Jan Toorop

The Musée d'Orsay is a museum in Paris, France, on the left bank of the Seine. It is housed in the former Gare d'Orsay, an impressive Beaux-Arts railway station built between 1898 and 1900. The museum holds mainly French art dating from 1848 to 1915, including paintings, sculptures,... furniture, and photography. It is probably best known for its extensive collection of impressionist and post-impressionist masterpieces by such painters such as Monet, Manet, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, Seurat, Sisley, Gauguin and Van Gogh. Many of these works were held at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume prior to the museum's opening in 1986. The museum building was originally a railway station, Gare d'Orsay, constructed for the Chemin de Fer de Paris à Orléans and finished in time for the 1900 Exposition Universelle to the design of three architects: Lucien Magne, Émile Bénard and Victor Laloux. It was the terminus for the railways of southwestern France until 1939. By 1939 the station's short platforms had become unsuitable for the longer trains that had come to be used for mainline services.
more

The Kröller-Müller Museum is an art museum and sculpture garden, located in the Hoge Veluwe National Park in Otterlo in the Netherlands. The museum has a considerable collection of paintings by Vincent van Gogh, such as The Potato Eaters, Cafe Terrace at Night and Sorrowing Old Man ,... making it the second-largest collection of Van Gogh paintings in the world . Apart from the Van Gogh paintings other highlights include works by Piet Mondrian, Georges-Pierre Seurat, Odilon Redon, George Braque, Paul Gauguin, Lucas Cranach, James Ensor, Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso, etc. The museum was founded by Helene Kröller-Müller, an avid art collector who was one of the first to recognize Van Gogh's genius and collect his works. In 1935, she donated her whole collection to the state of the Netherlands. In 1938, the museum, which was designed by Henry van de Velde, opened to the public. The sculpture garden was added in 1961 and the new exhibition wing, designed by Wim Quist, opened in 1977.
more

The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam is a museum for classic modern art, contemporary art and design in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. It is housed on Museum Square next to the Van Gogh Museum and close to both the Rijksmuseum and the Concertgebouw. The original municipal museum was founded in 1874, but... developed into the present museum after a 1909 decision of the city to collect contemporary art and accept donations of work made by artists of international acclaim, Georges Braque and Wassily Kandinsky being among the first to enter the museum from outside the Netherlands. Its original light red brick, Neo-Renaissance style building of 1895, designed by city architect Adriaan Willem Weissman, was painted white on the inside in 1938 by its director Willem Sandberg and is currently being renovated and enlarged with a new extension and utilities building. The museum has announced to reopen on September 23, 2012. Since its 1909 decision to collect contemporary art the Stedelijk Museum has consistently reflected new currents and developments in art and design in both its exhibition and acquisitions policy.
more

Art Nouveau is an international philosophy and style of art, architecture and applied art—especially the decorative arts—that were most popular during 1890–1910. The name "Art Nouveau" is French for "new art". It is known also as Jugendstil, pronounced... [ˈjuːɡn̩tʃtiːl ], German for "youth style", named after the magazine Jugend, which promoted it, as Modern in Russia, perhaps named after Parisian gallery "La Maison Moderne", as Secession in Austria-Hungary and its successor states after the Viennese group of artists, and, in Italy, as Stile Liberty from the department store in London, Liberty & Co., which popularised the style. A reaction to academic art of the 19th century, it was inspired by natural forms and structures, not only in flowers and plants but also in curved lines. Architects tried to harmonize with the natural environment. It is also considered a philosophy of design of furniture, which was designed according to the whole building and made part of ordinary life.
more

Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire. The works of Edgar Allan Poe, which Baudelaire admired greatly and... translated into French, were a significant influence and the source of many stock tropes and images. The aesthetic was developed by Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine during the 1860s and '70s. In the 1880s, the aesthetic was articulated by a series of manifestos and attracted a generation of writers. The name "symbolist" itself was first applied by the critic Jean Moréas, who invented the term to distinguish the symbolists from the related decadents of literature and of art. Distinct from, but related to, the style of literature, symbolism of art is related to the gothic component of Romanticism.
more

Neo-impressionism was coined by French art critic Félix Fénéon in 1886 to describe an art movement founded by Georges Seurat. Seurat’s greatest masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, marked the beginning of this movement when it first made its... appearance at an exhibition of the Société des Artistes Indépendants in Paris. Around this time, the peak of France’s modern era emerged and many painters were in search of new methods. Followers of neo-impressionism, in particular, were drawn to modern urban scenes as well as landscapes and seashores. Science-based interpretation of lines and colors influenced neo-impressionists’ characterization of their own contemporary art. Pointillism technique is often mentioned, because it was the dominant technique in the beginning. During the emergence of neo-impressionism, Seurat and his followers strived to refine the impulsive and intuitive artistic mannerisms of impressionism. Neo-impressionists used disciplined networks of dots in their desire to instill a sense of organization and permanence. In further defining the movement, Seurat incorporated the recent explanation of optic and color perceptions.
more