses the rustic charm of the area, showing people working in their allotments. Nonetheless, modern development looms: to the left of the smaller mill, a large apartment building rises above the fields.
Montmartre offered a conjunction of urban and rural elements that appealed to Van Gogh. InVegetable Gardens and the Moulin de Blute-Fin on Montmartre, he juxtaposed complementary hues — yellow and purple, blue and orange, green and red — throughout the painting, applying the principle that a color looks more intense when placed next to its complementary. In addition, he made the colors vibrate by combining the loose, spontaneous brushstrokes of the impressionists with the more regular hatchings and dots of Seurat’s pointillism.

Another source of inspiration that Van Gogh explored in Paris, where japonism was then fashionable, was Japanese woodblock prints. He admired their bold designs, intense hues, and flat areas of unmodulated color. In 1887, he made paintings directly copied from Japanese prints, accentuating their color contrasts. The Japanese influence would remain strong throughout Van Gogh’s work, finding its way in his use of daring perspectives and in the flat decorative patterns he often added to the background of his later portraits.

It was during his Parisian period that Van Gogh painted most of his self-portraits — mainly because he was unable to afford models. Their psychological intensity was deliberately sought after in an attempt to go beyond photographic resemblance. It was achieved through bold color contrasts and frank brushmarks that do not conceal their constructive role. Van Gogh also fashioned his own identity. InSelf-Portrait as an Artist he does not wear a painter’s smock, but what he described himself as “a blue peasant’s blouse of coarse linen.” The palette, with its display of unmixed bright colors, indicates the artist’s association with the modern movement.

ARLES 
Exhausted by the pressures of the urban environment and attracted to a simpler rural life and warmer climate, Van Gogh decided to move south. In February 1888 he left Paris for the small town of Arles, in Provence. In contrast to the varied and experimental production of the Paris years, the paintings Van Gogh created in Arles (some two hundred over a period of fifteen months) present a greater stylistic consistency. Renewing his contact with nature, Van Gogh painted steadily outdoors, recording the light-filled blossoming landscape of spring in Provence. He adopted new types of compositions, such as the vast, open vista of The Harvest, one of his favorite paintings. The wide range of yellow hues and the brilliance and density of color throughout the canvas evoke the blazing sun of summer over the fertile land.

In Arles, Van Gogh developed his ideas about the expressive value of color: “Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use color more arbitrarily, in order to express myself forcibly.” These ideas found direct application in a group of paintings he created to decorate the so-called Yellow House into which he moved in September 1888 and where he dreamed of founding an artists’ colony. In The Bedroom, for instance, the intense colors were intended to produce an image of “absolute restfulness.” “It’s just simply my bedroom, only here color is to do everything, and…is to be suggestive of rest or of sleep in general…. The shadows and the cast shadows are suppressed; it is painted in free flat tints like the Japanese prints.”

The artists’ colony never materialized. Only Gauguin answered Van Gogh’s invitation and came to Arles in the fall of 1888. For two months both artists shared their enthusiasm for brilliant colors, occasionally painting side by side. But conflicts of personality arose, compounded by Van Gogh’s first breakdown (a result of some form of epilepsy), which led to his well-known mutilation of his ear and to Gauguin’s departure. Distraught by his condition, Van Gogh confined himself voluntarily to the mental hospital of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in May 1889.

SAINT-RÉMY-DE-PROVANCE 
Between his breakdowns, Van Gogh devoted himself to painting and drawing, with complete lucidity and in perfect control of his creative ability. In the confinement of his room he made copies after prints of old master paintings. He also painted scenes from his window and in the asylum garden. When he was well enough to venture outside, he produced series of paintings of cypress trees, olive orchards, and the surrounding mountains. His palette became more subdued, with combinations of ocher, dark green, and blue.

Van Gogh’s fascination with the sun persisted, however, as in Wheatfield with a Reaper, to which he ascribed a symbolic meaning. “I see in this reaper — a vague figure fighting like the devil in the midst of the heat to get to the end of his task — I see in him the image of death, in the sense that humanity might be the wheat he is reaping…. But there’s nothing sad in this death, it goes its way in broad daylight with a sun flooding everything with a light of pure gold.” This optimistic vision is brought home by Van Gogh’s dynamic, swirling strokes of thick paint defining the wheat field, itself an image of the force of life in nature.

