French Pointillist Painter, 1859-1891 Georges-Pierre Seurat (2 December 1859 ?C 29 March 1891) was a French painter and draftsman. His large work Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, his most famous painting, altered the direction of modern art by initiating Neo-impressionism, and is one of the icons of 19th century painting Seurat took to heart the color theorists' notion of a scientific approach to painting. Seurat believed that a painter could use color to create harmony and emotion in art in the same way that a musician uses counterpoint and variation to create harmony in music. Seurat theorized that the scientific application of color was like any other natural law, and he was driven to prove this conjecture. He thought that the knowledge of perception and optical laws could be used to create a new language of art based on its own set of heuristics and he set out to show this language using lines, color intensity and color schema. Seurat called this language Chromoluminarism. His letter to Maurice Beaubourg in 1890 captures his feelings about the scientific approach to emotion and harmony. He says "Art is Harmony. Harmony is the analogy of the contrary and of similar elements of tone, of color and of line, considered according to their dominance and under the influence of light, in gay, calm or sad combinations". Seurat's theories can be summarized as follows: The emotion of gaiety can be achieved by the domination of luminous hues, by the predominance of warm colors, and by the use of lines directed upward. Calm is achieved through an equivalence/balance of the use of the light and the dark, by the balance of warm and cold colors, and by lines that are horizontal. Sadness is achieved by using dark and cold colors and by lines pointing downwards.  Related Paintings of Georges Seurat :. | The Circus | Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte | Bathers at Asnieres | Le Chahut | Standing Female Nude |
Related Artists:
Jacob Gerritz. Loeff, Monogrammist JGL
Alternative names Jacob Gerritz. Loeff, Monogrammist JGL Description Dutch painter Date of birth/death c. 1606-1607 after 1670
Georg Scholz
1890-1945 was a German realist painter. Scholz was born in Wolfenb??ttel and had his artistic training at the Karlsruhe Academy, where his teachers included Hans Thoma and Wilhelm Tr??bner. He later studied in Berlin under Lovis Corinth. After military service in World War I lasting from 1915 to 1918, he resumed painting, working in a style fusing cubist and futurist ideas. In 1919 Scholz became a member of the Communist Party of Germany, and his work of the next few years is harshly critical of the social and economic order in postwar Germany. His Industrial Farmers of 1920 is an oil painting with collage that depicts a Bible-clutching farmer with money erupting from his forehead, seated next to his monstrous wife who cradles a piglet. Their subhuman son, his head open at the top to show that it is empty, is torturing a frog. Perhaps Scholz' best-known work, it is typical of the paintings he produced in the early 1920s, combining a very controlled, crisp execution with corrosive sarcasm. Scholz quickly became one of the leaders of the New Objectivity, a group of artists who practiced a cynical form of realism. The most famous among this group are Max Beckmann, George Grosz and Otto Dix, and Scholz's work briefly vied with theirs for ferocity of attack. By 1925, however, his approach had softened into something closer to neoclassicism, as seen in the Self-Portrait in front of an Advertising Column of 1926 and the Seated Nude with Plaster Bust of 1927. Appointed a professor at the Baden State Academy of Art in Karlsruhe in 1925, the students he taught included Rudolf Dischinger. Scholz began contributing in 1926 to the satirical magazine Simplicissimus, and in 1928 he visited Paris where he especially appreciated the work of Bonnard. With the rise to power of Hitler and the National Socialists in 1933,
Floris van Dyck
, also called Floris van Dijck or Floris Claesz. van Dyck (Delft or Haarlem, c. 1575 - Haarlem, before 26 April 1651), was a Dutch Golden Age still life painter. He lived in Haarlem for most of his life, but he was born in Delft. He was a cousin of Pieter Cornelisz van Dijck. In 1600 he is documented as being in Rome, indicating he made a journey to Italy. In 1606 he returned to the Netherlands, where he joined the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke in 1610 and became dean in 1637. He was influenced by Osias Beert and Clara Peeters. He is considered the inventor of the banketje (banquet still life genre similar to breakfasts, or ontbijtjes), together with Nicolaes Gillis.