Test of mastery

The potato eaters is the most ambitious painting of Van Gogh’s Dutch period. Prior to starting the painting, he makes over a hundred portrait studies of farmworkers, various drawings and two painted studies. Thus he prepares himself for his first large painting on the theme of peasant life in Brabant, which he regards as a kind of test of his mastery. He wants to prove that he is on his way to becoming an accomplished figure painter. This painting precedes the final version and has virtually the same composition, but the layout is sketchier.

Arduous peasant life

Van Gogh makes the drawings and studies at the home of the peasant family De Groot-van Rooij. It is not his intention to make precise portraits of these people. He seeks to depict the atmosphere and the primitive nature of the arduous peasant life.

'Honestly earned'

He later writes to Theo: You see, I really have wanted to make it so that people get the idea that these folk, who are eating their potatoes by the light of their little lamp, have tilled the earth themselves with these hands they are putting in the dish, and (…) that they have thus honestly earned their food’.

Nocturnal painting

Van Gogh had intended to make a nocturnal painting for some time. And not one in the conventional manner, in shades of black and grey, but actually with an abundance of colours. Equally unconventional is that he paints this gas-lit terrace of a café in Arles in situ and in the dark, because colours have a different appearance during the day than by night.

Sharp contrast

The most eye-catching aspect is the sharp contrast between the warm yellow, green and orange colours under the marquise and the deep blue of the starry sky, which is reinforced by the dark blue of the houses in the background. Van Gogh was pleased with the effect: ‘I believe that an abundance of gaslight, which, after all, is yellow and orange, intensifies blue.’

Constellations

He writes to his sister Wil: ‘I enormously enjoy painting on the spot at night.’ The fact that he observes keenly is borne out by later astronomical research. He painted the constellations precisely as they appeared on the night of 16 or 17 September 1888.

Touch

A work of art that you can touch, that you can walk through, in which you are even allowed to play! The world-renowned Jardin d’émail by Jean Dubuffet leaves an indelible impression on many visitors, young and old.

Different world

The artificial, walled ‘garden’ was designed specifically for the Kröller-Müller Museum. The contrast between the bright white with jagged black lines and the natural surroundings is particularly stark. Once inside this art garden, the visitors can imagine themselves in a completely different world.

Characteristic

The atmosphere of this monumental sculpture is characteristic for the work of Dubuffet. All his work expresses his fascination with the unusual, the spontaneous, the subconscious and the chaotic, which are typical for the paintings and drawings of children and the mentally ill. He calls these expressions that he admires, which are not regarded as official art, ‘art brut’.

Analytical cubism

Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque developed cubism during the first decades of the 20th century. The movement went through several phases. Violin is an example of analytical cubism. During this phase the figure or object is dissected, broken into fragments and depicted from multiple viewpoints.

Network of surfaces

The illusion of a natural perspective disappears completely. Instead, a network of surfaces placed next to and behind each other is created, separated by lines and shadows. Typical of analytical cubism is that the composition is built up from the middle and ‘fades out’ towards the edges. The oval shape of the painting is also striking.

Experiment met the form

In this painting, the starting point, the violin, only remains recognizable in a few areas: the curl of the neck, the strings, the bridge, the curvature of the body and the shape of the f-holes. The colours are muted and limited to ochre, brown and grey. All the attention is focused on the experimentation with the form.

Bright, light colours

In February 1886, Vincent van Gogh goes to live with his brother Theo in Paris. There he becomes acquainted with the painters Pissarro, Toulouse-Lautrec, Signac, Gauguin, Seurat and Bernard. Inspired by their work, he begins experimenting with different styles and with bright, light colours.

Self-portraits

During this period, he has the ambition to become a portrait painter and to thus earn a living. In the absence of models, he paints numerous self-portraits, ‘because if I can manage to paint the coloration of my own head, which is not without presenting some difficulty, I’ll surely be able to paint the heads of the other fellows and women as well’.

Dynamic character

Van Gogh is not interested in making photographic portraits. A portrait must also express something of the subject’s emotional state. The colours are still fairly subdued in this self-portrait. Soft blue and green tints dominate the painting. By contrast, the rapid brushstrokes are exuberant, particularly in the background. These give the work a lively and dynamic character.

Sonsbeek

In the mid-fifties, Rietveld surprised the international art and architecture world with this pavilion. He designed it for the Internationale beeldententoonstelling in de open lucht Sonsbeek ’55 in Arnhem, where it was used to exhibit smaller sculptures. His creation immediately attracted all the attention.

Space and light

The horizontal and vertical elements of the pavilion are made of simple materials. The elements are placed in such a way that the architecture and the sculptures reinforce each other. ‘The empty space and light determine the value of the architecture in, around and between the boundaries, which are only there to define the space’, wrote Rietveld later.

Rebuilt

The building was temporary and therefore demolished after the exhibition. Thanks to a private initiative, the now legendary pavilion was rebuilt in the sculpture garden of the Kröller-Müller Museum in 1964. From that moment on, it was no longer called the Sonsbeek pavilion, but the Rietveld pavilion.

In the open air

In 1841, zinc paint tubes appeared for the first time, making painting in the open air a lot simpler. The paint no longer dried out so quickly and was easier to carry. The impressionists took full advantage of this. They left their studios and went painting outdoors, ‘en plein air’.

From on the water

From 1871 to 1878, Claude Monet lived in Argenteuil, a village on the Seine just outside Paris. Following the example of the painter Charles-François Daubigny, he had a boat built in which he could paint the surroundings from on the water. Thus he was able to depict the effects of light on the water and on the landscape from any convenient spot.