AUVERS-SUR-OISE 
After leaving Saint-Rémy, Van Gogh spent the last two months of his short life in Auvers-sur-Oise, some twenty miles north of Paris. This picturesque village, with its thatched cottages, had attracted many painters in the nineteenth century, from Corot and Daumier to Pissarro and Cézanne. Among the landscapes Van Gogh created in Auvers is a group of thirteen narrow horizontal canvases, perhaps intended as a decorative ensemble. One of them, Wheatfield with Crows, has long been mistakenly thought to be Van Gogh’s last painting, and as such has often been interpreted as a dark premonition of his suicide. Seen as one in a series of contrasting visions of the countryside shown under different skies, the painting appears less threatening, the visual echoes from one canvas to another suggesting instead an overall image of harmony. “I almost think that these canvases will tell you what I cannot say in words,” wrote Van Gogh about some of these landscapes, “the health and restorative forces that I see in the country.”

But Van Gogh’s recurring crisis often prevented him from working. In a bout of depression the artist shot himself in July 1890, and he died two days later, at the age of thirty-seven. In the paintings he left he had expressed his deeper feelings through the most lucid combination of bright colors, bold compositions, and a rich handling of paint — thus setting the direction for many of the expressionist tendencies in twentieth-century art.

Source: 2008 National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Born in Quiévy, Nord, Auguste Herbin studied drawing at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lille, from 1898 to 1901, when he settled in Paris.

The initial influence of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism visible in paintings that he sent to the Salon des Indépendants in 1906 gradually gave way to an involvement with Cubism after his move in 1909 to the Bateau-Lavoir studios, where he met Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Juan Gris. At his second exhibition at the Salon des Indépendents of 1910, his work was exhibited in the same room as that of Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes and Fernand Léger. In 1912 he participated in the influential Section d’Or exhibition.

After producing his first abstract paintings, Auguste Herbin came to the attention of Léonce Rosenberg, who, after World War I, made him part of the group centered on his Galerie de l’Effort Moderne. His work was exhibited there on several occasions from 1918 to 1921.  Herbin’s radical reliefs of simple geometric forms in painted wood, such as Coloured Wood Relief (1921; Paris, Musée National d’Art Moderne), challenged not only the status of the easel painting but also traditional figure-ground relationships.  Upon becoming more interested in abstraction, Herbin began to participate in the Salon des Realities Nouvelles.  He served as the director of the Salon until 1955 and died in Paris in 1960.

 Body Text

Henri Maik was born in Paris on March 27, 1922 the son of the illustrator and engraver, Joseph Hecht.

Maik designates himself as a Primitive painter, not a naïf painter. In many ways, the paintings of Henri Maik are paradoxical, at once familiar and strange, childlike and sophisticated, quiet and vocal with color.  They are dreamscapes; their terrain lush with fields of simple flowers, exotic trees, rare birds and the beasts of the jungle. In a Maik painting, you enter a community of creatures, at rest and at play, dwelling in perfect harmony, who seem to look out at us, as if to suggest we might do as they are doing.

Multi-talented, Maik has designed tapestries woven in collaboration with Aubusson, created a collection of limited edition fine jewelry, and he is the author and illustrator of several popular children’s books.

In 1940, at the age of 18, Maik enlisted in the French Navy and served as a medical corpsman. Subsequently, he was captured and imprisoned in the Maritime Hospital in Brest. From 1942, when he was released, until the Liberation of France, he worked as a lumberman in Normandy. Following the Liberation, Maik returned to Paris and worked as an actor both in the theater and in French films. He began painting in 1956. The year 1960 marked a turning point in Maik’s career, for he had his first one-man show in Paris.

In 1964 Wally Findlay recognized his talent and hosted Maik’s premier United States exhibition in Palm Beach, Florida.  This was to be the first of many successful exhibitions presented at Wally Findlay Galleries in New York, Chicago, Palm Beach, Beverly Hills and Paris.

The Musée de l’Art Moderne, Paris, featured Henri Maik’s paintings in 1966, 1967 and 1968 in an exhibition of sacred art. The Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris featured his canvases in 1966 and 1967. Maik’s work garnered critical acclaim in exhibitions at the Abbey of Salinsles-Bains (Jura) in 1965 and in 1966 at the Galerie Johnson, Usès (Gard). In 1968 he was honored with an exhibit at the Maison de la Culture d’Argenteuil.

Maik exhibited in the Salon d’Automne, the Salon de Bollène, the Centre National de la Tapissserie d’Aubusson, as well as the Salon of Swedish Art. His paintings are in the National Museum of Budapest, the Center of Contemporary and Experimental Art at Rebhoboth, Israel, the Musée d’Art Naif de I’lle-de-France at Vicq and the Musée de Colmar.

John Bentham-Dinsdale paints the sea and the great ships of the era when “Britannia ruled the waves”with her fleets of Clipper ships and fighting ships whose huge white sails took them over the seas of the World.  John loves both the sea and the sailing ships. To ensure that his paintings of ships and sea battles, or an era long gone are accurate down to the smallest detail, he does meticulous research.  A Yorkshireman by birth, he professes he really feels at home only on the blustery east coast of England close to the sea he loves and paints so well.

John Bentham-Dinsdale’s early years gave no indication he would eventually be an artist, nor that he would excel as a marine painter.  His mother was one of the many daughters of J.H. Bentham, a liberal social reformer; his father was a wine merchant.  After going to Ashville College, Dinsdale spent five years at the School of Architecture in Leeds, graduating with a Dip. Arch, A.R.I.B.A.  During World War II, John was a commissioned officer and pilot in the Royal Air Force.

When the war ended, Dinsdale found work in the theater which had always been his passion.  He designed scenery for a number of repertory companies in London’s West End and, at one point, ran his own company.  An opening in British television came along and in 1956, he was made Assistant Designer with Associated Television in London.  Three years later he was head of Design and Construction  for Tyne Tees Television in Newcastle.  Dinsdale had been painting virtually since he could hold a brush, but it was not until 1965, having moved back to Yorkshire, that he made a full-time commitment to marine painting and historical research.

A founding member of the British Sea Painters Group in 1970, John Bentham-Dinsdale is included in Marine Painting published by  Omell and 20th Century British Marine Painters by D. Brooke-Hart. His work has been widely exhibited in Europe, Australia, Canada, the United States and the Far East.

John had his first one-man show in London in 1974.  Sir Charles Cayzer bought one of his paintings and presented it to a ship of the Royal Navy, H.M.S. Camperdown.  In 1982, a painting by Dinsdale was accepted and hung in the Vancouver Municipal Galleries, and his work was listed and illustrated in the Dictionary of 20th Century Marine Art.

Dinsdale’s wide-ranging research has resulted in his painting not only English Clipper ships, but American ones as well.  Aided by his extensive marine library, he makes a few preliminary sketches; he then develops his canvases from them.  The sea in all its’ moods is shown in his paintings.  The water has depth and sparkle; it pulses with movement and light under the action of the wind.  The ships rest solidly in the water even as they careen under the force of the wing and waves, and they are accurate down to the smallest detail of their rigging and accoutrements.  John Bentham-Dinsdale carries on the English tradition of masterly marine painting.

Marc Chagall was born July 7, 1887, in Vitebsk, Russia. From 1907 to 1910, he studied in St. Petersburg at the Imperial Society for the Protection of the Arts and later with Leon Bakst.  In 1910 he moved to Paris, where he was associated with Guillaume Apollinaire and Robert Delaunay and encountered Fauvism and Cubism. He participated in the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne in 1912 and held his first solo show in 1914 at Der Sturm Gallery in Berlin.

Chagall visited Russia in 1914 and was prevented from returning to Paris by the outbreak of the war. He settled in Vitebsk where he was appointed Commissar for Art in 1918.  He founded the Vitebsk Popular Art School and directed it until his resignation in 1920. He moved to Moscow and executed his first stage designs for the State Jewish Chamber Theater. He returned to Paris in 1923 and his first retrospective took place in 1924 at the Galerie Barbazanges-Hodebert, Paris. In 1933, the Kunsthalle Basel held a major retrospective of his work.