Impression

In this painting the boat is moored between two poles, motionless on the water. A figure is vaguely distinguishable in the cabin, probably Monet himself. The majority of the canvas is occupied by the calm flowing river, in which the boat studio and the trees, but also the sky are reflected. In this painting, Claude Monet gives an impression of the tranquillity on the water during a summer day.

Blossoming fruit trees

When the fruit trees in Arles are in bloom in the spring of 1888, Van Gogh paints them nearly every day. Thus, in a short period he produces fourteen paintings and several drawings and sketches of the blossoming trees. He considers Pink peach trees one of the most successful in the series.

Anton Mauve

In the evening of the day on which Van Gogh makes this painting, he finds a letter from his sister, who writes to tell him that Anton Mauve has died. This painter was not only his cousin by marriage; he also taught him to paint in oils and watercolour. Van Gogh decides to dedicate the work to him.

Tender and cheerful

He writes to his brother Theo that he was moved and affected by the news, ‘and I wrote on my painting Souvenir de Mauve Vincent & Theo and if you think it’s good as it stands we’ll send it to Mrs Mauve in both our names. (...) It seemed to me that in memory of Mauve we needed something that was both tender and very cheerful and not a study in a more serious key than that’.

Objects for the interior

The Italian artist Giacomo Balla is one of the first to embrace futurism, the art movement that seeks to express the dynamism of the modern age, the sensation of speed and constant change. In addition to painting, he also devotes himself to the futurist design of everyday life and indulges in countless designs of objects for the interior, from covers, lamps, tableware and collapsible furniture to complete interiors.

Moving car

In Paravento con linea di velocità, Balla uses the theme of a moving car to experiment with the depiction of motion. The car itself is not recognizable, but motion and speed are represented in an abstract, energetic arabesque, the linea di velocità.

Shaped canvas

Through the medium of the folding screen, painted on both sides, Balla literally occupies the space and extends the boundaries of the two-dimensional painting. Partly due to the fresh, contrasting colours, this folding screen is a remarkably modern looking shaped canvas, in which light, speed and dynamism are reduced to a synthesis of line and colour.

Cylinder

Fernand Léger begins working in a cubist style under the influence of Cézanne and later Picasso and Braque. However, much more emphatically than his examples, he depicts figures and objects in volumes, such as the cone, the sphere and the cylinder. The cylinder appears so often in his work that a French critic even called him a ‘tubist’ instead of a cubist.

World War I

In August 1914, at the start of the World War I, Léger is conscripted and deployed to the front for the construction of trenches. During his time at the front, he makes many drawings that he later develops into paintings. Soldiers playing cards was created during his convalescence in Paris after a poison gas attack.

Robots

In this painting Léger combines cubism with the aesthetic of the machine. The soldiers are not people of flesh and blood, but look more like robots with their robust, geometric shapes and their arms like steel forged pipes. The recurring elements are reminiscent of the machinery of war. The alternation of small and larger areas of colour also lends the painting dynamism.

A whole

Floating sculpture, Otterlo was created as a commission for a sculpture that would form a whole with a pond and with the environment. Marta Pan designed the pond, a curved body of water, in close relation with a floating, organic sculpture in white polyester, which contrasts greatly with the green of the surroundings.

Dancing

The sculpture consists of two organic forms, which move independently of each other around a central pivot. The concave upper form functions as a sail that catches the wind. Wind, water and reflection are components of the sculpture, which moves across the pond as if dancing.

Movement

Movement is an essential theme in the work of Marta Pan, who was born in Hungary. In 1947 she settled in Paris, where she had many contacts in the world of theatre and dance. Her sculptures, mostly organic forms in wood, related to the human scale and inspired by the themes ‘pivot points’ and ‘balance’, are a source of inspiration for choreographers.

Influence

Initially, Piet Mondriaan painted in the naturalistic style of the Hague School. Curious about the latest developments in the art, such as the cubism of Picasso and Braque, Mondriaan leaves for Paris in 1911. Under the influence of the cubists, he soon reduces his colour to mostly grey, ochre and brown and the recognizable reality gradually disappears from his paintings.

Analytical cubism

Tableau no. 1 clearly shows the influence of analytical cubism. In this, an object or figure is dissected, broken into fragments and converted into a complex structure. The composition is built up from the middle and the shapes become blurred towards the edges. Tableau no. 1 has an underdrawing of a tree, but this motif is barely recognizable.

First steps

Mondriaan dissects his subject into countless segments. This creates a lively structure of horizontal and vertical, straight and slightly curved lines and grey and ochre surfaces. In this painting and in other works from the same year, Mondriaan takes his first steps towards ‘the unchanging pure reality behind the changeable forms of nature’.

New aesthetic

Speed and movement are the main themes of the Italian futurists. They regard the classical marble or bronze sculpture as entirely inappropriate for expressing the modern world and its dynamism. Thus, the aesthetics of traditional art and culture need to be replaced by the ‘new beauty’ of contemporary dynamism and by subjects such as the car, the train, the motorcycle, but also the human figure, on the move.

Speed and movement

Umberto Boccioni is both a painter and a sculptor. With the sculptures that he makes during his brief lifetime, he proves himself a true futurist. In this powerful sculpture, he attempts to capture the speed and movement of a human figure in a single sculpture.

Structure of the action

He is interested not only in the depiction of the many stages and moments of a hurrying figure, but also above all in the idea of the movement of a figure in space. ‘Not a unique form, but a unique sculptural rhythm, not the structure of the body, but the structure of the body’s action.’