During World War II, Marc Chagall fled to the United States.  The Museum of Modern Art, New York, gave him a retrospective in 1946. He settled permanently in France in 1948 and exhibited in Paris, Amsterdam and London.  During 1951, he visited Israel and executed his first sculptures. During the 1960s, Marc Chagall continued to travel widely, often in association with large-scale commissions he received. Among these were the windows for the synagogue of the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center, Jerusalem, installed in 1962, a ceiling for the Paris Opera installed in 1964, murals for the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, installed in 1967, and windows for the Cathedral in Metz, France, installed in 1968.

An exhibition of the artist’s work from 1967 to 1977 was held at the Musée du Louvre, Paris, in 1977-78, and a major retrospective was held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1985. Marc Chagall died March 28, 1985, in St. Paul-de-Vence, France.

Wifredo Lam was born in Sagua la Grande, a small Cuban town, in 1902. He was of mixed ancestry: his father was Chinese and his mother was of African, Spanish and Native-Cuban descent. He showed some artistic talent as a young man so when he went to Havana to study law, he also learned painting at the Academy of San Alejandro. In 1923, he went to Madrid in order to further his artist studies. There he married Eva Piriz in 1929 but both she and their young son died in 1931 of Tuberculosis. He was in Madrid during the Spanish civil war in which he sided with the Republic.

In 1937, he went to Paris and became close friends with Pablo Picasso. It was through Picasso that he met many of the leading artists in Paris at the time. With the threat of German invasion in World War II, he left Paris in 1940 and went to Marseille. There, through Varian Fry he became friends with André Breton and formed close ties with the Surrealist movement. In 1941, he returned to Cuba and stayed there until 1946. He then lived in various places including Paris, New York and Havana. He married Helena Holzer in 1944. They were divorced in 1950. In 1960, he married Lou Laurin with whom he had three children.

Camille Bombois was one of Paris’ best known primitive painters. He lived with his wife and their canary in a cozily cluttered little house on the Rue Emile-Desvaux.  Bombois painted steadily far into the night, by the light of a big electric lamp.

Born in Venrarey-les-Laumes, Côte-d’Or, Bombois’ early life was utterly different than one would imagine an artist having.  All the more remarkable that he achieved such great distinction among Frances’ important painters.  His childhood was spent on the canals of his birthplace on a barge owned by his father.  His schooling was exceeding brief and when he was twelve years old he was sent to work as a farmhand.

The first indication of any interest in drawing or painting developed when he was sixteen.  He began to draw scenes from his life as a shepherd and a worker in the fields.

Along with this new found absorption in drawing, Bombois loved wrestling.  A strong, muscular boy, he soon became the regional wrestling champion.  Frequently traveling circuses came to his region of France and he was always ready to pit his skill against that of the circus athletes.  One day he left with one of these circuses and discovered a whole new world of professional wrestlers, female equestrians, and the whole personnel of the circus shows.  This was an introduction to a totally different way of life and also furnished him with exciting new themes for his drawings and paintings. While with the circus he heard many fabulous reports of Paris.  He deserted the circus, setting off on foot for the capital.

In order to devote the necessary time to his work, he found a night job in a printing plant, working there for seven years, snatching only a few hours sleep, and in his free time he succeeded in developing and elaborating a technique and approach to painting completely his own.

This strenuous but rewarding life was interrupted by World War I and four years in the trenches.  In 1922 having resumed his avid pursuit of painting he decided he was ready to have his first show and put his best canvas on a chair in the street, with a few small ones on the ground around it.  Buyers and admirers came forward. When the dealers brought Bombois’ work in off the curb and started selling it against velvet-draped gallery walls, he decided he was ready to set up as a full-time studio and at last Bombois was able to devote himself entirely to painting.

In the years following,  he grew continually in stature and recognition.  The essence of the work of this unique artist is well stated in the publication: The Museum of Modern Art, Masters of Popular Painting–Modern Primitives of Europe and America.  Bombois’ history explains his work.  It is obviously the work of a powerful man.  The forcefulness of his vision is athletic, and so is his masterful fashion of transferring it to canvas without hesitation or weakness.  He disdains to make things easier for himself through the use of lighting effects.  He sets his composition in the middle of a brilliant light which emphasizes the volume of the masses and the perfection of details.  This is the secret to his lyricism.  His purpose in using such lighting is to achieve a strictly accurate portrayal of the people and things he knows.